If you play a cleric, your character should have a well-defined relationship between your character and their god. Let’s explore this relationship by providing a foundation for cleric characters born with a divine purpose woven into their background.

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As a cleric continues to experience events that reveal a divine purpose, they eventually undergo an epiphany. In a campaign that goes to 20th level, a cleric should achieve epiphany after experiencing three to four revelations, somewhere around 15th level.

Epiphany represents a clear understanding of a single aspect of the relationship between the cleric and the deity. An epiphany serves as the pillar of the character’s divine purpose.

A character experiences an epiphany suddenly, without rhyme or reason. A helpful epiphany allows GMs and players to work it into the campaign. While a GM can craft awesome adventures and campaigns around the character, randomly or spontaneously determining a divine purpose allows an unexpected element to add to a character’s story, like in real life. An epiphany avoids exerting influence over the campaign direction and instead lets events in play unlock it.

Epiphany is specific. It codifies all the character’s actions and beliefs towards a single, well-defined purpose. After experiencing the epiphany, the cleric can finish the statement: “My deity put me on this planet, in this body, at this time to ______________.”

The example epiphanies below are themed to the seven core domains. They are broad enough to allow application to a variety of circumstances, but a GM should feel free to sharpen them up to provide necessary specificity within their campaign.

Death

Death opens the path to eternity. Your purpose is to take the dying across the threshold to the gardens of the goddess of death by delivering a final secret to the departed.

Death is a weight on the Scales of Justice. Within the world, powerful enemies seek to undo the cycles of life and death and deny cosmic balance. They thwart reality and time. You must seek them out and deliver them to true death.

Light

Light is present in all things. You must find the light in the deepest darkness that hides in the shadows of the center of the world. The light is locked within the shadow, masked in darkness and guarded by aberrations who seek to shroud the world in eternal night.

Light reveals truth. You must rout out and bring to light all those who preach false truths and offer deceptive promises. These deceivers hold positions of great prominence and power. Only by revealing the truth can one vanquish them.

Nature

Nature has the final say. The natural world sends signs and omens for which you must remain vigilant. Once nature makes its decisions known, you must ensure they are implemented, upheld, and enforced. Mortal salvation can occur only if nature reclaims what mortals have taken from it.

Nature connects everything. Everything on the Material Plain connects to nature. Whenever you spot the disconnect, it gnaws your thoughts and memories and drives you to make sure others remain conscious of the same connection.

Knowledge

There is a reason secrets are kept.The goddess of knowledge hides the four primordial truths upon the Material Plane where the divine are not permitted. However, beings outside the mortal realms seek the mysteries. You must ensure that they cannot be uncovered.

Knowledge paves the path to enlightenment. First, you must find the lorekeepers to become a mortal vessel for divine knowledge. There are others like you, each tasked with a similar purpose, and together you shall merge into a collective consciousness one day.

Tempest

After the storms subside, there is peace. You embody the tempest, and your storm shall cleanse the world. Those who deny the storm offer false peace in the form of complacency and subservience. You must instill the storm within them.

All must face the tempest’s rage.All creatures inevitably confront the tempest. How the individual withstands the storm predicts the fate of their future. The storm drags off those within its wake and lays lows those with the hubris to match it. You must master the tempest to hold your path when it surfaces. It leads into the eye of the storm.

Trickery

Salt in the mirror. You must draw mortals to the understanding that their consciousness is an illusion, the prank of a mad god. What they experience doesn’t exist. In accepting the illusion, one can alter reality as quickly as telling a lie. Even you and your purpose are a lie. Thus you must invent your purpose without revealing the prank and losing your power.

The jester holds the crown. The other gods are too serious. They spend too much time sequestering mortals to participate in their games and use their worshipers to gain power and influence. Your task is to play the role of the fool, and your tricks distract the other gods’ servants from accomplishing their goals and gaining power.

War

War is the path to liberation. You must unite the southern tribes and lead them to rise against the Empire and shatter the oppressive reign of The Immortal Dynasty.

The prophecy of the End of Days draws near.You must be ready to take your place in the War to End All Wars, for you alone must stand to see the dawn of the new age.

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Discover more about your character—of any class—by gazing into the Tome of Heroes. Use this book of character options to make your character special, with new backgrounds, subclasses for every class, unusual races, tons of new equipment, and much more!

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