Our second d20 supplement, At Death's Door available for purchase at RPGNow! At Death's Door features 5 new death religions with deity writeups, NPC's, a new spell domain and 7 unique spells. Dogma, lay worship, priesthood and temples, funeral practices and NPC priests are fully described for each deity. Purchase this collection of death gods for roleplaying games
I asked my partner to articulate why we did this book.
There is a mythological undercurrent common to fantasy role playing games. Much ink has been spilled discussing the universality of mythic forms. From Carl Jung to Joseph Campbell these themes have been much articulated. The similarities of heroic figures are the very meat of the appeal of the fantasy environment and the science fiction one for that matter. The gods of nearly all mythological pantheons manifest the ideals of self actualization and self sacrifice. It is the re-enactment of this ideal that is the central pleasure of role-playing games. We are drawn to reinvent the tales of the nursery because they are the important ones and the ones that remain with us. Graspable across generational lines and even those separating the ages, they call us to them over and over again. Given this it comes as a surprise how little attention is generally given the religions in role-playing games. In the early days of Dungeons and Dragons all clerics were some sort of take on the medieval Christian warrior priest. Ultimately this revealed itself as incomplete and unsatisfying. The revision of the cleric rules in latter editions was an attempt to address this inadequacy. The rules book contains a small list of gods but because gods are so closely connected to the world they exist in this list cannot be complete. Without their natural social context they are colorless collections of attributes to fulfill a space on a character sheet. At Death’s Door is an attempt to further these attempts to reform the cleric into a more complete character class. A priest is not simply a healer or spell caster who fights fairly well. The priest occupies an important role in his or her society. A clearly defined deity clearly defines this role. All high-mindedness aside it is our belief and hope that this product will make it more fun to play a cleric, add a dimension of depth to the fantasy world, and open doors for players to make characters that exist outside of the dungeon.
At Death's Door is a chunk-size packet of entertaining and intergrative death deities for d20. There are four death gods illustrating several aspects of Death but without getting all goofy about it. There's 4 fully fleshed writeups with good attention to the deity's worship, ritual and items to better foster campaign play. Each deitiy has one or two archetype priests fully written up as NPCs. Spells? We've got spells! Atrocious typography, insipid design and this crappy website are just along for the ride!