How hard is it to write pantheons people care about?

K · Post by K » Mon Dec 12, 2011 11:20 pm

The idea of worshiping an idea and getting spells that way is totally pre-Eberron.

That being said, I think the most damaging idea is "faith."

It removes a lot of the elements of a church/religion that make it fascinating as a storytelling device. You can't do internal politics for any but the evil gods, you can't have corrupt priests or heretics os religious schisms, and it's a threat to PC agency in many cases.

I mean, would you buy a DnD story about the clerics of the god of love and justice murdering each other in the night and falsely convicting others of crimes for financial profit if that story also involved them getting their powers at full from their professed god of love and justice (or their faith in the tenets of love and justice)?

That'd be a perfectly acceptable story to tell in the real world because it actually happens, but in DnDland you can't tell that story at all because priests are one-dimensional icons of their faith.

All of these issues get glossed over in RPG discussions because RPGing is still reeling from the devil-worship accusations of the 70s and no one wants to criticize religion at all, but I think the archetype needs to take a take from real-life religions and just divorce religious power from actual belief and faith.

Getting power from just your beliefs is fundamentally flawed as a storytelling device for RPGs.

Ice9 · Post by **Ice9** » Mon Dec 12, 2011 11:28 pm

Oddly, this is an area that 4E has a better take on. Divine characters are initially granted their power by a god (maybe ideals too, I haven't checked). Once granted, the power grows on its own, and the god in question can't control or revoke it.
It's a bit vague about whether you need to believe in them for the initial granting, or just have the high priest think you do, but even with the stricter interpretation, you can still become corrupt later on.

Alternately, Eberron handled this by gods being very distant, not communicating much, and not really giving a shit about their Clerics' alignment. So yeah, the scheming high priest is still getting his power from the god of love and sunshine, but that doesn't actually preclude him being a dick who poisons all his rivals.

K · Post by K » Tue Dec 13, 2011 12:51 am

Eberron is schizophrenic about the gods.

The clerics need to start as the right alignment, but can change alignment freely. Paladins can also change to any alignment, but need to "adhere to the highest tenets of their faith" all the time.

What those things actually mean is beyond me since it seems entirely contradictory.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Tue Dec 13, 2011 1:00 am

K wrote: I mean, would you buy a DnD story about the clerics of the god of love and justice murdering each other in the night and falsely convicting others of crimes for financial profit if that story also involved them getting their powers at full from their professed god of love and justice (or their faith in the tenets of love and justice)?

I could totally make that work. If all the god cared about was love and justice, you could do some seriously fucked up shit in the name of love and justice (and really, what zealot murderer *hasn't* murdered either in the name of love or justice? If their logic is sound but they start by rejecting normal social norms, it's totally doable).

I ran Paladins that way in my homebrew setting. They were scary motherfuckers because all that mattered was their interpretation of their patron god's ideals. A Paladin of strength would blow into town, murder all the men and children, and spend the next year isolating the town from the outside world, and roll in after a year to mate with the woman who survived the best. Paladins to the god of love were obsessed to unhealthy degrees, paladins of justice had fucked up concepts of "balance" that they adhered to.

Then again, I had tossed the pantheon of gods out of the setting, and what was left were places of power so potent that they resonated the patron god's ideals. Paladins were people who lived in/near these places and became attuned, gaining power, so they had power without guidance, drifting towards a frightening level of zealotry.

TheFlatline · Post by **TheFlatline** » Tue Dec 13, 2011 1:27 am

Prak_Anima wrote:
PoliteNewb wrote:
Due to players never remember any god's name, I'm probably just going to give them titles like the seven gods in Westeros. It's pretty easy to remember which one is the Smith and which one is the Mother. Hard to add more in-depth stuff in if your players don't even remember which is which.
I've been considering the same thing after reading Jo Walton; the main character worships a quasi-Greek/Roman pantheon, but she seldom (if ever) names them...they're just "The Radiant Sun", "The Virgin Huntress", "The Sky Lord", "The Master Maker", "The Lord Messenger", and so forth. Kinda elegant, since it can work across cultures...The Radiant Sun is the same guy even if some people call him Helios and other people call him Ra, and even if they believe very different things about him. The important thing is, he's the fucking sun, and that's why they worship him.
so far I have The Apple Picker, The Gleaming Scholar, The Prismatic Racer, and the starts of The Rosy Baker.

