priests changing gods, again

So I asked earlier if it is possible for a priest to change gods, if any of the skills they got as a priest of one god was transferable to another, and was given a pretty solid “no.” But I’ve been wondering about the “almost and maybes?”

If the question is specifically for the LoA campaign, the answer is a solid NO. Henry’s been very clear about this. Changing gods requires a crisis of faith. Even the type of “enlightenment” you describe in terms of Fire Dragon / Nier is still a crisis of faith.

If you’re talking about a home campaign then it’s whatever the GM thinks is appropriate.

From a mechanics perspective you shouldn’t suddenly unlearn a skill and pick up an equivalent number in a new one. A favored skill is one that particular god’s followers train in, so it would make more sense to gain access to it or be required to have access to it in order to finish the conversion. As I don’t see this happening outside of a home campaign, again it comes back to the GM.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

But if you believe Anshar=Yig, then you’re not actually changing anything so the point is moot. You’re just adding an additional layer of complexity to your worship. Although if you know and believe that Anshar=Yig in character, there would be some real questions about why you’d worship her in the first place…

I agree with Paul. Henry has stated long ago that in order to be a ‘true’ priest of the gods (meaning one who can cast spells of that god and use their Talent powers) you have to have DEEP conviction and belief in the primacy of that god. You can give the other gods their due, but the paradigm of modern priests of the Pantheon of Man is that one god is primary above all others, and therefore you are taught from a neophyte to focus on only a single god.

To shatter this deep-seated faith in a god is no mean feat. Let’s be entirely honest: If you can casually change your faith, you didn’t have any to begin with, and you . In Arcanis, you are absolutely sure of the primacy of your god, and to have that challenged is enough to break a person. Look at Aulus in “In Darkness, Light.” It took him decades to come to his level of jaded athiesm, and even at the end there was enough subconscious faith that he could come back (if the Heroes persuaded him enough). The same is true about a ‘conversion’ from Anshar to Yig, in that the theologies of these two powers are fundamentally different, even if the actual divine being is the same. To make such a major conversion is not something you can just ‘do’ any more than I can simply flip a switch and make myself a woman. It requires a lot of soul searching, a change in psychology, and a wide number of other changes that take years of time and effort (more or less depending on your definitions on the subject).

What wouldn’t take a major change is a conversion between CHURCHES, but retaining the same gods. A switch between the Milandisian Orthodoxy and the Mother Church likely wouldn’t change a significant amount of your faith in the God, just the bureaucracy involved. That said, Milandisians are taught from the breast that the Dark Triumvirate are evil and to be feared, while the Coryani DON’T, which means that there is a rather major change in the total theology involving those three gods. This adds complication, but not an unsurmountable one. In fact, I’m pretty sure it is easier to go from the Orthodox religion to the more liberal Coryani church than the other way.

I’m not sure some of these “coversions” indicate a lack of faith. After all, doesn’t every single Black talon high priestess face this exact problem? They are raised with the tale that they worship the fire dragon and escaped Kassegore, and then learn that the fire dragon is Kassegore? I don’t think that the only ones to survive that revelation are the ones with weak faith.

I suspect this is the same stuff that priest of Anshar in the know and val’Inares that learn the truth have to make. So I think it is definitely something to be thought about.

My question had to do with a very odd character concept I had once – a val’Abebi who had learned about the “Secret of Semar” by accident in his youth, and seized upon it as an amazing idea. He would become a priest of Althares, but secretly believes that Althares is Kassegore. He believes in Althares and Kassegore. The same as the Ash Hide Ssressen believe in the fire dragon and Nier. Of course, he can’t tell anyone this, as he knows he would be burned as a heretic. Since he believes in Althares, he should be able to get through to become a spellcasting priest of Althares, right? The question is, what happens afterward if he is right? What happens afterward if he is wrong?

For the first part, probably nothing, since the odds of getting a Kassegore worshipper to teach him Kassegoran cants is pretty close to zero, right? I mean, maybe if he learns that Kassegore is the fire dragon, he could get a PC priestess to teach him, but even that is pretty low odds. On the other side, if he learns he is wrong, that could lead to a serious crisis of faith. Not sure how I would handle that yet….

