The Implied Apocalypse of the Cleric

So, JD Vance killed the Pope, and to celebrate, award-winning JD Vance lookalike Prismatic Wasteland is putting on another Blog Bandwagon, this time about clerics. A lot of digital ink has been spilled about what it means to be a cleric in old-school DnD, from implications of hierarchy to variants of “Turn Undead” used for worldbuilding to discussions over whether it should be thrown in the bin entirely.

For this blogpost, I'm going to hone in on the thing that grinds my gears about certain old-school clerics the most: namely, that you can't cast any proper spells until hitting second level, and what that says about the gods' priorities. To quote semi-famous YouTuber and divorced man Jared Knabenbauer, “Until [Level 2], you're just a shitty fighter.”

Me and the lads talking about old-school RPGs

(Yes, I know that in ADnD they can cast spells from first level, and that Pathfinder fixes this. We're talking about OSE and its ancestors here because I want to.)

I'm generally an advocate for classes to engage in their core fantasies right from the get-go. In OSE's case, that involves being “...trained for battle and sworn to the service of their deity.” Once a cleric has “proven their faith” by reaching second level, they can then cast spells, the biggest way to, y'know, channel divine power.

However, what isn’t here is just as important as what is. Namely, that every Cleric starts out with the ability to repulse the undead. 

As Worm Guy and Throne of Salt have pointed out, the cleric's Turn Undead ability says a lot about both the threats the world faces and also the role of the Gods in it. Heck, Tomb of the Serpent Kings has as one of its beginners lessons "there are undead in the dungeon."

Keeping that in mind, we have a scenario where all the gods favor life over unlife, and all have their most battle-ready worshippers hobble themselves in a way that would primarily affect their ability to kill living opponents, the kind that have blood to bleed. Paladins, which can access cutting weapons, get their spells a lot later, presumably having to prove their devotion that much harder in order to get access to the goodies. (Yes I know Gary Gygax just misinterpreted artistic conventions in the Bayeux tapestry but let's have fun with this).

This isn't surprising, given the class was inspired by the exorcist priests of Hammer Horror films and designed to counter a rising undead horde in the original campaigns, but that initial context has long since disappeared, and with it turn undead in more recent editions of DnD.

However, what if, as Worm Guy and Throne of Salt said, we think through the worldbuilding implications? Whether you argue that Dungeons and Dragons' setting is post apocalypse or collapse, something really bad happened that killed so many people that even now 1/3 of castles are just completely empty, and all the gods collectively agreed to train a portion of their clergy specifically as exorcists. 

What was this great threat? Was it some great vampire lord, like the Baron of Blackmoor? A self-replicating horde of zombies? A mighty lich and his spectral lieutenants? An Empire of the Ghouls? Whatever it was, it has left a scar on the world. Many of the last bastions of humanity have been left abandoned, and beneath the earth lurk the remnants of this mighty horde, preying on those foolish enough to venture forth.

Lon Chaney, bringer of the apocalypse?

This titanic struggle has left the gods weakened, more willing to let their faithful channel the raw power of life itself before granting them access to finer manipulations of magic, for those clerics that fall snuff out just a bit more of the remaining divine spark.

This is to say nothing of the impact such a great dying would have on infrastructure. As order and trade networks broke down, untold numbers starved, towns shrunk, and the roads became more dangerous as other monsters reclaimed the wilds. That all paints a picture of a world struggling to rise, ripe with the treasure of fallen kingdoms, and perilous to explore. 

It sounds to me like a world in need of heroes.