I might add The Crooked Man to your list. He's sort of a Jungian archetype that I created for my Dark Heresy game that has turned into a sort of reoccurring character in different games by different people.

He more or less is Cassandra, only he acquires his knowledge/wisdom through great personal sacrifice, and then spends the rest of his life realizing that nobody else will ever believe him unless they too go through what he's gone through.

Let's see here I have a brief writeup of him from my original idea. Originally, I created a specific Tarot deck, writing out divinations for each card, and using the re-worked major arcana to both tell the "Passion" of the emperor in 40k (Early spreading Christianity and the empire reconquering lost planets would encounter the same language barriers, and thus a tarot deck full of suitable iconography would be a simple and elegant solution) and to create certain monomyth style themes and stories that I could weave into the main game, giving it depth and a certain level of cheap mysticism.

It actually worked pretty well, and The Crooked Man fit into fantasy pretty well, along with a few other of my Major Arcana (and started a real Jungian psychology mysticism kick in our group).

Actually, Jungian psychology in a fantasy setting where there's already magic and shit might work for a religious system. The collective unconsciousness of intelligent beings creates archetypes of concepts that can be filled by individuals who are ambitious and motivated enough to ditch their humanity/identity and follow the rules.

Which is actually the overall idea behind my DH game. Humanity is generally low-level psychic (illustrated by nulls being uncomfortable to be around), and their shared collective unconsciousness creates archetypes. The Emperor is the Emperor still in part because there's a hundred trillion people *believing* that there must be an emperor. However, someone else could usurp him if they could play by the rules and oust the Emperor. The Chaos gods are archetypes as well (less someone stepped into those roles as they became self-aware on their own, since alien horror is a common fear among man), as are other players. So quite literally the players have encountered the Green Knight from the Arthur legends, and are starting to refer to the Emperor as The Fisher King. What power archetypes actually can grant I don't get into, nor do I really go into why someone would want to become an archetype. I hinted that archetypes can touch every human's subconsciousness and that there's power to be had, but a primal power that costs individual identity. It's been enough so far.

The Crooked Man-

The Crooked Man is not a character, or even really a man. He is an abstraction- an archetype of sorts. Most commonly invoked as the holder of arcane knowledge (“The Crooked Man knows…” is a common phrase), he represents the end of the Path of the Fool. He represents unholy or exotic or unwanted knowledge, usually unlooked for and acquired at great personal suffering. The demon-haunted veteran, the torture victim, and the survivor of obscene and macabre supernatural events all are aspects of The Crooked Man. The crooked man is the inverse of the Hierophant.

Traditionally used as a reply when one doesn’t know (and often doesn’t *want* to know) the answer to a question, he rarely appears in an illustrated form. When he does, he is shown usually to be a frail, ageless yet horridly aged, spindly man that wears tattered rags. He is notably twisted, taking a sharp right-angled bend at his waist, and slowly twisting back to have an upright head. Occasionally one arm is either missing or mangled, and in literature, he is described as moving slowly, painfully, and with precarious balance. His “personality”, if such a word can be used, is mostly neutral or regretfully resigned towards those that would interact with him. At best, he wishes to spare other Fools his path, though it is the path of the Fool to ignore such warnings.

ModelCitizen · Post by **ModelCitizen** » Tue Dec 13, 2011 2:24 am

K wrote: Getting power from just your beliefs is fundamentally flawed as a storytelling device for RPGs.

In real life when we talk about "faith" we're usually talking about the belief that a religion is objectively true in the face of evidence to the contrary. In D&D land nobody needs that. Pretty much every religion is true and there's no one to argue otherwise.

Faith in D&D is the belief that your god will do what he/she/it promised to do. If I say "I have faith in Chauntea," I don't mean I believe Chauntea is real, because of course I do. I mean I believe Chauntea won't let us starve this winter. If I say "I have faith in Orcus," I mean that someday Orcus will dickpunch Pelor and start the zombie apocalypse. Since all the gods promise to do contradictory and incompatible things (Chauntea wants us the harvest to last through the winter, Auril wants the crops to freeze) in any conflict at least one person's god will fail to deliver. Thus continuing to assume that the gods will do what they promise to do requires faith.

