Their spells would bounce like billiard balls off anyone in a state of grace; simply the usual modicum of decency and determination would get a man
through. You could be killed by them, or through their machinations; you could be fooled, dazzled, victimized; but in a certain ultimate sense, you could not be conquered unless you wanted to be.
-Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson
"The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall."
-The White People by Arthur Machen
I just finished reading Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson and it makes a better case for clerics to be separate from magic-users than anything else I've ever read. In a lot of books (and in history) trying to draw a clear distinction between divine and arcane magic is foolishness, for example in Conan does it ever really matter if Conan's enemies are priests or not? The same applies to D&D, clerical magical seems to start out as I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Catholic but as it developed into pseudo-paganism what spells clerics get and which magic-users get gets more and more arbitrary until in 4ed "power source" is mostly irrelevant fluff.
In Three Hearts and Three Lions on the other hand, divine magic is explicitly Christian (or at least Abrahamic) power that serves the purposes of Law while all arcane magic is, when you get right down to it, Satanic (although not necessarily all practitioners, magicians seem able to bind and command demons while remaining basically decent people) and Chaotic.
In Three Hearts and Three Lions divine magic seldom does anything that would have any effect on physics but instead it works to protect and oppose the influence of Chaos so it's really easy to differentiate magic and the divine in that book: Law upholds the natural order while Chaos subverts it.
OK, so let's run with that. What should explicitly Christian clerics look like? Let's try to make their powers tied as closely to Christianity as possible. Also instead of having clerical magic be something separate from the workaday ritual of medieval Catholicism let's try to infuse the sacraments and the rest with magic. I'm an atheist personally but how so much of modern fantasy takes Medieval themes and sidelines the religion that was so important in Medieval times always struck me as strange.
Protection vs. magic
This is the clearest benefit of the divine in Three Hearts and Three Lions, it lets spells bounce off of you, enables you to erect barriers against magic and keeps agents of Chaos away from churches (until human allies defile them). One thing I liked in the book was this protection is dependent on what you're doing right now, even minor failings (like jealously) can break this protection, but you don't have to go through the whole D&D paladin atonement annoyance to get the power back up, just act decently the next day.
In the book going into a church can break illusions and presumably other spells, so high level clerics would then be walking talking bundles of Dispel Magic. Throw in exorcism of those possessed by demons and you've got a good bread and butter powerful for clerics and would make a lot of Chaos be as much about tempting as killing D&D parties.
Prayer
In Three Hearts and Three Lions the clearest benefit of prayer is that holy words cause physical pain to creatures of chaos. In D&D terms this would seem to be extending Turn Undead to Turn Chaos, which would be a very potent ability.
Lay on Hands
Lay on Hands and clerical magic is mostly about recovering lost HPs but historically (IIRC) and in Three Hearts and Three Lions it's more about getting rid of disease which fits in the anti-magic wheelhouse of clerics if you think of diseases as curses rather than as caused by germs.
Burial
One thing that appears over and over in folklore is how many problems with undead come about as a result of people not being buried properly. Cutting an arc of slaughter through the opposition without burying any of them is asking for undead and having a cleric along can help with that.
Holy water
Stick an expiration date on holy water so it's useful to have a cleric along to bless more. Let them bless weapons and well which would allow them to count as +1 weapons for purposes of hitting can only be hit by magical items critters.
Marriage
In Scandinavian folklore marrying a troll woman can turn her (mostly) human. This sacrament could be a good way of driving out Chaos from certain creatures.
Also many creatures of Chaos desire to marry mortals as the pact of marriage gives them power of them, which being already married prevents.
Inspiration
For Gandalf-style inspiration perhaps a mechanic along these lines: clerics can drive out supernatural fear and other magically-inspired emotions and against Lawful people they can inspire one of the Seven Virtues. For example a cleric would have a good chance of being able to exhort an NPC towards "charity" but couldn't choose the form that that charity would take.
