I wander through every once in a while. For the record, I think some of the stuff in this thread is amazing.
I am just giving you a hard time Sam.
I wander through every once in a while. For the record, I think some of the stuff in this thread is amazing.
I second this. I don't post much on these boards (how do you people find the time to post so often??) but I always keep my eye on certain posters such as yourself who are well-spoken and have inspiring ideas that I can steal for my own games--well, hypothetical games; my friends and I have been talking about starting a game for at least 6 months now, but we're always too busy :-/ But I look forward to seeing what else you put out for us!
I wander through every once in a while. For the record, I think some of the stuff in this thread is amazing.I second this. I don't post much on these boards (how do you people find the time to post so often??)
I had my life surgically removed in the fourth grade.
And thanks everyone for the kind words. I hope to have something of substance to show you all within the week.
The Churchlands proper are skewed in my mind to low to mid level stuff, so this is a little bit moot, but the Great Church knows some of its clergy have historically had the power to raise the dead. They can't look at their spell lists in the rulebooks, but they know the gods can do it and they know it's among the abilities granted to the faithful. The rarity of mid-level casters means it doesn't come up often, but it does and the Great Church tries to be thorough. Plus it is one of those life and death matters that most every real world religion has something to say about.
So then, to knock a bit of rust off the insides of my skull:
The Great Church, its Necromancers, and Necromancy
The dead are dead, passing beyond the wall of the world by the Opener of Ways and to their rewards or rebirth, as judged by the Three-Eyed Queen. This is the will of the gods and not for mortals to challenge. Any art or artifice that does so is blasphemous, a hubristic strike against godly order that casts one’s soul into darkness. The Inquisition seeks necromancers just as it seeks demonologists.
To the Great Church, necromancy is any act or magic pertaining or, summoning, influencing, controlling, or animating the dead. It includes the creation of undead, the conjuring of the spirits of the dead, seeking knowledge from the dead, restoring the dead to life, and for some authorities even includes healing the living as this forestalls the approach of death.
This being the case, the Great Church employs divine gifts to animate the dead not at all. The act of doing so draws on dark powers that corrupt one’s soul, creates a creature hateful of all godly life and in rebellion against all godly ways just if a demon were conjured, denies the soul of the fallen its proper rest by disturbing its worldly remains, and violates the will of the gods in that it usurps the place of the Opener of Ways and subverts the judgment of the Three-Eyed Queen.
While the creation of undead is the most flagrant of necromantic sins, prohibitions extend rather further. Orthodoxy condemns the raising of the dead with nearly equal vigor. The dead are dead, as dogma says. Under no circumstances can it ever be permitted as it is an act of rebellion against the gods, it denies the fallen their reward or takes them from their proper punishment, and places the necromancer in an unholy twilight between life and death while corrupts just as creating undead corrupts.
This prohibition is absolute and preached at every funeral and in every autumn and winter. It is a dogma of the Church not to be challenged. Except when it is. Though the Great Church maintains steadfast silence on the matter and glosses over or outright ignores the raising of the dead by any other than the gods themselves in various myths and lives of saints, in fact on certain occasions the revival of the dead is in fact quite permitted. This is a matter of settled Church law, admitted by Orthodoxy…in private among fellow clergy.
The raising of the dead is allowed to monastic clergy alone, and among them only to those admitted to the Sacristy of the White Covenant. To the ordinary layperson, and indeed to most ordinary priests, this prelature is a secretive band of priests and priestesses who do not speak of their affiliation or their order’s purpose. A majority are priests-errant but many also become advisors to prominent churchmen both secular and monastic.
Like the Inquisition, the Sacristy of the White Covenant is a personal prelature independent of the Church’s normal hierarchies. Members answer to the prelature’s co-leaders, the Grand Sacristan and Grand Sacristrix. These worthies respectively keep the sacred Chalice and Rod that are the order’s chief relics. The Sacristan is always a priest of the Opener of Ways and the Sacristrix always a priestess of the Three-Eyed Queen. By canon law, the two are considered married to one another and this union supplements any others they may have previously had blessed by the Church. Their vestments include a sacred chain of alternating black and white links that binds the two together about the neck and waist for all formal occasions, leading to the general populace knowing them as the Chained Ones.
Members of the Sacristy bear a sign of the Chalice and Rod by which they can identify themselves to one another or to other clergy, but rarely proclaim their affiliation openly. Instead at need they will take the person they must present their credentials aside and do so discretely. Those outside the Sacristy are not required to give aid to members, unlike the situation with Inquisitors, but must generally refrain from impeding them as they go about their business.
Becoming a member of the Sacristy is a demanding process, which can only begin by invitation of an existing member. One cannot apply and requests for advice on how to win notice are met with silence. Those clergy in the known often suspect that asking is the best way to be removed from the pool of candidates. Those invited, if they agree, must swear vows of secrecy, obedience, and undertake a an oath of silence for an entire year during which they may not speak or, if possible, make any sound at all. At the end of the year they are initiated in a sober ceremony replete with invocations of horrific punishments for those who break their oaths or misuse the gods’ gifts. At the conclusion they receive an additional ordination in the names of the Opener of Ways and the Three-Eyed Queen, which empowers them to reach beyond the wall of the world and restore life to the dead. Most, but not all, members are already parts of the monastic orders of one of the aforementioned gods. Those who are not are considered members ex officio from the time of their ordination.
Members in general may use their gifts at their discretion. Reaching beyond the wall of the world includes simply speaking with the dead and disinterring bodies. Ordinary priests are technically permitted to do such things, but obligated to undertake numerous and prohibitive ritual cleansings, not to mention giving good reason and receiving permission from their bishop. The Great Church in general encourages the job be left to the experts. Members of the Sacristy can, if they wish, just take a shovel and go to work.
However, even for an ordained member of the Sacristy, raising the dead is not taken lightly. Among non-members, it’s prohibited entirely. Members have permission to raise the dead if and only if the deceased are baptized faithful of the Great Church in good standing at the time of their death. Furthermore their death must be known to be contrary to the will of the gods. This can only be presumed if the deceased fell at the hands of a supernatural evil, these in chief being demons, the undead, and arcanists. Being sacrificed by or to one such entity counts, but being slain by human cultists does not otherwise unless one was slain by something like an unholy blessed dagger or spells the cultists got from said unholy patrons.
In other circumstances, such as being slain by pagans or by non-human, non-animal foes (“animal” entailing anything relatively common to the Churchlands, including giant versions, but excluding things like goblins, manticores, dragons, snails that crap lightning bolts, etc) may permit the dead to be raised. In such cases, one must speak with the deceased first to ensure they were in a righteous frame of mind and, time permitting, commune with the appropriate heavenly authorities. In any other case, communing is mandatory and permission not generally forthcoming. In every case, the priest must report the raising to his or her superiors at the earliest opportunity.
