#clerics

i keep having this dream where your blood is turning my hands into river stones, and i keep waking up to pale white sunlight

That her spells even (barely) work at all raises all sorts of questions about how the gods even worked. Did they actually need mortal worshipers to function, or were they just extremely powerful entities that came from somewhere else and simply demanded fealty and worship from beings they saw as less than them? If someone like Dr. Talter can access divine spellcasting without a god, how exactly did clerics work, considering the shapers seemed consider sorcerers as their most favored servants and priests?

In Aramán, is the divine a tangible force in the universe that can be understood with observation and study like wizards do to the natural world, or is the Totality's observing it a passive act of worship in itself that is close enough to the relationship between mortal and a god that they've accidentally stumbled into being clerics of another stripe?

These motherly murderesses are charged with nurturing the fallen lamentiri seeds that grow into new Sylvaneth, and if they’re not also the season’s most stylish way to grind Pox-Wretches into paste we don’t know what is. After all, today is all about sharing love with those important to you, and Grove Guardians can’t wait to share how much they love dicing Nurgle’s detritus up with their very important grove sickles. All jokes aside, this incredible miniature is packed with evocative detail from top to bottom. The Grove Guardian can be seen watering delicate flowers on their jagged branches while a newly formed Sylvaneth slumbers away in a pod, and small critters climb all over the aged wood.

Clerics originated way back in the pre-OD&D days, when the game that would become Dungeons & Dragons was still a fantasy roleplaying add-on intended to be paired with your favourite historical wargame. One of the players in Dave Arneson's original Blackmoor campaign had an army whose commander/player character was a vampire named Sir Fang, who proved to be sufficiently overpowered that a mechanical "hard counter" was desired.

This ended up taking the form of a vampire-hunting priest character heavily inspired by Peter Cushing's turn as Abraham Van Helsing in the 1958 Christopher Lee adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula; that vampire-hunting priest in turn developed into what would become one of original flavour D&D's three core classes (the other two being the fighter and the wizard – the thief/rogue came later).

The paladin, meanwhile, was originally a direct, 1:1 lift of Holger Carlsen, the protagonist of Poul Anderson's 1961 fantasy novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, and was introduced as a subclass of the fighter – rather than a class of its own – in the 1975 Greyhawk supplement. Over the game's editions it's wandered from being a fighter subclass, to being a high-level "advanced class" to which qualifying characters can switch at 10th level, back to being a fighter subclass, and finally to a core class, where it's generally remained.

So, in short, the cleric was originally a purpose-built hard counter to vampire PCs loosely patterned after Peter Cushing's Abraham Van Helsing, while the paladin was originally for people who just really wanted to be one specific Poul Anderson character.