Newbie stuff

Welcome to the Priests Guild. This is a little guide based on the most common questions that get asked (to do with the guild that is, not 'can you ward this?', 'can you res me?' or 'can you passage me?'). If you have a common question you get asked which isn't here, then give us a tell or a mail.

How do I join the Priests guild?

So, you've decided to join the Priests Guild. A most excellent choice...

Basically, first you need to worship a god. Which god(s) you can worship will depend on your alignment, you have to be in a Gods alignment before you can worship them. This will depend on whether you pulled a lever when you were in the alignment room of the newbie area, if you are set on a particular god you may have to completely restart (i.e. deleting this character and starting a new one) and pull the correct lever (though the levers give different degrees each time, so take notice), or spend a long time killing things with the alignment opposite to which you want.
Once you have decided which god to worship, you need to find their temple, either use an urchin, or take a look at the excellent discworld maps. Once in the temple, you must find the gods high altar, and pray to that deity. You have now become a worshipper of that god. To become a priest, you must find the worshippers area and 'join' the priests guild. Congratulations, you are now a priest of that God. Note that this process will differ if you decide to become a priest of Pishe, as She currently has no temple and does not accept worshippers, you only need to go the fountain in the temple of small gods and join.

Can you give me any starting tips and info?

Your primary skills are those of the faith tree, though the fighting skill tree is important to many priests, if you want to advance at a reasonable pace.
As you advance your faith skills, you will get a number of rituals. To see what rituals you have, type 'rituals'. There is a help file for each of the rituals, simply type 'help <ritual>', e.g. 'help cure light wounds' and note you can also look up information on each of the rituals on the rituals page.
To use the rituals, you use the command 'perform', e.g. 'perform cure light wounds on me', for more help type 'syntax perform'. That is however fairly long to type so most priests use aliases for rituals, type 'help alias' for a detailed explanation on what they are, but as an example, typing 'alias cl perform cure light wounds on $*$' will set up an alias where if you type 'cl me' or ‘cl valkyr’ it will work the same as the example of performing the ritual. For more details and extra functionalities (such as standard arguments), read the helpfile.

How should I rearrange my stats?

This is not something to rush into quickly. Make sure you have read "help rearrange" and "help stats" before you attempt this, as well as asking other players from the same deity for advice. There is no such a thing as the best rearrange for a priest anymore. A rearrange for a Sekkite who wishes to go PK will strongly differ from a rearrange for a Pishite who only wishes to restore and resurrect people.

I would advice you to answer the following questions for yourself, before considering a rearrange:

Now that you have determined which stats are most important for you, you should experiment on Acim’s bonus generator with some different rearranges (what happens if I move one point from dex to int?) and pick the one you like best.

There! You have now rearranged! Normally you are stuck with this rearrange for the rest of your character’s life. If you would happen to feel the need to make a minor adjustment (one stat point at a time), you should consider visiting Ralph in OC.

 How do I advance my skills?

You can advance your skills in the worshipper area of your temple, also called the vestry. Type ‘info’, or ‘cost faith’ to see what you can advance in your primaries, what you currently have in those skills, and the experience cost to move up one level. You can also type 'cost faith to 50' for example, to see the xp cost of getting your overall faith to 50 from where you are now.
To advance, you can type 'advance faith' or you can advance the subskills by using 'advance faith.rituals.defensive.self', note that you can use the first two letters as a shortcut, ie 'advance fa.ri.de.se' or ‘advance fa.ri.de.se to 100’ or advance fa.ri.de.se by 10’.
You can also advance a little of the other skill trees, try typing 'cost fighting', 'cost other' and so on.

What should I advance?

To start with, you will need to advance overall faith (at least up to level 5, when you can advance faith.rituals, then you need 10 faith.rituals to be able to advance faith.rituals.defensive etc.) This can only be done up to level 50 however, at which point you have no choice but to advance the individual subskills shown in the list. In reality, no-one actually advances faith to 50, but you can better start advancing the subskills asap.
As to what particular skills you should advance after or even before this, my advice is to look at what rituals you can get on the gods page, or look on the rituals page to see which you would like to be able to use, then advance the subskill that the rituals you want use.
Note you should try and learn some fighting as quickly as possible, firstly the 10 levels available in the guild, then more off other players. The best practice is to take the fighting exercises in the newbie area. With any luck you can get your blunt, sharp, pierce, parry and dodge to level 5 without any cost!

How can I get money and experience, I can't even kill a cockroach!

Don't despair, these are super cockroaches, really, they are. But you must understand that the priests guild is not the most easy guild to start a character off in. We are one of the few unlucky guilds that have no primary skills capable of doing direct damage to an opponent, instead we have to rely on the non-primary fighting skills. The 10 levels of fighting you can learn in the priests guild are probably not going to be enough to start killing anything, you are going to need to learn more off another player. This is now fairly expensive to do, so you will need to earn some experience. Without fighting you can get experience by idling and performing rituals. Once you have learnt a bit of fighting (I would concentrate on either blunt or sharp, not both) then you will be able to go out and smite mightily, at this stage, the only rituals which will be a great deal of help to you will be cure light wounds, dust devil and minor shield. Now that you can get money and experience by killing things, you can go on your merry way, using this to learn more fighting to kill tougher things, or learning faith to get some of the more powerful rituals going (especially major shield).

Why does it say my god's attention is elsewhere?

Performing a ritual is an attempt to get your God to use some of His power to aid you in something. How convincing you are in your attempt to get your god to do this for you, depends on your bonus in the faith skills relevant to that particular ritual. If your god's attention is elsewhere, this means you did not have sufficient faith to convince your god to help you, and that His attention turned to other things (drinking, eating, plotting, …). You will need to increase your skills in the future in order to increase your chance to succeed your ritual.

Pray and the burial commands don't seem to do anything, what do they have to do with alignment?

Basically, they will move your alignment back into favor with your god, but how effective they are at it does depend on your faith.rituals.special bonus. Check the alignment section for more details.

What is a square stone/ivory statue/black medallion etc. and what does it do?

These are upgraded versions of the holy symbols which are used in some rituals and are readily available in the temple shops. Any ritual that requires a holy symbol to perform can be performed with one of these as a substitute. Each god has a different one, but you can use another god’s if you first consecrate it at your high altar, which can be handy so that you can wear your holy symbol by consecrating a black medallion (for Sek) instead of carrying it in your inventory. An other possible substitute, for every god, are charged prayer beads. They can replace a symbol, an amulet and a relic, all at the same time.

Sandelfon: Square stone
Sek: Black medallion
Pishe: Small ivory statue
Fish: Ritual fishing rod
Gapp: Golden thimble
Hat: Brass feather
Gufnork: Fluffy ball