Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Classes&Cogitations, 6: Da Drood

Call me nitpicky, but the druid class' biggest problem is its name. When implemented, it appears to have wound up by default (in contrast to clerics) a catch-all for paganism, laden with noble savage hippie claptrap alongside a smatter of animism, shamanism and that old tree surgeon joke from MASH as the definition of druidism. Plus, much as it pains my lycanthropic self to admit it, it doesn't mesh well with what became druids' most famous class feature, shapeshifting.

Animal skin-changing (or inducing such changes in others) is a pretty common storytelling trope in most early religions, and a power claimed by many of those religions' mystics... but it's usually associated with the concept of shamanism. Granted it's a largely semantic difference, and there's plenty of overlap between Celtic druids and the widespread shamanistic beliefs of Eurasia (or the little we can glean archaeologically after Christians' and Muslims' unending cultural genocide campaign) but once D&D (and its copycats) decided to expand via classes actually called "shaman" etc. then the skin-changing or skin-walking or inhabiting the bodies of animals should mostly have migrated over to them.

And it's not like you wouldn't have plenty to work with to flesh out a druid class without (or with heavily reduced) shapeshifting, even from my meager knowledge of Celtic religion. The idea of druids forming secretive cabals out in the wilderness (to protect their oooohhh-spoookyy forbidden knowledge) was actually historically true as far as I know, and combined with a similarly secretive aversion to the written word and reliance on oral tradition this could make for some pretty memorably conspiratorial druidic cults without anyone ever growing a single extra hair. But aside from living outside the main community for the sake of secrecy, the druidic priesthood was concerned less with wild animals than with natural cycles of life/death or the seasons (to the point of obsessing over the turning wheel as universal motif) and come on, what director worth his salt can't make a visually stunning scene out of wagon burials?
 
Speaking of oral tradition, while more modern religious education may be carried out in organized edifices with written stores of official dogma and objects of devotion or study, earlier religions around the world routinely localized their stock of lore squarely in the pin-head of the tribe's one official witch doctor. That one, in turn, would keep an apprentice or two. While for monks, clerics, paladins, etc. I've constantly been emphasizing the need to flesh out their monasteries, churches and other trappings of their order, for the wilder types much of their existence would revolve around the direct master-student relationship. If you want a brief but lovely example of that, run a mage through Old Mebbeth's quest chain in Planescape: Torment. In fact, quite a few of that game's backstory interactions centered on long-term apprenticeship (Dak'kon / Ignus / Ravel) for good or ill...

Calling upon animals to help could still be in the druidic wheel-house (but I'll get to the Conjuration school when I talk about wizards) alongside light and darkness, seasonal effects, maybe calling upon dead souls to inhabit animals if you want to stretch it a bit, augury whether based on the behavior of animals or on entrails, empowering warriors, you name it. Let's not forget that rather infamous druidic predilection for human sacrifice, which I've found conspicuously absent from cRPGs. For some strange reason.
 
Where you split the difference between druids, witches, shamans, voodoo and other "natural" or "spirit" magic as opposed to organized churches depends on your particular game's system, but to ensure a difference, split you must. If not, well, look at something like NWN2 and tell me whether druid/shaman/warpriest/etc. actually feel like different classses.
 
In practical terms, druids work best as a summoning and crowd control class (brambles, ice, stone, sunlight) and many of those spells beautifully complement that Celtic turning wheel motif, through waning/waxing growth and decay, changes and cycles. But for physical control to stand out, games in general need to give up their obsession with telepathy and mind control, and that's a topic to be revisited some other time.

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