God and Dungeons and Dragons

 Gasp! I started writing this in 2012? I guess I wrote myself out of the memory assault. Besides that I've exhausted myself with almost eight additional years of career drudgery. Work as a foreign service officer has actually been quite interesting, and I've had some assignments where the work was deeply important and meaningful to the welfare of American citizens, or even to people generally. But the 7am to 6pm daily grind, much of it in front of a computer, had the effect of dulling down memory. 

Assignments to date: Non-Immigrant Visas in Shanghai. American Citizen Services in Shanghai after a lengthy medical evacuation. Non-Immigrant Visas in Rio de Janeiro. Children's Issues - International Parental Child Abductions - in Washington DC. Non-Immigrant Visas in Hanoi. I am a Consular Officer after all. 

Getting back to the blog, it started as an exercise to get the upper hand on a deluge of memories and sentimentality, but even in the first post I said I'd have to write about D&D and role playing games to hold my interest. That is where I am at now. I can only keep this up if I write about RPGs. 

Tonight I turn to religion and D&D, specifically the character class of cleric. The D&D cleric is more or less a holly warrior, someone who has devoted life to upholding the tenants of her or his faith typically through martial means . In most D&D games this often mean fighting against the forces of darkness, evil, and chaos. The three other character classes in D&D are mage, thief, and fighter. None of those, come to think of it, are self-explanatory either. The different between a fighter and cleric though is the religious aspect. Clerics are warriors connected to their faith, god or gods, and this means they also have access to special holy powers, which in game terms manifest in protection and healing spells (plus others), and the ability to turn away undead creatures. In the basic rules of D&D that my twin brother and I started with there was not much explanation beyond this. However, it could beg the following questions: What faith, and what god or gods are cleric characters devoted to? Or are we talking about God? The basic D&D rules were purposefully ambiguous here, seeking the largest possible customer base. Advanced Dungeon's and Dragons, or AD&D, was not. 

The AD&D game had the book Deities & Demigods that detailed the pantheons of 15-17 different religions, depending on the printing. Some of these were "historical" such as the gods of ancient Egypt and Rome. Some were fanciful and copywritten, such as Cthulhu and Nehwon. Some were just legend, such as Arthurian. Then there were the handful of pantheons that were basically contemporary faiths, such as a collections of gods from Hinduism, and some Japanese and Chinese gods seem historical but are in fact still worshipped today after an Eastern fashion. One basic assumption of Deities and Demigods is that players may have their clerics devoted to these religions or gods. Not included in the book is God from the three monotheistic faiths of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. 

So when my twin brother and I got stated playing D&D in earnest  it was without the above Deities and Demigods, which we had never seen or heard of, and the friend who played with us, Casey, was a devout Mormon. Right off Casey wanted to play a cleric, and he was a holy warrior of God. This would have been about the time the big Satanic scare got started in the U.S. with regards to D&D, and I can remember Casey's mom, Elaine, grilling us on that, plus clerics. We made a good defense of the game  by saying that clerics were holy warriors devoted to God, fighting against evil everywhere. I had not thought at all about who clerics worshiped or where they got their powers until Casey started playing with us. When I did start to think about this it felt off somehow. I didn't invite God into my toys and hobbies and fun time, and it was a warren of a rabbit hole if you started to think seriously about how applying D&D rules to God and prayer might work. We later found that the D&D cleric and rules did work half decently if used with the ancient Greco-Roman cosmology and the like, but again, only if you didn't put too much thought into it. In the mid 1980's of rural Texas we never could have played D&D if we had gone the non-God route with Casey, so our clerics back then remained holy warriors of God, full stop. Don't think about it at all, just play the game and have fun.  If we had been aware of Deities and Demigods I wonder if we would have dropped the game altogether, at least until our next chapter in life.

Here is the first image of a cleric you see in the 1984 edition of  Dungeons and Dragons Basic Rules. It is an ink and pencil by Larry Elmore and a true beauty.  At some point I'll have to write about Elmore's contribution to the puberty years, but that is another story. 

This picture reminds me of a funny moment the first time Casey played D&D. He had armed his cleric character with a mace. Wielding it in combat the first time he said something along the lines of; "I pull out my mace and spray it right in the goblins eyes!" Damn dude, wrong century. I probably showed Casey this picture to get him on track with the older version of a mace.