DM Q&A: Faith for other races

[weaverofmyths]

So I have seen that the choice of deity you get is limited by your race. Is there a way to unlock this? Or perhaps have one's faith changed manually for one not typically associated with a member of this race. For exemple, if I play an Elf that was raised by hins for some reason and decided to worship Yondalla... is there a way to have Hin faiths unlocked for this character at the cross thingy, or have it changed by DMs?

[Munroe]

Jun 1, 2021 23:46:51 GMT -5 weaverofmyths said:

So I have seen that the choice of deity you get is limited by your race. Is there a way to unlock this? Or perhaps have one's faith changed manually for one not typically associated with a member of this race. For exemple, if I play an Elf that was raised by hins for some reason and decided to worship Yondalla... is there a way to have Hin faiths unlocked for this character at the cross thingy, or have it changed by DMs?

The easiest way to play a character of a non-standard faith for their race is to write-in the deity on the character at character creation. The deity selector places text in the hidden Deity field of the character sheet but this field can also just be filled out by the player during character creation. So if an elf wanted to worship Yondalla a player could type Yondalla in the deity field during character creation and ignore the Deity Selector Device. As long as the deity's name is capitalized correctly and spelled correctly (and there are no accidental leading or trailing spaces, the deity name should function for deity-specific scripts that check the deity field.

Note that such a character would still be expected to have appropriate alignment and domains domains for their deity. Having incorrect domains taken at cleric level 1 requires for the character to be remade to fix them. Incorrect domains taken on a character taking cleric as a second or third class can be fixed by deleveling the character until all cleric levels are removed. But anyway, check the domains for the deity and make sure they're right.

In the case of Selûne (and any other deities with symbols in their names), I believe the standard deity selection does not use the special character, so such a character would list their deity as Selune, not Selûne. (I'd have to test that to be sure but I don't think her worship is race-restricted anyway as part of the Faerûnian pantheon.)

Note that divine classes that worship non-deities/quasi-deities (including fiends such as Asmodeus or Orcus, and dead deities, such as Bhaal or Myrkul) require application and DM approval before creating such a character.

If you find you can't get out of the starting area with your character's typed-in deity, a DM should be able to help you get out.
(I don't think there's a hard-stop check on deities by race, but it's been awhile since I've been through the starting area, so I'm tagging DM Hawk just in case as he might know differently.)