Unfortunately the word means such different things in real life and in D&D land that it's easy to misinterpret. People latch onto the word "faith" because it's a popular theme in modern culture, even though the theme as understood by the modern world is out of place in D&D.

(E: Am I repeating things to you that you and Frank wrote in one of the Tomes? I kind of feel like I am. If I am sorry.)

Eberron is schizophrenic about the gods.

The clerics need to start as the right alignment, but can change alignment freely. Paladins can also change to any alignment, but need to "adhere to the highest tenets of their faith" all the time.

What those things actually mean is beyond me since it seems entirely contradictory.

That's just WotC's bit about not writing settings that diverge from the core rules. I'm about 90% sure that Keith Baker's original Eberron didn't have alignment at all.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Tue Dec 13, 2011 6:37 am

Flatline: while a God with a title along those lines would fit into the Pantheon I'm working on, he'd be more Loki-esque than the martyr you made, given that my Pantheon is based on something specific and that's what the Crooked figure is. I posted up what I have so far, it's about midway down the previous page. Take a look.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Tue Dec 13, 2011 6:37 pm

So how about Eddings' gods? That seems to be exactly what K was looking for (aside from being written by Eddings).

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Dec 13, 2011 7:18 pm

K wrote:Eberron is schizophrenic about the gods.

The clerics need to start as the right alignment, but can change alignment freely.

Huh. I never read that part. Is that a direct quote from the Campaign Setting book?

souran · Post by **souran** » Tue Dec 13, 2011 8:47 pm

The "Eberron dieties are distant" is part of their advantage and appeal. It means that more classical "faith"

However, the other advantage that the ebberon pantheon has is that its polythiest aspect is actually polythiest.

The greeks belived and worshiped the entire pantheon. You might have a personal patron, or your city might think its under one particular dieties protection but you belived in the interaction of these dieties.

However, the one thing that pretty much every D&D setting gets wrong is that these Polythiest dieties have to DO SHIT. That is what makes them worth praying to. The point of a "portfolio" of divinity is not just what you control but the dieites should then each have a JOB making that shit happen. People worship them because they either don't want that diety to say "screw this, I am playing golf" or becasue you want them to WITHOLD their power.

Chantenu doesn't just "help the crops of herfaithful followers grow" she IS the reason things grow at all. If she dies and nobody takes up her mantle EVERYTHING stops growing. animals, plants, kids, EVERYTHING.

Similarly, the reason Pelor doesn't show up to solve everybodies problems is because he has to ride a fucking chariot across the sky everyday. If he doesn't the sun stops comming up.

ON the other hand the god of disease and discomfort sends a little gift to everybody who doesn't give a copper penny to every one of his lepper children.

This is a tiny bit close to how people actually end up with multiple polythiestic gods.

However, places like the realms and lots of D&D worlds have Dieties who supposedly are the god of X who really don't do anything. They are just really powerful people. And being the guy in the party who gets his power from some other really powerful guy is really crappy.

Further, if the gods are just really powerful dudes then who cares, because unless you have to fight one they are just really stupid NPCs.

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Wed Dec 14, 2011 4:09 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
RobbyPants wrote:
K wrote:You know, I'd really like a version of the gods that doesn't involve granting spells.
What do you want them to do? Just be really powerful dudes?
Pretty much, yes.

The moment you have gods "granting spells" it gets into all kinds of bullshit about beating up gods and people losing spells, or people becoming more powerful than their gods and losing spells and all that shit. If you cast spells and pray to a big red rock, it shouldn't matter whether that big red rock has divine rank 2 or 3.

-Username17

Hmmm... so the Kata Tjuta and Uluru mega stone?

I've been contemplating using the 7-10 of Earth's chakral points as some of the sources of power in my Zcience-Phantasy game/setting.

The idea being that people going to one of several locations and performing a ritual, meditating, or waiting for an auspicious moment, to atune themselves both to the location, and to a specific power flavour.

The other atunement types would be to gods (aka planets and stellar bodies) via astronomic observatories.

People worshipping the _sun_ proper is something I'm much more fine with. It gives the planet a gravity well, radiation, boundless energy; and can murderize you with heat. Likewise with straight out Lunar worship (night light, cloud disruption, tidal forces) and Gaian/Earth/Mineral worship.

