Clerics are an admittedly awkward party member in Dungeons and Dragons. Their primary purpose is to worship and serve a deity. Yet, if we are being honest, this is mostly lip service in practice. The dungeon denizens they slaughter are not usually the enemies of their god. They are typically hapless blokes or beasts that had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A casual onlooker could even be forgiven for believing that the cleric serves their party based on how frequently they hand out divine aid—even when those party members share a different alignment.
Although Dungeon Crawl Classics offers my favorite iteration of a cleric, I will be the first to admit that DCC has contributed further to this awkwardness. Its core rules included bespoke patron profiles, but lacked similar write-ups for its pantheon of gods. This omission was later corrected by Goodman Games’ publication of the very excellent DCC RPG Annual in Fall 2019. The Annual is frequently recommended to players seeking a more expansive understanding of clerics and their deities. I myself have often recommended and referred to the Annual on Reddit and this blog. Yet, as I noted last time, its not the only option out there.
In this post, I review a DCC supplement published in the spring of 2019 and arguably overshadowed by the Annual: Donn Stroud and James A Pozenel, Jr.’s The Lesser Key to the Celestial Legion. This world-building toolkit for clerics provides players with over 50 tables to generate heralds, religious elements, cleric duties, and deities. It also offers a few house rules for handling recurring situations that clerics may find themselves in during down time. While this supplement is sometimes uneven in its execution, it contains several sparkling gems we can pry from its pages. More generally, The Lesser Key to the Celestial Legion represents a road not taken for DCC players. Hopefully this review allows those of us who follow the Annual to backtrack a little bit and see what other sights we may have enjoyed had we taken The Lesser Key’s alternate route.
General Overview
The Lesser Key to the Celestial Legion contains six chapters and an appendix. These chapters cover a wide array of clerical content, such as heralds, boons, religious observances, relics and saints, tasks for clerics to complete, and rules for churches. It contains a nice array of original pen and ink drawings, as well as some older public domain art. I appreciate that Donn Stroud and James A Pozenel, Jr. designed tables that utilize the entire DCC funky dice arsenal (d3, d4, d5, d6, d7, d8, d10, d12, d14, d16, d20, d24, d30). These dice aren’t cheap and it’s always nice to have other opportunities to use them.
Chapter 1: The Celestial Legion
This chapter provides several tables for heralds, who serve as a deity’s intermediaries or messengers. I absolutely love the idea of incorporating heralds and will do so in future campaigns. Some of this chapter’s tables, however, are overly complex and likely to create nonsensical results. Heralds are meant to be grotesque and unworldly, but this chapter’s tables can produce ones that are gratuitous and unwieldy. In this section, I highlight the problems I encountered making heralds before highlighting why I love heralds all the same.
This is the herald I rolled using The Lesser Key‘s tables: a 6’ tall humanoid with a lizard head and body comprised of rippling nerves. Its features include hawk-like piercing eyes and three arms from aquatic creatures: a shark fin, sea anemone tentacle, and a nudibranch appendage (if you don’t know what a nudibranch is, you are not alone. I had to look it up. It’s a shell-less, marine snail—essentially, a sea slug. I’m including a photo below.). Its skin color is “dolm” (which, along with two other possibilities, “jale” and “ulfire,” are apparently fictional colors from David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus; I look forward to reading it). I should add that I rolled the minimum number of features recommended (eyes, extra features, and appendages). This herald could have also had some array of wings and horns.
Incorporating a few adjectives like rippling and piercing can help smooth out the description, but I found the feature table to be messy and likely difficult for players to conceptualize. (And that’s to say nothing about its inclusion of terminology like nudibranch, dolm, jale, or ulfire, that are downright unintelligible to most people.) I would love these tables if they produced something closer to the demon described in Brendan LaSalles’ Crimson Oracle funnel: “a thirty-foot-tall praying mantis with the head of a pale skinned woman with massive fangs and long black hair. A burning halo of what appear to be huge black flies orbits the creatures head, and its forked tongue lashes about its face like a cat o’ nine tails.” Obviously, messy and nonsensical results are often a risk one takes when using tables, but given how strong the other tables are in this supplement, I wish they had spent more time revising this one. As written, I would just use the features table for inspiration.
