Clerical Errors

Tony DiTerlizzi

“Fixing the cleric” is about as common in OSR circles as “fixing the thief”. The cleric is also frequently cut from campaigns, houserules, and heartbreakers, usually because it doesn’t really fit well outside of a eurofantasy setting with a big church or something post-apocalyptic like Canticle of Leibowitz. Many fixes say that they want the cleric to feel more distinct and not just a different type of wizard. I think this is a very Game Designer opinion, in the sense that I don’t think the experience of playing a cleric feels like playing a wizard, but I do take the point. What usually follows, however, is a system of piety points or tracking deity disfavor with a high degree of either tracking stuff, “the DM will decide how this works exactly”, or both, neither of which I’m that crazy about in a class.

Assuming you haven’t found the perfect alternative system to meet your preferences, I think there are several easier options to fit the cleric into an OSE game without overhauling the system. You can mix and match most of these as desired.

1) Clerics can use swords

The ban on edged weapons is a weird D&D-ism that doesn’t port well to many settings (arguably including a eurofantasy one with a big church, funnily enough). If you keep everything else the same and change this, you no longer need a separate paladin class and the cleric fits a more recognizable fantasy archetype. The BX cleric’s missing spell at 1st level now fills the role of the paladin “proving their faith” before getting spells, but you only have to wait one level instead of four.

2) Spontaneous Spellcasting

Clerics don’t memorize their spells. Instead, they can use a spell slot to cast any spell from the cleric spell list. Now it feels like praying for a miracle in response to a specific situation, cleanly differentiating it from the wizard's prepared spells without needing to do a lot of work.

The OSE cleric’s spell list is tiny, which makes it easy to keep track of. You could probably fit the whole thing comfortably onto a little player handout, and the spells largely do what they say on the tin (in the sense that a player probably doesn’t need to know the full text of Remove Fear in advance to figure out what it does). You can easily vary it up for different gods by swapping out a couple of spells, and clerics won’t be punished for preparing the more interesting spells over Cure Light Wounds.

Rebecca Guay

3) Open the Schools

Why shouldn’t the cleric just be another kind of wizard? Merge the spell lists (with 12 MU spells and 8 cleric spells per level, they fit comfortably onto a d20 list for determining random spells, although the occasional repeated spell may break this pleasant symmetry). You can give Magic-Users turn undead too if you like, either as a 1st-level spell or as a class ability. It’s certainly genre-appropriate – for Gandalf and Ged of Earthsea, banishing evil spirits comes right after the Light spell in a wizard’s bag of tricks. The school on Roke has a whole section devoted to healing magic, and Ged can cast Raise Dead. Witches are magic-users, and they love cooking up healing potions in their big soup pots. D&D might be the only time where A) healing magic exists, but B) wizards can't use it, so removing this strange distinction is a slam dunk. Fill in any repeat spells with your favorites from the Druid and Illusionist spell lists and you're off to the races.

If you’d like to draw a distinction between scholarly wizards and spell-casting fighters, the OSE Half-Elf provides a good template (base 3,000 XP, HD, attacks, and spell-progression as Clerics).

If you use this variant where the d4 HD Mage gets the full range of spells and you drop the cleric, I’d recommend giving the now-absent d6 HD to the Thief. You are in absolutely no danger of making the Thief too strong.

Angus McBride

4) Clerics are Elves

In Tolkien, anyway. Elrond can cast Remove Curse and is a master of healing – he’s even able to produce healing potions (or possibly it’s a member of his household who makes the miruvor, but either way the point stands). Glorfindel can turn away undead and evil spirits with the power that is in him. Carcass Crawler Issue 2 has a nice implementation of this (basically mash the base OSE Halfling and Elf classes together, use the Cleric or Druid spell list, 3,000 XP to reach level 2). I’ve been playing with a slight variant of this class and I like it a lot, but if I was removing the cleric class I’d add turn undead and use the elf’s normal XP track.

Trolls! Obviously Trolls

There’s an often-repeated bit of DMing advice that says you should never say a monster’s name. I don’t get this. I mean that in two ways:

1) I find this idea aesthetically unsatisfying.

A lot of monsters have great names! Goblin. Elf. Troll. Dragon. They’re good words, loaded with resonance. The fact that they conjure immediate associations in the listener is a good thing.

2) I have tried this and it didn’t work.

