[DF] Where do Druids derive their power from?

[demonsbane]

Originally Posted by aesir23

Or Bel, or Cernunnos, or any of these guys.

As far as I know, DF doesn't have an "official setting" (thank Dagda), so all of these non-mechanical questions/considerations are up to the GM.

My personal suggestion: Druids worship a primordial life force that predated the gods of Clerics, but has since been brought low by the upstarts of the worlds new pantheon. Now (s)he sleeps, but through his/her/its dreams, all life is touched by the ancient life force.

I'd recommend you write your own explanation based on the desired mood of your campaign. Alternately if you want, you can leave it up to whichever PC wants to play a druid.

That is, or at least something like that. After all, Druids were the Celtic priests. Celts' non-urbanized default and preferred environment tilts modern people to imagine Druids as excessively crude people worshipping nature superstitiously, which would be outright pantheism -a fairly recent phenomenon that boils down to confounding "the creation" with "its creator(s)", or effect with cause, finally resulting in a negation of the cause because an exclusive exaltation of its effect. Regarding Druids, things like animism or shamanism don't hold water, either, despite neopagans' flawed reconstructionism. Like hindu Brahmans Gods -in a way, different facets of the unnamed ultimate mystery or reality-, not mere intermediate "spirits".

Similarly, the idea of them worshipping "a primordial life force" lessens them near to the cultural level of "animist" peoples, because that "life force" usually pertains to the intermediate cosmic level, which is psychic and not purely divine. At least, such expression ("life force") can be misleading.

They weren't defending "the nature", in the materialistic, sentimentalistic, naturalistic and ecologist sense cherished today (which turns them into a caricature of an ancient priest and little more), but the equivalent of cosmic order, easily trampled by the exploits of mechanized and heavily organized barbarism ("civilization") mainly aimed to achieving mundane goals.

Now, being this Dungeon Fantasy, the thing is up to you. You can understand "Clerics" as a more urbanized type of priests, devoted to a particular religion (possibly newer and more tied to "civilization"?), maybe relying more on fairly public institutions (churches of any sort), while OTOH Druids can be related to a different and less obvious and more organic hierarchy lacking of much of all that mainly artificial burocracy -but still heavy in strict ritual observances-, relying in natural surroundings and having to do with "barbaric" peoples, linked to a more primordial set of divinities and world view. After all, when "civilization" met them (as it were), Celts (with their Druids) already were representatives of a near extinct age of the world.