The two “Other Signs of Divinity” tables are wonderful, however. These tables allow one to determine how a herald arrives, its immediate physical impact on nearby individuals or things, any additional appearance quirks (like shimmering), and the herald’s sensory impression. For example, my custom herald manifests to players as follows: “A holy book appears on the ground and the pages rip out, circle around, and herald emerges from the tornado of paper and ink” (10). Mortals standing in the herald’s presence are drained of 1d12 hp when it speaks. Thankfully, this loss is not permanent and will not cause death. There is also a constellation of 13 stars behind the herald and a “taste of sour bile invades the throats of all viewing [it]” (11).
In my previous post, I highlighted the importance of omens. I believe that heralds provide a similar roll—only stronger. An omen is a nudge, a herald is a shove. And let’s face it. Sometimes players need a shove in the right direction. While I’m not completely satisfied with this chapter’s ability to consistently deliver a viable herald (in terms of its appearance and features), I think the “Other Signs of Divinity” tables completely make up for this because they strike a balance between making the herald weird yet coherent. They communicate the visceral impact the herald has on the world and playable characters. In short, they make heralds—and by extension, their deity—feel real.
Chapter 2: Boons
At one page long, this chapter is uncharacteristically short. I suspect it was originally included in chapter 1, but was made into its own chapter later on. It provides a single table for boons granted to clerics who request aid. I don’t see this table as being particularly useful, however, since it results in random boons. What is a cleric going to do with a boon of temporary invisibility if they are calling upon their god to stop them from drowning? Clerics are meant to serve their deities, and I cannot imagine any deity—except for the most chaotic and capricious—dispensing random boons. The divine favors provided in the Annual offer a much better model for handling boons, as they help communicate to players what the deity finds important. In fairness to the authors, the Annual was published after this supplement.
Chapter 3: Observance of Religions
This section offers fourteen tables—the most in any chapter, apart from the appendix—for designing and fleshing out holy symbols, worship practices, and holy days. These are all great things to think about, but I would never roll on these tables because the results are too random and incoherent. The tables for determining why and where a holy day is celebrated are probably the most useful. The other tables are mostly useful for identifying relevant questions that players/GMs can think about (e.g., what holy vestments might these clerics wear? How do they worship?) than their randomly determined answers (e.g., fancy robes; flagellation).
Chapter 4: Relics, Reliquaries and Saints
This is a great chapter. The tables are all useful and not too complicated. For the relics table, you can roll for body parts, format, and power. For instance, I rolled an ashen eyeball that grants +1 to CL for one cleric spell. While the reliquary tables might lead to some complications depending on your relic, I don’t think this is as fraught as the heralds’ tables. For instance, the reliquary I rolled was a holy symbol made of stone—a reliquary, by the way, is where relics are stored. After a little bit of thought, I decided that my holy symbol would be a stone eyeball (similar to a glass eyeball) with the ashen remnants of a saint’s eye stored within it. If a DM wants to include unusual relics that don’t involve body parts, there is an additional table for that.
In my last post, I discussed Ben Milton’s rules for relic magic in Knave, Second Edition. (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 the relic with magic. The blessing continues as long as the PC maintains their patron’s favor and possession of the relic.) Although Knave offers its multi-purpose equipment tables as a means of generating relics, The Lesser Key’s tables are far superior because they were designed specifically for generating relics. If one uses Knave to generate relics, one will end up with tools, miscellaneous items, books, clothing, fabrics, decorations, weapons, and so on—pretty much everything and anything except for body parts.
I still like Milton’s idea that relics do not become powerful until the cleric goes on a quest, though I don’t see the harm in allowing players to find relics that already possess some incipient power. One might consider increasing the power of a relic after they bring it to a shrine. For instance, the ashen eyeball I rolled might have its modifier increased once it’s presented to the deity. Alternatively, the relic may have a few weak charges and need to be permanently recharged by the cleric at a nearby shrine.
