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My2Cents
2014-12-25, 05:45 PM
Hi, I have a question about D&D, especially the forgotten realms setting.
I've never found anything that explains where seers/prophets fit into the scheme of things.
Can they know things that the gods don't? Who provides them with the information? Ao?

TenDots
2014-12-26, 12:20 AM
Firstly, as far as I know Seers are just Psions who focus in divination. They find stuff out by going and reading it for psychic impressions or whatever. They work out the future by making informed estimates.

Prophets, on the other hand, get their knowledge by basically asking their deity what's up. In that case, lorewise, they shouldn't know any more about the future, or anything, than their god does. Whether that is truly the case depends on whether or not your DM is strict-RAW or RAI, because I'm pretty sure that contact other plane in 3.5 will get your deity to tell you truthfully things it doesn't even know, if I'm reading it correctly. There are also prophets that just act as a medium between some outsider who knows what's up and people on the material, in which case knowing more than your benefactor isn't possible.

So, to your questions.
Yes, Seers and prophets can know things their gods don't. They do this by, for example, counting the blades of grass in a field. Seers aren't truly connected to gods in any way, so they definitely can. Prophets might be able to crunch-wise, as there's nothing to suggest that simple divination spells cast through divine magic also inform the magic-supplying god of their readings, as far as I can tell.

Information will come from whichever being you contact, or from your own observations. For example, a seer scrying a sun on collision course with their planet might predict the apocalypse.

I'm pretty sure Ao wouldn't even supply the divine magic needed to cast a divination spell, much less provide information directly. If he really needs to let people know things, writing on the sky with fire generally works pretty well, but on the other hand I don't think he'd ever care about anything writing on the sky would help with.

To wrap up, they fit into things by predicting world-shaking dangers ahead of time (or whatever), then hiring some adventurers to go on an epic quest to stop it. This generally works :smallbiggrin:

jedipotter
2014-12-26, 01:10 PM
This mechanically depends a bit on what edition you use.

Any spellcaster that uses divine magic must have a god in the Realms, and that god will provide all the divination answers that are asked.

An arcane spellcaster can get their information from anyone and no one. Depending on the magic used.

So a cleric in 3.5E using the spell commune gets an answer from the god they worship. Thier god might or might not know the answer.

A wizard in 3.5E can cast contact outer plane and get a vague answer from ''someone/something'' that may or may not know the answer.

Both the cleric and wizard in 3.5E can cast legend lore and get knowledge from 'nothing'.

Each god only knows ''some'' things. Realms gods are not all knowing. It might be a bit too much to say no god knows. Depending on your edition there could be some 200+ gods, so chances are at least a couple of them might know any one thing. Though most gods only know about things they care about. For example, Tempus does not know or care to know much wizard lore.

Unless your playing in 4E where they did the ''lets kill of all the gods except a couple to make the Realms more cool like Ebberon.'' Then, sure the handful of gods left might not know things.

Most gods know, at least vaguely, about the future. For example, in the more well written 1E and 2E Realms most of the gods knew the Time of Troubles was coming, or at least ''something bad''. Plenty of gods planned ahead.

But in the not so well written 4E all the gods were action wildly out of character to fit the silly story line and were so busy killing each other and getting themselves killed that they knew nothing about the Spellplague.

Ao never communicates with mortals.