Religious Casting Systems

General Resources
#1

Yo gamers.

I’ve been looking into spicing up my casting in the vein of DCC. I have a pretty neat arcane corruption system leveraging some tables from Maze Rats, but I can’t figure out how the religious casting should work.

I like holy magic where the deities are ineffible, fickle and sometimes capricious. No benevolent overseers here. My current attempt has been a chance to incur a religious burden when casting a spell, which takes up an item slot and restricts use of the spell until a task is completed. Things like “sacrifice an animal” or “throw a festival” or “kill someone in a show of devotion.” Only thing is I’m having trouble coming up with a good amount of non-trivial interesting religious challenges.

Do you guys have any rules that model this kind of system, or any burden ideas?

#2

These sorts of things show up in my Holy Taboos table, but I’ve also used my My Magic Cannot one for other, more complicated restrictions on how the Magic itself can be applied.

What I tend to prefer these days, is to give each “Cleric Spell” it’s own source (Deity, Spirit, Daemon, Saint, or whatever) rather than only having to appease a single Deity among a slew (that’s still just a trifle too Monotheistic for my tastes). I just prefer things a little more interesting in most cases, with fickle and bickering powers that sometimes contradict themselves and each other. I generate these using my Deity Generator and assign them a Prayer/Spell that they can grant if their needs are met or sometimes it’s granted but won’t be granted again until the proscription is followed.

2 Likes