This one isn't so much hidden, but hey, when you've got a series title, you gotta stick with it. Unlike with the Church of Law which has been obscured by tme, I think people have a good idea of what Druidism in D&D is: it's neutral and associated with Nature. In the Greyhawk setting and other places it's the "Old Faith" standing in perhaps for pre-Christian beliefs of Europe but without the Christianity.
I think there's another way to go, though, completely consistent with what the original works tell us about druids.
Druids first show up as monsters in the Greyhawk supplement. We are told they are "priests of a neutral-type religion." They can shape change and attractive barbarian followers.
They become a class in Eldritch Wizardry where they are described again as Neutral and "are more closely attuned to Nature, serving as its priests rather than serving some other deity." Mistletoe is holy to them, and they protect plants and animals.
Neutral may well just have been meant to imply unaligned here--not taking a side in the conflict between the civilizing force of law and the destructive forces of chaos: "I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me: nobody cares for the woods as I care for them," as Treebeard would have it. But maybe it's not just the woods the druid cares about?
Unlike Law and Chaos which seem to be transcendent and come from extraplanar forces, maybe Nature in this context is the cycles and balance of the material world? Given the description in Eldritch Wizardry, it seems likely to me that the religion of the druids is pantheistic with Nature (or the material plane) being an immanent divine force or deity. It could be animistic with everything in the natural world having a separate spirit, but it might also be monist, where divine Nature is the only true reality.
I think then that the druid's neutrality is a somewhat militant sort. The dualism of Law vs. Chaos is contrary to their understanding of the unity of all things; the strong, opposing polarities are nonsensical if existence is governed by cycles. Worse, these ideas from the Outer Planes would be alien intrusions on the harmony of the world.
Druid Shinto would be amazing!
ReplyDelete"slightly predisposed towards evil actions"
DeleteTrying to pin down a few of the nuances led me straight back to the grand enigma, "elemental evil." Whatever it was originally intended to be, whatever it became in print, I wonder now if monster druids show up in the Greyhawk supplement as agents of TOEE and then vanish from encounter tables after the temple is purged, giving the now-familiar "druidical religion" space to emerge from the deep background.
One thing that's interesting about Hommlet is that some form of "druidism" was established there long ago but a new, fairly high-level (5th circle) priest has recently been assigned to monitor the local community . . . which raises the question of who led services in the TOEE days and what happened to them. Either way, it's suggested that the regional hierarchy finds elemental "evil of this sort" offensive enough to keep an eye on.
Meanwhile the injection of Cuthbertism as a fairly close take on "celtic christianity" or the veneration of syncretized pagan figures is hot stuff. As I'm sure others have analyzed over the years, the shrine is new and resident clergy are highly irregular . . . and they work with rangers, who are always "good" and have access to druid magic.
Someone could play this as a gothic campaign where pockets of otherwise waning "old ways" linger as primitive superstition around the fringes, with some pagans choosing to work with the new age and help suppress the more unhappy-making aspects of the rites, remaining "elemental" while renouncing the "evil." Then you have a spectrum of responses ranging from whatever they worship in urbane Veluna through semi-pagan Cuthbert and his ranger friends through normative Gnarley druids and then back to the monsters with their barbarians and berserks.
But for me right now I'm more intrigued with inverting that structure and running a campaign from within druidism itself. Maybe elemental "evil" is just a season of woe that came and went and now it's time for a season that waxes toward weal. In that scenario, TOEE is the real "old religion" and after a mediating phase an era of elemental "good" (TOEG, the Cuthbert temple) is the new religion that rises. This has all happened before and will all happen again.
However. Due to the bizarrely brief irruption of TOEE it's more likely that this was an artificial challenge to the cycle . . . a season that flared out of time. We can blame this on any number of "demon" conspiracy theories but the text is not really helpful there. I wonder (almost wrote IMG there by reflex, In My Glorantha for you all suffering through this at home) if we can retrofit a rogue hierophant to make everything work. What would that look like, if one of those illuminati decided to change things up? How fast would that go?
We know there are elemental princes "of evil" but few people have gone looking for their counterparts "of good." And there are courts among all the elementals that tend toward woe . . . water weirds, xorn, efreets, you name it, they have a grudge, they're mean, they embody or enable our vices. Who taught them to do that? How does that happen out there? What are the hierophants doing?
So this rapidly becomes a kind of Perelandra campaign, something DND has rarely seen.
A more nuanced comment than the first: if druidism is an activist affirmation of "cosmic balance" or "wu-wei" ["woe-weal"] or even "newtonian physics" then they might be the philosophical influence that drives committed neutral NPCs like Mordenkainen, who makes a big deal over putting his thumb on the scale of law or chaos depending on the day. We can imagine this as the "church" these influential mages attend and the voice of the "god" they acknowledge.
ReplyDeleteShinto aside it might even be possible to reconstruct the druid PC as someone who achieves spell effects through close attention + attunement to natural phenomena . . . a proto scientist who doesn't pray so much as exploit available reservoirs of internal energy that ebb and flow with experience. Of course it's easy to push this too far into a 3E "tinker druid" sort of place where you call your character Charles Darwin and instead of a sickle you carry a microscope, but there might be a really sweet spot closer in.