For the raised, life can be difficult. Titles, property, and grants of nobility pass to one’s heirs at the moment of death and do not return to the revived. One comes back to the worth with nothing. Many noble families maintain house laws that prohibit any reviving on the grounds that a risen and dispossessed former noble becomes an obvious menace to his heirs. One is dependent on one’s friends and comrades to help one get a fresh start. Many of the revived are grateful to the Church and seek to take up holy orders, but others are resentful of what they’ve lost and become embittered, even dangerous.
Some are clearly twisted and changed by the experience. In these cases, the Church blames the priest or priestess responsible for performing the ceremony improperly or without proper warrant as the true gift of the gods would never have such a result. Clearly, the priest has fallen and become a necromancer in earnest. The twilight between life and death tempted him and his gods-granted powers let him think he could replace the gods. Heresy could not be avoided, and such a person is forever damned, as is the deceased who came back changed. Such outcomes are rarer than raising the dead itself, but have caused such strife that they form the popular imagining of such things. To the commoner, necromancy is necromancy.
Ooo! Ooo! I want a giant snail that craps lightning bolts for a mount.
Ooo! Ooo! I want a giant snail that craps lightning bolts for a mount.
Darkstorm: Leader of the Darkling Lords had the totem of mollusk. It looks like a hideous oozy green slimy 8 ft snail that shoots lightning out of mouth. :D Well, thats what I vaguely remember anyways.
tee hee ...
Hugs Samnell!
With the depth of hand-written letters, the typed word can be profound and meaningful even across oceans, on a computer.
I crawl, dirt-smeared and soaked with sweat, free from the sewers of Nixonland and into the bright, shining day of- Well I finished the book anyway. It's a great piece of history but I don't think I ever want to do that again. I made it worse by trying to do it with a book club and thus stopping when it was going well, thus stretching it out far more than I should have. I'm unlikely to do a book club again.
I'm not sure what I'll read next, but it couldn't help but be more inspirational to the Churchlands project than Nixonland. :) Also I'm going to try to get away from the historical adaptation a little bit (It's important, but hard in different ways. :) ) and deal with more of the pure creation stuff.
On a bit of a meta level, I got a small kick out of this from one of Ed Greenwood's original FR players when I read it a few days ago:
It's a bit long:
“A) how did Ed deal with the death of nearly all of the gods”In the home Realms campaign, none of this has happened yet. We’re still in the initial wild-rumors phases of the about-to-unfold Time of Troubles.
As a designer (and creator of the pantheon and most of the gods in it), I imagine Ed took it in stride. He has always, from the beginning (while understanding that gamers always have a hunger to know more about deities and the overarching “way things work”), taken the position that mortals simply can’t know the truth about many things divine, because none of their sources of information (church doctrines, what priests say, rumors, even what they themselves witness or receive as visions) can be trusted.
Even the gods deceive, and when interpreting “what really went on/is going on,” most mortals are in the position of seeing only a glimpse of a confrontation between folk they’ve never seen before, and then having to extrapolate the lives, aims, and back stories of everyone involved, and somehow, by sheer luck, getting it all correct.
You may have noticed, in Ed’s novels, some characters using the expression “the Watching Gods.” From the very outset of the Realms, before TSR ever published one word about it in long-ago DRAGON articles, Ed has murmured to players (through Elminster [[himself an “unreliable narrator,” always remember]], Khelben, various sages, and manifestations of Mystra, your namesake, and Mielikki, not to mention PC-overheard conversations among sages and archwizards) the notion that a LOT of what we “know” about the gods is spurious, that some gods have always masqueraded as others, that what priests and therefore believers see as several separate deities and demigods may well all be aspects of one entity . . . and so on.
So no one in the Realms can be certain that many gods perished. They’ve been TOLD that this happened, and may have seen events explained as being part of this or that god’s destruction, BUT . . .
I spent a lot of time in FR. One of my games is still set there and I loved the hell out of it for years. (Still do, but not so much the current version.) I've followed the steady stream of questions answered over at Candlekeep very intermittently. The answers are often fun to read and full of interesting ideas, but conversely many of them are arcane details about minor named NPCs and the like that would require some research just to understand as anything independent of Random NPC X's Life and Times. Prior to the past week or so I don't think I'd been back in two or three years.
Then I come around and there's one of Ed's players laying out just how I've come to want to set matters of religion up in my homebrew, at least by implication. I certainly didn't arrive at the same place from all my years reading FR product and even my experience with published lines that tried to pursue ambiguity was that concreteness necessarily drifted in both out of inertia-driven repetition (Who has the space to write up a whole new foundational myth in every supplement? I was tired of giving that one warforged leader a new story in every book after about the second one over in Eberron.) and to satisfy the desire of the consumer, myself included, for more firm and clear setting details.
I got here without Ed and found him patiently waiting. Funny how that worked out. :)
I've got a lot of ideas bouncing around again and I don't know which I want to set upon first so I think I'll just talk one out.
On the Nature of Magic
When Churchlanders speak of "magic" they mean arcane magic, which is emphatically nothing at all like what holy men and women of the gods do. In fact, it is the exact opposite. The two could not have less in common and in fact the one is the antithesis of the other. A priest works miracles. A wizard, witch, or pagan makes pacts with evil spirits to achieve unnatural ends, corrupting the world and themselves with the act. Importantly, this evil is inherent. Orthodoxy recognizes no distinction between using arcane magic for good ends, rather seeing those ends as corrupted and twisted by the magic itself. Then of course the use of magic even once creates a stain that can only grow. Magic is an addiction, a compulsion, a poisoning of the soul.
To Orthodoxy, magic is practiced as follows:
1) One discovers or forges a connection with evil powers from beyond the walls of the world. This connection can form unawares, from the simple act of being near magic being worked, reading particular tomes, even hearing certain words. This opens a door in the walls of the world that leads directly to your soul.
Some unfortunates are born with this connection and the Great Church views them as hopelessly damned by their very nature. This connection can also be imposed from without, and the Great Church teaches that before the Purge arcanists recruited this way. They would take a liking to some young person, in folklore preferring either the especially righteous and good-natured or those already corrupted by vices both petty and severe. Through horrific rites they would force their corruption into the body and soul of their apprentice. Physical mutilation is a common feature, up to and including torture. Many apprentices in folklore are drugged, beaten, enchanted, forced to spend long times twisted into unnatural forms or the shapes of ordinary objects. Some form of sexual violation is often featured. On rare occasions, new found apprentices are made sacrifices to otherworldly patrons and then restored to life somehow.
