My Fantasy RPG World, Feedback and Ideas appreciated

[pendrake]

Hurrah. I like Mera. But I do have some additional Khemra and Underdeep/Realm thoughts.

 

[Scalenex]

Hurrah. I like Mera. But I do have some additional Khemra and Underdeep/Realm thoughts.

Also, as a thank you for being so helpful, you can choose the order. Who do you want to see after Mera?

 

[Scalenex]

The next deity I will cover in detail is Mera. Nilen, the gnomish cobbler hero of my hopefully not so hypothetical future novel will probably be a theurgist or favored soul of Mera. If he doesn’t wield magic powers, he is going to a Mera worshiper.

It’s not likely that someone would run a Scarterran for me as a player because I’m a backseat driver and would constantly be telling the Game Master that he is doing it wrong, but if I could play my own game, I would probably want to play a Mera affiliated character.


Mera in Great Detail


Mera “the All Mother,” “Fire Tamer” “The Soft One”
Alignment: Neutral Good
Godly Nicknames: The All Mother, the Fire Tamer, the Soft one
Priests’ Nickname: Tenders of the Sacred Hearth, Short form, Tenders
Favored Weapon: Quarterstaff
Symbol: A small enclosed flame floating on the water.
Favored Magic: Healing, Protection, Purification
Divine Tool of Power: A comb forged from Turoch's liver. The comb removes poisons and corruption. A lot of Mera's devout followers have a symbolic comb in their hair at all times.
Primary Dominion: The Sea
Primary Gift to Mortals: Control over fire
Synopsis: Mera loves all living beings and abhors violence. She provides healing and succor to those who need it when she can. She promotes strong close-knit communities as the best way to provide for the basic welfare of everyone. She promotes tolerance between all people, regardless of their differences. She manages the sea and helps mortals use it safely and derive sustenance from it. She is also said to have taught mortals to tame fire, providing the hearths for family’s to use a physical center to their home lives.
Priests and Primary Followers: She is the most commonly worshiped deity by the peasant classes with a very large number of fairly modest temples. Most temples tend to identify themselves as Terrawan or Walchese. Two sects with different broad religious interpretations of Mera’s will. The two groups usually get along but they rely a lot of ritualized formalities. New priests are recruited primarily from their lower class flocks, usually offered into the priesthood’s service as young children.
Common Times to Invoke her Name: Mera is commonly prayed to before leaving on a sea voyage. Mera is often prayed to for recovery from injury or illness. She is also prayed to for familial harmony, both in day-to-day and during major milestones likes births and weddings.
Basic Tenets: -Cherish your family and community.
-Recognize that all beings are part of a greater community.
-Protect those who need it.
-Be generous to all, especially those in great need.
-Water is essential to all life, ensure that is used well.

Mera’s Portfolio includes but is not limited to: Sea travel, fishing, purification, drinking water, protection, community, peace, medicine, family, hearth fires, inter-group cooperation, gnomes, foe to the undead



Godly Rivals

Most Nine define their relationship to the other deities based on what they did during the Divine Rebellion against Turoch. Mera is no exception. During the Divine Rebellion she put almost all of her efforts to shielding as many souls as possible from the fighting. These souls would later be what the Nine would draw on to repopulate Scarterra with new mortals later.

Mera is a very compassionate entity. When another deity is helping make mortals’ lives better, Mera is on their side. When the other deities are spreading misery and pain, Mera is opposed to them. Mera has never stopped trying to protect mortals. She is pained by the loss of single life, the loss of a single soul. It is nearly impossible for Mera to willingly sacrifice one mortal to save a hundred.

Hallisan and Zarthus are both romantic rivals for Mera’s affections. Mera shares a value of wanting to help good people in common with both Hallisan and Zarthus, but she finds their zealousness to punish evil doers distasteful. Hallisan and Zarthus mortal minions often protect Mera’s mortal minions without being asked, and Mera finds this more than a little patronizing.

Korus and Mera usually get along. Like most of the goddesses, Mera secretly pines for Korus, but Korus doesn’t like her that way, at least not often. It is rumored that Mera is Korus’ favorite goddess, if Korus is able to show favoritism at all. The biggest point of contention with him is that nature is often harsh and unforgiving, and so is Korus. Mera prefers a more pastoral peaceful wilderness and Korus does not always provide this.

Khemra and Mera get along fairly well. Mera thought the Compact gave the Evil gods too much leeway, and that is the main point of contention between them. If evil succeeds when good people do nothing, Mera views Khemra as a divine embodiment of a good person doing nothing. Mera will probably not admit it, but she secretly appreciates the stability that Khemra strives for. Stability usually means safety and peace…usually.

Mera is somewhat envious of Nami’s free spirited nature and appreciates the freedom and beauty she embodies. Much like Korus, Nami has a very harsh side to her personality as well. Nami sometimes is pretty careless about spreading misery and pain unintentionally both through her chaotic followers and through random shifts in inclement weather.

Mera may value stability, but Phidas’ version of stability is not something Mera appreciates. She finds his brand of order horrifying. She believes the greed and covetousness Phidas encourages among mortals to be a cause of much suffering.

It’s a very close race to see whether Mera dislikes Maylar more or dislikes Greymoria. Greymoria certainly loathes Mera. In terms of sheer numbers, Mera has the most mortal worshippers and Greymoria has the fewest. Greymoria is bitter and jealous and lashes out at Mera’s followers at every opportunity. Whereas Greymoria wants to thwart Mera, Maylar’s minions probably kill more of Mera’s followers than Greymoria’s. Maylar believes that the strong should dominate or destroy the weak and Maylar believes Mera’s followers are very weak.


Mera Spirits

I covered spirits in broad strokes on page 12. Pendrake wrote some good ideas for Mera spirits on page 12.

Mera deploys spirits to the material plane quite often. She more active spirit minions than most.

Mera most commonly likes deploying spirits of healing, but she also deploys a lot of guardians, assisting spirits. She has very few punishment or questing spirits.

When it comes to spirits, Mera seems to prefer quantity over quality. Mera has small number very powerful and versatile spirits at her command but most Mera spirits are very one dimensional entities with a single skill set. Most healing spirits cannot fight well. Most soldier spirits cannot heal.

Many of Mera’s spirit minions are strikingly handsome or beautiful but many are very unassuming. A lot of Mera’s minions are stealthy. Some of Mera’s healing spirits are capable of becoming invisible at will. The people cured have no idea why they get better. These spirits tend to hang around Mera’s sacred pools. A few even swim around Mera’s Lake. Some mortals believe drinking sacred water heals illnesses but it’s not the water, its spirits living in or near it.

Two I concepts I came up with for common Mera’s spirits are Fisherman’s Friends and Blue Healer (the latter is a perhaps a lousy pun). Fisherman’s Friends usually take the form of sea gulls. Hey can control animals to a limited extant and summon fish towards fishermen who pray to Mera often. Blue Healers are handsome/beautiful blue men/women that possess great healing power and happen to have blue skin.

Mera’s spirits are generally kind compassionate individuals and they can form personal bonds with mortals easy. Many villages have a local spirit guardian or healer that stays with them through generations. While it’s not common in general for spirits and mortals to conceive half-spirit children, Mera probably claims more half-spirit grandchildren than any other deity. It’s common that half-spirit mortals have blueish skin.

There are not many Tenders who advanced Spirit Magic, but a few exist, especially among the Firebringers and Scaraquan Mera worshipers. The default summoning creatures are dove or bats for air, dogs for land, and sea turtles for swimming minions.


Mera and Geo-Politics

Among the human nations, Mera is usually the most beloved of all the Nine. Mera’s Tenders and spirits commonly provide healing, protection, food, warmth, and sage advice without asking anything in return.

The Tenders rarely interfere with princes and potentates as long as those in power give the Tenders freedom of movement to help people as they see fit. Most human rulers are all too happy to give them this freedom of movement and make it a point to praise the priesthood of Mera publicly to show off in front of their subjects.

A relatively new semi-heretical offshoot of the Tenders known as the Paladins is extremely political. They have created theocratic police states for the people’s protection in very dangerous areas. Paladin sympathizers are supposedly plotting coups around the world and this has caused more paranoid rulers to give Tenders in general less leeway than before.


Gnomes often assimilate the religious values of their non-gnome neighbors, but when left to their own devices, most gnomes are very pro-Mera. Most gnomes believe Mera created gnomes to be her ambassadors on Scarterra. Gnomes are disproportionately highly represented in Mera’s priesthood.


Mera is respected by the dwarves of Meckelorn and Stahlheim, but Mera’s priesthood is fairly small here. Mondert is much different, they are island nation that depends on fishing and they value family and community highly. Mera is the state patron of Mondert and the Tenders are very influential there with roughly as many dwarf Tenders as human Tenders.


Mera’s priesthood in the Elven Empire is small but growing. As the Elven Empire assimilates more values from their human subjects, Mera worship is becoming more fashionable among the elves. Among the Wood Elves, Mera has fewer temples and clergy than Korus and Zarthus, but more than every other deity there.

Very few nations and tribes are overtly hostile to Mera. The largest nation opposed to Mera is Kahdisteria, the home of the Dark Elves and the only nation who claims Greymoria as their state patron. Mera worship is actively squashed wherever it is found, especially among the slave classes. That has done little to stop underground Mera cults among the slaves though. Tenders are rarely revolutionary sorts, but Tenders are the core of the resistance movement in Kahdisteria.


Mera has less influence in uncivilized lands than among civilized lands, but she is far from a bit player sitting firmly in the middle of the pack among the Nine. She has more followers among the monstrous races and barbarian tribes than Hallisan, Khemra, and Phidas.


Mera Creatures

In a sense Mera sees every mortal as her child. She has not created many vanity races because she does not want to play favorites. So far the only race I have created by Mera is the gnomes. Mera intended gnomes to be ambassadors of peace between dwarves and elves, in fact between all mortal races. Gnomes have a bonus on most social rolls because Mera gave them silver tongues to be diplomats. Gnomes are small because Mera thought this would make them non-threatening and thus better diplomats. Gnomes have no homeland because Mera wanted gnomes to consider everywhere their home.

I’m not sure whether I want Merfolk to be created by Mera or if I want them to be created by Mera, Greymoria, and Korus working together. Mera has adopted many groups beyond humans and demi-humans. Mera’s adopted children include the Kalazotz, brute giants, the rare benign goblin tribes, many kobold tribes, cyclopes, and the list is growing.

I haven’t figured out the specifics yet, but I’m going to make whales and dolphins at least loosely affiliated with Mera. At the very least she is going to have some spirit minions that take the form of whales and dolphins. I may or may not also include cetaceans that have full sapience.

I am heavily making Myconids a Mera associated race. Their general pacifistic stance and high focus on family’s makes them a good fit. I’m not sure whether I want to make Myconids a race Mera helped create or merely a race Mera adopted. They could be a joint Korus-Mera creation. Korus certainly made enough joint creations with Greymoria. I could add “fungi” to Mera’s portfolio. I’m open to other suggestions.


Mera's Clergy

Not all priests and priestesses are divine-spell casters. Not all divine spell-casters are priests.

On Scarterra, Mera has more priests and theurgists than any other deity, narrowly crowding out Hallisan. A few exceptional individuals exist, but Mera’s priesthood seems to have a quantity over quality approach to theurgists. A great many Tenders only gain a few dots of healing magic and never expand beyond this.

Most of Mera’s non-spellcasting priests and priestesses dedicate themselves to the healing arts. Most have at least a few dots of Medicine and Hearth Wisdom. Even if they are not affiliated with Mera directly, most of the best physicians and herbalists were at least trained by a Tender.

To become a theurgist, a mortal needs strong piety, a high Willpower, and a strong drive to use their mundane skills in a passionate matter. About 80% of theurgists emerge as the result of priest sponsored training and about 20% are self-taught as it were (and most priesthoods make special accommodations to absorb self-taught theurgists into their ranks). Among Mera’s faithful, roughly 40% of the theurgists are self-taught, far more than any other deity. No one is 100% sure why this is, but the common theory is that Mera is beloved by the people, circumstances create homegrown theurgists.