In my most memorable attempt, I ran an encounter with a gold-chased, gem-encrusted minotaur skeleton without ever saying the word “minotaur” and my players thought the fact that I scrupulously avoided saying it was a joke. Maybe this is a bad example because skeletons and minotaurs are such identifiable monsters compared to the various shades of goblin/hobgoblin/ghoul/orc that people typically use as examples for this principle, but I ended up using a lot of words to zero benefit. That same dungeon also had undead monks who had had the first joint of each finger cut off and replaced with pen nibs, fought in a ruined library that was knee-deep in foul water. That encounter had a much bigger impact on the players and it didn’t seem to be lessened by the fact that I mostly said “zombie” instead of “dead men, rotting yet still animated by a hideous spark of unlife” when one of them made an attack roll.

This admonition, I think, comes from DMs who love running gonzo horror games, where it is genuinely a great piece of advice. It is a little deflating to learn that the braying horror that Cletus Clanghorn just fired his last shotgun shell into was actually a cleverly-disguised bear. But not every palate is so jaded, and in a more classic fantasy milieu you can easily find yourself obfuscating to no benefit. 

Can you imagine trying to describe what a dragon looks like without using the word “dragon”? Do you think your description would be enhanced by that omission? If you spend a lot of time describing a “lizard-like creature with four legs and vast bat wings, with smoke curling from its nostrils” your players will probably go “...so is it a dragon?” Whereas if you say “a delicate pale-blue dragon with silvery wings” (or indeed "There he lay! A vast red-gold dragon, fast asleep") the word “dragon” is doing a lot of heavy lifting that opens up more space in your descriptive budget. By not hiding the ball on what it is, you can spend more time on what makes it interesting.

3) Metagaming Concerns

Dungeon of Signs says “...the specific mechanical aspects of a potential foe is the last thing one wants players to be thinking about when they start an encounter.”

This is, in my experience at least, wildly untrue. Players love thinking about the specific mechanical aspects of a potential foe! It’s part of how they assess the risks of an encounter. This isn’t to say you should just hand your players the relevant monster manual page for each fight, but informed decisions do lead to good gameplay. Many of my formative D&D memories involve one of us kids eagerly sharing some monster facts and discussing strategies for how to deal with them. Some of these schemes were good and some were terrible, but they were all engaging. You can decry this type of out-of-game discussion as metagaming, but I think the sense of shared adventurer knowledge is a lot of fun.

Por Que No Los Dos

Outside of gonzo-horror reskins, I think there is a useful nugget at the core of a lot of the Never Speak The Monster’s Name advice, which is just that monster descriptions should be evocative, and that your players should have reasons to care about them. I think it’s perfectly fine, even good, to use monster names paired with a good description. For example, Against The Wicked City’s ogre description reads “An eight-foot giant who comes clambering from her cannibal larder, her hot breath reeking of carrion, her long hair matted with human gore”. In a setting where ogres aren’t a discrete category of monster and you’re just using the stats to describe some kind of human mutant, great. In a more typical D&D Fantasy setting, I don’t think it would be at all lessened by changing it to “The ogre comes clambering from her cannibal larder, etc.,”. You get the associations of the word “ogre,” and have now tied it to the specificity of what this ogre is like. It’s notably a different kind of ogre than an oafish, fur-clad, treebranch-club-wielding ogre, emphasizing different qualities of the name’s common associations. That sort of thing builds the space of the imagined world: if I meet a goblin in the same setting as the cannibal ogress, I’m not likely to assume that it’s the silly Labyrinth variety. Finally, some of this is mechanical. If goblins are a worthless chaff enemy, then your players are unlikely to care for a long description of what is essentially useless information. If on the other hand the arrival of 2d6 goblins is a meaningful encounter, then I suspect that they will!

If you're a bad enough dude, you can give a monster plenty of impact with no description at all.

"Thus he came alone to Angband's gates, and he sounded his horn, and smote once more upon the brazen doors, and challenged Morgoth to come forth to single combat.

And Morgoth came."

Postscript: The Wisdom of Solomon

If you’re really bothered by D&D taxonomy of humanoids, however, and are determined not to tell your players which Monster Manual entry you’re referencing, I recommend a compromise: lump your categories. Kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, and bugbears can all be “goblins”. “A huge goblin, almost man-high”. “Shaggy-furred beasts with long arms and horrible goblin faces”. “Squealing goblin imps with beetle-black eyes in their spoiled-milk faces”. Ogres, trolls, giants, and so forth can all be uh… one of those things. A huge range of creatures can fall under “fairies” or “elves”. Basically every corporeal undead can be a “revenant,” “wight” or even “ghoul”, and the incorporeal ones can equally all be “spirits,” “ghosts,” or “wraiths”. Each of these choices will skew the flavor of the monsters and setting in a certain direction, which you can use to your advantage – see the shift from “goblins” in The Hobbit to “orcs” in The Lord of the Rings when describing the same creature.