NB: It bears repeating that this is what Orthodoxy thinks of its enemies.
This act changed the apprentices and made them like unto their masters, to whom they were in some ways beholden, whilst also separating them from their previous lives. A good, loyal son might find he no longer feels any affection for his devoted father, or is even inclined to betray him. A mother might be set against her own children, feeling a growing urge to drown them.
Folklore and Inquisition archives speak of many scenarios ranging from abrupt and radical shifts of character to slow corruptions that only became apparent over years. Stories of the rites of initiation tend to the extremely lurid and some Inquisitors and even laypeople have been discovered to have an unhealthy fascination with the accounts. Successive generations of scholars have tried to mitigate against this by omitting particular details or couching them in increasingly technical and obscure jargon, with mixed success. The general trend is towards more and more thorough bowdlerizing, but the accumulation of jargon and periodic rediscoveries of older sources also mean that every generation or two a new wave of unexpurgated chronicles surface.
Some of these uncut, all-access works are limited to a kind of glossary, of varying accuracy, to the euphemisms and elisions while others are inspired by rediscovery of older works. Still others are pure, lurid inventions of either righteous chroniclers favoring illustration of proper morals and warn away by contrast or based on spurious texts that come into Inquisition hands from without and are taken as genuine. Inquisitors don't consult the Nameless One to be sure their archives have every detail right and are wary of casting anything away lest it leave them unarmed against future threats. That said, the Great Church fairly often condemns a work and outlaws it when it becomes the focus of popular attention. Works are most often outlawed in particular sees by the local bishop, but on occasion at higher levels and such acts are supposed to be reported up the hierarchy so a decision binding on all the faithful can be reached. In practice the Great Church is very inconsistent. Powerful, influential sees tend to have the works they want banned everywhere regardless of whether they present a sweeping peril or not while a work condemned by a smaller see often has to wait until someone of influence takes a personal interest.
Once one has undergone the rites of initiation, one is an arcanist. The door is open an the sinner proceeds onward.
2) The arcanist undertakes many dire and foul audiences with dark powers which teach him blasphemous secrets not meant for mortal ears. These secrets both guide his own experiments and directly grant him powers. They likewise further warp his mind and soul, each act making him ever more beholden to both his worldly and otherworldly masters. In the end, progression in the art turns an arcanist against even his master. The Inquisition ponders the paradox that sinking far into the black arts turns one against all, including one's master, yet arcanists are likewise known to have a drive to seek out and train apprentices despite the likelihood they are recruiting their own assassins. Many ascribe it to madness, but others believe the fell powers play a deeper game and wish that apprentice slays master before master can grow in hateful power to the point of threatening his patrons.
3) Once learned in the secrets of darkness and armed with fell powers, the arcanist can go about using these powers. To Orthodoxy, this entails supplication to one's patrons who then fill them with potency. To support this they can point to many occasions where a slain wizard erupted in a storm of magic upon death, or otherwise fell under unusual circumstances. This, they say, is proof that their bodies and corrupted souls are vessels for unnatural power released when they expire.
Once filled with fell might, the arcanist can then release and shape it to his twisted will. This requires blasphemous incantations, strange materials, careful gestures, or some combination of the three and the arcanist must maintain adamant focus on their unfolding and form as the power sits uneasy within him. To the Inquisition's delight, it can be disrupted and wasted if that focus can be broken. This discharge may still blight the area or cause some harm, but is generally far safer than what the arcanist wished to be done. Some in the Inquisition believe that when the energy is wasted it is lose forever to the arcanist's patrons, like a sword rusted to nothing. Others maintain that the power is only loaned and so returns to its owner regardless.
This process is utterly alien to how the Great Church works miracles. To work a miracle, one must first be ordained. This ceremony includes speaking the personal names of the gods of the Great Church, the only time when these are uttered. By custom this is done in a curtained area set up within the cathedral. The bishop and the acolyte enter together after sharing a ritual ablution, while priests guard the space with their lives and angels watch unseen.
In a whisper the bishop imparts the names, and this act ordains the acolyte. The knowledge is indelible, forever a fundamental part of the new priest. It inscribes itself upon his soul in such a way that even when not thinking upon it, he can feel a divine presence within. For secular clergy, this is only a slight awareness. Their monastic counterparts receive somewhat stronger, though still not distracting or overpowering, senses appropriate to the focuses of their devotions. A priest of the Builder of Walls may always have a sense of being safely enclosed, where a priestess of the Three Eyed Queen would have the sense of being weighed and judged.
The ordained then meditate upon their connection to the divine, screening out the rest of the world. By the time one is ordained, one generally knows all the necessary prayers for miracle working by heart. They are different for each deity and for the church as a whole, but fit into relatively logical systems that greatly aid memorization. The supplicant selects the proper prayers in mind and addresses himself to the gods (or god, if monastic). The prayers are silent, but each is accompanied by the proper divine name. For monastics, this is always the name of their particular deity. Monastics append ritualized thanks to the other gods at the conclusion of their prayers. For secular clergy, the deity chosen depends on both the prayer being requested, one's intended use for it, and the priest's own spiritual state.
At the conclusion of each supplication, the priest silently affirms he will use the miracle-working power of the gods only as they would wish and in accordance with the teachings and dictates of the Great Church. The instant each request is completed, the priest feels power come into him from without and lodge itself in his soul. Accompanying the power is a combination of mental exercises and thoughts that must be joined to the spoken prayer to properly endow it with the will of the gods. While the spoken words are always the same, the spiritual mindscape required can be different every time. The power committed to the prayer and the mental components lodge together in a way that the priest can feel, with the exact impression depending on the deity imparting the energy. Builder prayers tend to feel like bricks emblazoned with heavenly seals, which together form a wall that in the minds of secular clergy wraps around and gives foundation to the prayers to other gods. Prayers of the Sublime Thought express themselves as esoteric combinations of geometric objects moving in relation to one another and inscribed with mathematical formulae and abstract symbolism. Red Goddess prayers are weapons aflame, the flames and blood upon their blades forming sigils.
Realize the miracle, the priest combines the proper intercessory prayer with the necessary mental state. The power flows into and through the mind state and consumes it as the world bends to the will of the gods. This requires very little practice, though intense focus is demanded. Most newly-minted clergy marvel at how they had to strain to memorize voluminous prayers, proper protocols, which gods to call on when, and the like only to find that once ordained most of their task in working miracles is to hold on tight. At times many even feel as though the gods are subtly correcting minor errors in their utterances and, when necessary, gestures. The working of such miracles naturally exalts the soul and brings one closer to the gods.
