AMIA ARCHIVE • View topic

Leira is supposedly dead. Being that she is all about lies and deceit, she may be or may not be. Is having a non-clerical character worship her ok without a request? Possibly a sorcerer.

Thanks!

Yup, that'd be totally fine. It's only when you're a divine caster that you'd need to have approval to have a dead deity as your patron.

Drop by the shrine of Oghma any time to tell about your beliefs!

:twisted:

Ahh, very cool... and Iron... just a wee bit creepy :shock:

Your character can worship literally -anything- they want. If there is some reason your character finds to do so, they can believe the tree in their front yard is divine. Now here's the kicker, belief is powerful stuff in the multiverse. It is the stuff that deities are literally made of and their meat and drink. If a character honestly, truly believes in a deity, regardless if whether that deity is alive or dead or even never existed, that character's belief is powerful enough to grant the character divine spells of up to 2nd level.

Consider a madman worth cleric levels who worships an entirely imaginary being made up from his deluded imagination, if he does so truly, he can gain and use spells of up to 2nd level. Unscrupulous beings like fiends often make use of this to create cults who mistakenly believe the fiend is a deity and through this can ascend to near-power status (aka Abyssal Lords, Lords of the Nine) to actual deity level. Mind you, it takes a whole lot of worshippers to do this.

Can you cite a FR source for any of that, MnM?

Or, can you maybe clarify... are you saying a character is free to believe IC whatever crazy thing she likes? Or that a character may mechanically receive divine power from whatever crazy thing she likes? Where are you getting this 2nd-level spell rule from?

Are you sure that's FR-specific? I am pretty sure in FR you must worship a divine power of some sort to get any spells.

If I recall correctly the the clerics only needing a belief thing is just from base D&D FR requires you to have an actual Deity to cast spells. However! With that being said the "Servant of the Fallen" Feat from "Lost Empires of Faerun" specifically gives the ability to worship and get spells from a Dead/Forgotten Power.

Leira's totally dead, you could worship her via that feat, but you'd be getting your spells from Cyric, cosmoslogically-mechanically.

TormakSaber wrote:

Leira's totally dead, you could worship her via that feat, but you'd be getting your spells from Cyric, cosmoslogically-mechanically.

Not sure about that. The LEoF section on dead gods seems to imply that dead gods have enough belief-power stored in their carcasses that they can respond to strong faith. I thought the whole point was that gods are difficult to kill, and almost any dead deity of the last few thousand years could be resurrected to former glory if enough people believed and conducted the correct rituals? Leira may be dead as an active personality, but the memory of her and her divine body are still floating around the cosmos. Will have to double-check to be sure, though.

Yeah, I thought the same. And the neat thing would be that if a god previously absorbed by another god were to be believed in enough again, it would basically erupt and split from the current god. I don't remember any particular precedent of that happening, but I like the uncertainty of it. Perhaps Lathander really is Amaunator. Or perhaps enough people simply believed that he was, and he will turn into him anyway. Deities are half actual beings, half metaphysical concept in my book. How they work exactly can never fully be understood by our mortal minds, so the rest must be taken on... faith.

Dark Immolation wrote:

And the neat thing would be that if a god previously absorbed by another god were to be believed in enough again, it would basically erupt and split from the current god. I don't remember any particular precedent of that happening, but I like the uncertainty of it. Perhaps Lathander really is Amaunator. Or perhaps enough people simply believed that he was, and he will turn into him anyway.

That has always been my take on it. I mean, we know pretty much for a fact that as per canon lore pre-4e, Amaunator was not Lathander. The 2e deity book says (copied from online so not sure which one; F&A I guess):

Quote:

Over the centuries, many theories have been put forward by later religious scholars as to what ultimate fate Amaunator met. Some insist that he died, but others (notably the sunmasters of the Brotherhood of the Glorious Sun) argue that he was reborn as Lathander. Still others believe he survives as the vengeful Bedine deity known as At’ar the Merciless and yet others assert that he turned his back on Faerûn and entered the pantheon of the lands of Kara-Tur or simply moved on to other planets (such as Oerth). The truth is that with the loss of nearly all his followers in Netheril after its fall, Amaunator began the long, arduous, and painful process of dying of neglect. After about a millennium, he did not have enough power left to maintain his power base in the outer planes and was ruthlessly exiled to the Astral Plane. His corpse now drifts with the endless astral tides, awaiting a day when some ambitious spirit may help him regain his once-proud heritage.

Perhaps some aspect of him was absorbed by Lathander. Perhaps, since deities are as much defined by the concepts and myths about them as their real persons, the association with sun and the belief of a bunch of heretics was enough to maintain the link. Perhaps the faith of the heretics was ultimately enough to plant a seed of Amaunator in Lathander and make him grow, until he burst out and killed the previous god. Or maybe, which is more interesting, the old Amaunator was never reborn. Perhaps Lathander had to change when the faith of thousands implanted a new personality on him, perhaps he thinks he is the Amaunator of old but is actually a new god altogether. But given that the identity of deities is fluid and tied to their self-representation and what is believed of them, it's hard to say what such a distinction would mean; if he holds Amaunator's portfolio, if he got an imprint of his personality and memories from the datastores of the cosmos, and if everyone considers him Amaunator, is there any difference? It's not like identity in the planes is determined by continuity of the physical body. Whatever the case, Amaunator seems to have been reborn while at least part of him was inarguably dead and floating in the Astral; he wasn't just "pretending" to be Lathander.

But there is no doubt, in light of the above, that there was one corpse of Amaunator in the astral plane, and that's probably what empowered any Servants of the Fallen he had (as opposed to Heretics of the Faith who'd get it from Lathander).

I feel the H.P. Lovecraft couplet "That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die." is especially fitting here.

Supposedly Dead Power question

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