Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Ok I notice this a running theme in your answers. You seem to be saying " It is only included if it fits this narrow justification I hold." Why not say "You can play paladin, but you have to explain how your oath fits this scenario." There are certainly people who joined the Crusades to spread their doctrine, which would fit Oath of Conquest or Oath of the Crown. There are people who would have joined to test their prowess in battle in the name of their god, Oath of Glory. There would be people with a theological viewpoint closer to Thomas Equines who would fit Oath of the Ancients.
Heck, most of Christianity theologically would align with Oath Of Redemption.
I could see saying " No Warlocks Unless it is Celestial pact. Then you are Called a Friar." but "Only one type of this divine class maybe" seems a little controlling.
You got to leave some room for your players to have their say.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
I was going off of the Oaths that the Knight Orders swore in real life not the reasons individuals had for coming. Are you telling me to just make up knight orders to accommodate the different Oaths?! Also how is a Friar comparable to a Warlock?
Ok, in the case of Friar i am going off of the mendicant monks but didn't think that people would know what Gyrovagi ( Gyrovague is singular form ) are, so i went with Friar because Friars can be non-ordained and alos lead a mendicant lifestyle often putting them outside of church hierarchy. A divine Warlock would be very much outside of church, and in the case of a Gyrovague, they were disliked by the establishment even as they were recognized as having a holy calling.
Renaming things is part of Theming when doing these kind of alterations. You could rename them anything you felt appropriate.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
It's just that monks don't make a pact with God they make vows or commitments.
When you're adapting a game to fit a different setting than its default, class flavor text does not matter and should be ignored -- what matters is mechanics.
History can be a great source of inspiration and this is OK, but I advice fictional worlds because you enjoy complete creative freedom to alter the plot, to add PC species, clases+subclases, and monsters.
* In 2nd Ed king Arthur Perdragon and the knights of the round table were oficial "quasigods".
* Now this makes me remember the old comics of "Capitán Trueno" (= captain Thunder, the Spanish equivalent of prince Valiant). I also remember when I read the no-fiction book "the Crusades throught Arabian eyes" by Amin Alouf. Other interesting character from History is Baldwin IV of Jerusalem or better known as the Leper King.
If you want ideas for a true villain, other historical character, the Spanish Muslim warlord Almanzor was the terror among the Iberian Christians. The irony is his sons were involved in the fitna of al-Andalus, the civil war that caused the end of the Umayyad caliphal dynasty and the division into taifas (smaller Muslims kingdoms).
I also remember other historical adventure novel I read when I was a child, "the sword of saint Fernidand", set in the Reconquista.
Do you know what a covenant is? The thing mentioned all the time in the bible?
Covenant 1: "a usually formal, solemn, and binding agreement."
2: "a written agreement or promise usually under seal between two or more parties especially for the performance of some action" Source Meriam webster.
Do you know what a common synonym for Covenant is? Pact. It isn't as far off as you would think, and would seem obvious to anyone who actually practices the Faith being discussed.
Oath, Vow, Pact, Covenant are all synonyms for the same concept. They only have different meanings in the D&D game System because they are also Mechanical terms in this system.
Upholding vows and commitments can be seen as Covenant or Pact. If you don't want Divine Warlocks you can just say you don't want them, you don't need to have flimsy justifications that don't hold up to scrutiny.
I have already done the thing you are asking us about doing. You can say "I don't like this so won't include it" but you don't get to make emphatic declarative statements about how the religion I practice can and cannot be adapted to D&D.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
I forgot about the covenant.
Now that I think about it, there were certain nobles in the Holy Roman Empire that allowed Court Magicians and some villages that had Wise men while the Ottomans also had magicians. So, maybe there can be some leeway if there's a decent enough explanation for them being there with the group.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with using history as basis for your game. Of course, I'd throw in a little of your own ideas and blood in to make it more original. People generally are averse to grounding their settings with real history because magic and fantasy elements and such. It's a bit of a weak excuse, grounding fantasy cultures with the aspects of real life historical cultures makes your cultures more believable imo. Obviously you can't copy it one for one, magic throws a wrench into things. That said, the forgotten realms already does it really, IE the Calishites are based on Middle Eastern Cultures. Moonshae Isles has Celtic influence. That is to say nothing to were 90% of the monsters featured in the game are drawn from the folklore of multiple cultures. You get the point though. Anybody saying history doesn't have a place in D&D have no idea what they are talking about. Like, did we pull the concept of knights in plate mail from nothing then?
I'd say give it a shot, the best campaigns often start with passion and ambition.
AI summary of the Crusades: "The Crusades were immensely brutal, marked by widespread slaughter, atrocities, and profound human suffering that lasted for centuries. They involved the massacre of thousands of Muslims, Jews, and fellow Christians,"
You are proposing a lawful evil campaign for your players.
Read the OP's original pitch. It is about setting aside religious differences to fight real evil. Muslim and Christian forces joining to fight one of the Demon lords.
