I’ve always disliked the theme of having a large weapon conjure in and float around on the battlefield. Almost so much that I avoid the cleric class because it’s usually their bread and butter for attacks.
When thinking about adapting the looks of certain spells while remaining mechanically as intended, I liked the idea of having a spiritual weapon that was a swarm of fireflies. Which when attacking would swarm the target and turn to light as the many bugs pass through the creature. This led to the idea of applying the theme further and spirit guardians would also be a circling cloud of fireflies. A cleric of light using a connection to creatures that actually emit light.
How have you themed your cleric to avoid the mundane look?
In certain cases, I have the Spiritual Weapon simply appear as a lower-powered Bigby's Hand...a floating copy of the cleric's fist, or the hand of their god.
Not quite a cleric, but I had a Divine Soul Sorcerer who had cleric spells, and was descended from the Raven Queen. He summoned a giant raven to serve as a Spiritual Weapon, and his Spirit Guardians were a literal murder of crows.
Lastly, I had a Spiritual Weapon that was essentially a morningstar whip...a shimmering, radiant spiked ball on the end of a extending chain that the cleric wielded. As he was strictly a caster, and less a brawler, this spell was one of the few circumstances where he'd use a "weapon".
Spiritual Weapon and Spirit Guardians are some of my favorite spells to customize! My best example is my elf Grave Cleric whose Spirit Guardians took the forms of her dead human siblings, whom she'd been writing to since the beginning of the game. I really love the fireflies idea!
I think many take the word weapon in the spells name and description a bit too literally much of the time.
I'm far more preferring of a representation that far more reflects whatever god that I am following for a particular character. For Example my Follower of Bahamut draws up a ring of light and a glowing dragons head comes through and every time it attacks it breathes a blast of light on that opponent. My Nature character I played for a short time on the other hand. Actually called up a man sized ethereal Ent and it physically moved on the battle field and bashed at enemies with it's branches.
Though far more common for me was actually to cast Spirit Guardians and wade into battle in heavy armor with a fairly good Con and by level 4 I'd picked up Warcaster to keep concentration. it was often highly affective because of the radius on Spirit Guardians combined with my movement speed. Made it harder for things to run away from it.
In the game I'm playing in currently my High Elf Cleric serves an aspect of the church called the Lioness (life cleric so the mother and protector aspect of the god of the church) and his spirit weapons we decided manifest as a set of claws that float around raking across the enemies of the faith. Made for a good bit of RP flair for the table.
I don't bust out Spiritual Weapon unless the party is really hurting and my concentration buffs aren't doing their job, so I try to switch it up and make it funny to keep the newbies from getting too flustered. Sometimes it is a floating object (never a weapon in the traditional sense), but I try not to do that unless that's all I can think of in the first 5 seconds. I've had a couple of really fun ones!
We had a cleric in our group that had a table of 100 different things it could be. Sure on the list were normal things like hammers and swords, but apparently he got desperate for things that could attack and had things like scissors, gun-chucks (we had to look it up and were laughing the entire fight), malice, fear. If it was ever a concept like fear we claimed it was like the smoke monster from lost. formless smoke.
My cleric is a Knowledge Domain and so I've had fun themeing her weapons for that. My favourite is a giant floating tome. I have it bludgeon enemies, chop at them, close on top of them (all flavour of course as it's all force damage). My other idea is a giant Quill or bookmark, all around the theme of recording and knowledge.
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I’ve always disliked the theme of having a large weapon conjure in and float around on the battlefield. Almost so much that I avoid the cleric class because it’s usually their bread and butter for attacks.
When thinking about adapting the looks of certain spells while remaining mechanically as intended, I liked the idea of having a spiritual weapon that was a swarm of fireflies. Which when attacking would swarm the target and turn to light as the many bugs pass through the creature. This led to the idea of applying the theme further and spirit guardians would also be a circling cloud of fireflies. A cleric of light using a connection to creatures that actually emit light.
How have you themed your cleric to avoid the mundane look?
In certain cases, I have the Spiritual Weapon simply appear as a lower-powered Bigby's Hand...a floating copy of the cleric's fist, or the hand of their god.
Not quite a cleric, but I had a Divine Soul Sorcerer who had cleric spells, and was descended from the Raven Queen. He summoned a giant raven to serve as a Spiritual Weapon, and his Spirit Guardians were a literal murder of crows.
Lastly, I had a Spiritual Weapon that was essentially a morningstar whip...a shimmering, radiant spiked ball on the end of a extending chain that the cleric wielded. As he was strictly a caster, and less a brawler, this spell was one of the few circumstances where he'd use a "weapon".
Spiritual Weapon and Spirit Guardians are some of my favorite spells to customize! My best example is my elf Grave Cleric whose Spirit Guardians took the forms of her dead human siblings, whom she'd been writing to since the beginning of the game. I really love the fireflies idea!
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
I think many take the word weapon in the spells name and description a bit too literally much of the time.
I'm far more preferring of a representation that far more reflects whatever god that I am following for a particular character. For Example my Follower of Bahamut draws up a ring of light and a glowing dragons head comes through and every time it attacks it breathes a blast of light on that opponent. My Nature character I played for a short time on the other hand. Actually called up a man sized ethereal Ent and it physically moved on the battle field and bashed at enemies with it's branches.
Though far more common for me was actually to cast Spirit Guardians and wade into battle in heavy armor with a fairly good Con and by level 4 I'd picked up Warcaster to keep concentration. it was often highly affective because of the radius on Spirit Guardians combined with my movement speed. Made it harder for things to run away from it.
In the game I'm playing in currently my High Elf Cleric serves an aspect of the church called the Lioness (life cleric so the mother and protector aspect of the god of the church) and his spirit weapons we decided manifest as a set of claws that float around raking across the enemies of the faith. Made for a good bit of RP flair for the table.
I don't bust out Spiritual Weapon unless the party is really hurting and my concentration buffs aren't doing their job, so I try to switch it up and make it funny to keep the newbies from getting too flustered. Sometimes it is a floating object (never a weapon in the traditional sense), but I try not to do that unless that's all I can think of in the first 5 seconds. I've had a couple of really fun ones!
We had a cleric in our group that had a table of 100 different things it could be. Sure on the list were normal things like hammers and swords, but apparently he got desperate for things that could attack and had things like scissors, gun-chucks (we had to look it up and were laughing the entire fight), malice, fear. If it was ever a concept like fear we claimed it was like the smoke monster from lost. formless smoke.
My cleric is a Knowledge Domain and so I've had fun themeing her weapons for that. My favourite is a giant floating tome. I have it bludgeon enemies, chop at them, close on top of them (all flavour of course as it's all force damage). My other idea is a giant Quill or bookmark, all around the theme of recording and knowledge.