Hot off the desk of Pluffet Smedger…
In the usual way discussions on the CanonFire! Discord produce musings worth a nearby scribe scribbling down for posterity. Sage Jason Zavoda decreed it once.
So posted overnight by Gary Holian when Woesinger asked about saints in the Flanaess was:
“I think "saints" are largely an Oeridian and often Aerdi cultural practice and are most common in those socieities. The same class of individual exists in other cultures, but is often called by different names. Saints in particular are almost always sponsored by a higher power, usually an intermediate or greater god and they have or have been granted a spark of the divine, allowing them long lives and unusual abilities beyond that of normal clerics and followers. In class, they fit right in with quasi- and hero- deities, being on par with those personages. The former are rarely sponsored by higher powers but rather rose by their own designs.
Woesinger: Oh yeah - I'm not so bothered about the mechanics so much as the indirect effect the saints have on the world. Are there orders devoted to them? Do they have shrines, relics and rituals? Who typically worships them? Is this an Aerdi (and successors) thing or could you find a chapterhouse or shrine in deepest darkest Keoland?
Pluffet: To varying degrees, all of the above. However, a saint usually represents a particular focus within a greater religious context. I think the god with the most saints, the most "christian" in the classical sense, is Pelor. He has mainly saints and servants and seems to prefer to use them to express his power. St. Bane, a cult within the church of Pelor, emphasizes the sun and healing as tools to fight undead. Bane almost certainly has his own cults and altars around the Flanaess. Its noted that he is the closest being to becoming a demigod, which represents a splintering from the root faith, but not necessarily an antagonistic one. Just as Rao represented peace and reason, St. Cuthbert took reason and evolved it towards common sense, truth, and discipline.
Norker: Surely they have shrines, relics, and venerators. I suspect most saintly cults are local in scope. Like heroes and the 'small gods' of field and wood. I think 'sainthood'(but not worship of hero-deities) is probably an Aerdian thing, yes, tied to temples of Heironeous and Pholtus. I wouldn't use it for any gods not more or less LG in alignment. Think of the alignment graph with 'Saintly' in the LG quadrant.
Pluffet: They tend to fill a smaller niche and arise due to a great and specific need. Like Mayaheine, a saint from another world who rose up to demigodhood and is now in the Flanaess to counter Iuz and the Great Kingdom, except Moore removed the threat by the deus ex machina invocation of the Crook of Rao.
I've always been a bit mixed about wiping away pretty much everything that happened in From the Ashes. I don't think that FtA was a good fit for Greyhawk, and I question whether it fits D&D at all.
It was probably better for the setting as a whole, but between what happened in The Adventure Begins and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, I think it threw out too much.
I didn't like the offhand way that Rauxes was dealt with, nor did I like the Scarlet Brotherhood essentially being a paper tiger and have everything collapse. If the decision is made to undo FtA, then have two of the three evil powers suffer great setbacks, but leave one of them more or less intact.
I've said it before in an earlier thread, but I think Mayaheine is best used as a cautionary tale.
She arrives on Oerth as the survivor of another, similar world where whatever it is that's meant to be the greatest threat of the current campaign happened, and the people of that world failed to stop it happening.
Mayaheine remained there until the last, protecting refugees as they fled (probably not to Oerth), guarding the portal until the last person she could rescue left and shutting it behind her.
But she failed. All the heroes failed.
And now she's on Oerth because the same thing that happened to her world is now happening to this one and she can tell the people there to not do whatever the people on her world did. So she builds up a following, a subsect of the faith of Pelor, where they incorporate her warnings into their holy writings.
But as a goddess, she can't help much more directly than that. That's the PCs job. Oerth isn't her world and she doesn't have leave to act directly there. If she did, the most effective thing you could do is kill her off, which would really illuminate how grave the threat really is. What Mayaheine does is warn them of the stakes, and tell them one path to avoid taking.
She doesn't have to be there to oppose Iuz or the Great Kingdom. She's there to oppose whatever the most important threat is. That might be Iuz, it might be Tharizdun, or Vecna, or Kyuss, or Tiamat or Zariel or Demogorgon or some other figure.
I've said it before in an earlier thread, but I think Mayaheine is best used as a cautionary tale.
She arrives on Oerth as the survivor of another, similar world where whatever it is that's meant to be the greatest threat of the current campaign happened, and the people of that world failed to stop it happening.
Mayaheine remained there until the last, protecting refugees as they fled (probably not to Oerth), guarding the portal until the last person she could rescue left and shutting it behind her.
But she failed. All the heroes failed.
And now she's on Oerth because the same thing that happened to her world is now happening to this one and she can tell the people there to not do whatever the people on her world did. So she builds up a following, a subsect of the faith of Pelor, where they incorporate her warnings into their holy writings.
But as a goddess, she can't help much more directly than that. That's the PCs job. Oerth isn't her world and she doesn't have leave to act directly there. If she did, the most effective thing you could do is kill her off, which would really illuminate how grave the threat really is. What Mayaheine does is warn them of the stakes, and tell them one path to avoid taking.
She doesn't have to be there to oppose Iuz or the Great Kingdom. She's there to oppose whatever the most important threat is. That might be Iuz, it might be Tharizdun, or Vecna, or Kyuss, or Tiamat or Zariel or Demogorgon or some other figure.
So what you’re saying is she’s Quentin Beck. Don’t give her the glasses.
I've said it before in an earlier thread, but I think Mayaheine is best used as a cautionary tale.
She arrives on Oerth as the survivor of another, similar world where whatever it is that's meant to be the greatest threat of the current campaign happened, and the people of that world failed to stop it happening.
IMC she's originally from Guldor (the land of Maldev from Q1)
IMC, Mayheine is originally from Oerth. She attains the status of a Hero-deity and travels/is sent by her divine sponsor to other worlds to further his agenda there. Eventually, she attains the status of a Demi-god in her own right and returns to Oerth (her home-world/plane) when the rise of Iuz threatens to destroy it. Being from Oerth herself, like Iuz, her presence on Oerth is not a violation of the 'No Direct Involvement' agreement between the gods.
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