You should read things before casting judgement on them.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
Combatants during the crusades committed attrocities, based on religious orders from on high. Thats lawful evil. Each side thinks the other side is "real evil" and should be destroyed.
If these combatants are then attacked by something more powerful and have to work together to survive, that is a tactical decision, not an alignment change.
China and Russia were allies with the US during WW2, but as soon as the war was over, everyone split back to their capitalist versus communist teams.
Actually, if the campaign intends to have a mixed party, with some christian and some muslim fighters in the party, it could potentially run into the same issues that an evil party runs into: player versus player combat, players undermining each other, stealing from players, keeping secrets from players, and such.
Running an evil campaign and keeping it workable over many many levels is really hard.
This also ignores the entirely reasonable possibility of them not working together. If a horde of demons were to appear on the battlefield, the first thought (on both sides) would be to assume that the other side (who are, of course, infidels and thus naturally would be in league with demons) is to blame, and even when they start indiscriminately attacking both sides, that just means they are foolish and lost control over their vile magic. At that point, a plausible choice of tactics is to just withdraw from the field and let the other side get slaughtered.
I mean, dnd is directly inspired by lord of thr rings, to the point that the Tolkien estate forced the term "hobbit" to be changed in early editions to "halfling". And LOTR is pretty much a good-vs-evil story. Borimir is the only "good" character who does something "bad" and he dies soon after.
The biggest reason that alignment exists was to say "these species of creatures are evil, and its morally ok to kill them on sight".
Its a fantasy setting of good versus evil.
Op asks "What if you use The Crusades as a setting?" And the answer will include the moral baggage that comes with real history.
Checkers is a game of red versus black, and there is no questions about why red and black are trying to kill each other. Theyre just pieces on a board. But dnd has rollplaying as a major component. The WHY is actually part of the game. Why are you a christian knight in the crusades? This would be the first question some players will have to answer. And if the crusades are committing attricities for the last few decades, your answer has to incorporate that history somehow.
If you want to ignore the history, the rollplaying, and the cooperative story telling that is inherent to dnd, then you basically strip dnd down to wargaming, down to checkers, down to red versus black. And if you do that, then the idea that its set during the crusades is also removed.
D&D as system was inspired by Wargaming more than anything. The predecessor to D&D, Chainmail was inspired by the Siege of Bodenburg, itself a wargame that Gygax played. Chainmail was a wargame in most of it's functions and play, as Dave Arneson ( A napoleonic war wargamer) and Gygax played Chainmail, Arneson added features like character classes, experience points, level advancement, and armor class to that system.
Gygax and Arneson eventually would collaborate together to make the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. That out of the way, Gygax as I recall was far more fond of Conan type fantasy than Tolkien. I think I even recall that Gygax personally hated the idea of playable non-humans in the game and added them more of pressure from his friends. So if you really want to dig into the roots of D&D, I'd be far more inclined to name wargaming and Conan as more significant core influences. I of course find the concept of only having playable humans quite boring, but that's aside from the point.
That all said, D&D is quite evidently different than how it was back in the day. I think we can both agree with that.
I would certainly argue D&D and it's themes now have expanded past the standard good vs evil affair to allow for other types of stories to exist. People get too caught up in the offical rules of the system and it's preestablished themes that they forget to do what was encouraged and fostered in the first edition of D&D, experiment, have fun and try new things. The first edition of D&D encouraged home-brew and experimentation. These days we're too caught up in official rulings and official settings that people forget to throw in their own ideas and themes.
Even then there is far more to the official settings than the Forgotten Realms, Eberron is a great example of an interesting alternative that doesn't always neatly fir into the standard good vs Evil affair. The Dark Sun game world is yet another D&D setting that does not neatly fit into the mold if you will.
The Crusades as a setting is not for everybody, I am not denying that some people don't want to approach the topics that come up with the Crusades, and some do, and they are perfectly ok for wanting to do so. It is not inherently wrong to want to explore more historically inspired setting in themes in Dungeons and Dragons. It still has the DNA of a wargame deep down, it's not as far fetched as you would think. Fantasy has explored morally grey campaigns many times over, D&D has done so. It is not this huge leap to start exploring these themes with this system.
I can foresee some pretty deep characterization from these circumstances, being a Christian Knight in the crusades and such. That said I will certainly agree, not everybody is willing to go down that road, it can be messy after all. Certainly not for everybody's taste, due to the nature of the conflict. Those who do with maturity however, I imagine will find alot to gain from it.
I don't think saying "These days we're too caught up in official rulings and official settings that people forget to throw in their own ideas and themes." is even remotely true. Just look at the sheer volume of homebrew just on this site alone. According to WotC, over half of all games are run in homebrew settings. I don't think there is any shortage of people using their own ideas and themes. We can debate whether a particular idea for a setting or campaign is a good one or not (ultimately that's up to the group that will be playing it of course) but there is no question that people are bringing their own creativity and imagination to the game.
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