Game: The Quintessential Cleric
Publisher: Mongoose Publishing
Series: d20
Reviewer: Wyrdmaster
Review Dated: 10th, April 2002
Reviewer’s Rating: 8/10 [ Really good ]
Total Score: 13
Average Score: 6.50
Clerics are like wizards but different. They get their magic spells in a different way and they’re better able to make use of healing magic too. Oh yeah, they’ve got something to do with gods and stuff but they seem to be too busy off on adventures to really have all that much time for sort of thing. I’m sure that that sort of sentiment is not uncommon in some games, it doesn’t really seem right though and seems to be the problem this book sets out to address. There’s a great feat in the Quintessential Cleric called Combat Co-ordinator which gives the Cleric the ability to boost the combat prowess of his fellow adventures as he hangs around at the back of the fight and directs the action. That example feat, though, is the exception to the general mood of this book; Combat Co-ordinator is something that an adventuring or otherwise roaming around Cleric could make use of whereas the majority of the new rules focus on those holy men who have settled down with their own congregation of faithful.
The character concepts are a core of the Quintessential Collector series. The concepts are templates that alter the basic character class without going as far as the sweeping changes that Prestige Classes bring. The concepts in the Quintessential Cleric tend to look at how the person became a cleric; such as the godslave, reformed criminal or vengeful survivor or look at the ways the cleric goes about preaching the wisdom of his deity; such as the anchorite, missionary or divine revolutionary. Those concepts with the fanatical touch tend to benefit from their extreme focus, one even gains a bonus hit point at each level whereas those who approach conversion and spreading their teachings through wisdom and good (or bad) example find themselves with bonuses to diplomacy and similar skills.
There are Prestige Classes as well, they’re pretty good as well but all of them apex after only five ranks rather than ten and I think this is the first time that this has happened in the series. Favourite prestige classes include the likes of the bloodchild, a mortal born with just a touch of divine blood and may equally well be reviled as revered by their church as a result and the Redeemer who specialises in restoring sacred sites or even defiling sites important to rival religions. Mongoose tend to have a canny eye on which books to release and when. If you’re thinking, as I did, that Clerical twists like the Redeemer prestige class are likely to spark off terrible conflicts between two rival religions then you’ll be pleased to know that Crusades of Valour: When Gods Collide a source book for Holy Wars was released in the same month as the Quintessential Cleric.
Tricks of the Trade might sound like an unlikely chapter for a book on clerics but it actually contains ideas gory enough to be appear alongside the Quintessential Fighter and other tricks sly enough to rank in the Quintessential Rouge. Harvesting relics is a strange twist on necromancy and works on the premise that the body parts from a powerful cleric retain some power for a period of time after her death. If you harvest a body for relics you can still try and resurrect the body but can’t use raise dead on it. That seems to make sense and immediately you can have fun with campaign ideas in which local cultures mummify the bodies of their dead in order to stop them coming back as undead or have weird scenarios in which the group’s cleric is presented with a healing potion made from his blood that last time he died… There’s also rules on how to try and convert people to your faith and the appropriate penalties and bonuses for dealing with people already faithful to a different religion, of a different alignment to you but who might be impressed by some careful divine spell casting. You’ll find rules for making holy items or incorporating holy symbols into other objects, implanting a holy cross in the centre boss of your shield for example. This chapter sets up the initial idea that a cleric should busy himself with trying to convert as many believers as possible, build an impressive temple and fill it with important artefacts.
