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Lutra wrote:

Yes..except to the point that once they make the pact they are no longer serving the purposes of their deity but the evil outsider's.

I don't know about that. You could still make a pact where you serve both Kelemvor and the outsider's interests. For example, you could get the powers from a rival of Orcus in return for stamping out one of his cults.

Yes, there's nothing impossible about serving two masters. It's risky, and risk implies the possibility of paying off. If you're lucky, you might even get a good afterlife. Most of the time you'll realize your error too late, though.

Mind that Blackguards don't necessarily even "serve the interests" of the outsider they make contact with. You keep talking about a pact, but the word isn't mentioned in the Blackguard class description. Nothing says it can't be a price you pay once for a lifetime of power. The more traditional pact also has two obvious possibilities: the fiend demands something of you either in life, or in death. That is to say, services or your soul. Probably not often/always both, because that would be a bad deal. I imagine the majority of blackguards who sell their soul for power want nothing to do with the fiend while they still have their life and freedom. A blackguard could very well be someone who sells his soul to do good and fight injustice in life, fearing the eternal torment that will claim him once he dies.

In fact, nothing keeps a Blackguard from being good, for all intents and purposes. (It was ruled years ago that you wouldn't get an alignment change to Good because of the supernatural taint that still lingers, but you could still act perfectly good.) Once a Blackguard always a Blackguard, so you could be trying to make up for a mistake in your youth. No matter how hard you try to serve your good patron god and do the right thing, in the back of your head you know you've made a deal with the devil and no amount of good deeds will change that.

I know of a Blackguard within the Kelemvorite church. Firstly, he was a Blackguard before joining and secondly, does he really serve Kelemvor? :wink:

IronAngel wrote:

Yes, there's nothing impossible about serving two masters. It's risky, and risk implies the possibility of paying off. If you're lucky, you might even get a good afterlife. Most of the time you'll realize your error too late, though.

This sounds like a pretty great description of a Blackguard that worships Kelemvor, yup. Thanks for all the responses by the way guys!

Okay.... people have mentioned (I know Svensk did, I think some others did, too) that in previous history the DM's had no issue with BG's being in service to Kelemvor. Well, we didn't (and I suppose, technically we still don't)... but this was also before we worked on Divine Champion. Before that, you had BG and CoT. BG was allowed to signify the evil side of what is now Divine Champion with CoT representing the good. Now that Divine Champion has been instituted, I would expect it to be used in regards to a more melee-oriented character receiving their powers from Kelemvor whereas previously BG was perfectly acceptable as a substitution.

So, with the implementation of Divine Champion we're now allowed to have a more proper stance on a BG in service to Kelemvor. I believe that Yoss has very succinctly described our stance on that. I just wanted to explain a bit further about the shift in stance from how it was interpreted to how it is now interpreted.

Thank you for that statement!

No problem, yo.

I'm kind of confused by that statement, actually. It seems like you're saying that the DMs' stance before was that the notion of a BG of Kelemvor was tolerable but discouraged, and the DMs' stance now is that the notion of a BG of Kelemvor is tolerable but discouraged. What changed? Or am I reading you totally wrong?

Lizzie wrote:

I'm kind of confused by that statement, actually. It seems like you're saying that the DMs' stance before was that the notion of a BG of Kelemvor was tolerable but discouraged, and the DMs' stance now is that the notion of a BG of Kelemvor is tolerable but discouraged. What changed? Or am I reading you totally wrong?

I think what he is saying is things are changing, and the dms cant always give a yes or no answer during these transitions periods. If it is set in stone when all this new lore and change is said and done people who would be affected would be given options.

The dm team is not unanimous and they are trying to change to be somewhat more united, and a questions has been asked that will probably be disused in back-channels and perhaps a verdict posted eventually in the lore section.

I know they are developing such currently so that some of the unwritten rules/lore are now written, but its a slow process i would say as much of Amia is not cannon.

Lizzie wrote:

I'm kind of confused by that statement, actually. It seems like you're saying that the DMs' stance before was that the notion of a BG of Kelemvor was tolerable but discouraged, and the DMs' stance now is that the notion of a BG of Kelemvor is tolerable but discouraged. What changed? Or am I reading you totally wrong?

Okay, I'll try to explain a bit more... before the Divine Champion was a custom class in the Amia system, there was Champion of Torm (CoT) which didn't accept Evil-aligned characters. So, even though AD&D had a class that allowed for characters of any alignment to be a champion of their chosen god, NWN didn't. It was common practice for characters who wanted to be a divine champion of an evil god to use Blackguard to imitate the divine abilities given to good-aligned characters.

Fast forward to the addition of Divine Champion... with the addition of this class, the use of Blackguard to emulate the abilities given by good aligned characters ability to take Champion of Torm is no longer needed as Divine Champion is open to characters or all alignments. We can now view the use of Blackguards within the ranks of a clergy in a much more canon-esque light. Hence our more canon outlook on a Blackguard being in Kelemvor's clergy now as opposed to before we had Divine Champion in the module.

My very brief opinion, after getting a headache reading all the posts is this;

You follow Kelemvor, you raise any dead or murder, and your buggered backwards into a small space.. simples. Kelemvor doesn't own a copy of NWN or play PnP D&D, he looks at souls and actions and takes it from there.

