"Where Did That Come From?" (SB)

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One of the hardest things to deal with, is suddenly introducing spirits and shamanic magic into a campaign where it has not existed previously.
==New Horizons==
Although shamans are commonplace in one part of the campaign world, their cultures are not represented in the lands where the PCs have been. If shamans exist in parts of the world that the PCs have not explored yet, they may come in contact with someone from that region for the first time. This can lead the PCs onto adventures in a brave new part of the world, perhaps spurred on by a desire to discover the nature of these "spirits" and the magical powers they are granting to the shamans. Campaign motivators that grow out of this possibility involve missionaries flocking to convert and "civilize" these distant tribes, inevitably interpreting these alien beliefs in terms of their own cosmology, and deciding that the "spirits" are a new form of evil to be combated. Merchants and conquering generals may be less zealous, but their reports are still colored by their own prejudices and assumptions.
Finally, most TSR campaign settings include either "barbaric" or "nomadic" cultures; any of these could easily support the kind of shamans presented here.
==Out from the Shadows==
It is also possible that shamans have been living among the people of the PCs' lands in secret for some time. The PCs discover a secretive solitary shaman, or cross swords with a spiritualist and her network of apprentices and bullied thieves. This option confronts the PCs with the nature and powers of the shamans first hand, and might encourage the party to investigate this "strange new magic." Priests and wizards in particular might be interested in investigating this.
=="'Why Haven't I Heard of This?"==
Of course, players of priests may be particularly perturbed by the appearance of characters whose abilities mimic their own. It stands to reason that priest-players would think their god would have informed someone in their church of the existence of these powerful spirits, whether they be benign or dangerous. There are two ways to approach this justified opinion on the part of the player, one which is a simple answer to provide during a commune.
One answer to this question may be as simple as the spirits being beneath the god's notice. The spirit world and all those in it are the products of the creations of insignificant mortals, and could never be of any real concern to the great cosmic powers. Interesting as they may be, the spirits are just interesting irrelevancies on a universal scale. (As such, the god's replies to any inquiries will be that they are figments of the imagination.)
Another, more radical approach would be for the DM to rule that the gods themselves are nothing more than spirits. Perhaps, if enough people venerate a great spirit, or deify a hero, then these beings can become powerful enough to step beyond the spirit world and create their own planes for existence, and from their, create new races and lesser gods. In this option, the gods would not have informed their priests of the existence of spirits, because when they transformed into their present state, they forgot of the existence of these lesser beings, instead coming to believe whatever mortals believed was true about them.
Either of these options can lead to several adventures, in which a PC priest either attempts to discover the truth of about the spirits—perhaps even becoming a shaman himself in the process, through the optional rules presented later in this section—or possibly even starts crusading against the shamans and their spirits in an effort to root out something so insidious that even the gods haven't noticed it yet.
=="It Was Right Under Our Noses!"==
Of course, it is also possible that the PCs have already encountered spirits and shamans, but just didn't realize it. There are several published AD&D monsters that could very well actually be spirits as they are conceived in this accessory. The following list suggests areas in and cultures from TSR's official AD&D gameworlds that might feature tribal shamans (since solitaries and spiritualists can exist just about anywhere in any gameworld), as well as monsters that, despite their classifications in the MONSTROUS COMPENDIUMS accessories, could easily be some form of spirit. After all, the variety of spirits is limited only by the creative potential of the human mind, so it stands to reason that each world would have its own unique kinds of spirits, as well as the archetypal ones presented in the next chapter of this accessory.
Creatures that might serve as "replacement spirits" are either incorporeal or spend most of their time invisible. Creatures with obscure points of origin are also quite suitable, because even if the characters have encountered the monster before, it is easily retro-fitted into being a spirit because no one knew what it was in the first place.
One thing for DMs to remember, is that the variety of spirits is limited only by the imagination of mortal minds; if a character can conceive of it, there's a good chance it exists in the spirit world. Therefore, since each character has a different outlook as determined by the environment in which he exists, the spirits that exist in the DARK SUN® setting are vastly different than those in the world of the DRAGONLANCE® Saga, or the BIRTHRIGHT™ or RAVENLOFT® worlds. With the spirit world, the sky's the limit.