I think this potential druid would be compatible with Sustare's original pantheistic vision (all about the rabbits, vague gesticulation around celtic snares) but then that gets choked as we approach ADD and then the "old religion" before the World of Greyhawk. They become an atavism, a confused and somewhat fragmentary celtic twilight survival of spirituality before alignment, maybe even a shamanic practice with the shapeshifting and the hit point healing and so on.
But back here at the beginning maybe we can imagine them as the new hotness. Maybe the immortal and puissant hierophants have only gotten interested in the prime material plane recently and nowadays some people who would have once become clerics opt out into druidism. This is the revolution. I dig it because then the hierophants are free to become "secret chiefs," effectively valis-style ETI entities rousing to shake it all around.
These are the days of miracle and wonder. Anyway, a different sort of vision.
Tao and Shinto were very much on my mind, but yeah a complete materialism druid--more pandeism than pantheism is also possible. The forest hippies become the architects of anti-clerical and anti-arcane scientific enlightenment.
ReplyDeleteMonkey.
ReplyDeleteWRENCH
Gang!!
"Druids serve only themselves and nature, they occasionally make human sacrifice, but on the other hand they aid the folk in agriculture and animal husbandry. Druids are, therefore, neutral--although slightly predisposed towards evil actions."
ReplyDelete--Gary Gygax, "The Meaning of Law and Chaos in Dungeons & Dragons and Their Relationships to Good and Evil" in The Strategic Review #6 [Feb. 1976], page 5
Oh yeah
ReplyDeleteThis would make Bonewits really, really happy.
ReplyDelete@Geoffrey - Interesting addition. Thanks for that. I might quibble with Gygax that "predisposed" says a little more than his ancedote, but very interesting, over all.
ReplyDelete@Bombasticus - It's about time something in gaming did!
I've run druids in three different ways over the years.
ReplyDeleteThe first, influenced by Lin Carter's Thongor, was focused on their being kind of magic-user/clerics with a hierarchy of power. As Carter said of the druids in the Thongor series:
"Druid is a common Lemurian word used as a synonym for "priest", as in the Druids of Slidith or the Druids of Yamath. Terms such as Red Druids and Yellow Druids refer to the color of the robes and other vestments worn by priests of a particular deity (for example, red for Slidith and yellow for Yamath). A cult of druids may be led by an Archdruid. By the time of Thongor these druidical brotherhoods were devoted to evil and had attained great power in the West."
I've also used them as the more bog-standard stand-in for the rural pagan priests of Europe, Celtic, Roman, Germanic, or otherwise, as they generally have much in common with all those groups (the Romans had rural/rustic priests as well as the urban Flamen).
Finally, I developed a more nuanced druidic faith based on the above, plus literary influences, and a full re-interpretation of Neutrality in the nine-fold alignment structure of AD&D; here is the adaptation I used for the Talismundia campaign:
DRUIDISM. Druidism is found throughout the island, even into the wastelands of Bael Turath. Some circles revere gods of nature from various pantheons, notably Artemis, Frey, Freyja, and especially members of the Tuatha de Danann; others might revere the Animal Gods or the Elemental Gods.
Druids of Talismundia must be neutral in some aspect of their alignment, which determines their Order – LN (Black), NG (Brown), N (White), NE (Red), or CN (Yellow).
• Black Order Druids seek to integrate the needs of Nature with those of Civilization.
• Brown Order Druids seek to integrate the needs of Civilization with those of Nature.
• White Order Druids seek to maintain a complete balance between Civilization and Nature.
• Red Order Druids seek to use the power of Nature to gain power over Civilization.
• Yellow Order Druids seek to destroy Civilization and return humans and others to the level of beasts, to live wild in Nature.
The Grand Druid of Talismundia does not rule; he leads, or at least, is supposed to lead, and those who wish, follow. The Grand Druid is usually a Black, Brown, or White Order druid; rarely, a Red Order druid. Never has a Yellow Order druid ascended to Grand Druid status.
There are also nine Great Druids, whose domains more or less fall along the borders of the nine realms:
• Antillia (includes Myrkwood and eastern Midlands)
• Beleriand (Eldamar)
• Feywood (Western Midlands)
• Goblinwood (Uruk-Hai)
• Greatwood (Narnia)
• High Vales (Khazâd-Zarik)
• Járnviðr (“Iron-Wood”) (Brobdingnag)
• The Great Waste (Bael Turath)
• Wayreth (Arkhosia)
The current Grand Druid of Talismundia, Allanon the Black, is a Black Circle Druid, as are most of the nine members of his High Circle (the High Circle can have druids of any Order at the desire of the Grand Druid).
The Grand Druid’s direct domain only includes the Druidholt. The Great Druids generally follow his lead; Black, Brown, and White Order druids as well, while Red Order druids follow only if they must, and Yellow Order… well, they pretty much do as they please, anyway.
I member those druids in Thongor
ReplyDeleteIn D&D-ish homebrew settings I've usually treated druids as being "godless" clerics, the pseudo-priests of a natural world that existed before and apart from the gods, all of whom are extraplanar entities (and in extreme cases, invaders). Becoming a druid isn't a choice, it's a destiny and possibly an affliction resulting from being touched by fundamentally incomprehensible natural forces. A lot of druids aren't wholly sane by human/demihuman standards, and the more they deny what they've become the worse that tends to go.
ReplyDeleteI like that
ReplyDelete