With a few minor exceptions, Mera’s priesthood does not seek to actively recruit divine bards, but they are more than happy to train new recruits as divine bards if they show a natural musical aptitude. A disproportionately high number of Mera’s divine bards are self-taught theurgists.

Mera is in the middle of the pack when it comes to favored souls. She has far fewer favored souls than Mera, Nami, and Zarthus. She has far more favored souls than Phidas, Khemra, and Hallisan. Mera’s favored souls are nicknamed “Blessed Ones.” A commonality in the background of Blessed Ones is they often have near idyllic childhoods in un-idyllic areas. In other words, they usually come from loving families that happen to live in areas plagued by war or disease which usually gives them a drive to help the less fortunate.

Mera’s Theurgists outnumber the Blessed Ones approximately three-to-one. Blessed Ones souls are not normally given any special status compared to theurgists. Theurgists and favored souls are supposed to treat each other as equals. Theurgists and favored souls do not interact very much though. Mera tends to empower favored souls in areas where she has few theurgists. She wants to spread her benevolence as far and wide as possible. A majority of Mera’s Blessed Ones are found among monstrous races and barbarian tribes. A lot of them show up among Kahdisteria’s slave population.


Factions, Schisms, and Heresies

The Tenders do not like to use the term “schism” but the priesthood of Mera has a major schism between the Terrawans and Walchese. If you want to split hairs it’s more of a denominational split than a schismatic split. The vast majority of human and gnome dominated Mera temples either follow the philosophy of Terrawa or Walcha, not both.

There are so many conflicting legends about these two great religious icons that no one knows for sure if Terrawa and Walcha were humans, gnomes, elves, dragons, spirits or something else. Both Terrawans and Walchese claim their legendary founder predates the other one. Relations between priests of these two group are polite but somewhat distant.

Not every Tender follows the teachings of Terrawa or Walcha. The Tenders of Mondert maintain their own tradition. The secret Mera cults in East Colassia maintain their own traditions and this is bleeding over into the Mera temples of the Colassian Confederacy. Mera worshipers who are not humans or demihumans usually maintain their own traditions. Most Blessed Ones choose not to declare themselves for an existing Tender tradition.

Terrawans
Terrawans believe that Tenders should integrate with their communities as much as possible. They are usually encouraged, sometimes virtually required, to marry and have children. Terrawan clerics often work multiple jobs often serving as the village cobbler, blacksmith, or any number of mundane jobs in addition to their priestly duties and traditional healing duties. Most Terrawan temples maintain extensive gardens and a few are able to feed their staffs entirely on their own produce. Terrawan temples tend to be very modest in size and artistry. Slightly more than half of the Terrawans are inducted into the order as young adults as opposed to inducted as children.

Many services are held in or near the homes of the congregation instead of in their temples especially when the nature of the service is very personal like a wedding, baptism, or funeral. Non-spell casting clerics are fairly common. Rank is based largely on seniority, not raw power. In some ways, Terrawans prefer their temples are run by non-spellcasters. Terrawans tend to travel often both so as to be able to administer to as many people as possible and because their temples tend to be located in rural areas with widely dispersed congregations.


Walchese
Walchese believe that Tenders serves their community best by making themselves examples of piety to inspire their congregations. Most Walchese take a variety of vows that set them apart from their congregation, such as vows of silence, celibacy, chastity, or poverty. Most Walchese Tenders do not pursue mundane occupations and most temples rely on donations to feed their staff. Most Walchese temples are large and ornate. Most Walchese priests and priestesses began their training as children.

Many temples have nearby or attached inns or hospitals. Services are nearly always performed at the temples and most services are presided over by a spell-casting cleric. Paradoxically the non-spellcasting clergy are often held up as greater exemplars of Mera’s faith but despite being heaped with praise, they mainly serve in supporting roles and almost never lead. Walchese tend to wait for others to come to them in the temple than mingle with the populace. Walchese temples are more likely to be found in larger towns or cities or along major trade routes.

Walchese are slightly more likely to play politics than Terrawans. It’s not common to see Walchese Tenders having audiences with the king or queen, but they actively try to maintain good relations with the local knights, barons and counts.


Firebringers
The Firebringers claim that their faction predates the schism between the Walchese and the Terrawans. The Firebringers draw roughly as many recruits from both traditions.

Most Tenders rarely venture far from their temples, but Firebringers are an exception. They are primarily made up of adventurers. They are also far more militant than the average Tender, willing to take up arms to defend the innocent when need be though they are expected to seek peaceful solutions before resorting to violence.

The Firebringers are the main communication artery between distant Mera temples and shrines. They are also sometimes called on by outside parties to serve as mediators in disputes as long as neither side of the dispute has a grudge against Mera.


The Pure Ones
The Pure Ones are a very old radical offshoot from the Walchese that has been on a slow decline for well over a century. They accept Terrawans into their ranks, but very few Terrawans volunteer. They take Mera’s traditional pacifist ideals to the greatest extreme. They are vegans who take pains to avoid stepping on insects and never resort to violence under any circumstances.

Maylar’s worshipers have decided it is good sport to kill the Pure Ones. Greymoria worshipers have decided it is even more enjoyable to capture innocent peasants and torture them to death while the Pure Ones nearby watch helplessly and dare the Pure Ones to break their vows.

Very few Pure One temples remain. The few that due has a heavily armed detachment of Hallisan or Zarthus worshipers stationed nearby to guard them. Something the Pure Ones certainly did not ask for. The Pure Ones are not total liabilities to the peasants under their care. Pure One theurgists are very powerful healers and diviners. Despite their small numbers, the Pure Ones claim more Oracles than any other Mera faction.


The Wayfarers
The Wayfarers are a group that splintered off of the Terrawans but they accept Walchese members. The Wayfarers is a mostly informal designation referring to any Tenders who focus on protecting waterways. They maintain lighthouses, operate trading posts along major river ways and even provide theurgists and holy warriors on civilian vessels to protect against pirates or sea monsters. The newest branch of the Wayfarers maintains temples catering to travelers built near oases along important desert trade routes.

Many Wayfarers are also Firebringers.


The Paladins
The Paladins are a recent offshoot of the Walchese but they are drawing a small but increasing number of recruits from the Terrawans. Areas with Paladin temples are almost entirely run by Mera’s clerics. They collect all the regions output of food and any other products and then distribute them the populace as needed. They control the mills, ration out supplies, arrange marriages, serve as the police, lead the soldiers should an external threat arise and basically control all aspects of their congregation’s lives, all in the name of their protection and welfare. Other Tenders look askance on their heavy handed and patronizing attitude of the Paladins, but the Paladins claim that their congregations are among the safest and most prosperous people in the world.

The Paladins control a lot of land in East Colassia, running the country that I’m calling Meraland until I come up with a less literal name. They have a small holding in Penarchia. I might give the Paladins one of the Border Baronies in West Colassia. They are looking to expand wherever they can.

Some Paladins are also Wayfarers or Firebringers, but not many.


The Unificationists
Mera temples are united by shared traditions and mutual respect but they do not have a wide spanning hierarchy. The Unificationists want to change that and establish a global Mera network. Most Unificationists are Walchese and over half of them endorse Walchese practices becoming the official doctrine of all or at least most Tenders.

Unifying Mera’s temples under a single banner does not seem like a realistic goal at this time. About a third of Unificationists are Paladins and about third of Unificationists believe Paladins should be branded as heretics.


Mera Heretics
Some Tenders furtively whisper that the Paladins should be branded heretics. As of yet, there is no major conflict between the Paladins and the rest of the Tenders. Most Tenders will not admit that the Walchese and Terrawan split constitutes a major schism. It’s almost impossible for a Tender to branded a heretic. The only real way to get branded a heretic is for a Tender to endorse killing other Tenders. This is rare but it’s not unheard of as both the Terrawans and Walchese have a hardcore fringe that thinks the other group is wrong. A few furtively whisper that the Paladins should be considered heretics as their methods gradually become more extreme.

A Firebringer who takes his mandate to battle evil literally and regularly sheds the blood of evil doers, proactively hunting down creatures such as orcs and goblins is probably not going to be warmly welcomed in Mera Tenders but the other Tenders are not going to brand the violent Firebringer a heretic.

There are many Tenders who are not associated with any temple or any faction, choosing to operate as lone agents, but these are not heretics either.

Usually Terrawans and Walchese bend over backwards to accommodate visitors from the other faction. There are a few hardliners that refuse to associate with the other group. The few Tenders who are actually earn the heretic label are radical Terrawans and Walchese that are so convinced that their faction is correct that they endorse converting the other faction to the “True Way of Mera” by force.


Material Needs

Tenders very rarely charge for their priestly, magical or medicinal services. They provide their services freely, but it is common knowledge that the Tenders rely almost exclusively on donations. Most of these donations come from relatively poor people, a constant stream of copper pieces, foodstuffs, firewood, clothing and whatever else the little people can spare funnels its way towards Mera temples.

If the local ruler wants to shore up his reputation with the lower classes, he or she will publicly donate sums of money to the Tenders, but even if the local rulers are generous, most of the Tenders’ resources come from the masses. In general the Walchese are better at weaseling donations out of rich people than the Terrawans.

Most Mera temples are fairly small and modest, but they are very numerous. The Terrawans tend to favor lots of little temples and the Walchese tend to favor a smaller number of somewhat larger temples.

Most Mera temples maintain a small garden or orchard. A few larger temples have substantial land bequeathed to them by the ruling elites and most of this land is put towards growing food and medicinal herbs. Mera based bishoprics are fairly numerous, at least compared to bishoprics for the rest of the Nine, but Mera bishoprics are fairly small as a rule, rarely exceeding the size and status of a barony or knightly estate.

Networks between disparate Mera temples tend to be fairly informal. Walchese tend to be slightly more formal with smaller temples nominally subordinate to larger temples, usually along national lines. Swynfaredia, the Elven Empire, and Kantoc all are heavily Walchese dominated lands and they all have a large central temple managing smaller satellite temples which manage smaller satellite temples. This is the closest thing the Tenders have to an expansive hierarchy but these networks have very little power outside the borders of their respective nations.


Priestly Ranks

Terrawan
Acolyte: Member still undergoing training.
Brother/Sister: Full priest or priestess.
Father/Mother: Priest or priestess worthy of respect
Grandfather/Grandmother: Priest or priestess worthy of great respect.

Cousin: Lay person among the community who regularly volunteers at the temples and assists the priesthood.
Uncle/Aunt: Non priest among the community who regularly volunteers at the temples and assists the priesthood and also possesses special skills (including magic) and/or renowned wisdom.

Errant: This attached to other titles, Errant Brother, Errant Aunt, etc. Errant Tenders are those who regularly travel.


Walchese (including Paladins and Pure Ones)
Spark: Member still undergoing training.
Ember: Full priest or priestess.
Flame: High ranking priest or priestess
Blaze: Extremely renowned priest or priestess
Incandescent: This rank only exists in theory. In theory an Incandescent would hold jurisdiction over all Walchese temples worldwide.

Acolyte: Lay person among the community who regularly volunteers at the temples and assists the priesthood.


Firebringers
Initiate: Perspective member of the order
Protector: Fully accepted member of the order
Revered Protector: honored veteran of the order
Grand Protector: legendary veteran of the order

Adjunct Protector: Honored friend of a Fire Bringer. In most cases this means the adventuring buddies of a Firebringer.
Adjunct: Non-warriors outside the Tenders who regularly provide aid to Fire Bringers.

Wayfarers (titles are used mostly informally)
Thirsty: Perspective member
Damp: Fairly new member of the order
Wet: Veteran member of the order
Drenched: Renown ranking member of the order

Example: “The convoy is going to be traveling through an area known to have pirates. We are sending three Wets and seven Damps to provide support. If we make a good impression on the crew we might pick up a few Thirsties.”


When different factions of Tender’s interact, they will usually take great pains to address the foreign factions by the other faction’s titles.


