Purity Is The Power To Contemplate Defilement - Ritual Purity for OSR Clerics

This came from a casual discussion on the glogosphere, but struck me as such a good idea that I had to write it down. 

Many Cleric spells in several OSR rulesets have reversed forms, but it's often unclear how legal they are for PC's to employ. Sometimes they are interpreted as being limited to Evil Priest NPCs, other times that they might be permitted for use by PC's in extremis, or just that a nebulous warning that using them too much might result in alignment change. This is how I'm going to start handling the matter.

At any given time, a Cleric can be in one of two ritual states: Purity or Defilement.

While in a state of Ritual Purity, their spells heal, illuminate, restore, and preserve, returning the fallen world to its proper state. All spells produce their normal effect.

While in a state of Ritual Defilement, their spells harm, deceive, break, and corrupt, reflecting human sin back upon the world. All spells produce their reversed effect.

At any time, a cleric in a state of ritual purity may choose to break the state, converting any memorised spells to their reversed forms. However, returning to ritual purity is harder than breaking it, typically requiring a return to a temple and spending a day in ablution and annointment - this explicitly does not require an Atonement spell to be cast nor is it accompanied with any sort of Geas or Quest; ritual purity is not the same thing as moral purity, and defilement is not punished, just rectified.

This presents an interesting logistical decision, particularly on a deep dungeon crawl - the party may encounter enemies potent enough to make a Slay Living or Harm very welcome, but once that bridge is crossed, then that Cleric is no longer able to provide healing, traditionally one of their most valuable party roles. At the bottom of a multi-level dungeon, with potentially dozens of encounter rolls between you and safety, this is no small thing. Bringing multiple clerics might be the meta strat, which is probably not too difficult - clerics are a pretty solid class, with few great weaknesses. I rarely ever actually see the stereotype of tables where nobody wants to play the healer; clerics are great at every level, and party composition tends to reflect that.

Settings where clerics of opposing alignments can be part of the same religion, or at least acknowledge the same cosmology - like Skerples' contextless OD&D, Deus Ex Parabola's Unfinished World, or WotC's Eberron - might be best suited to this idea. Some sects may even voluntarily choose to exist in a state of defilement for reasons both practical and theological.

Besides voluntary defilement, certain creatures or situations might induce it - getting energy drained by an undead, dealing peaceably with a demon, or getting extremely dirty, especially from something ritually unclean like gore, excrement or corpse-ash, would probably break your ritual purity. Maybe I'd allow a save for those sort of involuntary situations, but maybe also not - it might be amusing to figure out how the party gets their healbot through the sewer level.

It might possibly be prudent to introduce a magical item or even a mundane equipment item that allows Ritual Purity to be restored in the field, but make it either rare, expensive or awkward.

Clerics as Prophets (Esoteric Lorebuilding)

 Clerics are odd ducks. Their classical image of the mailed crusader with a religious proscription against wielding bladed weapons deliberately evokes medieval warrior-priests of the Archbishop Turpin and Odo of Bayeux vein. But while those fellows were members of a powerful Church with clear heirarchy and vast political power, the adventuring cleric is free to roam the backroads and wildnerness, associating with thieves, bandits and witches, and if they run afoul of the authorities they can expect to be treated like any other homeless vagabond. The various incarnations of the Cleric from OD&D to 5E have expounded on their power to call down miracles and avaunt unquiet souls, but conspicuously absent has been any reference to the political power of the church or temple they represent. This is strange on the face of it, priests have always wielded a lot of social clout - but our adventuring cleric is unmoored.

There's plenty of ways I could develop subsystems and add class abilities, but I don't like changing something when I can just recontextualise it instead. And for the adventuring cleric, one little tweak to how clerics are conceptualised makes everything about its design make perfect sense;

Clerics aren't priests, they're prophets.

You have no political power or support from a wider Church as a cleric because there isn't one. Oh, there's religions out there, sure - whole heirarchies of temples, pontiffs and priests - and you're not part of it.

Bearer of the Word

As an adventuring cleric you're a revelation, a new Word coming out of the wilderness to shake the foundations of the earth. If the wider religious heirarchy hears about you they're probably not going to welcome you with open arms; they're probably going to either laugh at you or ignore you. Once you start getting more notoriety they're going to denounce you as a heretic, maybe try to get you burned at the stake if your message is a bit too radical. Once you hit Name level and start gathering real power, they're going to start sweating bullets and quietly packing the silverwear into easily-moved trunks. Either way, they're not going to help you.

Terrible Purpose

But adventurers? Freethinkers and desperadoes, living by their wits and determination. The kind of folk who decide to make a profession out of wresting handfuls of grave goods from nameless horrors deep beneath the earth aren't the sort to look askance at a fellow for worshipping strange gods and preaching radical heresies, not when he can heal with a touch and cast back the unquiet dead by force of will. Sinners one and all - the ones who need to hear your Word the most.

Shake the Foundations

When a player wants to be a cleric I now tell them to invent the name of their god and the tenets of their faith themselves and that nobody before them in the current mileu has ever heard of it. This might be because they're a foreigner, a missionary from a mysterious land far, far away (with accompanying odd customs), or they're the first to hear the voice of a nascent god in the wilderness. As they grow in notoriety and perform great deeds, so too does the power of their god over the land swell - this is why their god can't just grant them miracles on command; their power is finite and constrained - the cleric's god is at first little more than a whisper on the wind, but quickly grows to titanic proportions.

Inner Mysteries

The spell list of all clerics is broadly similar because the divine itself has a certain essential nature - that of bringing Order out of chaos. Curative spells like cure light wounds and restoration just return broken parts of creation back to their intact state, but really that's all any clerical spell does. All clerical spells are essentially just glimpses into the world as it should be, sinless and unfallen. In the world as it should be water would refuse to drown, bar the way or even moisten the robes of the righteous - that's how a cleric casts water walk, by reminding the waters of their duty. Command and Gease/Quest? People should obey a servant of the gods. Flame strike? That's just the sun and stars fulfilling their intended purpose as weapons against the forces of darkness.

Of course there are gods of Chaos and Darkness, too. Sometimes they're just the guys who cast the reversed versions of Cleric spells and command rather than turn undead by default, but in my home games clerics are exclusively the servants of Order. The gods of Chaos have their priests, of course - they're just represented by Magic-Users.

Again, this is not an excercise in changing the class - it's an excercise in not changing it, keeping it exactly as written without any need to make the game world change to fit the way clerics are actually played. That said, if players want to add one or two spells per level of their own devising to their clerical spell list to flesh out their ethos I'm more than happy - I'm ecstatic in fact.

Lightbringer