In my last post, I compared and contrasted 38 write-ups for 19 DCC deities, as found on Knights in the North’s website (2017-2020), DCC RPG Annual (2019), and Clerics of the Known Realms (2021). Of these resources, both the Annual and Clerics of the Known Realms include the exact same content for their write-ups: description, special traits (lay on hands, divine favors, titles, disapproval table), and canticles. Clearly the author of Clerics of the Known Realms considered the Annual as the authoritative means for templating deities—and for the longest time, so did I. But just because the Annual does some things well, does not mean it cannot be improved upon. Nor does it mean it’s the only viable approach.
A deity’s profile can include lots of different pieces of information. Knights in the North’s write-ups, for instance, include the deity’s description, aligned deities, opposed deities, services provided by their church, their holy symbol, weapon proficiencies of their clerics, special abilities bestowed on clerics, creatures unholy to their faith, and a unique disapproval table for each deity. As I mentioned in my last post, there were multiple instances where I thought that these other details really enriched a deity’s profile. The type of information included in a deity’s profile depends on what you find valuable and how complex you want it to be.
In the spirit of expanding our view beyond the templating provided by the Annual, I review three other sources in this post that have changed how I think about clerics. They are:
- The Crimson Void (2015) by Daniel J. Bishop (aka Raven Crowking)
- The Umerican Survival Guide (2017) by Reid San Filippo
- Knave (second edition) (2024) by Ben Milton
The first two supplements taught me the value of including omens, tenets, and explicit sacrifice instructions. Knave’s description of relic magic changed how I think about bestowing divine favors.
The Crimson Void (2015)
In 2015, Daniel J. Bishop (aka Raven Crowking) published The Crimson Void. This supplement describes the goddess Kala Môr, the religious organization of her cult, as well as one of her temples. While it is very well written and offers highly useable material, I think its chief value is that it provides an incredibly thorough template for creating deities. To the best of my knowledge this was one of the earliest, if not the first, attempts to do so for DCC.
Much of the The Crimson Void’s content anticipates that found in the Annual, except that it’s more clearly organized. For instance, whereas the Annual identifies a deity’s alignment, domain, allies, foes, holy days, symbol, and occasionally habits of its clerics across a few paragraphs in the opening description, Bishop places these all under separate headings. Bishop’s content is also more detailed. Unlike the Annual which generally uses a sentence or two on each of these ideas, The Crimson Void typically devotes a paragraph. While I am a little partial to the Annual’s breezier formatting because I’ve used it longer, The Crimson Void’s templating certainly makes it easier to find the information. (I should also note that Bishop has improved this templating in his forthcoming Deities & Powers of the Middle World; its organization feels more intuitive to me and includes canticles, which I consider essential for DCC deities.)
OMENS
My favorite aspect of The Crimson Void is its treatment of omens, which the Annual omits entirely. An omen is a phenomenon that indicates whether a deity is happy or unhappy. For instance, Bishop writes, “Clerics of Kala Môr read omens in the flights of birds. Witnessing a hawk or eagle dive upon its prey is a good omen. Having a bird land upon one is a particular omen of Kala Môr’s favor. Finding a dead bird is an omen of disfavor, as is having a bird defecate upon oneself. Being attacked by a bird is a very bad omen, and the less natural the attack seems, the more it shows the disfavor of Kala Môr” (8). Omens provide clerics with a valuable framework for interpreting their deity’s desires.
Bishop’s take on omens strikes me as more useful than the severe approach found in AD&D’s Deities & Demigods. This supplement encouraged DMs to communicate omens through signs of punishment, such as losing access to their spells or contracting an illness and losing health. If players did not receive the message, the DM was encouraged to ramp up the punishment—possibly making it permanent. In DCC, the disapproval table performs this function.
