A Righteous Death Cult?

[Tirisilex]

I was reading the Death Cult section today and I thought about a girl who went to church all her life and then discovers after the Apocalypse that she has abilities similar to a Death Priest. She's a good person who has the abilities.. Not a power hungry person but a good people loving person who genuinely wants to help. What do you think?

[Semi-Retired Gamer]

It could be interesting!

[Tor]

Other than the questionable Brulyx connection (and that's hazy since the Rifter stuff isn't canon) Death Priests really aren't required to do anything bad... keeping zombies alive isn't actually bad if you're preventing them from hurting people. They could actually be used as free labour and in dangerous situations.

You could opt not to make people into zombies, instead encourage people to become Half-Living (a superior evolution of humanity, really) and then if any of those die by accident, you get more zombies that way.

[Tirisilex]

So not all Death Priests are bad? I was under the impression they were selfish and control freaks.. Who really only care for themselves. Kind of like a David Koresh kind of thing.

[Tor]

Currently there are not any good ones, the best alignments they're made up of are anarchist/aberrent.

I don't see anything actually forbidding them from being higher alignments though. There just don't happen to be any as of yet.

I expect that in the current climate it is certainly the evil Koresh types who excel at their work. The priests have enemies who do not tolerate their religion and good priests may simply be eliminated by enemies like the Reapers.

If they came to rule the world, ruthlessness would not be so required and I expect could ones could thrive.

[Grell]

It's not a bad concept. One thing to keep in mind is that the powers of a Death Priest are significant relative to the setting so while this girl's intentions may have started out good, she's walking a dangerous line to say the least. I see a character like this most likely becoming a very tragic villain, especially so if she was an ally to the player characters before her fall.

You should run or play this character and let us know how she ultimately develops.

[cornholioprime]

I was reading the Death Cult section today and I thought about a girl who went to church all her life and then discovers after the Apocalypse that she has abilities similar to a Death Priest. She's a good person who has the abilities.. Not a power hungry person but a good people loving person who genuinely wants to help. What do you think?

I'm not sure that you can even get the powers of a Death Priest without being evil (or at very best, Anarchist) in thought and deed.

In-game, whatever deity is granting you those powers is certain to know what any or all of his Priests are doing with it (similar to the way that a Priest of Light wouldn't be able to pull the wool over his deity's eyes), and one who refuses to do his bidding could very well see their powers getting stripped from them just as can happen to a traditionally-aligned cleric.

Out-of-Game, the power to essentially control the dead is arguably 'unbalancing' to the Authors intend the flavor of the setting to be for the heroes.

But yeah, to go along with what was implied or stated outright by other posters, I cannot off the top of my head recall anything in the rules explicitly prohibiting it (apart from a possible, official limit in alignments built into the O.C.C.).

[Tor]

It's not clear that the Death Priest actually is a priest at all, at least in the context of there actually being a god-entity they are linked to. Odds are this was the original concept, and may be the case if you use Brulyx's Rifter-stats, but since his existence is left ambiguous, these could basically be some mundane magicians able to manipulate PPE on a very simple level (similar to some of the Chaos Earth OCCs) and only a priest in name/belief but not function (much like the Fire/Brimston guys in Rifts New West)