Primal Spirits: Good or Bad?

So, what did anons think of the Primal Spirits from the 4e cosmology anyway?
> Explains why Druids are different to Nature Priests.
> Makes Barbarians from "Fighters who get angry" to "Tribal Warriors who let spirits fight through their bodies".
> Makes Shamans their own thing different from Clerics.
> Gives a different spin to followers of "tribal" religions such as animism, ancestor worship, etc.
> Stands between the Gods & Primordials.

Also, anyone have any of the Primal related artwork from 4e? Pic Related was the best I had.

Other urls found in this thread:

1d4chan.org/wiki/Primal_Spirits
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The Primal Spirits were the best thing that happened in 4e's cosmology, and they were fucking fantastic. Shamans and Druids felt very distinctively different from Clerics and Wizards, Barbarians got their own flavor niche and holy fuck the Warden was just a fantastic unexplored corner that was flavorful as shit.

This. It actually gave a lot of classes a distinct niche for once and fleshed out the setting very nicely. I'm also a total sucker for some old school mythic 'Gods vs Titans' stuff.

Also worked really well with settings like Eberron and Dark Sun. It's a great distinction and I'm really sad to see it go.

It's crazy how, despite not being actually written down, PoLand was a surprisingly deep setting that was also super versatile and encouraged you to run wild with it.
Due to the name I base my PoLand games around the Kingdom of Poland during Late Medieval

Honestly, Points of Light reflected a lot of what I'd learned as a GM about what made a good fantasy setting.

I tried running games in the huge established setting with deep lore and everything written down, and it honestly just felt stifling. It was all a matter of remembering things and checking details and putting in work to make sure the story I was telling didn't conflict with the setting, and at some point I stopped and asked why the sheer bulk of the setting was there, as all it ever seemed to do was interfere with me, not support me.

I ended up treating every setting like Points of Light, and telling my players that. There's a broad strokes picture of how things are set up with enough detail to give the setting a strong aesthetic and set of themes, but when it comes to the nitty gritty little bits of bullshit, I throw them all out. Grey areas that a GM can work in, creating their own stories using the setting for inspiration, is where it's at. I'd much rather a thematic, evocative basis for a setting with a few bits of detail and a lot of interesting questions than a thousand page lore bible containing answers for absolutely everything. Unanswered questions are an incredibly precious commodity when it comes to RPG settings, and so many games just absolutely squander them by giving them boring, bog standard answers that are infinitely less fun than leaving it open for the GM to come up with their own ideas.

You know, I honestly thought nobody would ever say anything like this, ever. I expected people to be in here slamming the Spirits for changing the Druid & Barbarian and creating the Warden.

I must confess that, personally, I really liked the Primal Spirits.

Druids and Barbarians always bored me before, they really had nothing to them beyond being "Captain Ethnic" versions of the Fighter and the Priest. The Primal Spirit version of the Barbarian is fucking awesome, and the Druid is... well, a lot improved.

Actually, anybody got any of the art from Primal Power? I'm really wanting to get some of that stuff for my collection.

4e, especially PoLand, has had a lot of love recently. Which is odd.

I think it's because the hate campaign is finally getting less intense, although it is still going, meaning people can actually discuss it and without all the misinformation flying around people are actually realising the things 4e did right. It was still a pretty niche, focused game which was at odds with the common perception (regardless of its accuracy) of D&D as a more broadly applicable system, along with changing a lot of fundamental assumptions about how things work and bungling their marketing and implementation on launch in a way that soured a lot of people on the system for good.

But end of life cycle 4e was a solid game if you were up for heroic fantasy action, and people are realising that it's still basically unsurpassed in that particular niche.

Regardless of the reason, I think it's great. The World Axis had a lot of really solid fluff to it, both new and old, and I wish 5e had at least kept the Nentir Vale as the default setting.

I mean, goddamn it, they had plans to start releasing Nentir Vale Gazetteers in the veins of Mystara's Known World Gazetteers! The first one was ready to hit the printers before Mearls pulled the plug on it!

Mearls will forever hold a special place among the ranks of hated game designers for how he undermined and crippled 4e, right when they seemed to be getting to grips with the system and really starting to explore its potential.

I have literally never run a game of D&D without them.

They make such a good niche fit for the "powers" that provide the abilities of Druids, more Spiritual Clerics and Spiritual Barbarians.

They offer a fantastic niche of more relatable more closely bound divine creatures that provide more interaction that the Gods on high.

Can folks post more Primal artwork from 4e, please? My collection is so very low.

Going to agree with this. This and other cosmological things are great aspects of 4e tossed aside because some people can't handle change, in spite it making lots of sense.

4e was one of the only settings to get animism right. Being able to fight enemies with your legends and histories was extremely cool.

I got you.

What Cosmological Things do you miss from the World Axis, specifically?

