Saint Cuthbert (Dungeons & Dragons)
| Game background | |
|---|---|
| Title(s) | St Cuthbert of the Cudgel |
| Home plane | Peaceable Kingdoms of Arcadia |
| Power level | Intermediate |
| Alignment | Lawful Neutral (Lawful Good) |
| Portfolio | Common Sense, Wisdom, Zeal, Honesty, Truth, Discipline |
| Domains | Destruction, Good, Law, Protection, Strength |
| Superior | None |
| Design details | |
In some versions of the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, Saint Cuthbert of the Cudgel is the combative deity of Wisdom, Dedication, and Zeal. Originally created for the World of Greyhawk campaign setting, he was later made part of the generic "core pantheon" for the game's third edition.
In 1972, when Gary Gygax began to playtest the new "Fantasy Game" that he and Dave Arneson would eventually develop into Dungeons & Dragons, using the dungeons underneath Castle Greyhawk, he did not have an organized religion. Since his campaign was largely built around the needs of lower-level characters, he didn't think specific deities were necessary, since direct interaction between a god and a low-level character was very unlikely. However, some of the players wanted a specific deity so that cleric characters could receive their powers from someone less ambiguous than "the gods". Gygax, with tongue in cheek, created two gods: St. Cuthbert—who brought non-believers around to his point of view with whacks of his cudgel —and Pholtus, whose fanatical followers refused to believe that any other gods existed.
The first published mention of Saint Cuthbert (spelled "St. Cuthburt") was in the second issue of The Dragon, in Chapter 2 of Gary Gygax's serialized short story The Gnome Cache.
Saint Cuthbert's name was inspired by the real-world Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (AD 634-687). There are subtle hints in some sources (including a short story in Dragon #100) that Saint Cuthbert of Greyhawk and Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne are intended to be one and the same, or at least that the former has knowledge of the latter.
Saint Cuthbert was first given formal game statistics for the Dungeons & Dragons game in "The Deities and Demigods of the World of Greyhawk" by Gary Gygax in Dragon #67 (1982), where his alignment then was given as lawful good (lawful neutral tendencies). Saint Cuthbert was subsequently detailed in the World of Greyhawk Fantasy Game Setting (1983), and in Greyhawk Adventures (1988).
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