Divine spells in Birthright

[rabindranath]

Hello folk!
This is my first time in this forum. I am a long-time fan of Birthright, definitely the best campaign ever created by TSR. I downloaded the 3e rules for BR, and I think that they are very well written, but a point which I found lacking is (not the author's fault, really, but Wizard's) the casting of divine spells; all clerics are practically the same!. I am playing 3e Birthright since one year, and my campaign has gone really well, with my adaptation of the boxed set and expansion material. To circumvent the problem with divine spellcasters, I revamped, retooled and reorganized the spell lists of 3e spells, to create an analogous to 2nd edition spheres. The work has been long and hard, but finally I got a document which I could use for all 2nd edition campaigns! I found that, with every AD&D campaing, the worst problem for converting are priest spells.
In the case of the BR campaign, I created the spheres of AD&D PHB, and updated according the material in P.O.:Spells & Magic, namely All, Astral, Charm, Elemental (air, earth, fire, water), Guardian, Healing, Necromantic, Plant, Protection, Sun, Weather
Then, based on the info in the boxed set, I assigned the spheres, with Minor access defined as spells of levels 0-3. The Paladins got to choose 4 spheres (with minor access only) from those given by the god they serve. Rangers have minor access only to Animal and Plant spheres.
If you want to peruse the document, I can post it in the download section. Feedback is welcome!

[Ariadne]

The BR D20 and the Atlas team know this problem already. We work on integrating deity related PrC's for Birthright to remove this problem a little. Some of the PrC's already exist, but the teams aren't of one opinion about them. The final version of those (and other PrC's) you will find in the Atlas of Cerilia...

Restricting "spheres" are highly against 3rd Edition as such, that's why we canceled it (see other threads in the play testing part). This would create several cleric base classes, allowed, but too confusing. If you created spheres, did you think of the other powers priests had in 2nd Edition? If you restrict one part, you should enhance the other...

[kgauck]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ariadne" <brnetboard@TUARHIEVEL.ORG>
Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 12:28 PM

> Restricting "spheres" are highly against 3rd Edition as such, that`s
> why we canceled it (see other threads in the play testing part). This
> would create several cleric base classes, allowed, but too confusing.
> If you created spheres, did you think of the other powers priests had
> in 2nd Edition? If you restrict one part, you should enhance the other...

Creating a seperate class for each divine spellcaster is exactly what I did.
Some of them are up at my Taelshore site.
http://home.mchsi.com/~kgauck/taelshore/divine.htm

This area is still under construction, so not all links go where I want, and
some are missing. Druids of Lirorn, for instance are linked from Druids of
Erik, not from the main page yet. But, you can see the old familiar
priesthoods of some of them. I have crafted unique spell lists for each
class based on the old spheres and an excel file.

Kenneth Gauck
kgauck@mchsi.com

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[Beruin]

rabindranath wrote:
[snip]
>>To circumvent the problem with divine spellcasters, I revamped, retooled and reorganized the spell lists of 3e spells, to create an analogous to 2nd edition spheres.
[snip]
If you want to peruse the document, I can post it in the download section.<<

I would greatly appreciate it if you could post this list as I planned to compile a similar list myself. This would certainly spare me a lot of work.

Ariadne wrote:
>>Restricting "spheres" are highly against 3rd Edition as such, that`s why we canceled it (see other threads in the play testing part).<<

Well, that`s fine with me for the BRCS but it`s not the way I would like to portray priests IMC. I agree with Michael Romes in this regard (quote):

>>3E Priests rob the priests of different gods of their identity, of their
flavour, their specialty.
In addition it unbalances the divine -arcane spellcaster balance in
Birthright.<<

Don`t get me wrong, in general, I love the 3E rules (so please no arguments to the tune of `Play 2e if you don`t like it), but I strongly dislike 3E clerics, for several reasons:
- Clerics are very similar to one another, regardless of their faith.
- IMO, they`re probably the strongest and most versatile (i.e. unbalanced) PC class, giving their mix of weapons, armor, high hit points, spells etc.
- The use of spheres in 2e made some spells, notably raise dead and resurrection, more rare, without banning them outright. IMC, these spells will only be obtained with difficulty, if at all.
- To top it off, the domain spells in 3E added a number of spells to the repertoire of clerics which had been the sole province of wizards before, thereby once again strengthening divine casters compared to wizards.These spells include (among others) invisibility, ice storm, cone of cold, fly, stoneskin, teleport, and several Bigby`s hand spells. I guess it might make sense for clerics of specific deities to have access to some of these spells, but in general I believe that it`s a very bad idea to add wizard spells to the cleric`s repertoire without limiting his power in other areas.

Christoph Tiemann


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[Birthright-L]

From: "Christoph Tiemann" <tiemach@UNI-MUENSTER.DE>

> IMO, they`re [clerics] probably the strongest and most versatile (i.e.
unbalanced)
> PC class, giving their mix of weapons, armor, high hit points, spells etc.
>

I thought so, too, in the beginning. They look very powerful on paper. I
even played some clerics to see if I was right. But in my experience clerics
are still not all that powerful - at least at lower levels. Nobody around
here plays a cleric any more, so now that our campaigns have reached a high
level, there are no PC clerics. Thus I can`t say if clerics are too powerful
at high levels.

Can anyone else answer this? Are PC clerics too powerful at high levels? I`d
prefer if the comparison was mostly to other spellcasters (wiz/sor mainly),
since the entire caster/noncaster balance issue at high levels is so very
much influuenced by how much magic items the campaign has. But any comment
is fine.

/Carl




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[Ariadne]

Originally posted by Beruin

- To top it off, the domain spells in 3E added a number of spells to the repertoire of clerics which had been the sole province of wizards before, thereby once again strengthening divine casters compared to wizards.These spells include (among others) invisibility, ice storm, cone of cold, fly, stoneskin, teleport, and several Bigby`s hand spells. I guess it might make sense for clerics of specific deities to have access to some of these spells, but in general I believe that it`s a very bad idea to add wizard spells to the cleric`s repertoire without limiting his power in other areas.
May I say, that "ice storm" and "cone of cold" already where spells granted by Kriesha to her priestesses in 2nd Edition (as powers). Don't get me wrong: I did like the 2nd Edition clerics very much too and to make them totally equal is just boring (agreed). That's why it was my idea to create prestige classes to make them a little bit individually without creating own spell lists for every religion...

[Azrai]

Clerics in the 3. Edition are strong and wield great power, but they are also well designed.

They are better playable than clerics in the 2. Edition. I made the experience that new players did not wan't to play clerics, because for the "sphere"-stuff one needs a very good overview of the spells.

To make clerics more specialised the invention of cleric-prestige-classes is needed.

Here is the point,Mark_Aurel ;)

[Randax]

Yes! Please post the priestly spheres you've developed! The second edition BR clerics had much more flavor and I no longer have enough time to develop the spheres on my own.