You Know Who sent over a NYTimes Article on “Shadowmancer” the Christian alternative to “Harry Potter.”
The author, G. P. Taylor has just sold the rights to Universal for $6.2 million, and hopes to have Mel Gibson direct the film.
” `Shadowmancer’ isn’t an alternative to `Harry Potter,’ ” he says, adding that he was simply writing “as a Christian.”
Nothing really all that new
It’s been a long established institution in fantasy literature that there tend to be two types of magic, arcane and divine. The extremely popular Dragonlance and D&D novels by Margaret Weis and Tracey Hickman draw upon a long standing mechanic in the Dungeons and Dragons fantasy universe where there exist these two types of magics.
In the D&D universe the world of the arcane is connected to Wizards and Sorcerers. Sorcerers have an innate talent for spell casting and can do it at will while Wizards are book learners. In other words, the Wizards are quite what most people expect, scholarly and wise through all their readings. (As a matter of fact there’s a prestige class called Loremaster, which amounts to a Wizardly Librarian.)
Then there’s the other side of the equation, the clerics. Clerics cast spells by divine right through the grace of their particular god or goddess. And while the Christian god isn’t represented in the D&D universe per se, neither so are the Hindu, Islamic, or Bhuddist gods either. However, there’s nothing to stop a person from playing a cleric that does draw power from such gods. There’s even a couple books, Deities and Demigods for the core books and Faiths and Pantheons for the Forgotten Realms universe that offer different kinds of rules and set up for “real world” pantheons from Greece, India, and beyond.