Scaraqua

Scaraquans consider Mera as one of the three Sisters of the Sea or the three Daughters of the Sea depending on how you translate “Seeyirah” from Scaraquan Common into English. Along with Korus and Greymoria, Mera is considered one of the preeminent deities of the sea. Outside the Three Seeyrah, the other deities are considered sidekicks, helpers, or minor annoyances to the Three Sisters.

Sea Mera is a little bit more aggressive and proactive than Land Mera, but she still retains her benevolent nature. She wants to spread community, peace, and joy throughout the waters. Mera is generally in favor of bringing Scarterrans and Scaraquans closer together through trade and fellowship.

Mera is associated commonly with sea mammals: whales, dolphins, seals, among others. She is also associated with sea turtles and salmon, sea creatures that lay their eggs in Scarterra. The list is non-exhaustive. A wide variety of sea creatures are likely to be associated with Mera. As far as Scarterrans know, all sea creatures are associated with Mera.

Mera is the mostly popular deity among most merfolk but most merfolk hedge their bets and are staunch polytheists. Mera is not particularly popular among Karakhai or Crab People but these groups are rarely hostile to Mera. Cephalopod people are frequently hostile to Mera, but they try to be subtle about it.


Hollow Earth

Mera is probably a bit player in Hollow Earth. She is the goddess of fungi, big whoop. As a goddess of drinking water and a goddess of the hearth, Mera has some dominion over underground heat and springs, but that’s something most subterranean people take for granted.

Mera is probably going to the main divine patron of the Myconids.




Anyway, hope you found this worth reading. I’m open to suggestions and feedback on fleshing out Mera and her followers further. I will answer any Mera based questions if you feel I left something out.


And I’m interesting in reading your thoughts about Khemra or any other past topic on this thread.

 

[Paradoxical Pacifism]

If there is interest, I will cover all nine of the Nine, one deity at a time and see what suggestions and comments you guys have. If there is not much interest in me doing this. I will stop.

I would like to see more. They are very much intriguing.

 

[Scalenex]

I would like to see more. They are very much intriguing.

Well okay, here is Nami.

Fun fact, in my early drafts, Nami went through a couple name changes. The rest of the Nine I pegged down names very quickly. For a long time, her name was going to by Phyra (based on her being something of a pyromaniac), but that was too similar to Phidas, so even I was getting confused. That and the more I developed the Nami, the less important setting things on fire became for her.

Nami is a based on a bad pun on tsunami. Her full name is Sue Nami.

I live in the Midwest region of the United States where weather changes on a dime and seasonal trends in weather are mere suggestions. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to make my weather deity male or female, but I knew I wanted to make my weather deity Chaotic Neutral.


Nami in Great Detail


Nami “The Inspired One” “The Passionate One” “The Storm Maker”
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral
Priests’ Nickname: Rovers on the Wind, Short form, Rovers.
Favored Weapon: Morningstar
Common Symbol: Cloud that’s half stormy and half white and fluffy, optional rainbow and lightning bolt. Any weather symbol can be a Nami symbol.
Favored Magic: Divination, Purification, Weather
Divine Tool of Power: Nami wove a bag out of Turoch’s hairs, out of which she pulls storms and a number of things you wouldn’t expect out of a fiber bag. The prototype of all Bags of Holding.
Primary Dominion: Weather
Primary Gift to Mortals: Free will
Synopsis: Nami wants mortals to embrace their passions and embrace change. She charges her followers to expose hypocrisies whenever possible. She determines all weather altering it to fit her moods. She is believed to have a hand in any unusual events even those not tied to the weather as she wants to see how people (and her siblings) well react.
Priests and Primary Followers: Very few mortals don’t worship Nami, but it’s fairly rare for Nami to be worshipped primarily. A few nomadic groups and scoundrel types sometimes worship her primarily. With very broad but not very deep worship, Nami’s priests are usually nomadic. Most cultures have festivals and holy days to Nami at different times of the year and it’s not uncommon for Nami’s priests to move on circuits specializing in presiding over those rituals and festivities. Others travel about doing Nami’s will in a less predictable fashion. Most temples are geared more around providing rest areas and bases for traveling priests than to administering flocks. Priests are allowed to recruit whomever they want as apprentices and train them pretty much as they see fit.
Common Times to Invoke her Name: Nami is most frequently praised before begin a revel. She is sometimes asked or thanked for favorable weather but the common belief is that she is largely un-swayed by prayers in that regard and does whatever she feels like most of the time.
Basic Tenets: -Embrace you passions, do not restrain them.
-Be like the weather: Don’t be predictable but don’t be completely random either.
-Embrace change in all its forms.
-Prevent others from taking themselves too seriously and expose the lies and hypocrisies they try to hide behind.


Nami’s Portfolio includes but is not limited to: Weather, freedom, prophecy, creativity, madness, arson, theft, travel, merriment, chaos, unorthodox wisdom, warlocks, humor, orcs


Nami the Portfolio Thief: Nami challenges the monopoly of many of her divine siblings. She moonlights as a foe to the undead, music patron, magic goddess, nature goddess despite the fact that these things are officially the domain of someone else. At some point she has dabbled in nearly everything that another deity considers their exclusive territory.



Godly Rivals

In some ways I view Nami as a less malicious version of Heath Ledger’s Joker. “It's the schemers that put you where you are. You were a schemer, you had plans, and, uh, look where that got you. I just did what I do best. I took your little plan, and I turned it on itself.”

The difference is Nami normally stops short of killing or maiming the schemers. She generally wants to embarrass and humiliate the schemers. She might believe that complex schemes are bad for people in general but admittedly she likes to cause disruptions because she is bored.

Nami’s basic modus operandi is to sit quietly for a long time, then do something completely unexpected to shake up the status quo. When the Ten drew up the Divine Compact to establish how the Nine would overthrow Turoch and then rule the world that survived afterwards the Compact included an intricate battle plan to defeat Turoch down to the smallest detail. Nami ignored this plan completely. When the Traitor tried to warn Turoch of the Divine Rebellion, all the Traitor’s information looked fake, so Turoch shook off the Traitor’s warnings until it was too late. In short, she thwarted the Traitor’s scheme by thwarting Khemra’s battle plan.

Nami said this was all according to her plan, but few believe her.

After the Divine Rebellion was over and Turoch’s corpse was picked apart for trophies by the Nine, Nami disrupted the status quo again. Originally each of the nine had exactly one ninth of all worship from all mortals. Nami was the first of the Nine to impart a Capital “G” Gift upon the mortals. She bestowed mortals with free will and this let mortals worship as they choose or not. This prompted the rest of the Nine to bestow Gifts to mortal kind to win favor. Some of the Nine gained worshipers and some lost worshipers. Nami actually walked away with fewer worshipers than she started with, but this didn’t seem to bother her.

Sometimes she and her followers opt not to interfere when someone is trying a hair brained scheme but they are standing by to laugh at it when it fails. The rest of the Nine don’t always agree with her on this, but Nami sees herself as more of a frenemy to her rivals than as true mortal foe.


Nami gets along well with Zarthus and Maylar. Both of these gods generally want simple short term things and Nami can get behind this. As much as Nami and her followers claim to be individualists, they are susceptible to being influenced by those around them. When Nami and Zarthus are getting along or when Nami’s Rovers are working with Zarthus’ Lanterns, Nami’s minions seem to become a lot more benevolent. When Nami and Maylar are getting along or when Nami’s Rovers are working with Maylar’s Testers, Nami’s minions seem to become a lot more malevolent.

Admittedly, Korus’ management of nature itself requires a lot of planning and work. Nami does not normally interfere with Korus’ plans and schemes. Korus is creative and adaptable and Nami respects him for that.

Nami believe Mera misses the forest for the trees and becomes overly focused on saving one person or small group instead of managing larger issues. Nami doesn’t poke a stick at Mera very often, but she doesn’t really respect her sister much.

Nami views Greymoria’s petty vindictive streak as childish for a deity of Creation but Nami finds the spillover effect of Greymoria’s godly tantrums amusing. She doesn’t poke a stick at Greymoria very often, but she is usually quick to mock her failures.

Nami is mostly a thorn in the side to the three Lawful deities. She finds Hallisan the most tolerable. At the very least he is the least hypocritical one. When the Compact was drafted, the Void did not exist. When the Void sprang into being the Nine had to hastily create the Barrier and Phidas was assigned to shore up the Barrier. Originally Phidas was supposed to have dominion over the minerals of the Earth. This got passed to Hallisan. Originally Hallisan was going to regulate the seasons but by accident the Void sort of imposes seasons. Sometimes when Nami creates unseasonal weather this is said to mocking Hallisan but after thousands of years of this, Hallisan doesn’t care as much as he did before.

Phidas and Phidas’ Masks love to explain why Phidas deserves more than a ninth of all worship because of how much he suffered. Phidas’ schemes are mostly to get what he thinks he is due. The rest of the Nine proverbially roll their eyes at this, but Nami and her followers go further. “You think you deserve a bigger share? Just admit you want everything, that’s more honest.” Nami and her Rovers love to unmask the schemes of the Masks.

Nami claims to bear Khemra no ill will, but she finds it inexcusable that Khemra still wants to reinstate the Divine Compact in full. Even Phidas and Hallisan have acknowledged that the world has changed too much for it to apply now.


Nami Spirits

Nami has more active spirit minions than most of the Nine. She has many very powerful spirits and many very weak spirits with everything in between. Nami loves variety. She has a wide variety of types of spirits at her command. Almost of every type can be found, guardian spirits, questing spirit, little gods, healing spirits, muses, etc. Nami even has a tiny number of Faustian spirits. She is the only deity besides Greymoria to have any.

Nami’s most common spirit seen are nature spirits embodying specific types of weather such as snow spirits, rain spirits, tornado spirits, etc. Many weather spirits have a secondary power set thematically tied to their weather. A rainbow spirit might also be a muse or a healing spirit. A tornado spirit is probably also a soldier spirit. Most Nami spirits have an element of a trickster's personality to them.

D&D has Slaad as the standard extraplanar minions of Limbo, the Chaotic Neutral plane. I’m not sure if the Slaad’s typical behavior truly qualifies as being representative of the Chaotic Neutral alignment. Even if they are Chaotic Neutral, Slaad are a bad fit for Nami.

For spirit summoners, Nami’s default air creature is a zephyr because of their folklore associations with winds. Nami’s default land creature is a mongoose because I like mongooses. I have not come up with what Nami’s default sea creature spirit is going to be. Of all the Nine, Nami is the only deity I have not figured out where she fits into Scaraqua. Maybe Nami is associated with flying fish?


Nami and Geo-Politics

Nami worship is broad but not very deep. Not a single civilized land has Nami as their state patron, but most civilized people like to worship, at least on Nami’s holy days. Nami’s holidays are generally lots of fun and few people want to miss the parties. Most mortals do not give Nami a second thought outside her holidays.

Nami’s core followers are usually nomadic. That’s why they are nicknamed Rovers because they rove. A few barbarian tribes have Nami as their patron deity. Even if they don’t view Nami as their preeminent deity, most barbarian tribes respect Nami as a secondary or tertiary patroness of the tribe. In civilized lands, Nami worship is common among traveling performs, soldiers of fortune, traveling peddlers and other people that are on the move a lot.

Unlike most of the rest of the Nine, Nami has zero standardized holidays worldwide. Most nations have between one and three Nami festivals every year and most of this festivals are limited to one nation. One nation might have their primary Nami festival in the Winter while the nation bordering them on might have their primary Nami festival in the Spring. A lot of Nami’s priests and priesthoods are circuit preachers traveling from nation to nation making sure they arrive in time for the major Nami festivals. A few well-traveled Rovers could celebrate more than a dozen major Nami festivals every year. Most circuit priests manage five or six Nami festivals a year.

In civilized lands, outside the annual Nami festivals, Rovers are often viewed as a nuisance or a menace. Sometimes Rovers sew chaos and disorder just for fun. Rovers often swing between groups of Maylar’s Testers and groups of Zarthus Lanterns, both groups that are often hostile to the prince of the realm. When their ranks are swelled with the numbers and passion of the Rovers, the Testers and Lanterns become a lot more problematic to the defenders of the status quo.

