Post by ibusoe on May 6, 2022 21:48:26 GMT -5
To get clericism you have to contact an Elemental. Elementals seldom are just chilling around A psion who has abilities to fuck with things would have a much easier time bargaining with elementals. They also would be more reliable.
I also see psionics as a focus aide. So if you were an elemental, and a human wanted to come join your religion as a member of the cloth, your assumptions would be if you were experienced in the care of humans would be that a priest would be little good if you weren't able to imbue him with elemental magic. That psionics would so contribute to both the study and the practice of elemental magic that to skip it's instructions would be counterproductive, and that any human that lacked the patience to achieve adequacy in psionics would never acquit themselves in a priestly role. Cult leaders think like this.
My perception of fire elementals is that they came to the Prime Material Plane for a variety of reasons, not always voluntarily. I see the elemental planes as inflected copies of the Prime Material Plan. Most things that exist in the prime material plane also exist in some format or analog in the respective elemental copies. But never quite the same, save death and taxes.
Why would a human go to the elemental plane of magma, if it took magic to go there? Presumably because there are some things there worth bringing home, including quantities of several phases of magma with interesting properties not easily obtainable in the Prime Material. But for every experienced magma harvester, there must be at least one person who just sort of wandered in without taking the time to learn the local language, and one person who wandered in accidentally on accidentally misleading directions, one who got lost on deliberately errant directions.
But the primary motive behind the human going to the plane of magma, is to pick up a familiar. A magma elemental. Likewise the primary reason that an elemental would visit Athas would be to pick up a human as a familiar, or servant. The elemental clerics are these interpid elementals de facto servants.
There is a similar range in elemental personalities to the human range. One thing to keep in mind when designing plots or quests around elementals is that they represent a very alien sort of intelligence. They do not share a human value system. If an elemental is visiting Athas, typically it is a wizard elemental. The non-wizard of their species aren't able to easily travel in between planes.
Elementals of this level of study and discipline seldom go to the effort to visit the prime material plane expressly to cause a problem. But they likewise don't have a solid understanding of human motive nor do they necessarily care. Few elementals that travel to the PM are seriously concerned about upsetting or inconveniencing humans. Given the vast differences between the two mind sets, it's often tempting for an elemental to assume that humans are less impacted by the affairs of elementals than they in actuality are.
I went ahead and sent out an email to a potential hosting company so hopefully I can get this off the ground before the next ice age. I think that whatever game ends up becoming the fallback point for Arm players should consider using CoffeeMUD. As soon as I can hosting up then we'll have a 'test' copy of the game. Kind of cool to think, because we won't right away need a 'dev' copy of the game, because CoffeeMUD is a functioning MUD engine.