User:Orion/Ourania (3.5e Campaign Setting)/Religion

Design Intent
3E sorted spellcasters into "arcane" and "divine", and then proceeded to stuff all kinds of ridiculous bullshit into the "divine" category. What with Archivists, Philosophy Clerics, Spirit Shamans and Favored Souls running around, it's hard to say what divine actually means apart from "the wisdom based ones." But one class always stood out as especially misplaced, not least because it was in the frickin PHB: the Druid. The PHB glossary defines divine spells as spells "of religious origin powered by faith or by a deity." It's pretty clear that outside Faerun, druidism is not "powered by a deity." Are we therefore meant to assume that Druidic spells are powered by "faith?" The actual Druid class writeup doesn't talk about faith at all, but rather "spirituality", which I would submit is not the same thing. Furthermore, druids are out of theme with the rest of the divine casting world. The other core divine casters all have a distinct extraplanar theme. They all draw power from somewhere "beyond," are good at summoning, warding, and banishing Outsiders, and get early access to spells like Plane Shift. In Ouranios, this translated to an association with planar cores, one which isn't apt for Druids.

In many ways the most elegant solution would be to simply recategorize. 4E went and made Primal its own power source, and one could easily imagine an alt-3E with Arcane, Divine, and Natural spells. This would work very well if you wanted to emphasize the role of druids as cultural leaders in marginal zones or in mythic history, or play up an uneasy three-way struggle between theocrats, technocrats, and traditionalists. But the Ouranios project prefers to change flavor text and add new mechanics rather than to overwrite mechanics present in the PHB, so we will be taking another route.

There's No Plane Like Home
If the Material Plane derives its properties from a localized planar core, no one has yet determined its location. Some hypothesize that it was concealed by long-forgotten gods who used it to create the known world, and that an explorer who came upon it could tinker with the settings of the Prime, or even that this has already happened four or five times in the past. Whatever the truth, it is clear that the Prime not only takes up more space, and less contiguously than any other, it also operates under very different rules. Unlike Outsiders, the native of the Prime are not dependent on its aether for survival. They need no more magic to travel in other planes than is required to physically carry them there, and thus can conduct extraplanar trade by merchant marine. Similarly, Prime spellcasters have found it relatively easy to construct short-lived bubbles of aether which allow Outsiders to live and work in the Prime. Even the Magical, which are spontaneously generated like Outsiders, are not restricted in their movements.

Today's scholars believe that the best explanation for these properties is that the Prime itself is becoming sentient. Other planes have no sense of identity, and thus the fiends and celestials generated by their substance remain fundamentally part of the plane. However, because the Prime is self-aware, it is able to comprehend the difference between itself and its inhabitants, and this able to separate itself more cleanly from them. Modern Prime theory holds that the Prime is able to tap into the unused brain space of all natural creatures, and is essentialy using individual Int 1 and 2 dogs and pidgeons as neurons in an enormously dispersed network. the capacity for language is thought to be what blocks the sentient races out from this network.

Clamantis in Deserto
However, the exclusion of the sentient races from the Primal network is not absolute. On rare occasions, someone who spends weeks or months separated completely from human society finds that their memories of home grow faint and their impulse to speak recedes. Eventually they stop even thinking in words, simple reacting to sensations. And when that happens, they begin to hear the Green Voice. The Green Voice tells them where to find food and shelter. It brings them to animals which guide or protect them. And though it never makes demands, it whispers requests and begs favors in dreams and lonely hours. Once someone has found the Green Voice, it cannot be rejected or shut out. One can choose only to accept the role of Ranger or Druid, or attempt to extinguish the voice by walking the path of the Blighter.