Twenty-five pages out of the hundred and twenty-eight book are given over to rules for the cleric’s congregation. The more people you have in your congregation, providing they’re believers, then the higher your congregation level. Clerics can only look after so many people in their congregation, depending on their own cleric level, before they need assistance from other clerics. Why would any cleric want to bother with a congregation and temple building in the first place? With a congregation, argues the book, you can get all sorts of work done of you, you can lobby with political power and, of course, start your own powerful church-cum-army! One of the best things a congregation can do is sing hymns. Really, no fooling; hymn singing is a vital aspect of any temple and an attractive option to any cleric. Hymns invoke the powers and the gifts of the worshiped deity in a different way than any one cleric could hope for. Hymns provide a whole range of magical talents and have a nice way of sharing those boons out between the cleric leading the congregation and the congregation themselves. I thought it all terribly silly to begin with but as I’m prone to doing I changed my mind. The hymns are divided up into the basic cleric domains, you’ll find hymns of fire, death, good or fortune for example and the rewards given for the singing of these hymns are appropriately matched. These hymns invoke the powers of the very real fantasy gods and are not treated as spells; they can’t be dispelled or countered normally. It was this caveat that won me over. The effects of the hymns are quite subtle at the lower levels – the trickery domain hymn at level one, for example, helps conceal the temple by making it look mundane and uninteresting; ideal for a thieves temple. Even the high ranking hymns, those songs which would require a large congregation to sing, are limited by the practicalities of getting so many people together and the duration of the effect thereafter. I liked this because it’s a handy utility for any GM to have when spinning together reasons why a party of adventures needs to go off and do something, why a cleric needs to be stopped from successfully building his church, or other sundry plot devices. That said; needing at least 20 people to help you achieve the smallest possible divinely powered hymn is next to useless for an adventuring cleric.
Of course, there are other ways to show your devotion to a god other than building an impressive temple. In the “To Serve the Gods” chapter there’s a whole lot of information on various religious vows a cleric can take. Vows are another example of a wonderful character quirk or scenario hook that can be used just as easily by a GM as a player and unlike the congregation they are just as applicable to wanderings clerics as they are to those in a temple. There are no suggested “power ups” for clerics who undertake vows; it’s considered that some religions will have vows of differing strength and importance as a core element to their convictions. For clerics who do ignore their vows or fail to keep them then there are consequences and penalties and the book has text to help with this. Later on there’s a chapter on the Fallen, those who where once pious but who have given up or been cast out of their religion. Clerics, needless to say, loose their powers. More importantly, perhaps, for a typical roleplaying game there are rules and advice on how to reverse the procedure and return to the church and the worship of the god.
New spells. Yes. A book like this was bound to have new spells but additional magical effects are ten a penny. Fortunately the Quintessential Cleric offers more. A clerical estate is a group of divine spells that fits inside any given domain. The idea is that although generic domain concepts like “Good, Luck, Strength or Destruction” are good enough to describe a deity and its powers in simple terms that they lack enough detail to give any focus to the god or his granted magic. For example, is it not realistic to expect a god, religion or cleric to be specialised in bad luck or misfortune rather than just luck? I think each of the domains from the core rules has two full estates detailed. Some of the estates have new spells in them but all these spells are found elsewhere in the Quintessential Cleric and you don’t have to purchase a third book.
One of the more carefully done sections is that of sacrifices. All sorts of gods and goddesses are pleased by sacrifices but this doesn’t mean blood dripping from altars. The gods of knowledge, for example, will accept offers of books. The books don’t have to be destroyed either, in fact it wouldn’t make any sense at all if they were, and are filed safely into the temple’s library. Sacrifices don’t guarantee you more power and you don’t have to be a cleric in order to attempt to please a god in this way. The rule system presented gives you a chance of having your offering noticed and then some sort of subtle favour granted in return. The favours materialise themselves along the lines of having critical hits converted into normal ones if the blow was directed against you or a visa versa if you manage to strike a powerful enemy at an important time. The sacrifice system in the Quintessential Cleric slyly introduces a fate point system into the d20 system and does it in away that doesn’t destroy suspense in the way that having the points clearly marked on your character sheet would.
The Quintessential Cleric is a good book. It’s well written and presented, the artwork is of typical Mongoose quality and there’s a whole range of artists who have contributed. The Collector Series really isn’t a power up book in the way that Wizards awful character class books have been and this is most apparent this time around. If you want to add religion to your cleric class then you’ll adore this book, if you want to give your cleric access to dungeon ready special abilities then you’re going to be disappointed. That’s not to say the book isn’t applicable to campaigns though, many players go down the route of taking control of lands and building up a kingdom from there. If your DnD game involves empire building or even simply looking after a village, town or city then you’ll get more use from the Quintessential Cleric.
