Defender of the Faithful

You read about Libels in the Designing Faiths chapter, under "Duties of the Priest," under "Vigilance." (If you didn't, you should now.)

When the faithful are threatened by such a libel, the priest must work against it; if he doesn't, or if he fails, his people will suffer more prejudice and be in more danger from people who believe the libel. (There will be enough who still believe the libel if it is proved false; if the characters can't prove it false, there will be many more believers still.)

In order to bring the other player-characters in on such a situation, try this technique: One fine day, the priest finds another priest (of the same temple) dead in his chambers. The dead man has been murdered, torn limb from limb. His chambers were barred shut from the inside; a thief could not have picked the bars. In the priest's hand is part of a page from his journal, and the rest of the journal is missing. The scrap of paper, written in his hand, is part of a longer chronicle: "in mortal danger. When the {insert the name of an enemy temple} summon the thing, it will kill him and we will be blamed. I know they work from the Citadel of Arbright, but could find out no more; I think perhaps they heard me as I listened to their talk. It is time for me to tell -- " There the passage ends, obviously when the priest was interrupted by his murderer.

This puts the priest-character and his temple in a delicate situation. Obviously, the enemy temple will summon up some sort of monster to kill some person, probably an important person, and the priest's temple will get the blame. Obviously, the summoned thing, whatever sort of monster it is, can penetrate locked chambers without violating the locks and bars.

The priest and his temple have to know more. But the authorities will not allow them to search the Citadel of Arbright, home of a powerful local family, on this flimsy and perhaps fabricated evidence. Therefore, the priest must sneak in, find out what is to be found out, and escape. He'll need the help of his friends . . .

And what they do find out, of course, is that the Clan Arbright is aiding the enemy temple. They together have found a way to summon an outer-planar creature into sealed chambers, and they plan to do this some night when the High Priest of the player-character's temple is closeted with the king. The being will kill the king and leave the high priest to take the blame, resulting in damage, perhaps permanent damage, to the faith . . . unless the priest-PC and his friends can thwart the plan.

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