An excellent counter argument for the good religions. Well played.
It does beg the question of how the peaseants would have reacted in SirUrza's visualization, if the village was overseen by such a priest.
Would they have been so quick to buckle under the dark priest who entered their fair village?
in the town square on such a fine day, whould the guardian of the village have been far away? Overseeing the flock he tends too?
Ahh... The possibilities. :o)
Or maybe it's too small a village to have a cleric.
Or when the evil cleric struck he was seeing to the needs of an ill child and only responded to the situation once the town was being overrun by undead.
I can think of a lot of reason good clerics aren't always present.
Oh yeah?!?!
Wel... well...
My good priest pushes the "bad man" into the village well...
So there... :oP
*hic-up*
The scene I've been envisioning since I read about the (AWESOME) new evil cleric turning ability is a feat that comes from WOtC's Libris Mortis. Its name escapes me at the moment, but if you take it, you are healed by negative energy, and harmed by positive energy. There's another feat you can take to cause undead that you create to burst upon destruction and release a wave of negative energy.
- Rebis
Tomb-Tainted Soul. Destruction Retribution.
I can see clerics of Norgerber being really fond of this kind of channeling.
Also it invokes images of "suicide bomber" clerics using their channelings as envisioned by other posters.
Consider then the difference between two towns: one that is blessed with the presence of a positive channeling cleric, and one that is not.
Towns without clerics would be much closer to the real world medeival town, with almost palpable levels of fear, stress, and paranoia. Anyone walking into town could be a threat, and the town literally has no one to "get their back". All of the perks of a "blessed" town don't exist, disease, death, and despair are all more common.
Cleric-less towns might become almost psychotic if a good cleric is in the party. They would beg for that cleric to stay in the town, or at least visit regularily. Less scrupulous townsfolk might actually try to blackmail the cleric into staying, and certainly one who didn't stay but tried to visit regularily would be presented with an eventual "look what happened because you weren't here" scenario, be it minor or major.
Imagine a fued between two nearby villages, because the family line of clerics ended up marrying and moving to one of them from the other. What if this happened frequently, with each generation "trading places" in the two towns. Or what about a family where each generation at least one of the two town's clerical bloodline members has a pair of twins, which grow up serving both the towns, but now in the current generation there is only one child born.
I do agree, the mechanics can heavily alter the fluff, in very awesome ways!
So the Walking Dude was a cleric? Makes sense.
The negative energy stuff isn't that new - it's just eariler than usual. In 3e, they can touch people to make them drop dead. Later, they can radiate negative nergy with mass inflicts.
And remember that a guy walking around while people are dropping dead attrackts adventurers. Although Richard always seems to manage.
Oh, and Richard on gnomes: "They're like children! You can't kill just one!"
I'd say there's no better way to discredit a good church than to have some evil cleric disguise himself and have at it...
That's true. I remember an evil FR game where I played a fey'ri assassin. We went up against a priest of the sungod Lathander. I'm not sure whether we killed him or he fled, but we wanted the city to hate the Lathanderites, so I used my inborn shapechanging talents and disguised myself as the priest. Taking a recently-found wand of fireball (and my use magic device), I ran around in the streets disguised as that priest, foaming at the mouth, screaming in the usual mad prophet voice, and killing people.
"SEE, YOU INFIDELS! I'LL DRAW LATHANDER'S SUN FROM THE HEAVENS TO CLEANSE YOUR DARK SOULS!" *fireball into crowd*
For some reason, the church of Lathander lost a lot of popularity in that city (my character was a master of disguise and deception, and made a very convincing cleric showing his "true colours")