The last couple of days of thinking about clerics have got me thinking about the various deities that I might worship if I ever got around to playing as a cleric. On the off chance that I was limited to the Suel cosmology, here are a few that I might try:

• Norebo, the God of luck, risk, and gambling, could be fun. According to one description, he possesses “that wisdom called deception,” and if that isn’t a good reason to follow some sky dude, I don’t know what is.
• Llerg is another chaotic neutral god. I can’t say I’m necessarily a fan of his ideology (wild beasts and strength), but Llerg is a great name for a god. “Fellow Llerg-ites: the time has come for us to throw off the shackles of this workaday world and leave our clothing behind . . .”
• Another god worth following simply because of their name is Dalt, the Suelian god of doors and locks. With a name like Dalt, that is not surprising.
• Finally, much like Dalt or Llerg, I am playing for name value only with Gesh, the Scribe of Hell. My understanding is that if one is a follower of Gesh, the appellation “Scribe of Hell” must always be added, undoubtedly in a cackling voice.

Scribe of Hell, indeed.

As I mentioned earlier this month, I don’t frequently play clerics. They’re too religious for my tastes, even in a fantasy world, and even though I know I could play an agent of Incabulos and spread plagues, disease, and rotting, it’s still a little too close to holy rolling for me.

That said, and there’s always a “that said,” I find spells like “Command” and “Sanctuary” to be pretty fun. The one-word rule of “Command” leads to careful enunciation and creative outcomes. Want to have a good time before swinging a battle axe? Have the cleric command the goblin leader to dance and start laughing. See a hobgoblin with a gleam of tactical know-how in its eyes? Tell it to forget, and watch that gleam go out and their best-laid ambush fall apart.

“Sanctuary” makes attackers make a saving throw, and if they fail, they simply ignore you. I love the second part of this spell: it’s not that the attack is directly repelled, it’s that you simply aren’t there in the mind of the attacker. The angry orc just moves on to the next unsuspecting ranger or thief who thought the orc that was right in front of you is now attacking them.

Calling all Mordenkainens, Tensers, Ottos, and anyone else who manages to make spells. Here are some I am looking for:

Locate Killable Monster
Create Mood Lighting
Find Lost Keys
Answer [reverse of knock]
Remember Directions
Summon Wait Staff
Ignore [allows the PC to ignore any summons or questions]
Awake [revese of sleep: allows the PC to wake up at any time]
Feign Interest

Thanks and let me know if you get around to any of these. Will pay good g.p. for them.

Apropos of our earlier post about the challenges of being a first-level magic-user in AD&D: what happens when Crithno Overtown, the most talented spellslinger to ever walk out of the Kron Hills, starts her adventure with Tenser’s Floating Disc? Now, I am a pretty inventive player, and here are a few ways I might use this spell to stay alive until I can acquire magic missile or shield:

• Have a tough fighter in the group? Offer to use the disc and its capacity to carry treasure or excess equipment before battle.
  
• Load up the disc with nearly maximum weight and, when the moment is right, discontinue the spell and drop the weight on some unsuspecting giant centipede or rat.
  
• Hire yourself out between adventures as Crithno the Magic Mover. Aim for the upscale market that exists in any fair-sized city and move their most precious furnishings using “only the power of magic.” Granted, this might be a bit of a grind, given the inability to cast the spell more than once a day, but hey, gold is gold.

See, there’s always a way around a bad roll.

A recent paper from Greyhawk University’s Economics Department confirms what we all already knew: fighters with the lowest starting money tend to die soonest.

Using death certificates and genealogy, the two authors of “Econometrics of Initial Purchasing Power” found that starting an adventure with 50 g.p. (the lowest possible for a fighter) forced fighters into suboptimal equipment purchases, leading to a far higher death rate in first and second-level adventures. The simple purchase of a helmet, shield, leather armor, a short bow, and a short sword took up almost 75% of a fighter’s starting wages. The combination of light armor and low missile weapon success rate forced many fighters into melee’ situations with little to no opportunity for success (which, for the purposes of this paper, was surviving the encounter).

It is only after initial monetary successes that these fighters’ chances of survival equaled those who started the adventure in the upper quartile.