"Faith" would be more a measure of attunement to a power flavour, than "I believe that the sun will rise again". So it would be more along the lines of "I believe that the sun rising every day is more important than the moon forcing tides; or illuminating the night sky; so we're going to kill those lunar cultist bastiches across the valley".

Of course, I'd like to have some sort of rock-paper scissors method going on; where the Water God feeds off of the Sun God's heat power; and then can negate the Suns ceaseless radiation and heat or fire with clouds and rain and water. While the Earth God simply throws up a powerful magnetic field and says "F U' since it now has a Magnetosphere and can create bio-organisms on its surface without worrying about their genetics being shattered by stellar radiation.

K · Post by K » Wed Dec 14, 2011 5:28 am

hogarth wrote:
K wrote:Eberron is schizophrenic about the gods.

The clerics need to start as the right alignment, but can change alignment freely.
Huh. I never read that part. Is that a direct quote from the Campaign Setting book?

The campaign setting book specifically says that the section on "Ex-clerics" section doesn't apply and that clerics can change their alignment without consequences like needing atonement, but it specifically does not change any other rules (and the alignment restrictions on choosing a god are not mentioned at all and the gods of Eberron still have their alignment listed, so the default rules must apply).

If they meant you could just be any alignment, they could have just said that in one sentence with a few supporting flavor sentences. They didn't.

It very specifically avoids saying that you can just be any alignment and it explicitly still has restrictions on alignment Domains like the Good or Evil Domain, so it's pretty clear the gods still care about your alignment.... just not as much as other DnD settings.

It seemed weird to me too, but when I read the wanking they did to "corrupt clerics," then it made sense to me. They seem to want basic DnD religion AND corruption stories, but they'd never do a Borgia-style story where bad people get into good churches for the power (or good people infiltrate evil cults).

I don't even know what they think Paladins do. "Highest tenets of your faith" isn't even a meaningful set of words in the context of DnD Paladins.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Wed Dec 14, 2011 6:28 am

souran wrote: However, the one thing that pretty much every D&D setting gets wrong is that these Polythiest dieties have to DO SHIT. That is what makes them worth praying to. The point of a "portfolio" of divinity is not just what you control but the dieites should then each have a JOB making that shit happen. People worship them because they either don't want that diety to say "screw this, I am playing golf" or becasue you want them to WITHOLD their power.

I don't really want gods to do stuff. It's generally something that's mishandled by DMs all the time where they use them as a railroading device or some kind of PC screw over, where the god of justice fucks you in the ass for doing anything remotely evil, yet the NPCs get away without punishment.

Having Elminster is bad enough, but when Elminster suddenly becomes nearly omniscient, it leads to a whole new level of screw over.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Wed Dec 14, 2011 11:55 am

K wrote:
hogarth wrote:
K wrote:Eberron is schizophrenic about the gods.

The clerics need to start as the right alignment, but can change alignment freely.
Huh. I never read that part. Is that a direct quote from the Campaign Setting book?
The campaign setting book specifically says that the section on "Ex-clerics" section doesn't apply and that clerics can change their alignment without consequences like needing atonement, but it specifically does not change any other rules (and the alignment restrictions on choosing a god are not mentioned at all and the gods of Eberron still have their alignment listed, so the default rules must apply).

I have no idea where you're getting this from. All I see is "A cleric's alignment need not remain within one step of her deity's alignment". Nothing about changing alignments, unless you think "remain" means that. Do you have a page reference?

K wrote:I don't even know what they think Paladins do. "Highest tenets of your faith" isn't even a meaningful set of words in the context of DnD Paladins.

It means you have to be Lawful Good and follow the paladin's code like it says in the PHB (and unlike clerics, who can be any alignment). Again, I have no idea where you're getting the idea that Eberron paladins don't have to be Lawful Good; I don't see anything to that effect in the Campaign Setting book. Page reference?

souran · Post by **souran** » Wed Dec 14, 2011 1:20 pm

Swordslinger wrote:
souran wrote: However, the one thing that pretty much every D&D setting gets wrong is that these Polythiest dieties have to DO SHIT. That is what makes them worth praying to. The point of a "portfolio" of divinity is not just what you control but the dieites should then each have a JOB making that shit happen. People worship them because they either don't want that diety to say "screw this, I am playing golf" or becasue you want them to WITHOLD their power.
I don't really want gods to do stuff. It's generally something that's mishandled by DMs all the time where they use them as a railroading device or some kind of PC screw over, where the god of justice fucks you in the ass for doing anything remotely evil, yet the NPCs get away without punishment.

