"In fact no gods anywhere play chess. They haven't got the imagination. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion; a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs."-- Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
Please note that large sections of this website are out of date. This website is mainly of historical interest. Use at your own risk! This applies particularly to anything stat related, as the skill/stat relationship has changed since the time of writing.
Welcome to the Priests Guild. This is a little guide based on the most common questions that I get asked (to do with the guild
that is, not 'can you ward this?', 'can you res me?' or 'can you passage me?'). Its only small at
the moment, but hopefully I will be adding more as I go along, if you have a common question you get asked which isn't
here, then give me a tell or a mail.
How do I join the Priests guild?
The basic process is that you choose the god you want to be a priest of, make sure you are in correct alignment, pray to the god at Their high altar, then move into the worshippers room and join (more detail).
Can you give me any starting tips and info?
Your primary skills are those of the faith tree, though the
fighting skill tree is important to many priests.
As you advance your faith skills, you will get a number of rituals. To see what rituals you have, type 'rituals'. There is a help file for each of the rituals, simply type 'help
To use the rituals, you use the command 'perform', e.g. 'perform cure light wounds on warrax', for more help type 'syntax perform'. That is
however fairly long to type so most priests use aliases for rituals, type 'help alias' for a detailed explanation on what
they are, but as an example, typing 'alias cur perform cure light wounds on $*$' will set up an alias where if you type 'cur warrax'
it will work the same as the example of performing the ritual.
How should I rearrange my stats?
This is not something to rush into quickly. Make sure you have read "help rearrange" and "help stats" before you attempt this,
as well as asking other players for advice. For a priest, to put it basically, you can either concentrate on having high faith skills, and being good at the rituals,
or you can attempt to be a warrior priest. If you want high bonuses in the faith skills for shielding, curing etc. (very popular amongst pishites), then
you will want to rearrange so that you get 23 wisdom, the main determinant of our bonuses. If however, you wish to be more of a
warrior priest, you will need slightly less wisdom, and a fair amount of strength and possibly dex. I have chosen the second option,
with a fairly low wis and high strength, click here to see how I did my rearrange.
wisdom - The most important of the stats, I would recommend a minimum of 18 or 19 for a fighting priest, and either 23
or 22 if you are looking for a priest concentrating on faith skills.
Possible rearrange for a fighting priest: 19 wis, 18 str, 9 dex, 11 con, 8 int.
strength - This is also an important stat for a priest as we must rely on fighting skills for offense. For a fighting
priests you may want to consider getting as much as 17 or 18 strength, while otherwise you can probably get by on 13 or 14.
dexterity - This stat is used partly for fighting, but mainly for covert skills. Although it is used in fighting,
it is not as important as strength in that respect, so if you are going for the fighting priest then it is better to put extra
points into str rather than dex. It also determines how many things you can carry, so it might be useful going slightly above
the minimum 8, possibly 9 or 10 dex may be useful.
constitution - This will determine how many hit points you get, and with a low con you will find it very difficult to
get a good number. For a fighting priest, a bit of this is handy, possibly as much as 11 or 12, whilst if you are not primarily
using your priest for fighting, you could probably get away with 8 or 9.
intelligence - This skill is used primarily for magic, which you most likely won't find much of a use for. Although
it is used in a fighting skill and one of our faith skills (faith.items) there is no reason to get any of this above 8.
Possible rearrange for a faithful priest: 23 wis, 14 str, 10 dex, 10 con, 8 int.
How do I advance my skills?
You can advance your skills in the worshipper area of your temple. Type info, or cost faith to see what you can advance in your primaries,
what you currently have in those skills, and the exps cost to move up one level. You can also type 'cost faith to 50' for example, to
see the exps cost of getting your overall faith to 50 from where you are now.
To advance, you can type 'advance faith' or you can advance the subskills by using 'advance faith.rituals.defensive.self',
note the you can use the first two letters as a shortcut, ie 'advance fa.ri.de.se'.
You can also advance a little of the other skill trees, try typing 'cost fighting', 'cost other' and so on.
What should I advance?
To start with, you will need to advance overall
faith (at least up to level 5, when you can advance faith.rituals, then you need 10 faith.rituals to be able to advance faith.rituals.defensive etc.)
This can only be done up to level 50 however, at which point you have no choice but to advance the individual subskills
shown in the list.
As to what particular skills you should advance after or even before this, my advice is to look at what rituals you can get
on the gods page, look on the rituals page to see which you would like
to be able to use, then advance the subskill that the rituals you want use.
Note you should try and learn some fighting as quickly as possible, firstly the 10 levels available in the guild, then more
off other players.
How can I get money and experience, I can't even kill a cockroach
Don't despair, these are super cockroaches, really, they are. But you must understand that the priests guild is one of
the more difficult to start a character off in. We are the only guild that has no primary skill capable of doing direct damage to an opponent,
instead we have to rely on the non-primary fighting skills.
The 10 levels of fighting you can learn in the priests guild are
probably not going to be enough to start killing anything, you are going to need to learn more off another player. This is now
fairly expensive to do, so you will need to earn some experience. Without fighting you can get experience
by idling and performing rituals. Once you have learnt a bit of fighting
(I would concentrate on either blunt or sharp, not both) then you will be able to go out and smite mightily, at this stage, the only ritual
which will be a great deal of help to you will be cure light wounds. Now that you can get money and experience by killing things,
you can go on your merry way, using this to learn more fighting to kill tougher things, or learning faith to get some of the more powerful
rituals going (especially minor and or major shields).
Why does it say my god's attention is elsewhere?
Performing a ritual is an attempt to get your God to use some of Their power to aid you in something. How convincing you are in
your attempt to get your god to do this for you depends on your faith skills relevant to that particular ritual. If your god's
attention is elsewhere, this means you did not have sufficient faith to convince your god to help you, and that Their attention
turned to other things. You will need to increase your skills in the future in order to make your ritual succeed.
Pray and the burial commands don't seem to do anything, what do they have to do with alignment?
Basically, they will move your alignment back into favour with your god, but how effective they are at it
does depend on some skills, click here for more details on alignment.
Its annoying carrying lots of shields around for major shield, is there any way around it?
Yes, the duration of a major shield can be extended by the performance of minor shield. Normal practice is to
perform the major shield once then this shield can be kept going
for days, weeks or even months by never letting the minor shields run out. Click
here for a few thoughts on how major shields work.
What is a square stone/ivory statue/black medallion etc. and what does it do?
These are upgraded versions of the holy symbols which are used in some rituals and are readily available in the temple shops.
Any ritual that requires a holy symbol to perform can be performed with one of these as a substitute. Each god has a different one, but
you can use another gods if you first consecrate it at your high altar, which can be handy so that you can wear your holy symbol
by consecrating a black medallion (for Sek) instead of carrying it in your inventory.
Sandelfon: Square stone
Sek: Black medallion
Pishe: Small ivory statue
Fish: Ritual fishing rod
Gapp: Golden thimble
Hat: Brass feather
Gufnork: Fluffy ball