Nami's followers hate being told what they can or cannot do. If an area gets a reputation for being oppressive against Rovers, this will usually only attract more belligerent Rovers to the area. Even King Drosst, probably the most ironfisted ruler in Scarterra, usually views it's easier to just ignore upstart Rovers until they get bored and move on. As long as the Rovers don't get too deep in bed with the Testers or Lanterns, Drosst is likely to give them a free pass.

The only nation that really tries to keep Nami on a short leash is the Elven Empire, and this is a questionable decision. Rather than have an annual Nami festival, traditionally the Elven Empire only officially condoned a Nami festival once every nine years. The Elven Empire used to control a third of Scarterra's land mass but has lost most of their colonies one by one. The Rovers never started any of these secession movements, but once started every secession movement has had Rovers aiding them.

The current Empress is the most reform minded elf to ever sit on the Imperial Throne. Among her other reforms, she tried to reinstate an annual Nami festival, but most of her vassals and governors opposed this, so she has made Nami festivals a once in three year festival. Much to the Empresses' credit, the Rovers have rolled back their rebellious activities within the Empire considerably as a thank you.


Nami Creatures

Nami is not nearly as prolific at creating new races as Greymoria, but she is certainly not opposed to new races. In terms of numbers and influence, Nami's greatest success was orcs, a race she created in collaboration with Maylar.

I might rewrite Satyrs to make them Fae Creatures instead of mortals, but I really like my Satyr creation myth.

There are lots of variation in the origin stories the Satyrs tells but they tend to follow this pattern: During the Second Age, a stodgy elven queen (or king or high priest or some other authority figure) in a stodgy elven nation (whose ruins are not far from this very forest!) banned dancing, alcohol, most music and generally was anti-fun.

A cult of Nami moved in to try to teach the subjects of said nation how to have fun. It worked out well, until the queen’s enforcers arrested them all. The queen was a powerful wizard (or had minions who were powerful wizards depending on the storyteller). She told the Nami cultists “If you will behave like animals, animals you shall be” and polymorphed them all into goats.

Nami took pity on her followers and offered to turn them back into the elves, but they insisted on carrying a mark of their transformation as a band of honor. Thus, the first satyrs were created from elves.


I haven’t come up with any other races of Nami creatures yet. I could create a good aligned Nami race that she made in collaboration with Zarthus or a nature aligned Nami race that she made in collaboration with Korus. Centaurs could qualify for either Zarthus-Nami or Korus-Nami race. Or I could make centaurs the product triumvirate. I don’t have to be a slave to my own fluff, but in my mythology most of the powerful races have multiple godly creators (humans, elves, and dragons are the only races created by all nine of the Nine). If the centaurs have three divine patrons, they would be very powerful and influential, at least on par with dwarves and gnomes. I mostly pictured Centaurs as a low population, low influence sidekick race to the Wood Elves.


I haven’t given Nami many adopted children. You might be able to find an oddball goblin or kobold tribe that happens to view Nami as their primary patron, but Nami has yet to convert one of Greymoria’s cast-off races en masse like others have done.

Most kenku/Tengu/Tengku are not particularly religious. However, when the crowfolk do take up the cloth, they frequently take up the cause of Nami. Tengku like freedom and they like travel, so they often join the Rovers. The other deity the Tengku often turn to for their spiritual needs is Phidas (since both Tengku and Phidas love gold). While Nami and Phidas do not normally get along, the Tengku on opposite sides of the proverbial fence are usually civil with each other. If the Rovers and the Masks need to hash something out peacefully, the two factions will frequently have Tengku broker the deal.


The Clergy

There are not hard and fast rules, only broad traditions and customs on recruitment. Most Rovers prefer to induct new members as young adults rather than as children. Most Rovers who begin their education as children are the sons and daughters of priests and priestesses of Nami. Apprentices of all ages nearly always learn on the job being dragged around wherever their mentor goes.

A great many new recruits to Nami are nonconformists of some sort. Many new recruits are fleeing an arranged marriage. Scarerra is a world where most commoners (and most nobles) pursue the same trade their parents, grandparents and great grandparents did, some people crave to do something different from their family business and joining the Rovers is one way to escape being a cobbler.

Some Rovers are nonconformists to their nation or race. The Rovers include orcs that want to be peaceful gardeners instead of warriors and the Rovers encompass sociopath gnomes who want to bathe in the blood of their enemies. The Rovers include many runaway slaves and ex-serfs in their ranks. More than a few criminals on the run try to find shelter within the Rovers.

In general, dwarves are not very fond of Nami, but the hidebound dwarf culture produces a lot of malcontents and these malcontents sometimes turn to Nami for succor. Nami has a disproportionately high number of dwarf priests and priestesses considering they have comparatively few dwarf worshipers. Same thing with the grey elves and dark elves. Wood Elves however tend to respect Nami highly celebrating two Nami holidays per year.

Not every fugitive or nonconformist is accepted though. The Rovers don’t adopt every runaway that comes to them. They test new recruits sincerity for Nami’s ideals and these tests can be pretty arbitrary. Almost every Rover had a single mentor and Rovers are allowed to take on whoever they want as an apprentice and the apprenticeship is done whenever the mentor thinks is appropriate. There are no hard and fast rules, but most Rovers frown on cheapening their priestly order with mass recruitment tactics.

In some cases, Nami’s Rovers wield enough social proof that they can shield their new recruits from the authority figures directly, but more often than not they live up to their name as Rovers moving their new recruits far away from their original homes.

Nami may or may not have the fewest Scarterran priests and priestesses of any of the Nine but she certainly has among the fewest priests. Nami has roughly as many priests as priestess, maybe a very slight female majority. About half of Nami’s priesthood has divine spell-casting powers, maybe slightly less than half. Nami has a fair number of divine spell-casters that are not priests. Approximately one third of Nami’s theurgists and three quarters of Nami’s favored souls are not ordained as priests or priestesses.

The Rovers do not have a lot of arcane casters in their ranks but they have more than most of the Nine except for Zarthus who has a lot of arcane bards and obviously Greymoria who is the goddess of arcane magic.

Favored souls of Nami are sometimes called Stormlings. Nami's favored souls are fairly numerous, roughly on par in terms of raw numbers with Nami’s theurgists. Nami’s favored souls once in a while empowers favored souls in odd places just to see what happens but this is fairly rare. Most Stormlings are born into families of devout Nami worshipers, or they were conceived during Nami festivals. Some of Nami’s faithful believe that children conceived in the rain are more likely to be favored souls.

Nami’s favored souls are given very little direction. When they are on the cusp of adolescence, a Nami spirit usually explains what they are, but they are not told what to do. Some favored souls choose to stick with their communities and others earn the title Rover traveling far and wide having adventures. Nami’s priesthood makes it very easy for favored souls to join the priesthood, but most favored souls opt to be independent agents.

Zarthus may be the god of music, but Nami appreciates music and the Rovers maintain their own musical traditions and incorporate music into most Nami worship rituals. The Rovers train a lot of divine bards into their ranks. They have more divine bards than all other priesthoods apart from Zarthus.



Material Needs


Rovers receive modest donations from commoners and nobles alike during Nami festivals, but they get very few donations the rest of the time. Because of this, the Rovers are generally frugal. There are relatively few Nami temples compared to the rest of the Nine’s temples and these temples generally have fairly small staffs to feed.

Most Rovers rove, so most Nami temples are situated on transportation hubs built along major trade routes, rivers crossings, and busy seaports. Temples are a good place for Rovers to share news, relax with their fellow followers of Nami, organize circuit priests’ travel routes and otherwise handle the logistics of facilitating celebratory Nami festivals around the world.

Outside of the Elven Empire, there are very few secret Nami temples. The Rovers prefer to live loud and proud.

Most Rovers practice a trade outside being a priest or priestess. A lot of Rovers are skilled rangers, performers, or craftsmen. Many ships captains refuse to buy any maps not certified by a Rover cartographer. Many Rovers are very good at living off the land either as a survivalist or as a thief. Most Rover pickpockets and burglars only steal enough to let them eat…usually.

Many Nami temples double as a mundane business. Nami temples frequently have an attached inn or tavern. Nami is the goddess of alcoholic beverages, so when Nami temples are bequeathed land, they usually set up a brewery, distillery, or winery and these dispensaries of adult beverages are held in high regard as the Rovers have a well-deserved reputation for creating quality spirits.


Factions, Schisms, and Heresies

Nami worshippers are fiercely individualistic. A great many Rovers claim to disdain the very idea of faction claiming that Nami’s priesthood has thousands of factions each consisting of a single member. That said the Rovers are easier to classify than they’d like to admit.

Circuit Priests

Circuit Priests refer to Rovers that enjoy presiding over Nami festivals and make it a point to go to as many of them as possible. Most nations and cities celebrate their holy days on different days of the year, so a single Rover can preside over the yearly celebration of Nami six or seven times a year or more. To many outsiders it seems like the priests just have a knack for showing up on time. The Rovers love to maintain the illusion, but there is hard work and organization behind the scenes to make this possible.


Sedentary Rovers

Sedentary Rovers are Nami priests and priestesses that mostly stick to one temple or the areas near them. Some Rovers view temple duty as enjoyable while others view temple duty as a burden. All Rovers view temple duty as important. Without safe places to rest, share news, and train, the Rovers would be a lot less effective and comfortable if they did not have temples to find succor in.

Some Sedentary Rovers are non-conformists to Nami’s worshipers and they don’t want to travel. A lot of Sedentary Rovers are either very old or very young. Older Rovers are often not as vigorous as they used to be, so they settle down to finish their lives and careers in a temple. Many of these Rovers have a treasure trove of lore and amusing anecdotes from their youth.

Sometimes new recruits are put on temple duty against their will. First, it teaches humility. Second, it lets a young Rover learn from several mentors passing through as opposed to just a single mentor.


Tribal Rovers

Those who worship Nami primarily are often nomadic. Some barbarian tribes have Nami as their primary patron and a lot of troupes of traveling entertainers also count Nami as their patron. A few pirate ships or even legitimate merchant ships are made up primarily of Nami worshipers and have a Rover chaplain among them. These are perhaps the most literal example of Rovers as they follow their mobile parishioners.


True Inner Conflict

The factions above are more lifestyles than true factions. The Rovers have some ideological splits which could represent true schisms. Relatively few Rovers are part of a declared ideological faction, but most Rovers are strongly opinionated and fall on the spectrum somewhere.

Every two or three generations, tensions between schismatic factions rise up to a boil among Nami’s core followers and the Rovers have a brief and bloody theological civil war. Afterwards an uneasy peace is declared and the Rovers try to play nice with other and embrace their diverse views only to have these tensions rise up again a generation or two later. The Rovers are about a due for a new civil war.


Should Rovers work with princes and other state leaders to try to spread Nami’s ideals within the system, or are all rulers ultimately oppressive agents of stagnation?

Should Rovers with divine magic be given more status than Rovers without divine magic? Should the study of arcane magic among Rovers be encouraged or discouraged?

Most divisive of all is arguments on the rights of the individuals.

A small but growing number of hardline Rovers believe that as followers of Nami, Rovers are justified in doing anything they want to whomever they want. This includes theft and arson among other serious crimes. If others cannot defend themselves, that’s their problem. These have been nicknamed by outsiders the Bachites (because I stole it from Roman mythology but I can claim there was a violent Rover in the past named Bachus) or the Brides of Maylar because they often work with Maylar worshippers (though they are roughly as likely to be male as female).

A small but growing number of hardline Rovers believe that the Nami’s ideals of freedom should be extended to all. “My right to swing my fist ends where your face begins.” These peaceful hardliners refuse to harm others other than in self-defense and encourage altruism even if it involves working with princes and potentates who do not always live up to Nami’s ideals of freedom. These Rovers have been nicknamed the Gentle Rain.

Traditionally, Nami temples are supposed to be neutral ground where ideological differences are supposed to be put aside but the Gentle Rain is making up an increasingly high percentage of Sedentary Rovers and they are often barring the temple doors to Bachites seeking shelter to avoid retribution from those they wronged. This is the opening salvo in the next Rover civil war.