Omens provide a useful way to nudge a player without punishing them. For example, in my current campaign, a player’s cleric worships Malotoch, the carrion god. During one session, they found a magic sling in the temple of Panais, a homebrewed chaotic deity of radishes and root vegetables. This magic item deals the same amount of damage as a regular sling (1d4), except that it never misses birds. As my players were exploring the temple, I repeatedly highlighted iconography of crows scattering from Panais’s magic. Nonetheless, the person playing Malotoch’s cleric kept and eventually started using the sling. At the time, I found it super frustrating because I wanted to convey that this was problematic without telling them outright—but simply adding disapproval felt heavy handed and arbitrary. Establishing favorable and unfavorable omens would have allowed me to more easily communicate within the game that Malotoch did not appreciate their cleric carrying a weapon that threatens her messengers and belongs to a rival deity. If they ignored the omens, some form of punishment would be in order.
The Umerican Survival Guide (2017)
Published two years before the Annual, this post-apocalyptic DCC setting for North and Central America provides one of my favorite examples of how to template deities. Reid San Filippo’s deity descriptions are breezy, flavorful, and concise. Umerica captures the exuberant chaos of DCC far better than most. Each deity has a short description, a list of tenets, special rules (which are akin to Annual’s divine favors), weapons of choice, unholy creatures, and desired sacrifices. Of these, the inclusion of tenets and sacrifices are especially noteworthy. I am convinced that most deities would be enhanced by including them.
TENETS
Tenets are a list of core beliefs held by believers, often framed as commands to take specific actions. For instance, Technos Discos, Umerica’s chaotic deity of music, has the following tenets:
- Somewhere, there is a party waiting to happen, start it.
- The beat is all that matters. Let nothing dissuade you from this.
- Music makes all equal, do not withhold the beat for anyone or thing.
- Always party like it is the last day of your life. (194)
I’m actually surprised by how seldom tenets are mentioned in other DCC supplements. To the best of my knowledge, only Dan Osarchuk’s Divinities & Cults series and the Knights in the North deity profiles identify them as such. Even then, Knights in the North only includes tenets for a few deities. This is a damn shame because tenets make it so much easier to understand what each deity wants. Obviously, this type of information can be distilled from a deity’s description, but formatting them in bullet points in another section cuts through the noise and makes them unmistakable.
SACRIFICES
Unlike tenets, sacrifices are included in the DCC core rulebook and regularly mentioned in supplements and campaign modules. The primary trap that these sources fall into, however, is that sacrifices are often framed in terms of their monetary value. DCC’s core rulebook, for example, states that “Sacrifices vary according to the nature of the deity, but, in general, any offering of material wealth counts” (30). One of the results on the disapproval table asks clerics to calculate their “total net worth in gold pieces” and sacrifice 40% of this treasure to restore their good standing (123). Notable exceptions to this include the descriptions of Malotoch, Pelagia, and Shul as found in the Annual. Sacrifices for these respective deities include slaying foes and exposing their flesh for crows, returning valuable shells and pearls to the ocean, and anything silver.
I think we need more flavorful sacrifices and that The Umerican Survival Guide offers many excellent examples. Sacrifices in Umerica are highly dependent on each deities’ personal preferences; these preferences include: meals, art, children’s toys, instruments, party paraphernalia, and family photo albums. Sometimes the manner of sacrifice matters more than the value or type of item sacrificed. Petrolex, the neutral god of fuel and fire, simply prefers burnt sacrifices. Yyallaayy, the chaotic lord of madness and randomness, prefers the sacrifice of random belongings. Other deities prefer items that acquired by a particular means or in a specific location. Clerics of Whaaar!, the chaotic god of violent combat and strength of arms, will please him by sacrificing “powerful weapons stripped from the cold, dead hands of a foe” (197). Not every sacrifice needs to be a material good, however. For S’aganoid, the lawful deity of truth and science, “Destroying or exposing falsehoods is considered a sacrifice to the god, as is sending knowledge or truth to the god. The priest must clarify which is which during the sacrifice” (191). Meanwhile, Silk, the chaotic lord of lies, considers “Deception. . . a form of sacrifice. Ornamental trinkets of little actual value are valued more by the god. Sacrifices are worth what the cleric has convinced others they are worth” (193). In sum, when designing a deity’s sacrifice profile, we should consider:
- what offerings the deity likes
- the sacrificial procedure
- where and how the sacrifice was acquired
- the possibility that a deity prefers nonmaterial sacrifices
What might this approach to sacrifices look like for the remaining deities in the Annual?
