Divine Intervention

Thursday, June 21, 2018

When talking about the planes, you can't skip talking about the planes' most powerful entities. So we're going to chat about the gods for a little bit.

In Pathfinder Roleplaying Planar Adventures, all 20 of the core deities are presented in the book, each with a deity stat block. These stat blocks aren't actual stats for the gods, and they have some of the information you're familiar with from places like Pathfinder Campaign Setting: Inner Sea Gods. However, the presentation here includes some new things as well. The stat blocks cover things like domains, favored weapons, and sacred animals and colors, but it also helpfully collects information like allies, enemies, holy days, worshipers, minions, and the gods' heralds. The stat blocks also list each of the deities' divine realms and points you to which page in the book features more details on that realm. What's new and exciting about these is that it also includes something new—divine gifts.

Illustration by Ian Perks

Divine gifts are boons that gods bestow on devout followers who achieve a legendary task or perform a particularly pious act. These divine gifts are unique to each god or goddess and allow the GM to spice up the rewards in their game. They work as excellent rewards when treasure just doesn't cut it. Divine gifts should only be used rarely or else they run the risk of feeling underwhelming or watering down the experience. If used against players (or used to favor a specific character) using divine intervention has the potential to upset and alienate your players. Divine gifts should be used to forward the story and reward significant events in the narrative of the campaign. As such, they should only be handed out once per player per campaign—but, hey... as the GM you're the god of the world you present, so you can what you want.

Illustration by Vlada Hladkova

Here are a few examples of some divine gifts.

Pharasma's Divine Gift

The recipient is not affected by the next effect, damage, or other event that would otherwise kill him.

Sarenrae's Divine Gift

As the sun rises over the recipient's home world, he can perform a 10-minute prayer (this may be part of his daily ritual to prepare spells) to invoke the Dawnflower. For the next 24 hours, all healing effects the character generates heal the maximum amount of damage possible. In addition, during this time he can cast breath of life and heal as spell-like abilities 3 times each (CL 20th).

Torag's Divine Gift

The recipient can perform a 10-minute prayer (this can be part of her daily ritual to prepare spells) to gain divine insight into defense and strategic situations for the next 24 hours. During this time, the character gains a pool of 20 defense points. She can allocate these points among any number of recipients as untyped bonuses to AC or on saving throws, to a maximum of 5 points per target (a single target can receive this bonus only to AC or to saving throws, not both). She can reallocate these points as a standard action any point during these 24 hours, but each time she does so, the total pool of defense points available for the next allocation is reduced by 5.

That's it for now with all this deity discussion, but a little later I'll be back to talk about some of the other sections of Planar Adventures.

Adam Daigle
Managing Developer