So, as any righteous eyes can see, the Great Church's miracle working is totally and comprehensively unlike any working of arcane magic. :)
That’s all for now. As always, questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome. To come will be an arcane view of magic, which predictably differs from the Great Church’s view of magic. I’ll try to remember to include something about the interactions between the two as well.
Holy crap this is long. :)
I wanted to write this as a companion piece to the Orthodoxy-bound description I posted before. Contra orthodoxy, of course, there’s no single way to do magic or central agreement on what magic is, how it works, and so forth. The arcane arts are no more limited to the Isles of Sorcery than theism is limited to the Churchlands. But the Churchlands are the focus so this will be at least implicitly driven by the paradigm of the refugee Churchlander arcanists. They got many of their ideas from the Churchlander elves, but they were more than mere inheritors and copycats. Rather they took elven ideas, their own speculations and experiments, combined them with insights gleaned from direct consultation with otherworldly powers, dragons, and the like to create their own synthesis.
A secondary bias in this is towards wizardry, since wizards are the guys most involved in active experimentation and research. It’s also necessarily a bit arcane in the everyday sense of the word. :)
The Educated Arcanist’s Understanding of Magic
The word ‘magic’ denotes different things, some distinct and some overlapping. In a way, each answers the question: What is magic?
What is magic? Magic is a substance and a field of energy
The raw stuff of magic, often called apeiron. Apeiron is infinite, indefinite, and unlimited. Arcanists generally use the term as it is, but if forced to translate it into crude, mundane languages will generally call it something like “the infinite boundless”. Metaphorically, apeiron is likened to an ocean without end, the wind, and fire. It’s strongly associated with dynamism, in an abstract sense.
Apeiron’s three primary properties are key to magical study. Because it is infinite, it must be in all places and all things. Because it is unlimited, it can never be exhausted or destroyed. There is always more magic and always enough magic to do anything. Nothing, in principle, is beyond the ability of the arcane arts. That is what it means to be infinite and boundless.
Most crucially, apeiron is indefinite. Its protean, ever-shifting nature makes it extremely pliable to the consciousnesses of the enlightened –and even the unenlightened- who through discipline, gift, study, and raw willpower can shape it to their liking.
Apeiron’s indefinite, infinite, unlimited nature makes it the focus of many paradoxes. Apeiron makes up everything, yet not everything is pure apeiron. In a sense, everything is of or has apeiron, but is not itself apeiron. The conventional elements arise from and return to apeiron, but are also separate things in themselves.
Most wizarding authorities hold that while human and other living bodies are made of the conventional elements, apeiron in certain forms and orientations comprises the spirit and soul and thus endows matter with life, motion, and consciousness. The matter has the least apeiron, or at least the least accessible and dynamic apeiron. The spirit, which is roughly the life force, the élan vital, etc, is more in tune with apeiron’s nature and thus more rich in apeiron. But as the spirit is the motive, animating force of matter it is still somewhat entangled with matter. The soul, being pure consciousness is pure apeiron and insulated from the matter by the functioning of the spirit. Sacrificing bits of life, or even whole lives, can thus be a great source of magical power. More potent still is sacrificing a soul and most potent of all is a soul freely given.
Apeiron in all its forms is present in all things in all places in all times. However its distribution is not uniform. Apeiron naturally collects in some places and is naturally sparse in others, to the degree that anything infinite and omnipresent can be scarce or abundant. Great concentrations of natural rock, particularly certain mineral formations, hold extremely static apeiron which is difficult both to access and to penetrate from without. However even here are exceptions, as while many minerals inhibit the working of magic, still others enhance it or can be used to influence it in certain ways.
In addition to these natural collections of apeiron, it might come to endow certain objects or places through design. Arcanists know many diagrams, designs, circles, and accompanying rites that can be used to focus the local apeiron in ways congenial to one’s work and to draw more apeiron to oneself. Furthermore they can create items that naturally harvest ambient apeiron over time. Of course they can also do the opposite.
Of particular interet to some wizards is a particular, somewhat aberrant form of apeiron. Doxastic apeiron is produced not through natural variations or deliberate artifice per se, but rather by the active and passive belief of conscious beings. Through the cumulative act of many conscious beings believing that a place, practice, or virtually anything has a special significance, they can over time make it a wellspring of the very powers they believe it to possess. In effect, belief transmits some amount of the apeiron of one’s consciousness to the focus of one’s devotion.
Their knowledge of doxastic apeiron leads many wizards to believe that gods are simply a class of otherworldly potentate that have seized command of an enormous stream of the stuff, which they then use to create more of it in a positive feedback loop. However the matter is by no means settled. Some wizards believe that gods created the world and apeiron out of their divine essences while others hold that the world had no special origin beyond coming from the essential, eternal flux of apeiron and that all things worldly and otherworldly are ultimately the products of conscious minds. An intermediate position holds that gods and other supernatural, otherworldly beings are beings in their own right distinct from ordinary life but which are magnified by the doxastic apeiron sent their way.
What is magic? Magic is the art and science of manipulating apeiron.
Apeiron responds in a way largely consistent with cause and effect. It can be examined and studied. Arcanists cultivate special senses that allow them to apprehend it more directly. They experiment endlessly and reason from their results as well as from abstract principles. Magic is empirical and the wizards are far from dumb. They can see how X causes Y and isolate confounding variables, replicate their experiments, and proceed onward from them to the next set of experiments. These findings are communicable and thus accessible to others.
But magic is also an art. A spell is, in arcane discourse, a particular protocol for the manipulation of apeiron to produce a telos, which is the effect. But the telos is not invariable and can be influenced by the local apeiron environment, the thoughts and intentions of the caster, and an almost infinite set of variables. Many of these interactions can be predicted and manipulated and mastery of these nuances separates many journeyman wizards from the true innovators. A spell is a bit like a recipe or a genome that can be flavored dramatically by minor alterations, substitutions of components, differences in pacing, alterations in focus at particular moments in the casting, and so forth. These can be as simple as “if you are out of this component, bite your tongue and draw a bit of blood to replace it” or as complicated as “only on the third day of the fourth month, during a new moon, the seventh son of a seventh son can ignore this effect entirely unless you use these additional components, place emphasis on the third syllable instead of the first, and then turn three times widdershins and touch wood.”
The interactions between spells are at least as complicated as all of that. In addition a caster must consider the unique way he visualizes the spell and the thoughts running through his head as he does. When spells from different casters collide, the minute differences between even the two students of the same master can be of great significance. Magical advancement is forever ongoing and mastery is a skill one must maintain, not an earned dignity.
What is magic? Magic is an innate gift.
