[Dungeon Fantasy] Druid without obligation to Nature

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

Just to start with, would a Druid have a concept of "nature" as opposed to "oak, ash, and thorn"(or even "this oak, that ash, the other thorn")?

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

They aren't historical druids and devotion to "nature" worked as a "Neutral" alignment premise.

The "oak ash and thorn" form isn't particularly historical either. But if you are connecting RPG druids to anything from before the 19th century, stop. There's no connection and never has been. Fantasy druids don't get any closer to actual history than Robert Graves, René Goscinny and Henry Kuttner.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by malloyd

The "oak ash and thorn" form isn't particularly historical either. But if you are connecting RPG druids to anything from before the 19th century, stop. There's no connection and never has been. Fantasy druids don't get any closer to actual history than Robert Graves, René Goscinny and Henry Kuttner.

Point taken. But wouldn't they conceive of locales rather then "nature" in any case?

[Boomerang]

Originally Posted by malloyd

The "oak ash and thorn" form isn't particularly historical either. But if you are connecting RPG druids to anything from before the 19th century, stop. There's no connection and never has been. Fantasy druids don't get any closer to actual history than Robert Graves, René Goscinny and Henry Kuttner.

Just curious: are the Druids in GURPS Celtic Myth historically accurate?

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Boomerang

Just curious: are the Druids in GURPS Celtic Myth historically accurate?

About that "historically accurate"... see... the problem is there's really only one contemporary first-hand written account concerning the druids and that was Caesar's... which is dubious as he was the leader of an invading force.


What exists in GURPS Celtic Myth is largely drawn from the oral histories of the Irish and Welsh (transcribed when the historians converted to Christianity). And I'm not gonna say what I think about oral histories.

[weso12]

Originally Posted by Dammann

What? My copy does. Sense of Duty (Wild Nature), DF1 page 7. I mean, play whatever is fun, but DF Druids are hippies, afaict.

I just checked and it's not required, you don't have to be a hippie if you don't want.

[Boomerang]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

About that "historically accurate"... see... the problem is there's really only one contemporary first-hand written account concerning the druids and that was Caesar's... which is dubious as he was the leader of an invading force.


What exists in GURPS Celtic Myth is largely drawn from the oral histories of the Irish and Welsh (transcribed when the historians converted to Christianity). And I'm not gonna say what I think about oral histories.

Interesting! I must admit I haven't read that book in years. Obviously all the magic related stuff is pure myth but I was curious whether they really did all those years of training. It is a shame there is very little in the way of written records.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

About that "historically accurate"... see... the problem is there's really only one contemporary first-hand written account concerning the druids and that was Caesar's... which is dubious as he was the leader of an invading force.

Actually I think there are a couple sentences in Tacitus and perhaps a few others, so at least we know there really were some priests called druids - Caesar didn't make them up entirely.

What exists in GURPS Celtic Myth is largely drawn from the oral histories of the Irish and Welsh (transcribed when the historians converted to Christianity). And I'm not gonna say what I think about oral histories.

It's actually worse than that, in that for a lot of them, we can't be sure they were written down until *centuries* after everybody converted to Christianity. This is one of the problems in debates over Welsh parallels for Arthurian myth, the oldest written sources of said Welsh myths are nearly a century younger than Chretien de Troyes

[Dammann]

Originally Posted by weso12

I just checked and it's not required, you don't have to be a hippie if you don't want.

Ah, yes, I misread it. It's just one of the options for quasi-pact Disads.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Actually I think there are a couple sentences in Tacitus and perhaps a few others, so at least we know there really were some priests called druids - Caesar didn't make them up entirely.

By 'dubious' I never meant that he made them up. More that... you can't rally trust anything he writes about them as it's third hand to him at best and what he writes about the religious/civic leaders of his enemies.

[Tuk the Weekah]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Actually I think there are a couple sentences in Tacitus and perhaps a few others, so at least we know there really were some priests called druids - Caesar didn't make them up entirely.

To be fair, evileyeore did say "contemporary first-hand", and Tacitus is getting most of his cultural info for Britain and Germany from his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who campaigned there some 20-30 years before Tacitus did any writing. It *may* be less biased than Caesar's work (although it could equally be a very early example of the romanticization of the Noble Savage contrasted with the Debased Civilization of Rome), but it is most definitely second-generation, second-hand info.

All of this would have been so much easier if Caesar had seen fit to write sacerdos or vates or what have you, instead of transliterating the (theorized) Keltic word *druwides into Latin.