Human Sacrifice-fuelled Cleric Concept

[off_ground]

Okay, I'd like to play a Cleric whose deity requires him to kill an innocent(or some such) every now and then for continued favor.

Obviously there's a slew of evil deities who'd love this arrangement, but we're a more or less Good-ish Neutral party with no lunatics, and the character I have in mind is a nice guy, human sacrifice notwithstanding. The deity granted him minor powers for minor tasks as a child, and as he grew up, and grew more and more reliant on these growing powers as part of his heroic identity as well as to earn his daily bread, he came to accept the necessity of a few sacrifices for the greater good.

It's pretty ingrained, and he's careful to hide his extracurricular activities from the rest of the party, seducing peasant girls in villages on the eve of departure so the party won't realize the those girls are never seen again and so forth. I'm thinking one murder per level or so, maybe more at high levels, and am still considering the exact methods of sacrifice, as in whether he needs to go all the way with candles and ritual chanting and such.

The thing to do is of course to pick a Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil deity and make the cleric True Neutral or Chaotic Neutral, respectively. Problem is, he'll need the Trickery domain or a similar one to both facilitate the killings and hide them from the rest of the party, and I can't find a single deity with Trickery as one of its domains who would seemingly endorse this kind of behavior.

Any ideas?

[ComaVision]

There seem to be a few that meet your criteria. (http://www.imarvintpa.com/dndLive/FindDeity.php)

Sounds like an interesting character concept :)

[Arbane]

This is a terrible idea and will lead to tears, metagaming, and PvP. Do not do it.

[Karl Aegis]

If you have to keep your activities a secret from your party they are not acceptable activities.

[Geddy2112]

Human sacrifice is not inherently evil, and can sometimes be good. A person who willingly chooses to sacrifice themselves for others is committing an incredibly good act. Now any god that demands human sacrifice is probably evil, and any who would reward it is neutral at best.

Seducing villagers and leading them astray to be sacrificed is not the same as the person who volunteers to stay behind so the rest can escape. While it is making a sacrifice to your god, it is pretty much kidnapping and ritualized murder. This certainly is not something you want to brazenly go toting about to a good/neutral party of non murderhobos.

I agree with the concerns of other posters: done irresponsibly this is unacceptable and will not lead to anything good. Since the party is not evil, it might be a character to save for another more evil campaign and play something else. Now if your group is fine with this, you are being very responsible by excusing yourself when you need to run off and "worship".

I have played in campaigns where this was done very well. I was a LG cleric, and the party had a LE bard rogue. We got along great because he was not a psychopath, but a very professional assassin. He kept his darker activities quietly aside and we worked out fine. Contrast to the time I played a paladin and the group goes murderhobo on innocent townspeople in front of me and says it was their fault for being alive. I did not enjoy that game.

I suggest dipping into pathfinder and worshiping Norgorber. He is a trickery deity of assassination, and one of his sacred holidays is the Ascendance night. It involves kidnapping and sacrificing an innocent person using poison. Norgorber would love for you to "sacrifice" people in his name, but you better be stealthy and sneaky about it. Just excuse your character during downtime, when the other religious folk go to their temples and do your thing. I would check with the group beforehand to ensure this will be acceptable in and out of game.

[Flickerdart]

Must it be a cleric? A body leech has much use for kidnapped people - their life essence gives him extra power points for manifesting. An ardent going into the PrC could still be very heavily aligned with a deity and faith that encourages this sort of thing.

[Urpriest]

If you have to keep your activities a secret from your party they are not acceptable activities.

If you have to keep your activities a secret from your fellow players, they are not acceptable. Activities you have to keep secret from your party are fine.

Anyway, your character should probably be evil, not neutral, as you're pretty much a classic example of the "by any means necessary" evil archetype.

I actually think that your story goes better with worshiping a Demon Prince or Archdevil. Unlike deities, they like playing the long game and have a real incentive to gradually tempt mortals to greater and greater acts of evil. Several should have the Trickery domain, I'd have to check which ones.

[Telonius]

Belial would work: "Members of this small cult devote themselves to domination, trickery, secrets, and seduction." Grants access to the Trickery domain, as well as Evil and Knowledge.

[mabriss lethe]

I definitely agree with most of the others: This would be a better concept for a more evil-permissive game. In that sort of game, I'd just go whole hog and serve an Elder Evil for those deliciously bonkers bonus vile feats.

[Rebel7284]

[Persisted] Greater Consumptive Field gives a great bonus for sacrificing living things. It's pretty late level though and involves a lot more people.

[ShaneMRoth]

Nothing the OP wrote directly violates the letter of the core rule set.

Nothing in the letter of the rules guarantees a DM a successful or stable campaign.

Players are at liberty to focus on the trees. A DM is obliged to mind the entire forest.

This concept goes beyond playing a character with an Evil alignment. If this character fails to perform timely ritual human sacrifice, he loses full functionality of his character.

For this concept to work, the DM is obliged to allow this player character to commit premeditated murder.

The OP's agenda as a player, if it gets out of hand, poses an elevated risk to the campaign itself that goes beyond selecting a potentially incompatible alignment.

The DM who allows this character concept is putting his entire campaign's stability on a crap table.

The level of trust that is necessary between this player and his DM is difficult to overstate. If that level of trust exists, this could be made to work, but it's still a high wire act without a net.

If the level of trust between the DM and the other players is caused to suffer then the entire game will suffer.

In general, fairness infers that all players be given the same set of options at character creation. This would seem not to be the case.

If the other players are not given a heads up about this character concept coming into play, then the level of trust between the DM and the other players will be placed at risk.

If the other players can't be trusted to refrain from meta-gaming (if they can't pretend that their characters don't know this cleric's secret) then the concept is unlikely, in the extreme, to work.

In game terms, I'd set the DC of this character concept at 40. Practically impossible for a mere mortal.