How is it that Hel has NO worshipers

[Fyraltari]

No.

This si, though.

[Doug Lampert]

Bloody Hel woweedd. That looks almost like Latin. Took me three times to parse through the whole thing. That is an actually amazing run of out-of-order type typos. It must be what reading is like with dislexia.

I'm not even mad, I'm just impressed, in a way.

Grey Wolf

I have mild dyslexia. I can read that set of errors without too much trouble except that "Thro" really doesn't want to parse as "Thor" for me.

I should note, that the usual dyslexia out of order (for me at least) is interior letters, which various studies have shown most people can read past fine. Woweedd's little phrase has mostly first or last letter involved errors, which are much harder to parse.

[rbetieh]

Seems like she'd be trying to plague everyone with everything she could, if possible. Of course, it may be the clerics just heal 'em up.

Well, if you believe souls are to be harvested because those souls power you, why would you harvest your neighbors (whom you hate) souls?

I wouldn't be surprised if there are a few Dwarf-specific diseases on this world, but the clerics of the other gods are still out their to defend their gods worshipers. Who, besides a really nice-guy is going to defend a Hel worshiper, especially from Hel herself? Same thing as what led to the Creed of Stone getting attacked, I would assume.

What seems particularly interesting is that Hel is close to being unique in her view of what the value of mortals is, at least by what we have seen of the other gods). These neat tidbits never seemed like they were worth a thread though, just kind of "ah neat" moments:

The voters of the north either showed concern for the mortals themselves (value the worship more) or concern for their own safety (snarl, keeping secrets, etc).

Tiamat is furious to lose her dragons, at the time it seems a Military Might thing, but now it seems reasonable to think it's a god-power thing. Her rivals still have their Dragon worshipers; she would rather have the worship than the dedication.

The Twelve appear to be worshiped as one unit, so I would guess that they don't compete for Worship or Dedication at all. Maybe the only power differentiation might be the actual souls powering your plane? Maybe this promotes balance within the pantheon?

And then, there is Nergal http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0875.html ... If Malack is in tune with what his god wants (and he is still being granted spells so...), can we say that Nergal and Hel have similar outlooks? Also, this raises a rather interesting philosophical question (which doesn't have any bearing on the story really)...For his plan to work, the sacrifices need to Dedicate to Nergal, so they need to Worship Nergal. I would guess that coercion is going to be used at times, but is coerced worship really Worship for God-Power reasons, and who would your dedication go to if it is not? Also is this outlook just a death god thing?

[squirrel_killer]

For me this whole thing is a fun history of DnD problem. Clerics do not exactly equal priests, way back when we had both for a hot moment, but priests are kind of terrible at adventuring, so we dropped them and stuck with just clerics who are more adventuring prepared with their minimal-but-still-there armour and weapon usage. This eventually lead to us conflating the two into one thing.

Now this is interesting because you could argue that the time spent by clerics to learn combat and the like is so they can wander off and spread the word of their chosen god teaching those they how to worship said deity, but that priests stay home in the temples and devote their every moment to their deity and worship while clerics perform the recruitment and the glory bringing. This would imply priests come into existence via clerics wandering around spreading the word of their deity until someone gets really into the idea, founds a temple in the name of said deity, and devotes themselves entirely to it, eventually that temple spawns some clerics to continue spreading the word of their deity and it repeats. So without any clerics wandering around there is no one to teach the worship of said deity to someone who would go on to found a temple and become a priest, nor is there anyone recruiting random people instead.

Hel appears to be the goddess of disease however, not just death. This means she does likely get some prayers devoted to her by the common folk to not send any plagues upon them and some strange, but maybe incorrect, rituals and sent to her in passing worship to attempt to appease her, but nothing more than that. We're talking things like "please Hel, don't send a plague upon us" or "thank you Hel for not taking from us our son when he fell ill". This is likely true for all gods, Odin might get prayed to so he sends a wizard to those who need magic or prayed to by wizards in passing for guidance in their research, or thank him upon their success. Thor may be asked to send his clerics to back up warriors and to send rains during drought, and so on. None of this requires a priest or clerics and would just be something people do. Real world history is full of things like this, if you need something you pray to the god of that thing and hope they heard you, but the gods aren't really part of your day to day beyond that. Clerics aren't the only worshippers or devout to a god, but rather just those who dedicate more than passing prayers or belief to their deity and perform the "objectively" correct rituals and the more detailed prayers that get them a direct feed to their deity, and in return they get to perform miracles on the behalf of said deities, and that then further helps spread more worship and helps get the gods dirty work dealt with. The scraps from peasants and the lack of big fancy ceremonies which require clerics or priests means Hel just doesn't get anything worth concerning herself with. It is a case of rounding to zero. 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000001 of a unit is more than zero, but you and I can both agree that basically just rounds to zero and might as well be treated as if it doesn't exist at all for practical purposes.