Having Elminster is bad enough, but when Elminster suddenly becomes nearly omniscient, it leads to a whole new level of screw over.

You didn't read the rest of the post.

Being a diety shouldn't just be about having shit tons of power and people who worship you.

It NEEDS to entail a job that is existentialist or pseudo-mythological that takes up most of that dieties time. This doesn't mean that when the DM needs one or two of them for a plot line that they are always to busy, but it does provide both the reason that dieties are worshiped and a reason why they don't interfere more in day to day shit.

The god of justice doesn't just judge people all the time, he judges everbody when they die to determine their afer-fate , or he is the patron of judges and you pray to him because if your trial is a sham he gets pissed and starts throwing divine curses on everybody. Or he acts as judge in cases that no moral is fit to decide like "has evil done wrong to good" or "is the abyss justified in trying to end existance" or "why do hotdog buns come in packages of 8 and hotdogs come in packages of 10?"

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed Dec 14, 2011 5:26 pm

Subtler divine intervention can be a lot more fun. You don't even have to get all that subtle, like in the beginning of Romance of the Three Kingdoms when the heavens showed their displeasure with eunuch influence in politics by caving in a mountain. Really, anything that is not bluntly the work of the gods by virtue of the fact that they were witnessed at the scene of the disaster/miracle or claimed credit directly through a vision gives things a much more mythological bent. Like, if the players offend the god of oceans, suddenly everything in water just hates them.

K · Post by K » Wed Dec 14, 2011 10:26 pm

hogarth wrote: I have no idea where you're getting this from. All I see is "A cleric's alignment need not remain within one step of her deity's alignment". Nothing about changing alignments, unless you think "remain" means that. Do you have a page reference?

That is what remain means.... it asumes you start at a state and need to keep it static.

The phrase is used in the "Clerics and Corruption" section and it doesn't override the sections on alignment restrictions for choosing a god or choosing a domain. The section specifically overrides the "Ex-cleric section."

Later in the Paladin section, it talks about clerics of the Silver Flame "adopting an evil alignment." This is support for the idea that they are not talking about people who are evil entering the church, but clerics of the faith who later become corrupt.

Both of these sections, taken together, show that the intent is that clerics start as the alignment close to their god and then are allowed to change alignment later.

K wrote:I don't even know what they think Paladins do. "Highest tenets of your faith" isn't even a meaningful set of words in the context of DnD Paladins.
It means you have to be Lawful Good and follow the paladin's code like it says in the PHB (and unlike clerics, who can be any alignment). Again, I have no idea where you're getting the idea that Eberron paladins don't have to be Lawful Good; I don't see anything to that effect in the Campaign Setting book. Page reference?

I misread that part. I didn't see that they were specifically talking about clerics of the Silver Flame being allowed to turn evil and not the paladins of the Silver Flame.

So that's weird in a different way, I guess.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Dec 15, 2011 12:32 pm

K wrote:
hogarth wrote: I have no idea where you're getting this from. All I see is "A cleric's alignment need not remain within one step of her deity's alignment". Nothing about changing alignments, unless you think "remain" means that. Do you have a page reference?
That is what remain means.... it asumes you start at a state and need to keep it static.

Let's say you had a restraining order that says you need to remain 100 meters away from Justin Bieber at all times. It's clear what that means.

Now let's say you don't have that restraining order (which is more likely). Therefore you need not remain 100 meters away from Justin Bieber at all times. Do you really think that means you are required to move within 100 meters of him before moving away from him?

K · Post by K » Thu Dec 15, 2011 1:40 pm

hogarth wrote:
Now let's say you don't have that restraining order (which is more likely). Therefore you need not remain 100 meters away from Justin Bieber at all times. Do you really think that means you are required to move within 100 meters of him before moving away from him?

For that statement to make sense, a pre-existing restraint would have to exist. Otherwise, it's a nonsensical statement.