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Another form of arbitrarty distinction in a futile attempt to try and make sublcasses into their own thing.

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What about it is futile, or arbitrary? Shamans were awesome, with a unique playstyle and a strong identity in how they related to the metaphysics of the universe.

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All of it. I like the Elemental (abyss)Chaos/(feywild)World(shadowfell)/Astral Sea(demiplanes) divide much more than the previous Wheel cosmology in general.

I think the whole thing just feels more interesting as a game and setting to explore and felt a bit more reasonable.

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Goddamn I love these arts.

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That's all for now.

Oh, man, I definitely agree with that. The Great Wheel bored me to tears - the World Axis restored my excitement for the idea of cosmological fantasy.

Yeah; don't get me wrong, 4e did bring back a lot of 3e artwork too, but the stuff that was made for it? Tended to be awesome as fuck.

There was this one Druid picture - in Primal Power, I think - that had this hooded man wearing antlers and a ragged green robe calling fire, ice and lightning from the sky. Anybody got it?

This one? I didn't remember the guy had antlers.

What is the difference between animistic primal spirits and psionic thoughtforms forged by the minds of all the natural world's creatures, animals, and plants?

Can the two coexist in a setting without thematic overlap?

This is a serious question for some modified setting-building of mine, inspired by PoLand. I like the idea of psionic thoughtforms born from the noosphere, wrought from the memories and emotions of mortal creatures and flora, but I worry that they would overlap too much with animistic primal spirits.

This is for a more "space fantasy, space opera" setting, admittedly.

>What is the difference between animistic primal spirits and psionic thoughtforms forged by the minds of all the natural world's creatures, animals, and plants?

It seems like it would overlap quite a bit to me.

Like what is the difference between a soul, ghost, residual psychic impression and an ancestor spirit? Even if there are clear differences it is going to look rather like splitting hairs I imagine.

Animism (shamanism) is for a world who can't explain why things happen really. Science naturally destroys that by explaining things. This is why most of us don't think there is a point in doing a rain dance when there is a drought, as we can see the physics behind rain and know there are no spirits.

Animism and science being side by side can be a bit tricky.

That happens a lot with psionics in 4e, so there isn't a lot. You could say one's a manifestation of emotion while the other is a manifestation of nature.

>Animism (shamanism) is for a world who can't explain why things happen really. Science naturally destroys that by explaining things.
Not if the spirits are actually why things happen.

That's the one! If you look close at its full-scale version, you can see small, black antlers (or branches mimicking antlers) on either side of his hood, underneath the staff.

Right, but then what happens to science?

In a iron age setting, you can ignore most science because it doesn't exist to explain shit anyway, a lot of stuff isn't observable and what is people don't care a lot. In a future setting you have to start figuring out which is which.

Are diseases malicious plague spirits? microbes? do plague spirits carry microbes? seems like a mess to me.

Why can't the two exist side by side?
Cruel spirits cause symptoms that mimic symptoms caused by actual diseases but can not be cured by scientific medicine.

They absolutely can. Just as a world designer/GM you have to keep it in mind when designing things.

There's actually a Psion "subclass" (for lack of a better term) in 4e that specializes in literally materializing its thoughts as realities in the Psionic Power sourcebook. You might want to check it and Primal Power out.

Anyone remember the actual Primal Spirits named in 4e? I know some were mentioned in Primal Power, and one or two in the Winning Races: Thri-Kreen article in Dragon?

The world serpent is the only one I remember

If spirits can be appealed to in order to ensure that the herd a tribe depends on continues to provide them with bountiful gain, I see no reason it couldn't exert similar control over the actions and behaviors of viruses and bacteria.

A human can start a fire, but fires can exist without human intervention. Similarly, a spirit can cause a disease, but diseases can exist without spiritual intervention.

4e is old enough now that the people for whom it was their first RPG are no longer in high school or college and thus are more socially isolated. Missing the social activity, they look back fondly on the last time they had a strong social group.

>4e is old enough now
God damn it. Time needs to stop passing because this is getting absurd.

In the next presidential election, people born after 9/11 will be old enough to vote. I don't know how to handle that.

I want to give a huge shout out and a thank you to the user(s) who posted all that sweet Primal-flavored artwork. 4e really had some great art to it, and I wish I could start a thread to try and collect it all, because it's scattered all over the net and my google-fu is weak.

What's the source for this pic?

Shaman was an excellent class in 4e, even if it's main feature was a bit of a clusterfuck as far as rules. They really needed to make a big FAQ for it but like most of the Primals and PHB3 stuff, it didn't get as much support as we would have liked due to the shift towards Essentials.

Though Essentials gave us a nice Primal Druid pet class which had probably the best pet-thing rules.