The universe is not fair. While all conscious beings have an innate store of apeiron, some have more than others. This greater concentration, and concentration of particular sorts, permits some the gift of magic while others are forever denied it. Many discover it in youth, but others would never have come to magic if not for being discovered by other practitioners. While all beings have potential, in many the potential is next to nothing. Practitioners will simply ignore most such folk; they’re not worth the time to train.
The gift brings with it a separate set of senses and abilities pertaining to apeiron. These are in most cases latent, but can even in their latent state be recognized by arcanists with the right training and spells. The full panoply of arcane faculties is complex, and the arcanists argue ceaselessly over what ought to count as one and what is merely an expression of a more basic ability. At the very least they include the ability to sense apeiron and perceive the subtle nuances of its flow. (This includes active spell effects in one’s presence and even feeling the shifts in apeiron in response to very powerful workings at a distance.) Over time they grow into an intuitive aptitude for apeiron and its flows, uses, and interactions. This accompanies a basic ability to shape apeiron as it moves, allowing one to shift and alter spells as they are cast, reach out and interact with set spells, and the like.
To get a bit gamey, Spellcraft, Use Magic Device, Metamagic, and Use Magic Device all model parts of it. An arcanist does not so much learn these things from books as hone his senses and abilities by experience. You can be taught Spellcraft, but it’s like learning to walk or ride a bike. There are methods, but ultimately it’s a collection of habits, muscle memory, and so on.
(Or so I’m told. I never mastered the balance necessary to ride a bike and my physical aptitudes are below average even for a stereotypical gamer. J )
What is magic? Magic is a path of personal transcendence.
There are religious arcanists, up to and including those who worship versions of the gods of the Great Church which orthodoxy would find blasphemous almost to the point of self-parody. Some insist that the Sublime Thought is at his core a deity of magic. Others add that the Opener of Ways is the patron of necromancy. The Builder of Walls governs warding magic. The list of heresies could set any Inquisitor aflame.
But a common thread uniting most arcanists is the belief, at least implicitly, that through working magic one can become something more. There’s no single endpoint, but rather the process is one of infinite becoming, forever finding a new frontier, a new limit to oneself and one’s ability, and reaching beyond it. Just as there is always more apeiron, there is always more that an arcanist can be. Some look forward to a blissful merging with the apeiron and the ending of self in the infinite flow of power. Others reach for ways to make their every whim carry the might of their greatest spells.
The method of transcendence, other than that it uses magic, varies enormously. Some become infernalists, walking the Path of Dark Revelations to cast aside their moral frailties. Others do not walk that path but summon up hellish lords of increasing power to demonstrate, to themselves at least, that they have someone mastered such beings. Others look not to Hell but to the Heavens, or to the fey, or become unsane by calling creatures from Beyond. For still others, transcendence lies in crafting wholly new spells or mastering the production of certain magic items. No, others will say, it comes from grappling with the shades of dead arcanists in their tombs and coming free with the secrets they knew. No, it’s from aligning oneself with the gods most completely so that their apeiron and your apeiron become one and the same. No, it’s from becoming a god. Or slaying all the gods. Or binding dragons. Or becoming a dragon. Or finding the elves.
Magic: The Lifestyle
Arcanists differ in their habits and personalities, but there are certain trends. Most begin their careers before puberty, becoming apprenticed to a more experienced arcanist. This is somewhat truer of prepared casters than spontaneous, but even among sorcerers some kind of mentorship isn’t unusual. The master is rarely less than middle aged. There are no organized magical schools or universities to which one would go and learn in a classroom environment with large numbers of other students. Nobody takes Necromancy 101 or Remedial Conjuration. Most masters keep only one apprentice at a time, though as many as three or four at once isn’t too unusual. Rarely a small group of masters will pool their resources and share space, even to the point of tutoring one another’s apprentices, but these groups tend to be short-lived as they descend into strife or see considerable turnover in faculty and students.
The relationship between master and apprentice depends on their personalities. Some are strict taskmasters who set ascetic lifestyles for their charges. Some perform experiments on their apprentices. Some treat apprentices as domestic servants first and students second. (No master who refuses to teach entirely will keep apprentices long.) Some are fatherly and motherly figures who take in gifted orphans or the children of friends and family. These last are quite rare, though surviving records of elven practice indicate it was more common among them.
As aforementioned, magic is the science and art of manipulating apeiron. The soul is also made of apeiron, as are the spell constructs that practitioners master. Channeling and handling these energies inevitably has an effect on the caster. Exactly how this is expressed depends on the person, mostly, and to a lesser degree the sorts of magic they expose themselves to. The effects are generally psychological, but physical effects tend to appear at later stages. Most practitioners slowly develop a slight aversion to their fellow practitioners. Magic also becomes increasingly important to them, and ordinary concerns somewhat less so. The sense of otherness and alienation tends to promote solitary research and tomb-raiding over collaboration with living colleagues. Becoming a paranoid hermit is also, of course, its own reward and tends to exacerbate existing issues.
Which is not to say that magic tends to attract only the well-balanced individuals. Being good at magic tends to require different modes of thinking and thus draws in eccentrics, the touched, and the just plain weird. By the time one has completed apprenticeship, the modes of thought best suited to particular spells and methods have likely become habits if they were not already. Even unwilling, even tortured, apprentices tend to come around quickly after they’ve learned to sense apeiron reliably.
Paradoxically, the first expressions of these changes often result in the master seeking apprentices. An apprentice could be reliable, not like some unknown. Furthermore an apprentice can be shaped in ways conducive to research. Every arcanist has an idea of what the ideal apprentice should be and few are shy about hammering their apprentices into that shape. After all, the process could liberate apeiron in interesting ways. Perhaps even some doxastic apeiron could be captured if the apprentice develops the right attitude. Few arcanists can explain it, but even those who have good reason to avoid apprentices often end up with an almost overwhelming desire to find and teach at least one. There’s something about the magic that makes one secretive and suspicious, but also wants someone to whisper those secrets to.
Many arcanists realize early on that magic they don’t have but someone else does have can be taken if they don’t want to part with it. As most also become more and more unwilling to part with their secrets, taking it becomes more and more sensible. One cannot replicate experiments without knowing what they were and why reinvent the wheel? Laws can seem like archaic, crude impediments to the advancement of scholarship. The result is that other arcanists are a leading cause of arcanist fatalities, which makes the secretive, suspicious hermitage all the more appealing. It’s just good sense, after all.
Inevitably, apprentices are turned out. They may leave on their own on good terms with their masters, but this again is rare. Generally one party or the other decides the arrangement must end and leaves regardless of objections. More often the master chooses, as most masters can trace their apprentices and recover them if they truly want to, but the apprentice doesn’t always know that and sometimes complicate matters by departing with items that are not in fact their rightful property. Few who do so suspect that their masters often feign dotage or inattention to ensure that the apprentices take certain items along for various purposes.
