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I'm running WotR with a fairly heavy power gaming group and am wondering what to do with the two of my PCs who chose the Touched by Divinity campaign trait.
One is NG Tiefling summoner, the other a LN (but starting to trend towards LE) Dhampir Cavalier/Cleric.
Both chose Desna as their deity for the purposes of the campaign trait, mostly to get the luck domain spells (mainly miracle) as spell like abilities using mythic power. I'm fairly clear on how to handle that if they start to abuse it, but it does seem a bit too much.
More troubling is how I'm supposed to maintain a straight face when I tell a Tiefling and a Dhampir that Desna is really their mother.
The party will arrive at Drezen next session, so I have some time before this comes to a head, but I was curious if anyone else had had similar issues with their PCs or otherwise had suggestions on how to handle it.
Deities are no longer beings of the race they were when they ascended. They are far above anything mortals can understand. It's likely that their reproduction is not sexual in nature, at least not in every case, and they are unlikely to be the ones to actually bear the child.
A godling is most likely to be raised by mortal parents. Look at our own myths and religions for an example. Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, not directly of God. Humanity as a whole are seen as God's children.
In the case of my group, the one that took this trait is a Dwarf Cleric of Cayden Cailean. We simply explained it that Cayden had a particularly raucous night of partying and somehow Bromar was born of a mortal Dwarf woman.
In your case you do need to tie these two different characters together somehow, and they have made your job harder by not following the suggestions in the players guide and making sibling characters. You may want to take inspiration from Thor and Loki, but do it in reverse? Perhaps they are both Desna's children but were raised apart, born of different families? The struggle comes not from finding out that they are actually of different parentage raised in the same home, but from finding out that their powers and abilities share a common root, and their families are not as different as they thought.
In this case, I would include some kind of common racial bonus when the trait gains power upon their Mythic Ascension at the end of book 1. It doesn't need to be something major, just something to tie the two players together somehow and foreshadow that they are connected by more than just a shared faith. Perhaps they begin having prophetic shared dreams that they slowly come to understand? Perhaps these dreams lead them to the temple in Demon's Heresy where they learn of their connection, and ultimately they lead to Arushalae?
At least that's how I might play it.
Also, tieflings can skip generations. You're not sired by the demon in question, those are half-fiends. So you had demonic blood and perhaps Desna chose to temper that with her own blood.
I'm a bit more worried about the Dhampir from a narrative perspective. I've been considering going for some other type of relationship with Desna, but going with the Dhampir PC being her chosen or something like that still poses problems as he's on the evil side of LN right now.
Given his lack of similarity to Desna, perhaps he is wrong about his divine ties and they are to some other god. It would be a nuisance having two divine heritages but in this instance the character screams to me nothing to do with Desna, nearly diametric opposite given he is a cleric that strikes me as very odd.
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Did his mother live through her pregnancy? It could be Desna imbued his mother with some of her essence so to try to help her live through the pregnancy and it "leeched" into the child.
How is the dhampir a desnan cleric if he's more than 2 steps out of alignment? Not sure if I missed something.
He's mostly cavalier. He took a cleric level, but is formally worshipping a LN Thassilonian deity whose name I don't have handy. It's decently well justified in character. Desna is the good that he fascinated with as per the trait. Allowing may have been a mistake from a mechanics perspective, but it's led to some fun RP, so I'm reluctant to make him change it.
Really, they took the trait to get Miracle as a spell like ability, and came up with good enough backstory that I let them have it. I don't think it's yet occurred to either of them that Lady Luck is fickle, and that luck, in the form of spell like ability miracles, can run out at the worst possible times.
My current thoughts on the trait, associated backstory, and mythic trial are to either change it to them being merely descended from Desna or just to ignore the parentage completely and tie their trial in with finding Arushalae, as there are plenty of Desna plot hooks there.
While I like herolab, it does occasionally lead to spoilers. At least that's where they claim to have gotten it. I haven't seen any other sign that they are reading spoilers.
I agree with the suggestion that the Dhampir is actually chosen by some other god. It does say that some godlings spend their lives trying to get away from their destiny, so to speak. Maybe he wants the CG Desna to help him escape from the godling bloodline of his LE father.