Communion
In Three Hearts and Three Lions, the main character feels nervous about heading out into the lands of Chaos without taking communion but doesn't give us any more details than that. Putting mechanical benefits to taking the Host might take this mental exercise a bit into the preachy though. What about Baptism? Extreme unction? Confession?
Detect Magic
The Chalion books by Bujold have some of the best treatment of religion I've seen in fantasy books. The most important power of saints in those books is to see things from a divine point of view and see what's going on with people's soul and detect magic in general, which is a good power for clerics.
Another thing I like about Bujold's treatment of religion is the priorities her gods have. They really only care about the spiritual so things like people starving or war don't really bother them much but disturbances to the life cycles of souls such as undeath piss them right off. I like how her gods are benevolent but have very different priorities than humans.
Relics
Note sure what to do with these exactly or if I want D&D clerics carrying around a bunch of reliquaries, but stuff like the Venetians raiding the Holy Land for saintly body bits to take back home is D&D as fuck and I'd like to include it.
Miracles
Having clerics being able to produce miracles that alter the physical world on command never quite felt fantastic and, well, miraculous enough. Maybe instead put in mechanics for miracles but have them be implemented by the DM in a way that surprises the player.
OK, moving on from good powers for Christian clerics to concluding remarks I think it's important to note that:
Donatus Magnus was wrong
Donatism is an early Christian heresy that says that sacraments carried out by immoral priests don't count. Catholic dogma, on the other hand, says that no matter how many puppies your priest kicked the morning of your marriage your marriage still counts. So most of those above powers should still work no matter what the cleric has been up to. To the extent that they depend on the morality of the cleric, they should depend on what they're doing RIGHT NOW when they're using their power and having a clerics powers fail because they're being a jerk but then work just fine later seems more gamable than loss of all powers across the board after screwing up.
Overall for Christian clerics I'd like to have them gain more and more potent powers that are always on, ones that are powerful but that don't really affect the physical world, rather than porting Vancian magic over to them, which I always loved but thought was a far better fit for magic-users.
through. You could be killed by them, or through their machinations; you could be fooled, dazzled, victimized; but in a certain ultimate sense, you could not be conquered unless you wanted to be.
-Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson
"The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall."
-The White People by Arthur Machen
I just finished reading Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson and it makes a better case for clerics to be separate from magic-users than anything else I've ever read. In a lot of books (and in history) trying to draw a clear distinction between divine and arcane magic is foolishness, for example in Conan does it ever really matter if Conan's enemies are priests or not? The same applies to D&D, clerical magical seems to start out as I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Catholic but as it developed into pseudo-paganism what spells clerics get and which magic-users get gets more and more arbitrary until in 4ed "power source" is mostly irrelevant fluff.
In Three Hearts and Three Lions on the other hand, divine magic is explicitly Christian (or at least Abrahamic) power that serves the purposes of Law while all arcane magic is, when you get right down to it, Satanic (although not necessarily all practitioners, magicians seem able to bind and command demons while remaining basically decent people) and Chaotic.
In Three Hearts and Three Lions divine magic seldom does anything that would have any effect on physics but instead it works to protect and oppose the influence of Chaos so it's really easy to differentiate magic and the divine in that book: Law upholds the natural order while Chaos subverts it.
OK, so let's run with that. What should explicitly Christian clerics look like? Let's try to make their powers tied as closely to Christianity as possible. Also instead of having clerical magic be something separate from the workaday ritual of medieval Catholicism let's try to infuse the sacraments and the rest with magic. I'm an atheist personally but how so much of modern fantasy takes Medieval themes and sidelines the religion that was so important in Medieval times always struck me as strange.
Protection vs. magic
This is the clearest benefit of the divine in Three Hearts and Three Lions, it lets spells bounce off of you, enables you to erect barriers against magic and keeps agents of Chaos away from churches (until human allies defile them). One thing I liked in the book was this protection is dependent on what you're doing right now, even minor failings (like jealously) can break this protection, but you don't have to go through the whole D&D paladin atonement annoyance to get the power back up, just act decently the next day.