Despite the sometimes predatory, sometimes adversarial nature of the master-apprentice relationship many arcanists remain somewhat fond of their tutors and those tutors in turn have something like fondness for their apprentices. Even if they parted with hurled spells and shouts, they may reunite years later and find each learned more than expected from the other. This fondness does not necessarily extend to not wanting to rip open skulls and rifle through the spells inside, but sometimes it does.
The general course of an arcanist’s life is one of increasing isolation, self-segregation, and obsession with magic. For some this is a particular sort of magic, but few would turn away at the chance to encounter anything new. Others join their obsession with magic with outside goals. In the short term, these worthies tend to handle the rigors of the magical life better then their more monomaniacal counterparts. But the outside world is often not as congenial as magical research and can be its own source of frustration. Fellow arcanists make more sense to the practitioner, but come with additional dangers.
If an arcanist survives rivals, apprentices, experiments, and adventure, eventually the body withers. There are many means of achieving increased longevity and most arcanists who reach this point know several and have the wherewithal to use them. By this point, years of accumulated use of magic have so shifted their thinking that many seem quite reasonable, even offering improvements on ordinary life. Years may be bought in pacts with otherworldly powers, stolen from the young, offered freely by apprentices as a price for their tutelage (rarely more than a year or so in this case), gleaned from the use of various artifacts, alchemical brews, and so forth. An accomplished arcanist can expect to live at least a century and perhaps as many as three or four in more or less the sort of body into which he or she was born. Beyond this point more demanding methods are required. Undeath is always an option, and a very easy one to pursue. Long periods of magical semi-stasis or retreat to places beyond the walls of the world where time flows differently might be considered. Additional means include bonding to one’s soul the essences of immortals, though this tends to cause radical shifts in personality. Some arcanists choose immortality in the form of becoming a sentient magic item, or storing their consciousnesses and memories in gems. (These gems were popular among the elves.) Others adopt serial immortality through a series of clones that wait in stasis until needed.
At any rate, death is rarely the end for any arcanist who does not deliberately set out to embrace it. Few do, but those who do have many ways to be very sure they die and do not come back. Arcanists of power slain by others, their minds still brimming with magic, frequently leave impressions on the local apeiron which can have a consciousness of their own which may in time find ways to come back to life. That much apeiron suddenly being liberated can likewise ensure that they take their slayers with them.
Aside their apprentices and occasional mates and short-term cooperation, few arcanists of accomplishment work well with others of their own kind. Their paranoias are quite adept at feeding on one another and every practitioner’s magic is subtly different due to their differing thought processes and experiences. The work of casting a single spell together, or even a cooperative ritual, can be extremely arduous as each caster wrestles the mind to some kind of compromise between the approaches involved. Rarer still are large cabals, but their whelmed power can be truly devastating.
In this matter, again, the elves appear to have done better. Surviving records (and in some cases, witnesses) at least strongly imply that elves practiced some kind of communal magic. Accounts agree that they were not as changed by the working of magic as humans are, or at least had much better luck coping with it. Why this would be the case is something hotly debated amongst the interested parties. Stranger still, certain records suggest that the elves sometimes worked magic that, whilst arising from a single cabal, grew to include many elves from without that willingly contributed some of their lives to the work or even simply experienced the flowing of apeiron thorugh their bodies as it happened. If the secret ways to manage all of this survived the elves, no arcanist who knows is telling.
Arcanists and the Churchlands
There are secret arcanists alive and operating even today in the Churchlands, despite the best efforts of the Inquisition. Some are natives who stumbled on power in old places or in old books. Others were found by outsiders and spirited away to be taught. Others are foreigners who came in secret for their own goals or to take service with corrupt noblemen. They hide in plain sight. They form the power behind thrones. They whisper in the ears of lords. Some of them are lords. The Purge was very effective, but it ended a very long time ago and most arcanists learn to be subtle if they want to live long in the Churchlands.
Most arcanists are at the very least uncomfortable on holy ground and will try to avoid it. Though the effect is hard to study if one wants to stay undiscovered, they find spells harder to work and prone to failure. Being on holy ground is personally uncomfortable, with a sensation of being watched often reported. Pain may result, especially near to altars or relics. In some cases, entry might prove impossible.
That said, arcanists who must cross spells with Great Church priests find that the spells function roughly as they would expect. They appear to manipulate apeiron according to normal principles, though the castings themselves are often strange and sloppy, to the point where the spell ought to have failed but still takes effect. While many dismiss the Great Church’s prayers as easy power given without mastery to those without discipline, few deny its potency. The fact that the priests are in some way cheating might be irksome, but crying fair play doesn’t make their holy fire burn any less.
For as long as I’ve known of the fresco, I’ve been fascinated by the School of Athens. In 1998 I discovered it accidentally at the Vatican, during a period of confused milling about after the Sistine Chapel. Unwitting I stepped through a door and it was less than six inches away from me, if under a sheet of plastic. Regrettably the room was quite crowded so there wasn’t much time to take it in.
I was a bit disappointed to learn that most of the identifications of the various philosophers are conjectural, but the two that are really important to me at the moment are the clear pair in the center. Raphael’s depiction of da Vinci is fairly close to how I picture the Opener of Ways, if with darker hair, though of course the figure in the fresco is da Vinci as Plato and that’s closer to the Sublime Thought with his hand up towards the heavens.
Which brings me to Plato’s younger companion, who stands a step or two nearer the viewer. Plato, the rationalist of a long ago Western Civ video, stands with Aristotle the empiricist. Aristotle, contra Plato, stands with his hand out parallel to the ground. I’ve had that duality in mind for a while now.
So here’s a god of the Great Church.
The Seer
The Seer is the Great Church’s god of knowing, similar to but opposite the Sublime Thought’s revelation. The Thought reveals, producing from nothing by pure thought. The Seer sees, creating knowledge through experience and study. Where the Thought favors a kind of receptive, mathematical sort of comportment the Seer instead looks to the world in acts of active perception and interpretation. Fallen and chaotic though it may be, deformed and cloaked in seeming and corruption, through its careful study humanity can glean knowledge that in its own way uplifts just as much as the Thought’s revelations. The Seer’s concerns are worldly knowledge: when to plant, when to harvest, the motions of moon and tides, the best methods of construction, and the like. She cares little for abstract knowledge derived from first principles and removed from everyday reality.
