Experimental Theology

One important influence in earthly history is uncertainty over the existence and/or nature of Divine Influence(s). People will fight a war because of such ideological differences. Heresies and schisms arise. Religions evolve and change, sometimes drifting far from their founding ideals. All of these things are dramatic and powerful events that a GM might wish to incorporate into a campaign.

But there’s the cleric problem. Powers are apparently very real in AD&D worlds, since they grant spells to clerics. A cleric out of favor with his deity is denied spells. This seems like the ultimate barometer of divine opinion. Cleric Arthur espouses the Old Doctrine; Cleric Bart seeks innovations. Arthur gets spells and Bart doesn’t. The Power’s opinion seems pretty clear, doesn’t it?

What if Arthur’s spells were the only thing keeping a plague-ridden village alive, and Bart was carrying some secret sins?

Why the Powers Can Still Be Mysterious

I don’t like the assumption that, because clerics have a connection to their deities, they have perfect knowledge about their Powers and the sort of worship the Power requires. Certainly they could. If your campaign world is the sort where Powers make regular appearances at all major temples and avatars regularly walk the streets, then it seems likely that the Powers would actively spell out their worship rites as many times as needed. What about a world where the Powers are a bit more remote?

Consider the natural world for a moment. We’ve been living on Earth and taking notes for five or six millennia, and we still don’t know how everything works. Everyone knows things fall down, but a law of gravitation didn’t come along until the eighteenth century. Scientists show no signs of running out of things to discover; even mathematicians have new things to do. Everything natural in the world is real and operates according to certain laws, but we’re still in the process of figuring those laws out. That’s experimental science.

So what if the Powers are real and operate according to certain laws? Would clerics be seeking those out? If doctors can heal based on the (entirely wrong) theory of the four humors for a few hundred years, can clerics worship wrongly as well?

The Fly in the Ointment

In typical AD&D, the cleric has a very specific code of behavior s/he must live up to. If the code gets broken, the spells go away. It’s a very all-or-nothing proposition in most cases. You might get a sect which demands more restrictions than the Power requires, but few who are going to be able to turn a faith on its head and still get spells. If a Power requires charity and poverty of its clerics, those who become greedy and fat will lose their spells. This seems pretty clear, and indeed is for most campaigns.

Getting Rid of the Fly

You can play some behind-the-scenes cosmological tricks to muddy the waters a bit.

By Any Other Name
The Powers don’t care what you call them. If the clerics of the Charity God start to act like clerics of the Greed God, the Greed God will begin granting them spells. The human clerics still believe that they are serving the Charity God. The Charity God may send divine revelations to certain followers, requesting that they bring the faith back into line.

My Evil Twin
Powers are spawned by belief as well as nourished by it. If enough followers of the Nature Goddess come to believe that she is a Destructive Nature Goddess, a Destructive Nature Goddess will come into being as a result of their worship. The original Nature Goddess will be weakened and perhaps injured by the existence of this perversion of herself. She could instruct her true followers to persecute the followers of the Destructive Nature Goddess in an attempt to eliminate her.

Take the Worship and Run
This is more appropriate for the less scrupulous Powers in a given pantheon, but a cynical GM could apply it to all. Maybe the Powers don’t particularly care how you worship them, as long as you worship them! They grant spells to all clerics who sincerely worship them, however they do it. Spells are revoked when clerics run afoul of what they believe to be true about their version of the Power - without some consistency, religions don’t serve the needs of people too well, and overall worship would drop.

Special Considerations
The Powers’ code of conduct isn’t all or nothing. Perhaps Arthur and Bart, above, serve the God of Healing. Arthur is doing a lot to heal people, even if his theology isn’t right. The God of Healing places Healing above his worship, so continues to grant Arthur spells so he can heal people. Bart was angry with his brother and let him die from a wound without healing him. The God of Healing refuses to grant Bart any more spells until he atones for this sin, even though the God himself prefers Bart’s new, innovative worship services. (This gets trickier to maintain as huge temple hierarchies start to oppose each other, though).

Beyond the Scope of This Portfolio
The Power may not care what its followers do, outside of advocating the elements in its portfolio. Clerics of the Nature Goddess might argue bitterly over whether they should support the current political ruler of the land, even coming to blows over it. (Assume a typical dynastic “Is he or isn’t he the True King?” debate). The Nature Goddess will continue to grant spells to everyone involved - she doesn’t care about the political ruler, just as long as he’s respectful of nature.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Can a cleric of one Power masquerade as another? The answer will vary by campaign; most GMs seem to feel that such an imposture would result in divine retribution. In the Forgotten Realms setting, specialty priests of the sneaky drow god Vhaeraun may impersonate priestesses of Lolth - apparently fooling even the goddess herself!

Religious Conflict Adventure Ideas

Clerics of the Sun God have decided to “burn away all impurities from the land” - that is, they’re out to kill all demi-humans (or unbelievers, or orcs, etc.) A Reform movement has sprung up which worships the “warming light of the Sun, which falls on man and dwarf alike.” PCs with the Reformers might try to reshape their faith from the inside out, or face their “fallen brethren” in the field.

A cleric of an elven Power which focuses on the cycle of nature has decided that “it is time for the world to die, so a new one may grow from the decayed corpse of the old.” The orthodox elven clerics want the PCs to track down this rogue and stop her mad plans.

Travelers have been found ritually murdered in the forest. Aspects of the mutilation mimic what clerics of the Huntress do to their monthly sacrificial deer. The temple protests its innocence. Is there a new cult growing, or is the temple hiding something?

There’s a power struggle for the throne, and the PC cleric’s temple has taken one side. It is not, unfortunately, the side chosen by the Matriarch of the faith. The contenders for kingship will meet on the field of battle in a month and both expect their clerical supporters to provide healing for the troops, as proof of their loyalty. Will the PC bear arms against his own spiritual leader?