An idea came to me last night - What if you follow kelemvor and do the opposite of what san just wrote?

You raise the dead back to life, Adventurers who have died you track down and resurrect, children drowning you get back to life and you make sure that people can continue with their lives until they die of old age..
How would the god of the dead feel about that? I believe, personally, that he would be -very- Okay with it, right? You're basically letting people have a second chance.
And as long as the corpse responds to the call back to life - There's no laws broken, only laws upheld?

Edit - And i came to think about a very decent way of getting involved in other's roleplay - You are basically A person's insurance.

"You know what, If you promise to follow kelemvor's dogma and XYZ, I will scry on you once a month at X day and Y time making sure you are not dead. If you are, I will resurrect you so you can live a long and prosperous life until you die of old age."

Or is this entire thing to corny?

Very_Svensk wrote:

An idea came to me last night - What if you follow kelemvor and do the opposite of what san just wrote?

You raise the dead back to life, Adventurers who have died you track down and resurrect, children drowning you get back to life and you make sure that people can continue with their lives until they die of old age..
How would the god of the dead feel about that? I believe, personally, that he would be -very- Okay with it, right? You're basically letting people have a second chance.
And as long as the corpse responds to the call back to life - There's no laws broken, only laws upheld?

Edit - And i came to think about a very decent way of getting involved in other's roleplay - You are basically A person's insurance.

"You know what, If you promise to follow kelemvor's dogma and XYZ, I will scry on you once a month at X day and Y time making sure you are not dead. If you are, I will resurrect you so you can live a long and prosperous life until you die of old age."

Or is this entire thing to corny?

I would argue that Kelemvor would look upon death similar to how Jergal does. When your time has come, you die.
Circumventing this by instituting a character offering "insurance" to adventures while noble could lead to a large unbalance. And why would Kelemvor wish to have followers worshipping him out of fear of dying?

Quote:

Doomguides are devoted clerics and paladins of Kelemvor, god of the dead, whom they serve, along with the people of Faerûn, by helping mortals deal with their fears of death and existence after the fact

Such act as offering a "get out of death" free card is much more suitable to some other evil diety who has specific cleric spells for it like Death Pact is how I see it

Agreed... Kelemvor isn't about evading death or trying to outmaneuver it. Second chances and renewals sounds to me like you're describing a Lathandran more than a Kelemvorite, Svensk.

I agree. I wouldn't say it's impossible to have such beliefs as a Kelemvorite (his precise attitude towards death is strangely ambiguous), but I don't think anything exactly encourages the interpretation either. Any cleric could offer such a service, and Kelemvor doesn't strike me as the likely candidate.

Yossarin wrote:

that's a good point about praying for spells like and them not being granted. As usual I try very hard to find an IC explanation for why things are the way they are OOC, and I always noticed all clerics have access to all the same spells regardless of the deity. Pathfinder has some variation on this with their fucking sweet domain system and a few special spells that only divine casters of a given deity can cast (Speak witb Dead being exclusive to clerics of Pharasma, for example), but even it keeps the all clerics have access to all spells rule.

According to Forgotten realm lore, it is not uncommon for clerics to ask and recieve spells of a seemingly counter-productive nature: In the first book of the Paths of Darkness series by Mr. Salvatore, a male cleric of Lloth prayed for and cast healing spells on her foe Drizzt. It simply seems that if the cleric feels strongly enough about the need of such an anathemic spell, that they feel it is in accordance with a higher principle (survival, long-term goals, etc).

Malokae wrote:

a male cleric of Lloth

I'm gonna let you finish in a minute but I gotta stop you right there. What. You may proceed.

Malokae wrote:

cast healing spells on her foe Drizzt

Wait... What?! Was this when Drizzt was 'ermegherd totally an Eili'?

On a (slightly) more serious note, no reason Lolth wouldn't grant healing spells. A dead Lolthite cleric is, well, a dead Lolthite cleric. I think the only deity that would have an issue with them would be Lovitar, possibly, though even she would want her clergy to live

Naivatkal wrote:

I think the only deity that would have an issue with them would be Lovitar, possibly, though even she would want her clergy to live

Who says healing spells must be painless? :twisted:

Naivatkal wrote:

Malokae wrote:

a male cleric of Lloth

I'm gonna let you finish in a minute but I gotta stop you right there. What. You may proceed.

I don't remember that specific situation, and I have little to add to the question of available spells, but about this: I don't know why male clerics of Lolth continue to surprise people. Their existance and viability even as PCs has been advertised on Amia for years when it comes up. Demihuman Deities puts the number of male priests at 4% of the clergy. And that was I think in 1368. Since then, the breakdown of the Lolthite monoculture, various insurrections, the rise of Vhaeraunian activity, the War of the Spider Queen etc. have probably only increased the number as drow society has had to deal with the crumbling of their idyll. That's conjecture, but at least we have no reason to believe the opposite to be true. So they're not even overly rare; almost one in twenty. Just not the accepted norm. I imagine their situation to be much like that of female mystics and lay preachers in the High and Late Middle Ages, though perhaps slightly better since they're part of the institution.

Kelemvor and Blackguards

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