The Seer is female. Her hair is generally short, or at least tied back, and she always carries a scale and a quill. The scale symbolizes the act of study that produces knowledge by scrutiny. One weighs one’s perceptions just as one weighs precious commodities. Once weighed, these must be written down to be shared so they can inform others in their own perceptions and studies, which in turn means they are weighed once more. She is depicted somewhat plainly, clothed demurely, with her only outstanding feature being her eyes. The Seer’s eyes take up fully half her face in two great, transparent orbs (usually made of plain glass or otherwise left as empty sockets to denote the same) in which “hang” (painted on the glass or literally suspended by cords or wires in empty sockets) rectangular irises that stretch almost to the edges of the eyes, with like pupils within. These symbolize the wide-seeing nature of the Seer, more adept than any mere mortal.
The Seer has a small but very devoted monastic order that was formerly divided in two factions: The Cloisters of Inspiration and the Mission of Sight. The reflected a fundamental difference in approach within the clergy that had hardened in recent centuries. The Cloistered believed that the best way to serve the Seer was to form like-minded communities of fellow scholars and learners within which perceptions could be weighed and measured and refined to a very high degree. They were heavily involved in the founding of the Churchlands’ universities, but also found patrons in the Churchlands’ larger and wealthier cities for smaller but more focused communities of engineers, architects, naturalists, and the like who grew quite wealthy through noble patronage and the cachet inherent in being able to say that one’s bridge or door or manor was designed by the finest of the finest.
The Mission of Sight took just the opposite approach, insisting that the Seer was best served by acting alone in the world. Scholars should of course collaborate and share, but the devotional study of the world should take place alone or in mentor and student pairs. To weigh perceptions too soon, they maintain, made it too easy for good scrutiny to vanish in the heat of the moment and excitement of possible discovery. So unmoored and isolated among the like-minded, poor thinking could pose as knowledge and lead many astray.
Over the years, the Mission became more and more suspicious of the Cloister. Did they go too far in their secret councils? They claimed to share all, but did they truly? Rumor of secret rites and unnatural investigations into matters the gods deemed unfit for man to know spread. Being concentrated in a few places and working together, the Cloister accumulated a worrying amount of power and influence. It whispered in the ears of noble and merchant alike. Wandering Missioners found themselves increasingly unwelcome at Cloister houses and universities, receiving only the bare minimum hospitality due a fellow priest. Quills went to scratching, as each slight became a treasured resentment.
The Cloistered responded with condescension, insisting that more study would reveal the truth of their methods and traveling Missioners simply did not have the necessary discipline. All were welcome to come and learn, but they must sit and stay to develop the proper understanding. The Missioners were, predictably, unimpressed.
Then, just fifty years ago and with great abruptness, the Supreme Patriarch disbanded the Cloister. Such things have happened before in the Great Church’s history, perhaps more often than the public records tell, but it had been more than five centuries since dissolution of this scale was last undertaken. The cause, the Church avers, was the will of the gods and thus beyond question.
The Inquisition seized much of its archives and arrested, or caused secular authorities to arrest, the Cloister’s leaders. This happened so swiftly and suddenly that unless one was an intimate of a Cloister priest one could have missed the event entirely. Cloister houses closed and Cloister chapters vanished. The Missioners quietly slid into many Cloister holdings, but others were forfeit to the local nobility or simply sold off. Most Cloister priests simply vanished, but several lower-ranking clerics endured trials on a variety of charges. Those far up in the hierarchy instead quietly retired to isolated hermitages and monasteries, swearing oaths to speak no more to any person save the gods and refusing even to answer letters or receive visits from dear family.
The works of the Cloister remain, however. They had the habit of using distinctive decorative embellishments, chiefly stone carvings, to mark their work in the keystones of arches, above doors, on prominent cornerstones, and the like. To the unlettered, these are simply the signs of a long-ago priestly order or general marks of good workmanship. To nobles they mark prestige still. The Great Church refers to them as a species of iconography no longer practiced.
The work of the Missioners is theoretically itinerant. They are to go from place to place learning and sharing and reporting back. However most Missioners undertake long sojourns, sometimes for life, with single patrons or in single places. Many serve as private tutors for the wealthy, but others run schools that teach the basics of literacy and arithmetic to any who come. In the latter role Missioners are quite popular with skilled tradesman and guiders.
Missioners are expected to report on their doings and findings regularly and in written form. These reports, generally called confessions, are copied and bound in the order’s legendary archives and strictly forbidden to laypeople. The written word is especially sacred to the Seer and is thus the preferred medium for any important discussion, with the top of each sheet of free parchment or the frontispiece of any bound book bearing a special prayer to the Seer to ensure the clear meaning of the author is conveyed and edifying to the reader. Writing must in no case be destroyed, unless the writing is blasphemous, heretical, or arcane. In those circumstances the only righteous course is burning. Only work that is faded or rotted past the possibility of restoration or use can be discarded. If such a work comes into a priest’s hands and to his or her knowledge no copy of it exists, a special ritual of mourning and hope for restoration must be performed before its destruction to express to the Seer that all know what is lost and wish it returned to the minds of men.
The Seer’s clergy are largely free to choose their own areas of interest and study, though those operating independently must see to their own support and those beholden to patrons must of course see to their needs. However many questions, called occlusions in the order’s parlance, are of somewhat broad interest and draw at least token and hobbyist efforts from wide sections of the order. These include, but are not limited to:
The Occlusion of the Lands
Broadly speaking, this is the pursuit of knowledge about what is beyond the next hill, over the mountains, and the like. Wandering geographers do most of the active field work, but their writings are extremely popular within the order both for edification and simply to read for pleasure. Many practice within the Churchlands and write travelogues, ethnographies of customs, foods, manners, give opinions on taverns and inns, and the like. But others are far more adventurous and accompany well-armed expeditions of knights-errant into the Builder’s Arm or the Giant Wall.
These latter tend to come to unfortunate ends on just those expeditions, but their works often reach popular attention among the Churchlands aristocracy. News of such a worthy’s death or disappearance (and some have disappeared several times, only to return later with some barely crawling back to civilization and others arriving back in port surprisingly healthy for their travails) tends to provoke an intense, if brief, demand for their works. Many church scriptoriums thus await their tidings with mixed motives.
The Occlusion of the Seas
Most priests from or living in coastal areas are interested in this matter. How is it that halflings, cursed by the gods, build such peerless sailing vessels that no righteous man can master or even fully understand? The body of literature on the subject is confused and contradictory, even from priests who spent years at sea and in peril of their lives and souls on the ships of wicked men from the Isles of Sorcery. A recurring theme is the perpetual incompleteness of understanding. Some key element always eludes the chronicler and thus renders the whole business somehow incomprehensible. Both plain writing and personal study have yielded the same problem, even among clergy of Todarese extraction who ought to be best disposed to such matters.
