Pteryx

It's been several years since I had the gushing session in which I explained the Archival Foundation to a friend that got processed into this entry (with the addition of a line of Althea's). In that time, some things about Keith Baker's viewpoints and society's understanding of religion and divinity in general have become clear to me. That understanding would seem to necessitate some clarification of the nature of the Archival Foundation — and how a collection of scholars who interact with divine spells in a superficially wizardly manner can still be divine casters instead of arcane.

The idea of the Archival Foundation began with the Archivist — and more specifically, with my not being too impressed with where the 3.5 Player's Guide to Eberron (which, contrary to popular belief, is a supplement and not 3.5's core Eberron book; that's the Eberron Campaign Setting) stuck the Archivist. It seemed to just treat archivists as a kind of arcane caster and stuck them in an academy of otherwise-arcane magic in Karrnath — after all, it came from Heroes of Horror, and as someone else has said Karrnath is a heavy metal album cover of undead cavalry riding across a wasteland. Like many of the 3.5 PGtE class placements, it came across as haphazard and ill thought-out.

It rubbed me the wrong way to see a divine casting class of such an unusual nature treated like just another randomly-learned set of skills in a setting whose biggest selling point to me was the mystery of the nature of divine magic. If anything, they seemed to demand a specific place of their own in the setting. After all, the very idea of a divine caster who used a spellbook/prayerbook and could copy just any divine scroll they came across down into it suggested a very different relationship with divinity and religion than a cleric, perhaps even one that might be regarded as heretical by some. I can't honestly say I had a very solid conscious idea of what that relationship was as the time, but it still served as the root of the concept of the Archival Foundation.

Now, what were those ideas I was drawing on? One is the concept of gnosticism — not specifically the capital-G kind that was a subset of early Christianity, but the broader, high-level idea of pursuing an understanding of the divine oneself, and at least some success being possible despite our mortal limitations. This idea stands in contrast to fundamentalism, the dominant paradigm of most organized religions wherein faith is defined as acceptance of authority and tradition without question because those are the only sources of truth available to mortals.

In Eberron, despite the setting having a closer explicit relationship with its orbiting planes than Great Wheel-based D&D settings do with their Outer Planes, you can't just go visit the gods with a Plane Shift spell. Eberron is also not a world where gods walk the earth and can offer revealed truth that way. Thus, there isn't a single unified mythology that simply has people promoting the agendas of favored gods; instead, you actually have multiple competing religions and views of the secret workings of the universe. Furthermore, while divine magic clearly exists and accrues to certain believers, clerics aren't necessarily completely reliable sources of gospel; they can grow corrupt, yet still draw on the power they touched before instead of getting cut off like in most other settings. On top of that, occasionally one finds clerics dedicated to beliefs that have nothing to do with existing religions. As such, there is room in Eberron for people who are curious about the divine without either assuming a particular religion tells them all they need to know or just assuming all evidence of the divine is a superstitious misunderstanding of fundamentally arcane magic. Some such people may even favor a specific religion as a starting point, even while being open to the idea that there's still more to be understood. And some of them, inevitably, will be passionate in their curiosity. In short, there is a place in Eberron for religious liberalism.

People who in any way ask fundamental questions about the nature of the divine instead of meekly swallowing whatever they're told by those around them, of course, have a history of being shunned and even persecuted. Even in our own world, it's easier to be atheist than gnostic. If gnostic pursuits were the only concept in play here, we'd be talking about isolated individuals, not an organization. Religious liberalism, however, opens the possibility of people like this of different religions recognizing that they could work together for mutual benefit. After all, someone who sees something differently than you do may catch details you didn't, even if you don't necessarily agree about how to interpret them.

Add to this that the divine is not merely real in Eberron, it has some common manifestations along with the differences from faith to faith. Clerics have a lot of spells in common, and spell scrolls exist — even if those spells and the scrolls made from them look very different from faith to faith. The quest to understand how such superficially different spells could have essentially the same results could easily serve as a rallying point for those who seek to understand divine magic, and collecting and studying divine scrolls of various faiths is an obvious step in that process. However, Eberron is a world wherein divine magic is contingent on faith. While many skeptics and atheists may have attempted such things before, they wouldn't have gotten very far. But passionate gnostic religious liberals? They just might succeed — and in my Eberron, that is what the Archival Foundation and the Archivist class are.

If you want a central jumping-off point for pursuing Eberron's unique religious mysteries, if you like gnosticism and/or religious liberalism and want it in your fantasy, if you want an organization that brings together clashing viewpoints and is barely held together by common cause, or if you just want an excuse to go infiltrating cults and robbing divine scrolls from tombs, I welcome you to consider using the Archival Foundation.