Because the Rovers are not very numerous and they tend to be widely dispersed, most Nami civil wars pass largely unnoticed by those outside of Nami’s tent. This might change. While more moderate Rovers are more sympathetic towards the Gentle Rain than they are sympathetic towards the Bachites, the Gentle Rain is pulling in outside allies such as secular authorities, Mera’s Tenders, and Korus’ Stewards of the Gift. It is generally considered taboo to involve outsiders in internal Rover disrupting and this is winning the Bachites more sympathizers than they would ordinarily receive. It is rumored that the Bachites are gathering allies under the table including Maylar’s Testers and Greymoria’s Children.


As fierce as the ideological divide between Bachites and the Gentle Rain is, neither of these groups are heretics. It is almost impossible for a Rover to be branded a heretic. The one taboo that Nami’s priesthood almost universally will not tolerate is to abuse the ability to summon rain.

Summoning rain (or other normal weather) requires someone to get ●●●● in the domain of weather, a feat relatively few Rovers attain that is almost unheard of for non-Rovers to attain. The lower levels create small effects to aid in combat or escape, gusts of winds, ice slicks, banks of fog, etc, but a true Weather Witch can cause or negate a drought.

If a weather witch wants to change the weather to aid a battle, that’s fine. If a weather witch wants to change the weather to spread love or fear of Nami, that’s fine too. What is generally not tolerated is for a Rover to use the rain or lack thereof to extort the locals for money or use control of the weather to demand land or titles. That is heresy.

It is very rare but not unheard of for Rovers to practice advanced necromancy and wield undead minions. Most Rover necromancers are Bachites or Bachite sympathizers. This is technically not heresy but this is viewed poorly by most Rovers. If the Gentle Rain rise to become the mainstream view of Nami’s priesthood, necromancy may become heretical.


Priestly Ranks

Neophyte: Trainee Member. Informally they are called “rain drops.”
Drizzle: Informal term for trainee member that is fairly far along.
Priest or Priestess: Full member.
Honored One: Informal term of respect for a priest or priestess of high standing. Trainees normally call their mentors “Mentor” rather than “Honored One,” even after their training is complete.

Forecaster: Slang term for Oracle.
Lightning Bolt: A Rover who is good at fighting.
Anchor: Polite informal term for a Nami priest or priestess that maintains a permanent temple.
Stationary Rover: Slightly derogatory informal term for a Nami priest or priestess that maintains a permanent temple.
Weather Witch: Slang term for a Rover who has gained a four or five dots of Weather magic.

Being a bunch of freedom loving individualists, Nami priests and priestesses don’t put a lot of stock into ranks and titles. If a Rover wants to get other Rovers to follow her she cannot pull rank. To sway her fellows, she needs to either have a really good idea, lots of charisma, or a litany of impressive past accomplishments.

Scaraqua

Unfortunately I have not yet figured out what Nami’s role in Scaraqua is going to be. Greymoria, Mera, and Korus are going to be the preeminent deities, considered the Three Sisters/Daughters of the Sea. Zarthus and Khemra are considered the Brothers/Sons of the Sky. Hallisan and Phidas are the Brothers/Sons of the Sea Floor.

My plan is for Maylar and Nami to be x-factors that do not stay in their lane. Maylar is going to be the Mother of Sharks among other roles and Maylar is going to the fourth most powerful deity under the sea.

Sea Nami I haven’t figured out any specifics other than she is probably going to be a trickster figure, probably a little bit more malevolent than her Land Nami, is mostly viewed as promethean liberator more often than dangerous trickster. I haven’t figured out if Sea Nami is going to be male or female. I might make Nami the one who stole the Sea’s Water and the Sky’s Fire so that life could develop on Land.

Hollow Earth

I have less material on Hollow Earth than I do on Scaraqua. I’m not even sure if I want to give Hollow Earth a separate cosmic paradigm or if I just want to make Hollow Earth an extension of Scarterra.

On Scarterra is a goddess of the winds and the sky, that’s something that means she probably would be a bit player underground. If Hollow Earth is going to be a separate realm, I’m probably going to make the three Lawful deities the primary gods. That doesn’t bode well for Nami either.

My roster of underground humanoids and monsters as of yet does not include anything that feels appropriately Nami-friendly to me. At least not yet.


Anyway, hope you found this worth reading. I’m open to suggestions and feedback on fleshing out Nami and her followers further. I will answer any Nami based questions if you feel I left something out.

 

[Scalenex]

Since I profiled three out of four of my goddess, I was thinking of profiling Greymoria, but Greymoria is the goddess of magic and I'm still working on a great many details about magic in my setting and metaplot, so I'll profile Greymoria last.

Greymoria is used to be last among the Nine! Hopefully my own fictional characters don't come alive because Greymoria would do horrible things to me for saying Mera is my favorite deity.

I could dump a giant wall of text about all the things I've pondering magic wise, but let me focus on a single topic and see if I can shake some feedback. Magic that anyone can do.

Asking the gods for a miracle and sometimes getting one

I disagree with Shadiversity's material a lot, but he has enough interesting ideas that I still turn to his channel once in a while.

He said when he is the DM of a D&D game, he has a house rule that if someone prays to a god in a time of need, there is a 1% chance that the god will intervene on the prayer's behalf with a miracle. Shad figures it's a magical world and the gods want mortals to believe in them so it's good PR that they occasionally do this.

I'm not sure I want make this based on a d100 roll, but I wonder if there is something to it where ordinary people can ask for miracles and sometimes get them. In my world instead of the sky opening up for a deity to smite something or heal something the equivalent in Scarterra would be an impromptu spirit summoning. Then the spirit solves the petitioner's problem, or at least tries to.

1% seems a little high, but if the odds of a person calling a miracle are less than 1% it's just a waste of time to roll the dice. 1% is about the lowest form of probability you can measure in an RPG.

Superstition or Science! ?

So here's my thought branching out from Shad's idea that praying for a miracle has a 1% chance of success. What if some/most/all common superstitions were true, at least sometimes.

In the old days, curses were taken pretty seriously. Getting the evil eye actually made people nervous. One thought I had was that if someone curses someone in Scarterra, there is a small but very real chance that the curse takes effect, usually in the form of bad luck (raised dice roll penalties for a set period of time).

Maybe make it based on Charisma + Hearth Wisdom so someone with a five collective dots of these two abilities would have a 5% of bestowing a real curse when cursing at them. Maybe make it based on Willpower. I don't know if this could be mitigated if the curse recipient makes a defensive good luck gesture immediately. Otherwise the curse recipient is going to have to get the curse giver to relinquish their curse, undergo some kind of cleansing quest, or just wait for the curse to stop (since such curses should probably not be permanent).

I suppose blessings could work similarly, but let's face it. Generally people put more emotion into wishing ill on people than wishing well on them. It would probably take a whole group of well wishers to create a temporary blessing on par with a typical peasant's curse.

A curse (or a blessing) that was given with a person's dying breath would be more potent.

I'm sure Greymoria would love to add potency to curses given in her name. Other deities might be able to strengthen ordinary curses inovked, or perhaps strengthen blessing.

Planar Travel for All!

When I first started drawing up my setting, my goal was to make Scarterra a setting for D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder but ultimately Scarterra merged with my other pet project of creating a new mechanics system.

Anyway, D&D Scarterra has a house rule that characters could make a skill check of some sort to open a gateway to another plane without casting any spells.

It's time consuming and fussy but it doesn't require any magical abilities. It's just requires a small group of people to chant and dance, light a bunch of candles and do a bunch of other ritual stuff perfectly correctly.

Each of the Nine had their own private extra-planar realm and each deity had a different ritual to reach their plane. For instance, among other things in Nami's ritual you have to touch a cloud at the end of the ritual. That means you have to either climb a high mountain, be able to fly or wait for a foggy day to perform the ritual.

I figured Nami's realm was cloud based. I hadn't got much further than that.

The reason I tossed the idea away is that while I thought it was cool if in theory anyone could visit the godly realms I could never answer "What do you they do when they get there?"

Binding Oaths

Oaths used to mean something.

In the American Civil War, the Union let some captured Confederates go free no questions asked if they took an oath never to take up arms against the Union again.

Back when the History Channel had good documentaries I saw a documentary on the true pirates of the Caribbean, don't remember what it was called. At one point a whole bunch of pirates and pirate collaborators were rounded up in Tortuga and were all given blanket amnesty if they sword an oath to never conduct in piracy again. And that's it.

Going back further, in Roman times if you swear an oath on your children's lives and break the oath, the Romans might take you literally and kill your children.

Oaths taken before God or the gods were taken very seriously.

In Current Year, oaths are kind of a joke.

Going into the realm of the supernatural. My favorite contemporary author is Rick Riordian. If someone who follows the Greek or Roman ways swears on the River Styx and they break their oath, the goddess of the River Styx will afflict great suffering on them. Thus, swearing on the River Styx is very convincing.

What if Scarterra has some kind of system where if you break an oath there is a good chance of cosmic justice hitting the oath breaker?

Maybe a modest chance of some relatively mild cosmic justice for breaking an ordinary oath and a large chance for breaking an oath in the names of one of the Nine. Either I can give all the Nine the chance to figuratively smite those who swear by their name and then break their word or I can make it the province of Phidas alone since Phidas is the god of both oaths and punishment.

Then again maybe I shouldn't give that much power exclusively to Phidas. Even gentle Mera would be pretty angry if someone swore an oath in her name and then broke their word.

 

[Aginor]

I admit I have been skimming over your latest stuff a little bit (sorry! I usually like your stuff a lot, I am just a tad busy and not a huge fan of deities in general) but that latest post of yours really caught my attention.
You have a lot of good points there.

So here are some thoughts:
Divine intervention should definitely happen in a world where gods play such an important role.

Of course a deity might be reluctant to help a mortal because of reasons:
- another deity is watching and there may be pacts between the gods. Even between enemies.
- deities are not almighty and might just be busy
- another god prevented the miracle from happening. That's especially true if the deed would run against his/her interests.


I strongly advice against gods being all-knowing/all-seeing. It is way more interesting to not have that IMO.

A deity might not help directly but be subtle about it (for several reasons some of which I wrote above)
Like in the old joke in which the priest drowns because he refuses to accept help from the police, the fire brigade, and the boy scouts (his god called them).

I also like the idea that either the deity the oath referenced or a neutral deity of justice (like Helm in the Forgotten Realms) or one of their servants might do the smiting.

I like more distant gods, so in my version of the Realms the gods don't usually talk to the people. But they might send visions to their clerics/paladins.
So if you break your oath there might not be something happening immediately, but you might be in for a nasty surprise when you meet the next paladin of Helm and _he knows_.

 

[Scalenex]

I admit I have been skimming over your latest stuff a little bit (sorry! I usually like your stuff a lot, I am just a tad busy and not a huge fan of deities in general)

Well @Paradoxical Pacifism says he wants more...

So here are some thoughts:
Divine intervention should definitely happen in a world where gods play such an important role.

Of course a deity might be reluctant to help a mortal because of reasons:
- another deity is watching and there may be pacts between the gods. Even between enemies.

Perhaps I need to figure out more about Divine Compact. The Divine Compact is the agreement the Nine hammered out to coordinate their battle against Turoch and to manage the world afterwards.

Other than who gets what (Nami gets the weather, Mera gets the sea) I haven't figured out too many details.

Nami broke the Compact almost immediately bestowing Mortals with the first Gift, that of free will. The other deities followed suit and decided if they didn't bribe mortals with a Gift of their own they would lose all their worshipers, even Khemra got in on the act. She bestowed writing on mortals with the hope that permanent records would help strengthen traditions.

- deities are not almighty and might just be busy

I haven't figured out how miracles work without a third party facilitator, either a thuergist (cleric/druid/paladin for you D&D fans), favored soul, or spirit.

The Nine's power is not infinite, it takes a little something out of them to empower a divine spell-caster or create a spirit.