Agreed; I don't normally like clerics, but the Shaman actually shook that up for me. It really felt like its own thing, and totally different to just "The Cleric of Nature but Ethnic".

On a random topic, for any 4e fans interested in chasing and sharing the art we enjoyed from that edition, I've made a thread for it:

Feel free to add whatever from wherever - sourcebooks, Dungeon, Dragon, whatever. I'm all but exhausted my supply.

Then how does one reconcile both psionic thoughtforms and animist spirits in the same setting?

Primal Spirits are born of the natural world and are the stuff of the world itself. Psi-forms emanate from the unformed potential of thought itself, and some believe they actually derive from their own planes called the Phrenic Planes.

Like I said, check out Psionic Power. There's a good, solid sub-chapter in the back of the book dedicated to theories about what psionic powers are and where they come from.

But would the difference be anything but academic?

Uh, at the very least, the thoughtforms literally exist only so long as their psychic is around to feed them with psionic energy and they don't really have independent personalities beyond that.

Whereas a Primal Spirit is very much independent and WILL spank a bitch if they think to disrespect them. Stormhawk once kicked the asses of FIVE Gods AND a Primordial all in the same battle before banishing them from the mortal worlds back to the Astral Sea.

Yeah, there are some aspects on which the difference is academic. But, ultimately, a Tulpa is very much not the same as a Primal Spirit.

I was envisioning something more along the lines of psychic thoughtforms born from the noosphere, which would persist for as long as sapient life and flora existed.

Or, after 10 years some of the butthurt has subsided and less people feel the need to shit on other people's games.

PoLand has become my go-to setting for all fantasy games that don't have a specific focus. There were enough nuggets of lore buried here and there in the books that I don't feel the need for anything more.

1d4chan.org/wiki/Primal_Spirits

Oh, I know about that article, I just wonder if there's any more than those.

I don't think there's anything more comprehensive than that, unfortunately.
Fuck mearls and his canning of the gazzetteer

Well, since you said it's a space fantasy space opera, there could actually be a big difference: primal spirits are tied to the "worldmind" of a specific planet, and while benevolent with respect to the wellbeing of that planet and its natives, are range from apathetic to downright xnenophobic about the concers of sapients outside of their worldmind. Psionic echoes, on the other-hand, resonate with the collective unconscious of the universe as a whole; they aren't as strong on any given planet as that planet's dedicated spirits, but they are more reliable and versatile because you don't need to aquaint yourself with a new set of spirits every time you go to a new planet. Hell, older starships and space stations probably even have their own spirits that are concerned only with the wellbeing of their charges.

Just my brainstorming on spirits vs mindforms in space opera sci-fantasy

bump

Never played or read about 4e but am digging the concept.
Can anyone explain how it works in game?

Primal is a power source in 4e. Certain classes use the power of primal spirits to do the things they do, much like how martial classes such as fighters use their own physical capabilities, divine classes such as clerics use the power of gods and arcane classes like wizards weave the arcane fabric.

While is correct, it is all fluff sadly. They never explored the differences of power sources in any mechanical ways or even separated them too much thematically.

Yeah they did

Primal powers have a strong tendency towards form changing, most primal daily powers last for an entire encounter, be they druid wildshapes, warden forms, special shaman spirits or barbarian rages. In terms of absolute mechanics though yeah, there's not a huge amount of power source specific feats, paragon paths or epic destinies for primal like there is for martial, arcane or divine

only because everything that a primal spirit could do was something that an angel, spiritual familiar or psionic thought blob could anyway because everything in 4e was mechanically interchangable with everything else.

Really what it did was give good fluff for barbarians, druids and rangers.

Oh, there were some mechanical traits unique to each Power Source - for example, Psionics literally does not function like the other Sources, with its abundance of At-Will powers and ability to use Psi Points to Augment those as needed instead of Encounter Powers - but they were subtle differences you often wouldn't notice unless you were playing them.

In fairness, Primal was introduced pretty late to the game (PHB 2) and only got the one Primal Power splatbook, whereas Arcane/Martial/Divine were in the game from the start and got some bolstering in every single sourcebook.

Ironically, I think Dark Sun was the biggest setting-based infusion of material for Primal material, and even so, Psionics stole the show there.

PHB2

The World Serpent had some good lore. One of the great things about primal spirits, though, is that it's easy to create your own - you want to play a druid who turns into Brother Wolf, a warden who pays homage to Grandfather Elk, or a shaman who's companion is Magic Octopus? Go for it.

>Right, but then what happens to science?

Science is a method, not a set of facts. If, in your setting, things burn because their spirits are angry, and the anger spreads from house to house as the entire town's spirit population goes angry, and you can stop a fire by throwing water over it because water spirits are naturally peaceful - then that's the explanation science will get to, once sufficient trial and error has been done.

MEARLSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

>noosphere

stop