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Gods & Monsters news and old-school gaming notes.

Gods & Monsters Fantasy Role-Playing

Beyond here lie dragons

New, improved Divine Lore

Jerry Stratton, September 28, 2013

The new Divine Lore is in a lot better shape. Because I’m syncing it with a database of spirit manifestations now, the list of manifestations per spirit type and per level should be more reliable; I no longer need to remember to change names in three different places.

Another advantage is that I can put the reverse versions in alphabetically with a note to see the normal version. I didn’t do that before because the risk of leaving in outdated information was much too high. At the moment, I’m only showing what’s different with the reverse version, but there’s no reason the reverse version couldn’t have a full entry.

While working on this and the online database, I’ve realized that reverse versions of spirit manifestations don’t make a lot of game sense. With spells, having a version and a reverse version means that, in-game, knowing one spell gives both versions, and memorizing one spell opens the possibility of using both versions. But prophets don’t memorize spirit manifestations; a spirit can manifest anything of its type. The only reason for keeping reverse versions of manifestations is the general idea that there are things the prophet can do with a spirit, and for some of those things, the reverse is also possible.

But from a rule sense, there’s no mechanical difference between marking animal bane as the reverse of animal call or just having two separate entries for animal bane and animal call. So I’ll be thinking about that.

As a side note, the on-line HTML version includes full stats for deities now that my conversion script handles floating content.

Also, don’t forget that you can also use the spirit manifestation database to create prayerbooks and spirit manifestation cheat sheets for your prophets!

  1. <- The Secret Bookshelf
  2. David A. Trampier dies ->