In general my three Lawful deities have a large retinue of theurgists and a small retinue of spirits and favored souls to do their bidding. My three Chaotic deities have a relatively small retinue of theurgists and a large retinue of spirits and favored souls to do their bidding. The three Neutral deities fall in between.

- another god prevented the miracle from happening. That's especially true if the deed would run against his/her interests.

If I have direct miracles this works as is. Otherwise I suppose they could counter another deity by sending a theurgist or spirit with instructions to stop the other group's pawns. That's kind of the foundation of a lot of adventures though the characters are not taking directions from their god so much as making an educated guess what their deity wants.

I strongly advice against gods being all-knowing/all-seeing. It is way more interesting to not have that IMO.

I agree. I don't think omniscient gods are a good fit for a fantasy setting. My friend also created his own cosmology for a hypothetical game (and a college thesis paper creating a fictional pantheon for a comparative religion class, got an A).

Anyway, his pantheon had fourteen gods if I'm not mistake. Seven gods of broad natural forces and seven gods of narrow natural forces. Anyway the light deity was omniscient but he died in a civil with the other gods. He knew he would lose the civil war but he did it anyway because he knew he was destined to fight in the civil war and die. Kind of nihilistic. He knew how and when he was going to die and couldn't do anything about it.

The light god knew that everything was predestined and there was no real free will because every god and every mortal's apparent choice was a reaction to events that happened prior. But everyone else is going through the motions of having free will because they don't know any better. The light god's corpse became the stars of the night sky. An astrologer can try to divine the future by reading portents in the star.

Most of the light god's surviving minions became demons, along with the fire god's minions. A few of the light god's minions sided with the other gods, the most powerful two became the sun and the moon. Now the fire god is basically the Big Bad and the other twelve deities are the Good Guys.

On the material plane, the good guys and one bad guy are in a stale mate because the Good Guys are extremely cautious (in their defense when they use their full power they tend to make messy mistakes) and the Bad Guy is not. To become a divine spell-caster of the Good Guys takes a lot of training and hard work but the Fire God gives out supernatural power to mortals like candy.


Anyway, none of my deities are omniscient (unless I decide to make Turoch a nihilistic omniscient who could not prevent his own death). Korus is considered the wisest largely because he can look at things without much personal bias. Every divine spell-caster can pick up Divination magic if they throw experience points at it. Spell-casters associated with Korus and Khemra get a small difficulty break in their favor. Korus has this because he is supposed to be the wisest of the Nine and Khemra has this because she values education and knowledge among mortals.


It is joked that the party ranger does not need to roll for tracking. If the story requires the PCs to follow the tracks to the bad guys, then he will find them. You don't want to blow the entire planned fight against the goblins because one player flubbed one roll.

On the other extreme, you don't want to spoil your big murder mystery plot and spill all the answers because one player got one very good roll.

Anyway, the level four dot and five dot powers of Divinations are limited to what the god or goddess knows or doesn't know. As the game master, I decide what Khemra knows or doesn't know. That's sort of a cheap cop out and if I pull it too often it would be a like a middle to finger to a player who invested lots of experience points in advanced divination power.

The biggest mystery, Neshik's origin, is something Khemra will probably not give Neshik and answer for. Neshik would have to go to the oracle of another god. An Oracle of Nami would probably be Neshik's best bet because Nami is more likely to keep tabs on Khemra's favored souls than the rest of the Nine.

I'll worry about that if and when one of my players decides to delve deep into divination magic. At this point, no one is especially interested in divination beyond the ability to see invisible creatures because when they fought Etch's crime syndicate, a lot of the bad guys had invisibility potions and this was irksome to the players.

A deity might not help directly but be subtle about it (for several reasons some of which I wrote above)
Like in the old joke in which the priest drowns because he refuses to accept help from the police, the fire brigade, and the boy scouts (his god called them).

I really enjoy that joke. My three Lawful Deities don't intervene in flashy miracles as much because Khemra, Phidas, and Hallisan have a lot of influence over the police, fire brigade, and the boy scouts. That's part of the reason they don't use spirit minions as much because they don't need to.

I suppose Korus (and to a lesser extant the others) could act through animals.

I also like the idea that either the deity the oath referenced or a neutral deity of justice (like Helm in the Forgotten Realms) or one of their servants might do the smiting.

I like more distant gods, so in my version of the Realms the gods don't usually talk to the people. But they might send visions to their clerics/paladins.
So if you break your oath there might not be something happening immediately, but you might be in for a nasty surprise when you meet the next paladin of Helm and _he knows_.

This actually segues into what was going to be my rambling introduction to Phidas' bio.

Going to Norse mythology, the Asgardian pantheon had to bind the giant wolf Fenris to stop him from destroying the world. In order to trick Fenris into allowing himself to be bound the pantheon had to make an oath with Fenris and break it.

Fenris suspected a trick and insisted someone put their hand in his mouth as a sign of trust. It was Tyr. Fenris bit off Tyr.

Fun fact, guess who the god of oaths and law in Norse mythology is? Tyr.

All the gods broke an oath, but it was Tyr who paid the price for it.


Originally I just liked the idea of Phidas being disfigured and therefore requires a mask. He is the embodiment of Lawful Evil, so he conceals his ugliness with a respectable façade. My justification for Phidas' ugly face is that he was the most grievously wounded of all the Nine in the fight with Turoch, but I figured I could take a leaf out of the Norse book and take this further.

Phidas is a sniveling liar but he is also the god of contracts and oaths.

All the Nine rebelled against Turoch. They broke their faith with him. Some of them rebelled against Turoch for noble reasons and others for selfish reasons but as far as Turoch is concerned they are all traitors (except ironically the tenth deity that is now known as "the Traitor").

Phidas was the first of the Nine to act against Turoch directly when he fed Turoch the poison that Greymoria created. Turoch managed to smack Phidas around a fair bit before the poison began to take effect. As the battle progressed Turoch remained most incensed by Phidas' betrayal, supposedly Phidas was the one minion he truly trusted. Turoch's last words were supposedly the godly equivalent "I'm coming back and when I do, I'm killing you first, Phidas!"

That is why despite the fact that none of the Nine really trust Phidas, they trust Phidas to maintain the Barrier against the Void to keep Turoch's wrath at bay. Enlightened self interest. Enlightened self interest is also the root of capitalism which Phidas also embodies.

In short I'm a genius whose brilliance is only overshadowed by his modesty. You are truly privileged to be able to read my typo-ridden posts.


Your suggestion sort of makes sense to have a Neutral deity associated with oaths but I'm too busy patting myself on the back with all my Phidas symbolism to change it now.

 

[Scolenex]

Of course a deity might be reluctant to help a mortal because of reasons:

As the game master, I decide what Khemra knows or doesn't know.

Everything I know about being a god, I learned from Futurama.

 

[Aginor]

Your suggestion sort of makes sense to have a Neutral deity associated with oaths but I'm too busy patting myself on the back with all my Phidas symbolism to change it now.

Well, I also kinda like that idea of yours, which sounds a bit like "it takes a liar to detect a liar". Or, more emotionally speaking: someone who knows the pain and shame and evilness that is breaking an oath. Only they can judge oaths properly.

Remember Darth Traya? She says the same sort of thing at some point IIRC.

Well @Paradoxical Pacifism says he wants more...

By all means, continue! Don't let my critical stance against supernatural stuff distract you!

 

[Scalenex]

Might as well cover Phidas since I gave him a good introduction chatting with Aginor. So I will just say that I based the name on greedy King Midas and added a Ph because “ph”s are cool and long ago my greedy Lawful Evil D&D god was Set who happened to rule a nation called Ophidia.


Phidas in Great Detail

Phidas “The Masked One” “The Scarred Lord” “Great Deceiver”
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Priests’ Nickname: Masks of Phidas. Short form, Masks
Most Common Symbol: A silver mask partially shadowed representing the mask Phidas himself is said to wear.
Favored Magic: Crafts, Protection, Purification
Primary Dominion: The Barrier Against the Void
Divine Tool of Power: A silver mask forged from Turoch's skin.
Primary Gift to Mortals: Standardized Currency
Synopsis: Phidas believes in promoting order and rewards those who support order and punishes harshly those who do not. Nothing is worse in his eyes then violating a sworn oath or contract. He is commonly viewed as the father of money and trade. He maintains the safeguards that prevent the Void from consuming Scarterras. He gained his nickname of the Scarred Lord and association with masks from taking serious injuries to the face while fighting Turoch. Phidas believes that since he suffered the most fighting Tuorch he deserves the biggest share of Scarterras. It said that Turoch vowed revenge on Phidas above the others so Phidas and his followers tends to be on the forefront of efforts to battle demons and Turoch cultists.
Priests and Primary Followers: Phidas’ priests tend to seek positions as kingmakers ingratiating themselves to leaders at every opportunity. They tend to have a place in most governments. A small number of nations have Phidas as the official state religion due to very successful efforts of Phidas’ priests over the years. Merchants and traders tend to worship Phidas primarily and this permeates to the general populace in areas with lots of trade. Some of the monstrous races worship Phidas primarily, particularly underground races.
Common Times to Invoke his Name: Phidas’ name is often invoked when swearing oaths or signing contracts. Phidas is often prayed to before attempting a financial venture or battling demons.
Basic Tenets: -Obey all your oaths and contracts and repay all your debts.
-Help others fulfill their commitments when they falter slightly. Punish them when they fail entirely.
-Create order to encourage the keeping of one’s commitments and fortify the world against destruction and chaos.

Phidas’ Portfolio includes but is not limited to: Defense against the Void, oaths/contracts, commerce, wealth, legal cunning, punishment, contracts, oaths, disguises, pragmatic ruthlessness, protection, protection rackets, life stones, subterranean monsters

Phidas the Mauled

Some theologians argue that the Nine do not have humanoid or Draconic forms, but most Scarterrans believe that Turoch ripped off Phidas’ face. Phidas took most of Turoch’s skin to forge a mask to hide his deformity. Some people say that Phidas walks with a limp, assuming gods walk.

However you measure it, Phidas has never fully recovered from the wounds Turoch inflicted on him. It is implied that the rest of the Nine have made full recoveries from their wounds.

Phidas uses the fact that he was more greatly wounded than his siblings as an excuse for why he deserves more power and prestige, but the rest of the Nine do not accept his rationale for why he deserves more power.

In general the Lawful deities have few favored souls and the Chaotic deities have lots of favored souls. Officially, the Masks say that Phidas does not have favored souls because Phidas does not need or want favored souls. Phidas’ detractors speculate openly that maybe Phidas does not have favored souls because he lacks the capacity to empower them. Insert a sexual innuendo here if you want.

Greymoria and Maylar have created a lot of new creatures. Phidas has created few if any. Officially, the Masks say that Phidas does not need or want to create a slew of vanity races, but again some speculate that Phidas cannot create new creatures. Insert a sexual innuendo here if you want.

Phidas does not have a lot of active spirit minions, but he is hardly impotent here. At any given time, Phidas usually has more spirit minions than Khemra and Hallisan at least. Half-spirit, half mortal children of Phidas are extremely rare but not unheard of. So far, no half-spirit child of Phidas has manifested the powers of a favored soul.


Masks

Phidas priests and core worshipers are nicknamed “Masks” because Phidas wears a mask and his followers wear masks. Very simple, but there is a lot of variation inthis practice.

Some of Phidas’ faithful literally never take their masks off in the presence of others while others only wear their ceremonial masks at extremely formal events. Sometimes the ceremonial masks are very small and just ring the eyes, and sometimes the masks obscure every single facial feature. When you get an outsider Mask among humans they will often make jokes. If a temple has fourteen humans and one kobold or tenkgu, if anything the mask makes the outsider stand out more. A lot of them take a mask of a different color so they can make the joke "If you have trouble spotting me, I'm the one in the green mask."

In most cases Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are superior to Tim Burton’s Batman movies, but one thing Nolan did bothered me. They said outright that Bruce Wayne is the mask and Batman is his true face. Tim Burton only implied it. There was a big masquerade party and the only people there not wearing masks were Bruce Wayne and Selena Kyle.