Look up the definition of "remain" in the dictionary of your choice. It means "to stay at a place one has been occupying" or "continue to exist."(Dictionary.com)

For that word choice to make any sense, you had to have been occupying some place or existing in some state.

Obviously, the negative of that concept is tripping you up. The negative is to "leave the place you've been occupying" and not whatever you think it is.

I mean, if I told you to "remain in San Francisco," then that statement is nonsensical if you are not in currently in San Francisco. (If you weren't in SF, the correct statement to get you there and make you stay is "Go to SF and remain there....." because that establishes the place you must occupy first and then tells you to keep occupying it when you get there).

The authorial intent of the passages in question may have been different and you can argue that until the cows come home, but the actual syntax says that clerics must adhere to the alignment rules when choosing a god and picking domains and they can later change alignment.

In fact, the whole layout of the passage suggests this by having a separate section for "Corruption and Clerics" in the Cleric section. Even the use of the word "corruption" implies that there was state of purity that was changed.

It's a good thing you caught me on vacation or I wouldn't even have taken the time to explain this.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Thu Dec 15, 2011 4:06 pm

Eberron corruption is less about just a totally evil bastard infiltrating a good church and more like a religious zealot who takes his work too seriously. It's built to handle characters like Torquemada who think they're doing divine work, but have just taken it too far.

It can also do good aligned members of evil faiths who turn the tenets of those faiths to something more positive.

And that's primarily the advantage of having gods that don't really exist. Nobody can actually tell you what Dol'Dorn's philosophies are, because Dol'Dorn never actually talks to you. So everyone gets to interpret whatever they want from it, much like a real world religion. So long as you actually believe what you preach, you get spells from it.

The concept that doesn't work in Eberron is the false believer. You can't just be an atheist in the church who gets spells. You could however be a believer in the Dark Six and infiltrate the Silver Flame, since there's actually no way the flamers will know your magic is coming from belief in the Six instead of the Flame.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Thu Dec 15, 2011 4:21 pm

Swordslinger wrote:The concept that doesn't work in Eberron is the false believer. You can't just be an atheist in the church who gets spells.

Do you have a quote for that? Because I was reading the campaign setting (as I noted), and I thought they basically said the opposite (that you could be completely corrupt and not give a shit about the god you're paying lip service to and you could still cast cleric spells).

Blicero · Post by **Blicero** » Thu Dec 15, 2011 9:57 pm

Yeah, I was also under the impression that you could totally worship money and booze and think all the gods were bunk and still walk up to some church of the Host and say, "Yo, I'm a priest of the Fire God. Can I have a job?"

And as long as you did things like were able to cast cleric spells and paid lipservice to the Fire God, they wouldn't have any automatic way of knowing you actually got your powers from Booze and Money.

(This could just be extrapolations, though. I'm afb.)

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Thu Dec 15, 2011 11:50 pm

hogarth wrote: Do you have a quote for that? Because I was reading the campaign setting (as I noted), and I thought they basically said the opposite (that you could be completely corrupt and not give a shit about the god you're paying lip service to and you could still cast cleric spells).

Faiths of Eberron, page 7: "Clerics gain their spells from their own faith, not divine intervention."

To get divine spells, you have to have belief in something. It doesn't actually matter what that is, but you can't be a total nonbeliever, because you need faith in some higher power. You actually don't have to believe in the god of the church you're currently a part of, which allows rogue clerics to infiltrate churches, but you cannot have a totally faithless cleric.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Fri Dec 16, 2011 1:11 am

Faiths of Eberron, page 7: "Clerics gain their spells from their own faith, not divine intervention."

This says to me that any faith in anything at all is enough. This includes yourself, your friend who believes in you, or just pure awesomeness. So you can totally be a naytheist cleric.

Swordslinger · Post by **Swordslinger** » Fri Dec 16, 2011 6:32 pm

Prak_Anima wrote: This says to me that any faith in anything at all is enough. This includes yourself, your friend who believes in you, or just pure awesomeness. So you can totally be a naytheist cleric.

At that point you'd have to explain why every NPC in the game doesn't have cleric levels then? If all it takes is good self-esteem, is everyone else super emo or something?

I take the line to mean faith in higher powers, and the game world source material treats it the same way. "Faith in yourself" or some bullshit seems to just be a blatant attempt to rules lawyer the system to make the cleric who actually isn't a cleric.