Study of this occlusion has its perils, even aside the physical danger. More than one priest has slowly gone mad and thrown himself into the rising tide in the end.
The Occlusion of the Spheres
Simply put, this is the study of the heavens, hell, and all the various limbos and other places. The work is extremely obscure and often used as an example of a problem one will never be able to properly study. Chronicles of dubious authenticity surface irregularly, often published anonymously and on occasion including blatant heresy.
The strangest and most consistent of these works include queer illuminations and cryptic glosses by a writer known only by his sign: three solid triangles arranged point to point to form another, hollow triangle within and enclosed in a circle. The solid triangles appear in various colors, sometimes different copies of the same work employing different colors. As a rule these tomes are found by scholars or travelers in neglected corners of libraries, private collections, or in newly-discovered ruins that leave little clue to who might have first written them. Many are clear copies of older works still, and sometimes the glosses refer to missing or ambiguous passages in these originals. In any case, the Inquisition takes keen interest in any such books and they have a habit of appearing in a sensation and vanishing shortly thereafter.
Your length and girth has always impressed me :D
... of your writing. Just wanted to be clear on that!
Your length and girth has always impressed me :D
Are you trying to-
... of your writing. Just wanted to be clear on that!
Tease! :)
It's been a while, hasn't it? You know how it is. Life happens and often refuses to stop, even if you use a flamethrower.
What I have today isn't so much setting material as some thinking out loud about social mobility in the Churchlands. JG Meyer's history of the Tudors reminded me how vital the Church was in providing social mobility. It would be anachronistic to say you could go from literal rags to riches by means of holy orders, but it gave people who were born to somewhat better means than rude peasantry (typically the children of shopkeepers and tradesmen) a path for advancement in an otherwise extremely stratified society. You could end up a person of tremendous influence with the right talents and the kind of education the universities could give. And of course that was a great way to make money hand over fist too.
I think I've hit a bug in just importing that into the Churchlands, so I want to talk it out and maybe get some ideas from my dear readers. For this to make sense, I want to back up a little bit and talk about how government office worked back in the day.
Court offices were appointed largely at the discretion of the sovereign and often were technically part of his household. They paid very little, but many of them offered privileged access to the sovereign and thus the chance to build up an enormous amount of power. Thus nobility fought to get themselves and their progeny to court, to be noticed, and appointed to the most comical of positions. Henry VIII had a Groom of the Stool (stool as in the thing into which one would put stool as in "sample") with duties relating to doody. His job was to make sure that there was always a clean, private crapper on hand for the king to void his royal bowel in. He further had the especially intoxicating duty of conveying the king's stool samples to royal doctors. That's a pretty s~$+ty job.
But that s!!~ty job entailed having personal, intimate access to the king all the damned time. It was thus necessarily a position for someone the king trusted and that person could have a great deal of influence. Which one would of course use to lobby for the interests of one's family and friends. Any such office, whether it's one of the big state offices or a s!!!ty (No, I'm not done being amused by that yet.) household office is a platform from which one can further ambitions that might reach out across generations. Sometimes even the office itself could become hereditary.
That can create a problem for the sovereign, since he's rewarding friends who can become rivals and powers to be appeased or worked around down the road. So for the really important offices (no, not the Groom of the Stool but others) a sovereign has to choose with great care as the choice amounts to some serious patronage almost by default. It's taking sides and picking one house above another. Furthermore, many of the important offices paid little to nothing but were expected to meet most of their own expenses. So you almost had to give a guy land or some kind of source of income, but usually land. More problems, since you have to take that land from someone or give it out of your own pocket which thus reduces your own revenues, etc.
Some of that is always unavoidable, but prior to the Renaissance European nobility didn't always run to the brains. Being a cultured, educated gentleman meant different things at different times, but book learning got involved relatively late. That limits the talent pool even further.
But then there's this other segment of society that is educated, at least by the standards of the time. They're not nobles, so picking one doesn't necessarily involve one in the struggles between powerful noble families. Better still, they can't pass it on to their kids since they're supposed to be celibate. And if that's not enough, there's land all over the country that's set aside just for them anyway! I'm not quite sure how it worked in France or elsewhere, but in England the king normally nominated bishops and the Pope effectively ratified the choice. So pick up a talented churchman, hook him up with a bishopric that can meet his expenses, and you have a minister who owes everything to you, does not bring with him all kinds of connections to present or future rivals, and can pay for himself. Perfection.
The system worked fairly well back in Europe, at least for the needs aforementioned. It gave something that wasn't quite the middle class room for social mobility. Even if the nobles hated losing a plum spot to a churchman, they could be content with the knowledge that everyone else was equally denied and the churchman wouldn't be using the position to set up his own dynasty.
Most Churchlands clergy are secular, in the sense mentioned in that post last year. They revere the Great Church's pantheon as a whole and are generally pretty worldly. I have not attached to them any sort of clerical celibacy. So if a sovereign is using the secular clergy like they did in our history, said sovereign would be creating all kinds of complications that work against the very reason that the clergy were such appealing bureaucrats and the like. But if the sovereigns don't do like they did in our world, then that closes off the main way for prosperous commoners to get ahead and may shove them more into the party of rebelling peasants.
It's sort of a mess and I'm not sure how I prefer to resolve it. I do know it needs resolution because I want things to make internal sense in the Churchlands. That requires Churchlanders to behave something like regular humans we're all familiar with. (Ok, maybe you more than me.) Military adventures are a great way for nobles to distinguish themselves and for their retainers to move up in the world, but a glass ceiling that nobody can break through short of that gives the sense that everyone who isn't a noble is some kind of serf, which I dislike both for complicating having non-noble adventurers and just on aesthetic grounds in addition to preferring at least some of the shades of distinction between a serf, a cotter, a peasant, a commoner, a townsman, etc.
The easy fix is to just say that the secular clergy are celibates and leave sanctioned whoopie to the monastic clergy of the proper orders. I'm a little concerned about that making the secular clergy a bit too on the nose Catholic, but I've accepted that outcome in the past often enough. :) Sort of a middle ground would be to put one or more monastic orders in the place of the secular clergy when it comes to the apparatus of government. But that raises questions about why the secular clergy are so dominant when the levers of power are in the hands of, say, the autocastrating monks of the Sublime Thought?
Or I could just suck it up and not have that social mobility, but I suspect that would be unappealing both to us as modern people and from the point of view of players who might want to have commoner PCs who can get ahead in the world aside from gaining levels or killing the king and taking his stuff. (Granted the latter did work in our world now and then.)
So anyway, interested in any thoughts. Oh yeah, and thread necromancy.