The Masks of Phidas have a lot of undercover operatives. In most places wearing a silver mask will make one stand out, so most undercover Masks are ironically not wearing masks. Most of Phidas’ best covert agents never take off their mask in or near the temple, and take on an assumed name, so their natural faces are unknown to as many people as possible.

Most masks worn by the Masks are silver but special reverence is given to red masks. Red masks are “oath masks.” “Until I accomplish ______, I swear by Phidas’ holy name, I will not remove this mask.”


Godly Rivals

Phidas probably gets along best with Greymoria. On the mortal plane, Phidas Masks work with Greymoria’s Children often. The Masks really value arcane magic and arcane magic items, but they have very mages in their own ranks, so they trade with the Children. In return the Masks provide the Children money, supplies, shelter, and in rare instances legitimacy.

Phidas may pine for Khemra’s affections but Khemra doesn’t like Phidas as much as Phidas likes her. On the mortal plane, Masks often take care of the Keeper’s proverbial dirty laundry for a bit of Khemra’s respectability.

Phidas and Korus don’t work together well, but they don’t fight each other much either. They just focus on separate things.

Phidas finds Nami annoying but not very threatening. On the mortal plane, the Masks generally believe that they are smart enough to convince the Rovers to go annoy someone else. Sometimes they are right. Other times the Rovers see through the charade and make the Masks pay dearly for the insult. Phidas believes while Maylar is more dangerous, he and is minions are easier to trick.

Hallisan and Phidas are definitely rivals. Their mutual similarities only keep them apart. They compete for influence in the halls of power, they compete for influence underground, they compete for the right to dominate the trade in magical items. The Masks and the Guardians rarely fight physically, but they are nearly always competing politically and economically.

Phidas’ minions rarely fight openly with Mera’s minions openly, but they certainly do not get along. Phidas’ Masks love to provide healing magic in exchange for money and favors, but Mera’s Tenders provide their healing magic to the masses for free! It wrecks the Masks’ business model. The Masks try to undermine the efforts and reputations of the Tenders whenever they can do this subtly.

There is no love lost between Phidas and Zarthus. Their minions are at each other’s throats all the time. Zarthus’ Lanterns hate tyranny and they believe the Masks are agents of tyranny, but at this point the reason for their feud doesn’t matter much. The Masks and Lanterns fight each other on reflex now. If the two groups are not fighting openly, they are having a cold war. The one thing they agree on is that Turoch is bad. Every sane person is opposed to Void Demons but the Masks and the Lanterns are among the most aggressive demon fighters.

I do think it would be interesting to write a novel about a Mask and a Lantern forced to work together to fight a bunch of infernalists eventually developing begrudging respect for the other.


Phidas Spirits

Most Phidas spirits are pretty ugly. Many are sickly looking and emaciated, but this is deceptive. A lot of scrawny Phidas spirits are surprisingly strong. Many Phidas spirits wear ceremonial masks, but this is not universal. Many spirits have secret weaknesses. In the case of Phidas spirits, you can sometimes physically weaken a Phidas spirit by taking off their mask. Not always though. Some Phidas spirits can hex enemies with their ugly unmasked faces.

Phidas has spirits that are healers, advisors, warriors, and nearly every other role but the majority of his active spirit minions are punishment spirits or guardian spirits.

Guardian spirits usually guard Phidas temples, Phidas’ treasure hordes, and Phidas Temples' treasure hordes. The most common Phidas spirit happens to be gargoyles. Phidas loves employing guardian spirits that can blend in with the architecture and a great many Phidas temples have many stone gargoyles on them. Gargoyles have been so successful that some of the rest of the Nine have begun creating similar guardian spirits.

The Masks include more golem crafters amongst their ranks than most priesthoods. They usually favor non-humanoid golems and often craft their golems in the shapes of gargoyles. A gargoyle spirit inside of a golem specifically created to house it is extremely powerful.

The most feared Phidas spirits are the Mask-less, Phidas’ default punishment spirits that show up to punish those who break oaths and contracts. These are spirits with extremely ugly faces. They come in a wide variety of sizes and power levels. There are humanoid mask-less that act as bounty hunters and executioners and tiny little imps that cause wagon wheels to fall off and other events of bad luck.

Not every Mask-less is a killer. The punishment is usually scaled to the severity of the crime. As long as the condemned regrets their lapse of honor, Phidas is satisfied.

The default spirit animals summoned by Phidas based summoners are probably going to be magpies for flyers, foxes for ground creatures, and catfish for aquatic creatures. I'm not married to these ideas, if anyone has a better idea for what constitutes a Phidas creature, let me know.

Phidas and Geo-Politics

Most feudalistic human nations have priests of Phidas, Khemra and Hallisan jockeying for influence. More often than not, Phidas is out of favor, at least compared to Khemra and Hallisan.

There are apocryphal stories about Masks of Phidas offering kings a large quantity of gold or a powerful magical item in exchange for a small favor. The small favor creates huge unforeseen problems for the king which the Mask will help him solve in return for another favor. And so on forth until the king is a helpless puppet of the Masks.

These stories are so well known that most princes and potentates work very hard to keep the Masks at arms’ length. If a prince needs something from the Mask it’s wise to arrange payment up front as opposed to some vague terms about debt. One thing that Masks can do to earn the trust of reluctant people is to spell out what they want and what they will do exactly and swear on Phidas name. Breaking an oath made in Phidas’ name is dangerous, especially for a mask.

King Henryk of Fumaya makes a big show of Phidas support during his annual festival and largely pays the Masks no heed the rest of the year. Henryk will politely listen to what the Masks have to recommend, but he usually doesn’t follow their advice. This is all too common in many human nations as well as Meckelorn and the Elven Empire. The Masks are kept tantalizing close to the levers of power but they cannot operate the levers themselves.

The Masks are tenacious. If they cannot win the favor of the king or queen, they will try to win over the dukes and duchesses. If they cannot win over the dukes they will turn to licking the boots of the counts and barons. The Masks are also generally in tight with the wealthy merchants and others who have great wealth but little formal political power.

Phidas is not very popular with the peasants and the Masks generally do not try very hard to win over the peasantry. Sometimes they will heal peasants for good publicity or pittance donations of copper pieces, but this is done more for the realm than for the peasants. Healthy peasants are better workers after all. While the Masks do not care if the peasants love them, they usually follow Machiavelli’s advice and try to make sure the peasants don’t hate them.


Phidas is the state patron of Uskala. King Drosst is easily cunning and ruthless enough to get in bed with the Masks and not be entrapped by waves of debt and intrigue. If anything, Drosst is manipulating the Masks. The Masks provide King Drosst with divine magic aid when he needs it and giant of quantities of gold. In exchange, the Masks get to have a say in most government appointments too lowly for Drosst to care about. The peasants hate the Masks in Uskala. When Drosst needs to do tyrannical things, he usually uses the Masks as his agents. King Drosst rarely pays the Masks for their services, instead he gives the Mask's legal authority to fleece the populace.


Apart from Uskala, Phidas is not the state patron of any powerful nation, but a lot of petty kings and independent counts and barons have Phidas as their state patron. Usually this occurs when a powerful warlord rises to top of the heap, but cannot play politics of peace time. Many of these warlords end up puppets of the Masks and another apocryphal warning story is born.


Phidas is fairly powerful in Kahdisteria. Greymoria is the state patron but the local Masks have managed to outmaneuver the other priesthoods to eke out a solid number two spot among the Dark Elves. Kahdisteria is built on Greymoria worship, so the Masks are content with being Number Two. If they reach higher they will assuredly be crushed.


Phidas is the second most powerful priesthood in the dwarf nation of Stahlheim. They got this power by ingratiating themselves to the guilds. The king has to keep the guilds’ wants and needs in mind when making policy decision and now the guilds have to keep the Masks’ in wants and needs when making decisions. It’s indirect, but it works. The Masks hope to displace Hallisan’s Guardians from the Number One spiritual spot in Stahlheim within two dwarf generations.


Phidas worship is basically illegal in any nation where the Lanterns of Zarthus are powerful. Most Zarthus friendly nations don’t last for long but the half-elf nation of Apseldia has infuriated the Masks by celebrating their bicentennial recently. Phidas is not officially restricted but it is very unpopular among most wood elves. The Masks are generally unwelcome in places where Mera’s Tenders are unusually politically powerful such as Mondert or anywhere controlled by the Paladins.


Very few barbarian people, either human, demihuman or monstrous worship Phidas. It’s not that they are hostile to Phidas. They just view Phidas as being unimportant to their lives. Unless the barbarian tribe is pro-Zarthus in which case they are anti-Phidas by default.


Phidas Creatures

It’s not known if Phidas helped Greymoria create the first goblins or not, but the plurality of goblins worship Phidas now. Laershin Kobolds view Korus and Phidas as their two most important deities. This sort of sets a precedent. Many subterranean races commonly worship Phidas and very few subterranean races are actively hostile to Phidas.

It is not known whether Phidas created Tengku or helped create them. They share Phidas’ love of gold and commerce but little else. Tengku are not very pious, but when they do take up the cloth, they commonly join the Masks. That’s a small minority though. The Tengku are not hostile to Phidas, but they do not consider themselves Phidas’ children.

I’m open to suggestions for a new Phidas race if someone has a good idea. I’m pondering snake men of some kind. I’m not sure if I want make my snake men noble savage (like Warhammer Lizardmen) or scheming bad guys (like D&D yuanti). If I make snake men a bad guy race, they will probably be Phidas friendly.


The Clergy

Phidas’ priesthood actively recruits new members. The Masks generally prefer to induct recruits as children rather than adults unless an adult is a self-taught theurgist or has other special skills.

You can gauge the influence of the local Masks by looking at where they are recruiting from. If the Masks are doing well, most of their recruits are the non-inheriting sons and daughters of nobles. In most places, the bulk of the Mask’s new recruits are the non-inheriting sons and daughters of wealthy merchants. If the Masks have been sidelined, most of the Mask’s new recruits are the children of very ambitious peasants. Some high ranking Masks say that all temples should aim to recruit new members from all levels of society, noting that lowborn Masks are often very tenacious and fanatical.

Phidas worship is fairly common in human, dwarf, and elf lands, so there lots of human, dwarf, and elf Masks. Gnome masks are not common, but gnomes are shrewd negotiators known for their silver tongues, so gnomish Masks are often disproportionately represented in higher ranks. A common saying is “Beware the gnome whose silver tongue is forked.” Dwarves' and elves' long life spans give them patience. They prefer the slow and steady method of accruing of rank and status. Tengku and human Masks tend to favor high risk/high reward plots. Gnomes sort of split the difference.

Roughly a third of Phidas’ priests and support staff are theurgists. Very few theurgists are divine bards. Divine bards of Phidas only show up once or twice in a generation purely by accident when the Masks recruit a musical prodigy without realizing it. Roughly three out of five Masks are male. Very few Masks are arcane mages. If the Masks want arcane magic, they generally broker a deal with Greymoria’s Children.

Theurgists are considerably more likely to be promoted to high ranks than non-spell casters. Highborn Masks are slightly more likely to be promoted to high ranks than lowborn.


Material Needs

The Masks have broad political influence but they do not get nearly as many donations as they would like. At best, Phidas is in the middle of the pack among the Nine for both casual worshipers and fervent worshipers.

The Masks will sometimes provide spiritual and magical services for free if they can do it loudly and publicly, but most interactions between Masks and the masses are transactional.

The Masks’ theurgists have a general aptitude for the domain of Crafts, so the Masks commonly produce potions, scrolls, and assorted permanent magical items (especially armor) for sale. Sometimes they will even sell golems, but they usually prefer to keep their golems for themselves. They might not be able to craft magical items quite as well as Hallisan’s Guardians but with their extensive merchant networks, the Masks can get their wares to where customers want them (and can afford them) easier. Also, given that they have generally good relations with Greymoria's Children they can buy and sell arcane magic items pretty easily along their same trade networks


Most nations don’t have a secular bank, they have the Church of Phidas. Phidas’ temples often double as institutions of lending for burghers and nobles a like. A lot of the Mask’s operating funds come from charging interest.

