Atypical Characters: Tricky Cleric

For this week the atypical character is a Cleric class with the trickery domain.  The reason is that, partially due to video games, when one thinks of a cleric they imagine a life domain cleric. Someone who's main job is to heal the party, and maybe fight if things get too dangerous.

Really though a cleric's spell set is based around their particular god. The Player's Hand Book for fifth edition has the domains of: Death, Knowledge, Life, Light, Tempest, Trickery, War. Each domain gives the cleric a different set of spells to choose from, apart from the cleric spell list.

"Gods of trickery-such as Tymora, Beshaba, Olidammara, the Traveler, Gari Glittergold, and Loki are mischief-makers and instigators who stand as a constant challenge to the accepted order among both gods and mortals. They're patrons of thieves, scoundrels, gamblers, rebels, and liberators. Their clerics are a disruptive force in the world, puncturing pride, mocking tyrants, stealing from the rich, freeing captives, and flouting hollow traditions. They prefer subterfuge, pranks, deception, and theft rather than direct confrontation." Player's Hand Book page 62

Any cleric serving these gods should have a large focus on stealth, deception, and other subterfuge related acts. As an example I present Nudnik.

This character sheet is less filled out than the last ones to better allow you to print it out and use it. Nudnik is a Female Tiefling with the Criminal (spy variant) background. All her rolls were done with dice, and clearly she has little in the way of physical capabilities.

This makes sense for a trickery cleric, as it isn't their job to come into conflict. Their 1st level spells are charm person and disguise self. At the first character level their clerical blessing is that they touch one willing target and give them an Advantage (+5) to stealth rolls for an hour. At second level their channel divinity allows the cleric to create an illusionary double of their self.

A character like this should really be played like a self-serving-sort. Very smart and witty for good social interactions, but also likely to screw with the party just to see what will happen. This could easily cause conflict, so the character should only do this when their is no perceivable threat to the party's lives when the prank happens.

Say the fighter is talking to a shopkeeper: the trickery cleric breaks an valuable looking item then casts mending to fix it; the cleric uses light to make the counter between the fighter and shopkeeper radiate; use thaumaturgy to make it seem like there is a fly buzzing in the fighter's ear; use disguise self to turn into a fat half naked man who starts dancing.

A more serious instance of the trickery cleric causing problems would involve using their deception skill to hide and item they stole from a guard and place it on a random person. They then use disguise self, inform the guard, and collect a small reward.

The point is that the trickery cleric is a stealthy character that will do generally odd things. They are very chaotic, just like most trickster gods, but usually not malevolent. They are either neutral or good. Their reasons for helping the party could that their god told them too, or the cleric finds the party amusing and sticks around. Using Nudnik's spry background, it could be to gather information for someone. It's really up to the player, as always.

Trickery Clerics seek to cause chaos in everyday life through pranks and deception, yet rarely to invoke lasting harm on others.