The final table in this chapter is dedicated to saints in repose—that is to say, miraculously preserved corpses of saints. I do not see this table being used as frequently as the relics table, but it could certainly be helpful when designing adventures. When I rolled, I generated a kneeling saint with her hands behind her back and various weapons scattered around her as offerings. She wears a hairshirt, amulet, and is guarded by 8 human soldiers. If I were to incorporate this into my campaign, I could see it as either a destination or the launching pad of an adventure. For instance, a cleric could journey here and offer their favorite weapon as a sacrifice. Alternatively, a criminal could steal her amulet (a relic) thereby requiring the party to retrieve it.
Chapter 5: A Cleric’s Mission
This chapter deviates from the rest of the supplement by providing house rules for running a cleric. Scattered among these rules are tables for conversion checks, orations, exorcism, and hecklers. Its rules for officiating ceremonies, healing, and miracles all lack tables, but that’s not really a huge concern. My biggest issue with this chapter is that some of its ideas are half-baked and poorly organized. For instance, there are two sections for determining how many converts a cleric can yield. One of these is a general conversion check that can be used in public displays, the other is based on the length of their oration (the longer the oration, the more converts). The probability for each table is completely different, however (figure 1). The general conversion table is much harder since a cleric needs to successfully cast a spell and then roll higher than a 5 on this table with a d20. Meanwhile, the oration table is guaranteed to succeed unless the cleric has a negative modifier, as even rolling a 1 with a d8 can net a couple new converts. The only real difference is that a general conversion table offers an incredibly slight chance of gaining clerics a disciple (the significance of disciples is explained in chapter 6—essentially, they maintain things in town when the cleric is away on an adventure).
Even if this material was more refined, I’m not sure I would incorporate most of it into a campaign. Unlike other instances in which a playable character steals the spotlight (e.g., during a thief’s stealth check or a warrior’s mighty deed check), these types of rules encourage actions that feel like a peripheral distraction for the party—and I’m saying that as someone who loves clerics. This is the type of material I could see myself using for a solo campaign or inviting a player to do in between sessions.
Chapter 6: Maintaining the Ministry
This chapter offers a framework for handling things that tend to come up naturally while playing a cleric. These include tables for measuring influence, determining what actions disciples perform, explaining what happens when the cleric is away, building shrines and churches, consecrating places, and generating holy quests. Compared to previous sections, the tables in this chapter are far less complex and easily slotted into a campaign. One of the more interesting house rules offered in this chapter is the requirement that clerics must maintain or establish a certain number of converts, shrines, holy sites, and disciples before they can access the next level spells or abilities. Regardless of their progress toward these goals, they can still level up and receive more HP and attack bonuses—they just don’t gain access to more powerful spells. That makes sense to me and could generate more interesting campaigns without being overly cumbersome.
Appendix
This section contains 16 additional tables. Some of these tables are for generating deities (names, domains, origins, and goals) and titling heralds. Most of the tables, however, are intended to help DMs generate complex holy quests. Personally, I like the simplicity of the holy quest table in chapter 6. I suspect that instead of killing their darlings, Stroud and Pozenel exiled them to the appendix.
Conclusion
The path provided by The Lesser Key to the Celestial Kingdom is a tad bumpy and winding at times, but it takes players in places worth exploring. Despite its flaws, I would still recommend this supplement to anyone interested in expanding the contour of clerics, deities, and religion beyond that provided by the DCC core rules and Annual. My favorite parts of The Lesser Key are its emphasis on heralds (especially their manifestation and presence), as well as relics and reliquaries. The house rules from chapters 5 and 6 could also be useful, though it really depends on the type of campaign someone wants to run. Moreover, I imagine that someone would need to pick and choose the house rules they want to use. Some of its tables function better as wells of inspiration (similar to the random string of words found along the edge of each page in Mythmere’s Tome of Adventure Design Revised) than as viable random generator. Although this supplement is not marketed for solo play, I think it might be especially helpful for these types of players owing to its house rules and the type of granularity its tables allow.
If you have used this supplement, please feel free to offer your own insights in the comments.
Finding this Resource
As of right now, a PDF of The Lesser Key to the Celestial Kingdom may be purchased on DriveThruRPG for $6.99. You can also purchase a paperback copy + PDF on Exalted Funeral’s website for $14.
The Wondering Monster 
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