In the book going into a church can break illusions and presumably other spells, so high level clerics would then be walking talking bundles of Dispel Magic. Throw in exorcism of those possessed by demons and you've got a good bread and butter powerful for clerics and would make a lot of Chaos be as much about tempting as killing D&D parties.
Prayer
In Three Hearts and Three Lions the clearest benefit of prayer is that holy words cause physical pain to creatures of chaos. In D&D terms this would seem to be extending Turn Undead to Turn Chaos, which would be a very potent ability.
Lay on Hands
Lay on Hands and clerical magic is mostly about recovering lost HPs but historically (IIRC) and in Three Hearts and Three Lions it's more about getting rid of disease which fits in the anti-magic wheelhouse of clerics if you think of diseases as curses rather than as caused by germs.
Burial
One thing that appears over and over in folklore is how many problems with undead come about as a result of people not being buried properly. Cutting an arc of slaughter through the opposition without burying any of them is asking for undead and having a cleric along can help with that.
Holy water
Stick an expiration date on holy water so it's useful to have a cleric along to bless more. Let them bless weapons and well which would allow them to count as +1 weapons for purposes of hitting can only be hit by magical items critters.
Marriage
In Scandinavian folklore marrying a troll woman can turn her (mostly) human. This sacrament could be a good way of driving out Chaos from certain creatures.
Also many creatures of Chaos desire to marry mortals as the pact of marriage gives them power of them, which being already married prevents.
Inspiration
For Gandalf-style inspiration perhaps a mechanic along these lines: clerics can drive out supernatural fear and other magically-inspired emotions and against Lawful people they can inspire one of the Seven Virtues. For example a cleric would have a good chance of being able to exhort an NPC towards "charity" but couldn't choose the form that that charity would take.
Communion
In Three Hearts and Three Lions, the main character feels nervous about heading out into the lands of Chaos without taking communion but doesn't give us any more details than that. Putting mechanical benefits to taking the Host might take this mental exercise a bit into the preachy though. What about Baptism? Extreme unction? Confession?
Detect Magic
The Chalion books by Bujold have some of the best treatment of religion I've seen in fantasy books. The most important power of saints in those books is to see things from a divine point of view and see what's going on with people's soul and detect magic in general, which is a good power for clerics.
Another thing I like about Bujold's treatment of religion is the priorities her gods have. They really only care about the spiritual so things like people starving or war don't really bother them much but disturbances to the life cycles of souls such as undeath piss them right off. I like how her gods are benevolent but have very different priorities than humans.
Relics
Note sure what to do with these exactly or if I want D&D clerics carrying around a bunch of reliquaries, but stuff like the Venetians raiding the Holy Land for saintly body bits to take back home is D&D as fuck and I'd like to include it.
Miracles
Having clerics being able to produce miracles that alter the physical world on command never quite felt fantastic and, well, miraculous enough. Maybe instead put in mechanics for miracles but have them be implemented by the DM in a way that surprises the player.
OK, moving on from good powers for Christian clerics to concluding remarks I think it's important to note that:
Donatus Magnus was wrong
Donatism is an early Christian heresy that says that sacraments carried out by immoral priests don't count. Catholic dogma, on the other hand, says that no matter how many puppies your priest kicked the morning of your marriage your marriage still counts. So most of those above powers should still work no matter what the cleric has been up to. To the extent that they depend on the morality of the cleric, they should depend on what they're doing RIGHT NOW when they're using their power and having a clerics powers fail because they're being a jerk but then work just fine later seems more gamable than loss of all powers across the board after screwing up.
Overall for Christian clerics I'd like to have them gain more and more potent powers that are always on, ones that are powerful but that don't really affect the physical world, rather than porting Vancian magic over to them, which I always loved but thought was a far better fit for magic-users.
Explicitly Christian Clerics?
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