If someone continues to recite the Cants with faith that they will succeed yet now believes that it’s powered from a different source (e.g., from Nier-as-Fire Dragon, or from intermediary Valinor instead of directly from Gods), then who’s to say it will fail?

Henry does. Not sure why as the creator of the world that it’s an insufficient answer. Henry has stated though I’m having problems finding the thread that this kind of conversion is not possible in the LoA game. If it’s a home campaign, it’s up to the GM in interpreting the world. The metaphysics behind it may be obscured, but the net result is the same. What am I missing?

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

At present, it is impossible for Heroes to change faith. In the current Legends of Arcanis Living Campaign, short of a campaign certified event (of which there are character documents and CP’s and all that noise) you CANNOT switch Gods.

As Paul suggested in a Home Campaign, that is up to you. I have some mechanics in my mind about how this could work, but thus far the official Legends of Arcanis opinion is “You cannot do this at this time.”

If you wish to do it as a home campaign, there are a few things to consider as the Chronicler for authenticity to the universe:

1) If you switch Gods, all your previous talents that you will have taken which are specific to them (Including Divine Spell Casting (ta)) are ultimately worthless since they were keyed to that specific God. While many of the cants are the same, you do not know how the other temple has taught it, so you can’t simply ‘cross it over’. This has been stated by Henry somewhere on the forums, but I cannot find the post at present (mostly because I’m too busy to look it up right now )

2) You would need to be allowed entry into the ‘secret’ knowledge of your new priesthood to learn the talents and cants of this new god, and let’s face it: If you were willing to jump ship on your old god, how willing are you to jump ship in your new one, and if there is that threat how much secret information are they willing to share?

3) While some Gods may be the same divine beings, their worship is not. As such, you can’t simply transition between Anshar and Yig as one would a blue shirt from a red shirt. You would have to work on it and do a LOT of soul searching to reconcile the vastly different theologies. A similar point probably would even exist between the Hunnai version of Belisarda and the elorii version: Same Goddess, vastly different theology and paradigms in their worship. A lateral move like this is probably easier than a complete conversion to another god, but it still is VERY hard, as evidenced by the fact that only the highest level of Black Talon priestesses are told the ‘truth’ about the Fire Dragon, and those who can’t handle the ‘truth’ are purged.

You’ve hit an area where the plot elements and rules elements don’t perfectly mesh. Related is also a question of how something like the Church of the Dark Triumverate or the Milandesian Orthodox Church splinter off and become seperate from the Mother Church where the followers can start smiteing each other when a decade ago (or a few centuries) they couldn’t. I don’t think it’s easy (possible?) to change factions like a DT Nerothian becoming a MC Nerothian. Much less changing faith in Gods in the world of Arcanis. But the underlying principles are not fully spelled out so I don’t blame people for finding the gray areas confusing. To me this has always been clear as mud.

One (wrong) answer would just be to say it’s all some form of solipsism… that it’s all how an individual priests see the world. And as a result could freely change between sects, or different “faces” of divine beings (Anshar/Yig or Fire Dragon/Kassegore). But from game play and Henry’s past statements I think it’s clear that this ISN’T the model use in the Arcanis Campaign.

Another (wrong?) answer would be to say the fundamental teachings/secrets are unique to each temple and you have to start over from scratch and relearn everything. At least for the PoM, the tradition of Cants comes out of a Pantheonist background. It breaks versimilitude for me to believe under this origin that there are 12 or 13 unique version of Diminish Fatigue each reinvented by each different Temple in the PoM and the “Pantheonists” who tend to the whole. I don’t think this is the likely answer either.

Yet somehow it seems to me it’s part A (personal faith) and part B (institutional instruction) mixed together. There is a solipsistic belief component and there is a difference in temples/teaching component. And it murky and perhaps not entirely subject to consistent internal logic.

I personally believe that Kass/The Fire Dragon is still the one who watches over the Ashen Hides. Because the Cants are not granted by celestial beings I don’t think there is any reason at all to think that Nier is actually involved with them despite the politics in Canceri and their Priestess’ beliefs. No idea how true that is or not.