- Cadixtat loves sacrifices of severed hands from lawful entities, especially angels.
- Daenthar considers the repair of broken metallic items to be his most cherished sacrifice, though offering burning coal also warm his heart—and forge.
- The Hidden Lord craves sacrifices in the form of dimmed or extinguished light, especially if no one knows who is responsible. While prematurely extinguishing a torch is acceptable, he is particularly pleased with his clerics who extinguish large, ceremonial lights.
- Justicia asks her clerics to sacrifice the weapons of those who oppress others.
Knave, Second Edition (2024)
An honorable mention goes to Ben Milton’s Knave, Second Edition. As a classless toolkit that embraces OSR design, Knave does not contain formal rules for clerics. His chapter on relic magic, however, was heavily inspired by the relational form of magic in DCC—indeed, in Milton’s design commentary, Joseph Goodman is the only author he credits as inspiring his formulation of relic magic. In DCC core rules, clerics are described as “adventur[ing] in search of holy relics that bring them closer to their gods and thus increase caster level” (28). This line is pure flavor, as there’s no description of what this process entails. Relic magic is an attempt to formulize this throwaway line.
RELIC MAGIC
Milton’s take on relic magic involves five elements: patrons, relics, shrines, blessings, and dis/favor. (Whereas DCC makes a distinction between patrons and deities, Knave does not; a patron is simply a powerful entity that bestows magic to a playable character.) In essence, a character must find a relic belonging to a patron and communicate with them at their shrine. Upon doing so, the PC receives a quest and if they return to the shrine after completing the quest, the patron blesses the relic—thereby endowing it with magic. The blessing continues as long as the character maintains their patron’s favor and possession of the relic. Blessings are meant to be “something small but useful, such as an aura or a minor spell that can be cast multiple times per day” (32).
Blessings are akin to the divine favors listed with each deity in the Annual. As such, a DM might consider limiting clerics from accessing (some of) these divine favors until they quest for a relic. Or better yet, they might communicate to their players that they can accumulate more divine favors with each new relic they retrieve. Since Daenthar and the Hidden Lord lack divine favors in the Annual, their clerics could “quest for it” via Knave’s relic magic. Alternatively, if a DM wants to limit Malotoch or Pelagia to only two divine favors instead of the three listed in the Annual, this is how they could justify it.
In short, Knave offers an elegant, engaging expansion of DCC’s divine magic.
Conclusion
My ideal deity profile would contain all of the elements from the Annual—description, special traits (lay on hands, divine favors, titles, disapproval table), and canticles—plus omens, sacrifices, and tenets. Adding these three elements provides a clearer framework for players and DMs alike without making it too cumbersome. They also make each deity more distinct and memorable. Although Knave’s procedure for relic magic does not belong in a deity’s profile, I consider it an important alternative approach for bestowing divine favors. All together, these sources can help us create better gods for our games.
Finding these Resources
As of right now, a PDF of The Crimson Void may be purchased on DriveThruRPG for $5.51; you can also purchase a paperback copy + PDF for $8.98.
A PDF of The Umerican Survival Guide may be purchased on DriveThruRPG for $6.99; you can also purchase a paperback copy + PDF for $26.51.
You can purchase a digital copy of Knave, Second Edition at DriveThruRPG for $20 or a hardbound copy with PDF for $35 on Swordfish Islands.
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