High priest duties and rights

A High Priest of a God is chosen by his followers. He or she will reign and guide his flock for as long as he/she desires, or until a schism is started against him/her.

In this section, I'll give a short overview of what a High Priest can do during his time.

Who can become High Priest?

Everyone! Well, nearly everyone, one or two exceptions. Ok, probably you'll never get to be HP to be honest... But, if you're of sufficient age, over GL 150 and if you've prayed shortly before the next election, you're a potential HP! All you need to do now is win an election.

Appointing ministers

The first thing a new HP usually does is appointing new ministers to help him guide his flock. Ministers get a fancy title and the "Minister" prefix, but are completely harmless. If you want to be a minister, suck up to you HP or threaten him with a schism!

Obsecrate

High Priests have a special command called obsecrate. With this command they can ask the deity to alter various things about the way deity points are spent. You can get rough details on the current setup with the devout inquisition ritual.

The things they can currently do are:

• Reduce ritual costs - up to 30% of ritual costs can be set to be shouldered by the deity point pool.
• Increase ritual costs by taking tithes - rituals can be made to cost 30% more than usual, with some of the surplus being put back in the deity point pool. This is a more efficient way of converting gp to dp than praying.
• Make rituals easier and better - self-explanatory really, this can chew up a large amount of dp.

As usual, heretics are unaffected by all of this.

Excommunicating

Have you been a naughty naughty priest? Played with your rod too much (FAITH rod, you sicko!)? Watch out, because before you know, you'll get excommunicated by your HP! Once excom'ed you won't be able to use any deity point related command anymore.

Schisms

OK, to be honest, HP's can't actually do this one, but YOU can start a schism against your HP!

Schisms are basically the priests' guild version of Votes of No Confidence. Any priest who could be a high priest in a standard election can cause a schism in the church by finding a supporter (who must also be a priest who could stand in a standard election) and initiating the schism by going to the voting room in the Temple of Small Gods and initiating a schism (syntax in the room help file). NOTE: excommunication is *entirely ignored* by this process, for obvious reasons.
Once a schism has been started, everyone else in the church will be informed of it and there will be a week's interim in which you can state your case, and in which other potential dissidents can jump the bandwagon and also declare their interests in the post of High Priest.
If, when the week expires, there are no valid challengers (eg, the separatist withdrew, or his supporter did, and no one else stood up), the schism will be resolved there and then. Otherwise, voting will start. This is exactly like a normal election, except:
        a) The incumbent High Priest remains in his/her role throughout, as do ministers.
        b) Only the incumbent High Priest and the successfully-seconded separatists will be up for election.
If a separatist wins, they will, with immediate effect, become High Priest as though they'd just won a normal election. If the incumbent High Priest wins, life goes on as before. If at any time in the entire two week process the High Priest position becomes vacant, the schism will be entirely aborted and a normal election will start.