Druids- historical and otherwise

I told you the druids had it coming.
I don't know how it is for you all. But it seems to me like first-time players choose to be druids by a significant margin. I can guess why this might be the case.
Druids are well rounded. Their selection of healing, offensive and utility spells, along with the decent hit-die and the animal companion give them lots of tools and options, even to the point of being effective for (gasp!) solo play.
They get a lot of power, and don't have to pay much for it: Maintain a neutralish alignment. Take some mild weapon and armor restrictions. No big. Better yet, their power comes from "nature" and not some stodgy, demanding deity.
(AD&D was better about limiting the druid, as they had very demanding prerequisites, and forced druids to participate in a druidic hierarchy reminiscent of that described by Caesar.)

Also, If you believe that art in the books influences the game (and I do) you might agree that the depiction of the druid is a big factor. Vadania the druid is the only female character in the book who seems to have both physical appeal and girlpower. The other female copyrighted sample characters tend to make people gag. Keep in mind, I'm mostly talking about 3E. 5E makes a huge improvement in the art department.



If this is the most inspiring female figure in your book, we have problems with the franchise...

This post isn't going to be a huge deconstruction of druids, because I don't have any particular alternate solution to propose. (We could use the religious rigor = spellpower rules that I proposed for clerics and just substitute nature for "deity," if that even fits the campaign setting. I'm not entirely content with that setup though.)  

This post is just a commentary on the ideas behind druids.

D&D druids are pretty much necessary to the game because they fulfill a particular archetypal role in the mind of the players. They get interpreted as wise men, wild children, beast-masters, shamans, lost boys and man-eaters. But in general, they represent an outlook and spiritual path which is more basic and primal than that of the cleric. A druid is to the cleric as the barbarian is to the fighter. 
As far as I can tell, D&D druids were largely inspired by the works of Terry Brooks and his Shannara series. But I've never read those, so I can't say to what extent.

Druids are also interesting because more than any other class, they are based on an actual, historical group.
Most people know that Druids were from ancient Celtic society. They were not an ethnic group, nor even a religion in themselves, but rather a class of priests and religious functionaries. 

We really do not know much about them. Druids left no writings of their beliefs or practices. According to Julius Caesar's book "Commentary on the Gallic Wars" the Druids transmitted their knowledge to initiates strictly by rote memorization of an oral tradition. So great was this body of knowledge that an apprenticeship could last 20 years! Now, ones enemies can usually be counted on to write interesting things about one, if not with perfect objectivity. But for the mere reason that there is no other record of Druidic doctrine, we may as well believe Caesar on this one.

In fact, almost all we know about Druids, comes from a few paragraphs here and there by their great enemies; the Romans. Notably Caesar's Bello Gallico chapter 6 section 13 (VI  XIII lol)  a few notes in Tacitus' Agricola, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo. Pliny the Elder even describes a Druidic rite in his "Natural Histories" which explains the association of sickles and mistletoe to the D&D druid. 

Taken together, the picture these Roman ethnographers paint is something very different from the free-spirited D&D druid.

Historical Druids were a class of highly respected and authoritarian priests.  They were the one-percenters of their time, with great power concentrated in a few individuals. They were a highly learned group, knowledgeable in medicine, divination, astronomy and natural sciences. They also served as judges. They payed no taxes and were never called upon to fight in wars, and the purpose of this was perhaps to maintain their neutrality in issues of justice. They had the power to excommunicate any who disobeyed their orders, and that individual would become a shunned outlaw. They did not encourage individual spiritual growth or any such modern, liberal philosophy. Rather, they were intermediaries between the rest of society and a pantheon of gods. Caesar names these gods in Roman terms; as Mercury, Mars, Minerva and so on.
What the Druidic equivalents of these gods were, or what they were named, I cannot say. But I can suggest with confidence that there were Celtic deities corollary to Roman deities. The same archetypal deities existed all over heathen Europe, with only local variations. We can see evidence of this today in how we call the days of the week in different languages

Druids also officiated over Human Sacrifices. Pretty much all Roman authors agree on this, and none gainsay the notion. Here is an account from Diodorus Siculus:

"especially, when they deliberate on matters of moment, they practise a strange and incredible rite; for, having devoted a man for sacrifice, they strike him with a sword on a part above the diaphragm: the victim having fallen, they augur from his mode of falling, the contortion of his limbs, and the flowing of the blood, what may come to pass, giving credence concerning such things to an ancient and long-standing observance. They have a custom of performing no sacrifice unattended by a philosopher, For they say that thanksgiving should be offered to the gods by men acquainted with the divine nature and using the same language..."

That's one hell of a spell component there. And just for a divination! Caesar describes another terrible rite which involved burning multiple live men in a giant wicker effigy. The victims were typically criminals, if criminals were available. But hey, they believed in reincarnation. So why not? The Celts can be credited for their practical notion that the gods cannot be cheated, and that only blood can pay for blood. The rite of the Wicker Man continues in a slightly sanitized form to this day.



If any of you actually try to get a wicker man going in game, I will be really impressed.

Basically, real Druids were everything that we moderns hate about organized religion, and then some. Modern day apologists argue that all these unpleasant things were merely Roman propaganda. But recent archaeological discoveries of bog burials and suspicious corpse-piles seriously challenge this cuddly denial fantasy.

Let's leave the fantasy in the game and keep it out of scholarship, shall we?

These ideas about toothless Druids and peaceful goddess-worshiping heathens have their roots in the Celtic Revivalism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Neo-Druidic groups exist today. But Neo-Pagans really don't have much to reconstruct from, and they essentially have to make up their religion as they go. (As opposed to a mainstream religion where everything is already made up for you.)

"The Druidess" Alexander Cabanel. There is no reason to believe that historical Druids were ever anything other than male. Still better than Vadania though.





Druids are not what we imagined them as, are they? Do you feel as let down as I did? Power from nature indeed! Their power was the same as any other evil old priesthood. Might as well just play a cleric!

So if our D&D druid is not a Historical Druid, then what is it? Well, let's consider their powers. Knowledge of plants and animals. Shape shifting. A resistance to the lures of the fey. The ability to pass unseen. Poison resistance. Dude. That's not a Druid. That's a Shaman.

And Shamans are a whole other kettle of peyote.