Community

One thing that's irked me considerably about the deities of 4e is that the information about them in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide seems to have been intentionally left vague. For someone playing a paladin or a cleric, this can be frustrating, as your religion is the most important part of your roleplaying.

The deity that I find the most confusing is the one I'm playing a paladin of at the moment, Pelor. While I'm relieved that there don't seem to be any more "OMG PELOR'Z REELY EVUL!" jokes floating around, the new Pelor seems to be made up of several disparate elements.

He's the Good god of:

• the sun
  
• summer
  
• time
  
• agriculture
  
• the harvest
  

He also supports those in need and fights against any and all evil. He's worshiped by humans more than any other deity and his tenets are as following:

• Alleviate suffering wherever you find it.
  
• Bring Pelor's light into places of darkness, showing kindness, mercy, and compassion.
  
• Be watchful against evil.
  

To be honest, I find it difficult to reconcile all these different aspects in roleplaying a single character.

What do you think? Is there a way to reconcile all these elements? What the hell was up with people claiming that Pelor was actually evil anyway? How would one roleplay a Pelorian character in a place where Pelor wasn't the dominant human religion (I'm playing a Pelorian paladin in a place where The Raven Queen is dominant)?

Thank you for your kind attention.

Perhaps a better understanding of the setting will help:

In the current online campaign I'm playing in, most of the players are residents of a place called "The Vale of Thorns", a twisted landscape where aspects of both the Feywild and the Shadowfell bled into the world. The result is that the place is literally carpeted with a hedge of thorns. Because of the bizzare interminglings of Feywild and Shadowfell, fey that inhabit the area are twisted, insane, and sometimes even murderous, and the thorns themselves have an odd power that lures the unwary into their embrace to become trapped and die, and they react violently when attacked (one of our party found this out the hard way). Despite this, people have managed to eke out a civilization within clearings in the thorns called "glens". In a glen, the power of the thorns is dampened, so you don't feel the urge to walk right into them, and most glens are connected by paths called "rose-ways", where the ground is covered with blood-red petals, where the power of the thorns is also dampened. There are some trails that have been blazed by hapless travellers, but these are considered dangerous, as there's nothing to check the power of the thorns there. Even worse is to try and "travel blind" as its been called, to try and make a path through the thorns yourself. Then the thorns mess with your sense of direction, getting you hopelessly lost and then growing over the trail behind you, trapping you and driving you mad before they kill you. Even worse, smaller glens and the occasional roseway have been known to dissapear and become swallowed up by the thorns, while others are formed, seemingly at random. What worst is that the thorns literally do not allow anyone to leave the Vale. Some people from outside the Vale may find a roseway leading in, but once they're in, the roseway dissapears, trapping them in the Vale.

In addition, the Vale rests on top of a massive buried city, called "The Labyrinth" by locals. The Labyrinth has many surface access points, most of them within glens in the Vale, and through the sewers of major cities. Whereas the surface is infested with thorns, the Labyrinth is infested with undead. No attempt has been made to completely clear it out, but it's guessed that any attempt would be a fool's errand. Below the Labyrinth lie entrances to our world's equivalent of the Underdark. No one really knows what's down there, save for the fact that warforged that lived at the time the Labyrinth became infested with undead moved down there when the city was overrun. Now they live there and some have even tried to get to the surface, but every time they try they're overwhelmed by the undead.

The general atmosphere of the Vale is one of oppression and hopelessness. Out in the wild, you live or die on the cruel whims of the thorns, and in the cities that have sprung up, it's no better. Most civilization in the Vale is formed from eladrin and shadar-kai, along with stranded members of other races. The eladrin and shadar-kai have been at war since the Vale was formed, with the most recent events being the destruction of a shadar-kai city and the founding of the trade-city Firepoint on its ruins. At the beginning of the campaign, the shadar-kai have retailiated by attacking and razing the eladrin city of Lunaer. Most of the PC's are refugees from Lunaer.

Firepoint is going to serve as the hub for our campaign. There aren't any shops in Firepoint. Everything is procured by "bagmen" who act as salesman, stockman, thief and even murderer as the case may be. People pay a bagman to acquire a particular item for them, and the bagman goes to any length to personally get it. More successful bagmen may take a more traditional role as a seller, having other bagmen work beneath him while he negotiates with the customers. There isn't a single leader or any real law enforcement in Firepoint. The various guilds and churches of the city hold power within their sphere of influence. The closest thing it has to police are the members of the assassin's guild. Their leader, Lady Razor, has made deals with the other guilds to enforce order within the city.

In other words, the whole place is kinda like this.

My character's a foreigner to this place, now trapped in it.

Pelor is basically a traditional sun god.


Sunlight is necessary for agriculture, and the flow of time and the seasons dictates when plants are sown and harvested. Measuring time is very important in agricultural society, and the pursuit of astronomical knowledge will probably be a major focus of Pelor's priests. None of these elements seem disparate, methinks.

Pelor as a light-bringer is also the traditional approach of light and darkness. Light reveals, and the use of light as a sentinel against the encroaching darkness is a classic trope, especially with the PoL setting.



(As for the evil thing, Pelor the Burning Hate is a wonderful reflavoring of the sun god image as an unforgiving, merciless antagonist, the harsh desert sun as opposed to the bright, cheery sun of the pasture.)

The DM's made it quite clear that the Thorns can never be completely destroyed, and if cleared they'll grow back, unless they decide not to (like to leave a path for gullible travellers so they can ensnare and kill them).

My Peloradin is, at heart, a naive good-hearted country boy suddenly trapped in a world where if he shows any sign of weakness or gullibility, someone'll cut his throat and steal his purse.

He's very tolerant of other people and he basically wants to be a "Good Samaritan" to everyone he meets. One of the other party members (a priestess of the Raven Queen, though not a cleric), is worried about him for this exact reason. She doesn't want him to be another corpse on her conscience.

I know good =/= dumb. But the idea is that he's never known betrayal or even dishonesty for that matter. He grew up in a tiny community where everybody knew each other and nothing bad ever really happened.