Editing Caverns Without Number (section)

=Gods & Religion=
This is the part where I complain. Feel free to skim this section at most.

I don't like the way that religion and clerics are portrayed in D&D. I'm most interested in what the PCs choose to do, in pursuing their own ends. Those ends may be selfless - a character might be dedicated to justice, for example. But it should be their own choice and for their own reasons, subject to their own reevaluation. Other, more selfish motivations are certainly easy enough to understand. "I would like that large pile of gold coins to belong to me rather than whoever currently lays claim to it" and "I would prefer not to die beneath this ghost-haunted pyramid I have been abandoned in" are both immediately relatable.

This is consistent with what I would consider to be most of the essential texts of the genre. So of course D&D, in its lack of wisdom, had to make a character option to subsume PC choices and priority to some half-baked imagining of how a pantheistic religion might work, if you stripped it of all interest and cultural factors. 

So we're not going to do that. 

There is nothing like a D&D Cleric in this world. There are healers. There are also persons who are "high priests" or the like. The former is someone who has bent their talents to medicine. Or, in the case of the Healer partial class, someone who has devoted themselves to using psychic energy as a substitute for complex pharmaceutical substances that can no longer be manufactured. A "priest" is a social role. They may or may not be a member of a class that provides magical powers. If they are serious about relationships with supernatural beings, they may have a respectable ability with the Pray skill. 

==Religion on Terminus==
Gods are a highly varied lot. There are extradimensional entities and spirits that seem to have influence over greater or lesser amounts of real estate. There are also some extremely physically real beings with supernatural powers that are more flexible or focused than the Spells and Arts available to mortal magicians. A local crocodilian river-deity, for example, may be both a physically verifiable giant crocodile, and also capable of causing or preventing flooding in the river. But, notably, ONLY their own river. A deity of some more abstract principle, such as the North Wind, might be more indeterminate and widespread in their presence.

The thing to keep in mind is that the gods are distant, weird, and inhuman, in all cases. The crocodile god is not up for a friendly chat. The North Wind was never a human, likely has no human feelings, and if it takes some anthropomorphic shape it is only as a matter of whimsy. Deities are typically not worshipped and revered in the way that a modern person in the US might imagine a religion to imply. The sailors do not love the gods of the seas. They fear them and respect them, and make offerings in the hope of improving their chances of coming home alive. Deities (in the vast majority of cases) make no guarantees or offers regarding the fate of a person's soul after death, which is a mystery, and of little concern to the typical person. Everyday matters loom larger, and death must take care of its own.

Devoted servants of deities may have some special power or another, which is typically minor and has a cost. For more serious exertions of divine power, if such a thing is desirable, the cultists will likely need to conduct some ritual. This will involve an offering, and a Pray roll from their leader. Note that the offering need not be a material object or bloodletting - some gods might look favorably on a night of frenzied dancing by at least twenty or thirty dervishes. It depends on the god and the ritual undertaken. This isn't something I expect to see a lot of in-game, since divine intervention is generally not an effective way to obtain human goals. 

Anyway. Expect weird and inhuman genius loci, snake cults, and sui generis beings of cosmic horror, not some kind of benevolent god of farming with an organized and hierarchical temple structure.

==Alignment==
These game rules don't make use of alignment, so it's not a thing on the character sheet. You should know that my preference, though, which informs the cosmic background of the world, is law vs. chaos rather than good vs. evil. Conditions of extreme law or extreme chaos are not survivable for human beings - the large central curve of neutrality is the only zone humans can inhabit. As such, PCs don't need alignments. The gods and other beings may be aligned with law or chaos. Their machinations are equally dangerous to human life.

==Known Deities==
I dunno, I'll put some stuff here eventually.