Chaplain
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Chaplain
Superiors: Head of Personnel
Difficulty: Easy
Guides: No external guides.
Access: Chapel office, Morgue, Crematorium
Duties: Hold services and funerals, cremate people, counsel the crew.
Also known as the Counselor, the Chaplain's role is to provide psychological support to the crew who need it. Besides your office, the crematorium and the morgue, you have no access.
It is vital that you use the radio to call people to the Chapel, because otherwise it is less frequented than the Library.
Duties
Each chaplain is free to invent the details of their rituals.
- Funerals: You have a stock of coffins you can use for wakes and space burials (that is, launching them out of the mass driver). Some employees appreciate wakes being held for friends and loved ones. See below.
- Psychological care: This includes counselling, pharmaceutical remedies (consult the chemist), and confessions. You have a confession booth; you and the confessor enter separate rooms and switch on the radio terminals. Most crew members rarely if ever submit to psychological care of their own initiative; offer to help when someone looks troubled. Prisoners are most often in need of attention.
- Church Services: Give sermons and sing hymns. Feel free to make these up, just try to keep it relatively sane.
- Other possible activities: Investiture of new acolytes and paladins, dedication of mechs, gravitational singularities, psychical research and seances, and pilgrimages to various places.
Religions
If you decide to go the religious route, the most common NanoTrasen-approved religions (fluffwise) in the year 2556 include:
- Acolysm; the unifying of many major Earth religions.
- Technologism; the belief that robots and cyborgs are holy
- Order of the Great Lady; the belief that the human race was gifted with the knowledge and ambition appropriate by a large, dragon-like alien who we now call Lady Elzra.
However you are free to propagate any present day religions you know of, or even invent one of your own! Just make sure it doesn't go against NanoTrasen and its values, or you may well end up in the brig.
Thanatology
The Mass Driver's primary purpose is for burials-at-space; wooden caskets are provides for this purpose. Caskets function likes lockers; place the body in the casket, give a eulogy (over the radio if no one is present), move the casket into the driver and fire it.
Note that some crew members may seek to use the Mass Driver as a way to exit the station into space. This should generally not be allowed without very good explanation.
The Crematorium is used to turn bodies into ash. Remember to strip the body before cremating it.
Propitiating the Gods
The Pray command is like an adminhelp, but is IC, and should be worded deferentially (e.g. "Oh Great and Wise Pelor, please grant your humble servant...). It is advised that you only pray later in the round; the gods have a habit of ignoring early prayers.
Prayers are more likely to be answered if they are somehow thematically appropriate: wishing for an RCD for no apparent reason is unlikely to be fulfilled, but praying for, say, a divine mission or the tools to complete such are more amusing to the gods.
You have candles and crayons in your locker. Candles can be set anywhere and lit (they eventually burn down). Crayons can be used to draw runes (commonly placed in front of the podium), as well as graffiti (not really your style) and letters (allowing you to write out messages across the ground).
Do not expect any prayers to be answered. Gods are fickle beings. Nobody knows what they are going to do next in their great designs.
Artifacts
Your Book
You begin the shift selecting your god, religion name, and holy book appearance. It can also hold a small number of items in it.
Striking someone with it has a chance of either healing or causing brain damage; there is also a minute chance of it reviving a corpse. Try not to do with without good reason. Hitting someone on the head with a book is not considered normal behaviour by any means. Your bible is a regular book. Do not hit people with it.
Null Rod
An odd item that is said to repel the evil magic of Nar'Sie. Made entirely out of obsidian, the rod will reveal and dispel runes, and protect the wielder from them. Using on a brainwashed cultist has a chance of reverting them, doing nothing, or hitting them. Use it wisely.
Traitoring
The chapel is a relatively secluded part of the station, and odds are the AI won't be keeping an eye on it. You can drag around bodies, as well as both space and cremate bodies without looking suspicious. It's your job, after all.