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A flavor question for PFS characters. Can I choose to be a cleric or paladin of a deity that no longer has an organized religion? I ask because one of the core concepts of those classes is their church/organized religion which they are at least trained by.
If I can, suggestions on what sort of background would be fitting for such a PFS character.
For specifics, I'm looking at running a Cleric or Paladin of Maat. Maat is the LN Ancient Osirion deity of Law, Order, Justice, and Truth. It's a deity with no subdomains, one of 3 PFS legal deities with access to the Void Domain, and the only such deity with an alignment compatible with Paladins.
Venture-Lieutenant, Netherlands—Leiden
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It's a PFS legal deity, so the simple answer is Yes.
Presumably there are still people in backwards Osirion villages that worship Maat. But the Society does quite a bit of poking around in such places, because that's where you can sometimes find ancient ruins. So such a PC getting into contact with the Society can be rationalized.
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The only reference to Maat that I see is from Pathfinder #80: Empty Graves. From the Mummy's Mask Campaign.
Gods: the gods on page 65–75 are legal for playSo, to my understanding, you can use them if you have the source.
Yeah, it's a legal deity for worship in PFS. That part I get. The concern is more flavor, in that Paladins and Clerics are trained in their church/temple, so without the organized religion, how did they learn to be clerics/paladins?
I mean, could do a "frozen in time" sort of background, though not totally sure how to represent that (suggestions welcome). Could also be a very old character, but I don't think any of the legal races can be old enough for ancient osirioni.
I suppose I could be a cleric/paladin that was trained in another religion, and then turned/traded to another deity. Hmmm...Do you think Abadar would trade a follower to another deity? Both deities are lawful neutral, so it would have to be an "over the table" exchange, but Abadar would certainly be a deity that would at least consider such a trade.
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It's a PFS legal deity, so the simple answer is Yes.
Presumably there are still people in backwards Osirion villages that worship Maat. But the Society does quite a bit of poking around in such places, because that's where you can sometimes find ancient ruins. So such a PC getting into contact with the Society can be rationalized.
Yeah, that could work too.
A flavor question for PFS characters. Can I choose to be a cleric or paladin of a deity that no longer has an organized religion? I ask because one of the core concepts of those classes is their church/organized religion which they are at least trained by.
If I can, suggestions on what sort of background would be fitting for such a PFS character.
For specifics, I'm looking at running a Cleric or Paladin of Maat. Maat is the LN Ancient Osirion deity of Law, Order, Justice, and Truth. It's a deity with no subdomains,
...
I don't know if they are citing a legal source or just making it up, but the Pathfinder Wiki does list subdomains for Maat.
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Venture-Lieutenant, Finland—Tampere
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I play a character who worships Bastet and I essentially fluff him as being from a distant, forgotten-by-the-world desert monastery where Bastet has been worshiped for centuries. Osirion is a huge place with millennia of buried history. I'd say it's pretty easy to make up a little community where the Old Gods are still the primary religion/s.
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As a paladin you have no mechanical or thematic requirement for a church. It's entirely possible to get your calling directly from your deity.
Yup. I have three divine warriors in PFS who were chosen by their gods without asking for it. Two of those involve lawful good goddesses, and the third's neutral good (and ancient Osiriani).
There's my battle oracle who was chosen by Iomedae, and cursed the way all oracles are. He's been swearing and cursing at the gods for ruining his life ever since. Having a lawful good PC that's so disrespectful to even the good and lawful gods has been fun. More recently (since level 4), he's figured out that Iomedae is probably his patron, and that she probably chose him for reasons that would count as "the greater good". So he's starting to grudgingly accept that although his life has been difficult because of his curse, he has actually done much good in the world that he never would have accomplished otherwise, so maybe she knew what she was doing.
Another is a paladin of Shizuru (major deity in Tien Xia) with the Chosen One archetype, who was approached one day by her familiar (a talking bird) and told that the empress of heavens wants her to be a warrior for good. At level 7, she still doesn't know the word "paladin" in the Taldane (Common) language, since she only learned that language on her way to the Inner Sea just before joining the Pathfinder Society, and she's only about 90% fluent in it.
The last, most relevant to this thread, is an archaeologist who found an ancient holy symbol of Isis at a dig site in Osirion. While holding it, she casually mused aloud (in Ancient Osiriani), "Oh Mighty Isis, whatever happened to you and your family? Why did you leave our world, and let other gods replace you?" Much to her surprise, the Goddess actually answered.
With a flash of light and crack of thunder, Adrianna was knocked to the floor. When she awoke, she discovered that she had the powers of an inquisitor, channeled through a holy symbol of Isis. She prayed for guidance, to find out what the Goddess wants from her, but Isis never communicated so directly again. She decided that her new quest in life would be to uncover the answers to those questions she'd asked Isis that night, while upholding the good and noble principles the Goddess held dear. That quest led her to join the Pathfinder Society and Scarab Sages.
In short, be creative. Religions don't necessarily have to be that organized, and the gods sometimes act on a whim. Even the lawful ones, if they see a mortal they can use to further their own (often secretive) goals.
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A few things:
Yeah, this thread seems weird...
because the Osirioni gods certainly do have organized churches.
As to the centrality of such organizations to the classes as such...
I really don't see the basis for that, any more than e.g. Wizards.
SURE, you can say it's COMMON, and even the NORM that such exists.
But it just isn't a fundamental core of the class.
The closest the class description comes to suggesting otherwise is saying they are "Devoted to the tenets of the religions and philosophies that inspire them" but that hardly necessitates training via an extant organized religious group.
If it were a fundamental core, then Deities without substantial numbers of followers to congregate in any one community simply would not have Clerics, and presumably could NEVER have Clerics because there was never previous Clerics to learn from. And yet non-Deities can become Deities, and they can gain Clerics who follow them, starting from scratch with no existing Church.
Being a Cleric doesn't actually require having any special knowledge of the Religion, you can easily invest ZERO ranks in Know:Religion or Spellcraft. If you do want your character to know such things, you can invent any number of means to acquire that knowledge, from independent research even using other historical archives, or you can suppose intermittent encounters between incredibly sparse followers unable to sustain continual organization, but who still pass on knowledge, or you can even suppose some sort of divine inspiration.
I feel like the assumption behind this thread is based on old D&D conventions of "a god's power derives from their followers" which we know just isn't the case in Pathfinder. Deities can and do have zero followers for periods of time, which in no way prevents future followers... pretty much every Deity started out without a church of their own, after all. One is free to be a Cleric of a deity while totally ignoring or rejecting the teachings of an existing church of that deity.
I'm thinking that the typical paladin would feel comfortable working with an established order, but if such an order weren't available, well, Good still needs to be done.
Yep. It's the Law. ;)