While it’s not as big of a cash cow as lending, the Masks have very secure vaults. Sometimes nobles and rich merchants pay the Masks a small fee to store their treasures in Mask guarded facilities. Sometimes the Masks are contracted to put magical protection (or simply supply guards) to defend the local armory or other stores of lesser valuables, but they have to compete with Hallisan’s Guardians for this privilege.

It’s uncommon, but the Masks are often intertwined with organized crime, especially in areas where the Masks are not welcome in respectable society. In some places this pits Mask against Mask as some of Phidas' faithful are working for the mafia dons and some are working for law enforcement.


Factions, Schisms, and Heresies

Phidas’ followers try to maintain a global hierarchy. There are four official Orders within Phidas’ greater priesthood and there is a fifth informal order that some are hoping to promote to a full Order status.

Officially, loyalty to the priestly hierarchy is supposed to be absolute and all Masks are expected to work together for Phidas’ greater mission. Unofficially, the Masks believe that fierce competition within the ranks makes the group stronger on the whole, the only rule to cheating is “don’t get caught.”

The Order of Phidas’ Mask was named before “Mask” became the slang term for all of Phidas’ priests and they have not changed the name since, so on some level they are the Mask’s Masks or the Order of Phidas’ Redundancy. The Mask’s Masks are the public face of Phidas’ priesthood. They conduct most weddings, funerals, and basic worship services as well as try to publicly do good works in Phidas’ name to improve Phidas’ image overall.

The Order of Phidas’ Shield is the military wing of the priesthood. In addition to providing guards and soldiers they also perform a lot of quiet tasks that temples need that are often taken for granted. Phidas’ Shield often serve as quartermasters for instance. They are the Mask’s first line of defense against the Void, and the Order of Phidas’ Shield is authorized a lot of resources towards this task, and they are happy to use third parties. Some adventurers are shocked when the miserly Phidas priests suddenly provide magical assistance to them for free just because they happened to fight some demons on their last adventure.

The Order of Phidas’ Stewardship is where most ambitious Masks hope to get transferred to, at least until they learn how many high born boots they have to lick. This Order is responsible for helping the secular authorities run their realms smoothly and the Order tries to ingratiate themselves to every monarch and every lord in the area.

Officially the Order of Phidas’ Dagger does not exist. The Masks do not even tell their own people the Order exists until they reach the middle ranks. The Order of Phidas’ Dagger is where most of Phidas’ spies, assassins, inquisitors, and other cloak and dagger experts work to further Phidas’ noble vision behind the scenes by any means necessary. Unfortunately for the Order, it’s not near as secret as they like. The Lanterns of Zarthus have found out about them and they blabbed about it to everyone. However, very few outsiders know how many are in this Order, what they do exactly, or where they are based. The only widely known fact is that the Order of Phidas’ Dagger does the priesthoods dirty work.

Phidas’ Bankers are the unofficial fifth order in Phidas’ priesthood that oversees the Masks’ lucrative lending business and magical item trade. At this point the Bankers are made up of members of all four official Orders and all four Orders are trying to make sure they reap all the benefits of this commerce while trying to give the other three Orders the grunt work associated with commerce. There is vigorous debate within the greater priesthood if consolidating all commerce tasks within a separate Order would reduce infighting or increase it.


The Pontiffs

At the top of Phidas’ hierarchy are three Pontiffs. If there is a vacancy, every Pontiff of the second highest rank can volunteer to try to fill the vacancy (and most do volunteer). The Pontiff candidates all face a battery of difficult tests by Phidas’ most powerful questing spirits to determine who gets the promotion.

The three Pontiffs are expected to work together but in reality this is not practical. The Pontiffs are too far removed geographically to communicate regularly. Also, anyone who clawed their way to the top of the Mask’s pyramid are going to be very ambitious and not likely to trust rivals.

One Pontiff is in charge of all Phidas temples in West Colassia. In reality, the dwarf Masks are loathe to take direction from a human pontiff, but they will at least pretend to listen. They are hoping to see a dwarf Pontiff eventually.

One Pontiff is in charge of all Phidas Temples in Umera and the Elven Empire, but the elf Masks are loathe to follow a human. There was an elf Pontiff once but the Umeran humans are generally prejudiced against elves (all the wars their ancestors fought), so they were even less unified under an elf pontiff.

The Third Pontiff is in charge of all Phidas Temples in Penarchia and East Colassia on paper, but in reality the Third Pontiff is the Pontiff on Penarchia and that’s it. East Colassia does not have a lot of Masks and these Masks do not cooperate ever because the East Colassian masks are split between the dark elves of Kahdisteria and the humans of the Colassian Confederacy, mortal enemies. East Colassian Masks generally ignore all directives from the Pontiff because both the Confederate Masks and Dark Elf Masks believe the Pontiff is a pawn of the other side. Political rivalry beats religious unity in East Colassia every time.

The Promised One Heresy

Phidas has never had a favored soul. Phidas’ priests officially teach that Phidas never empowered a favored soul because Phidas never needed a favored soul. Other priesthoods derisively say that Phidas is not powerful enough to empower a favored soul because of the injuries Turoch inflicted on him.

Very few theologians know or suspect that favored souls are capable of rebelling against their divine patrons and still retain their full powers. Those in the know speculate that Phidas is such a control freak that he doesn’t want to risk the slightest possibility that one of his favored souls could go astray, so he doesn't empower any.

Phidas’ priesthood has a persistent heretical offshoot that claims that someday Phidas will empower a favored soul (or several). He/she is referred to as the Promised One (or Ones if it’s a small group). When the Promised One emerges, he/she/they will usher in a golden age of growth for Phidas’ power and prestige.

The Tiamalan kobolds believe that their race will never be fully purified until they win the favor of all the Nine. The Tiamalans have given birth to multiple favored souls of every other one of the Nine. They believe that a kobold favored soul of Phidas will usher in a golden age for kobolds. A few farsighted priests of Phidas have pushed to induct kobold clerics to influence the Tiamalans just in case they are right.

The Tiamalan clans will always follow the lead of a favored soul born to their clan. Even after the favored souls dies, they will usually follow the god or goddess who empowered the favored soul if there is no successor. If a Tiamalan clan goes for a long time without a favored soul, they will try to honor the ways of Phidas to the best of their understanding. Recently, human Phidas priests have begun training a small number of Tiamalans as Masks of Phidas. This training is very truncated and unorthodox compared to the training Masks normally received, and the Kobold Masks have a lot more autonomy than human Masks of the same rank receive, but the heterodoxy is viewed as acceptable if it leads to expanding Phidas' influence to a new frontier.


Priestly Ranks

It occurred to me that the only priesthood I borrowed titles from Catholicism heavily is Phidas. I may have to change this. I am not a Catholic but I have much respect for Catholics and the current pope.

Anyway, the priesthood of Phidas is a hotbed of Byzantine politics. The Masks try to outmaneuver their equals, manipulate their inferiors, and flatter or overthrow their superiors.

Initiate: Trainee member.

Argentum: Full member

Platinum: Respected member, eligible to be in charge of a small temple or local organization.

Bishop: Important leader, eligible to be in charge of a large temple or critically important local organization.

Archbishop: The head of one of the Phidas four Orders within a large geographic area.

Pontiff: The highest rank. There are three pontiff, each with jurisdiction over about a third of all of Phidas’ temples in the world. Vacancies are filled by Phidas himself, usually speaking through an Oracle.

Platinum Bishop (with some cool kind of Elven translation): The highest ranking priest of Phidas in the Elven Empire.


Scaraqua

Phidas is a bit player in Scaraqua. Scaraquans frequently lump Phidas and Hallisan together as Sons of Sea Floor. Both Phidas and Hallisan are associated with photosynthetic chemical vents that provide food to deep sea creatures and both are associated with crustaceans and shell fish.

At some point I'll need to differentiate Sea Phidas and Sea Hallisan more.


Hollow Earth

I haven’t figured out the details, but Phidas is generally considered an important deity underground.



Anyway, hope you found this worth reading. I’m open to suggestions and feedback on fleshing out Phidas and his followers further. I will answer any Phidas based questions if you feel I left something out.

 

[Scalenex]

via Imgflip Meme Generator

Hope you guys are not too sick of me doing this, I still have four gods to go after this though I can put a pin it for later if someone has a different topic they'd like to discuss.

Zarthus in Great Detail

Zarthus core followers are nicknamed “Lanterns” because the moon is viewed as a metaphorical lantern and a lot of services are held at night with lots of literal lanterns and most of Zarthus’ temples have lots of lanterns in them.

Zarthus“Righteous Avenger” “Light Bringer” “Constant Rebel”
Alignment: Chaotic Good
Priests’ Nickname: Lantern Bearers. Short form, Lanterns.
Favored Weapon: Rapier
Common Symbol: Anything with the moon. Especially crescent moons.
Favored Magic: Augmentation, Crafts, Wrath
Divine Tool of Power: Zarthus shaped Turoch’s spinal cord into a rapier.
Primary Dominion: The moon
Primary Gift to Mortals: Art and music
Synopsis: Zarthus believes that mortals should work hard to provide for themselves and their families but shouldn’t let work consume them. He is said to have gifted mortals with music and art to help them to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Zarthus promotes self-sufficiency. He believes that mortals can both work harder and express them when not constrained by tyrants, well meaning or otherwise. Zarthus put the moon in the sky to light up the darkness and expects his followers to cast lights into the darkness and expose hidden evils so they can be removed. In addition for seeking out hidden evils, he encourages mortals to seek out hidden beauty and wonder.
Priests and Primary Followers: A few isolated small population areas worship Zarthus primarily. In more populated areas is the primary patron of artists and those who resist oppression. Zarthus has become a sort of patron for half-breeds and Zarthus worship is the state religion of the small Half-Elf nation of Apseldia. Zarthus priests can induct whomever they wish as long as they have two skillsets that can help further Zarthus goals and they know the most rudimentary rights. Zarthus has among the highest proportion of priests who can’t cast divine spells and a large number of priests relative to their small flock.
Common Times to Invoke his Name: Zarthus is commonly invoked before attempting an artistic endeavor or doing a difficult but necessary task alone. He is commonly prayed to for safety when traveling at night. He is often prayed to for deliverance from oppression.
Basic Tenets: -Provide for yourself and your family, help others do likewise.
-Those who restrict another’s ability to provide for themselves or enjoy themselves must be punished.
-Seek beauty wherever it may be found so you can enjoy it and share it with others. Art and music is the greatest expression of beauty.
-Seek corruption wherever it is hiding it, so it may be removed before it festers.

Zarthus Portfolio includes but is not limited to: The moon, the tides, light, exposing the corrupt, finding the hidden, music, art, self-reliance, community, bastards, half-breeds, orphans, freedom, vengeance, trickery to reach objectives,


Godly Rivals

Zarthus loves Mera, perhaps obsessively. The Lanterns and the Tenders usually get along. They both want the same goals, helping the lowly, they just disagree on tactics.

If Mera is the wife Zarthus desires than Nami is the mistress he cannot quit. Zarthus and Nami share a love of freedom. If only Nami had more empathy for the unfortunate. They normally get along, but the Lanterns and Rovers have been at cross purposes more often than either side would like to admit.

Zarthus and Korus usually get along. Zarthus’ Lanterns are usually pretty eco-friendly and Korus’ followers are usually pretty freedom friendly. Their paths just don’t intersect much outside of barbarian tribes or the wood elves, groups which value both Korus and Zarthus highly.

Hallisan and Zarthus are feuding for the romantic attentions of Mera. In a way they are feuding over goodness itself. Halisan and Zarthus are definitely divided by their similarities. Both value community, hard work, craftsmanship, and bravery but they disagree on all the details. In the mortal plane, their respective followers are usually good natured rivals. They might trade barbs a lot, but they rarely fight. They secretly enjoy saving pulling the other group’s butt out of the fire, so they can gloat about it later.

Maylar is there to remind Zarthus that freedom needs to be coupled with responsibility or it become destructive. Maylar and Zarthus are at odds a lot and their followers fight all the time, but it’s rarely personal. They just happen to have goals at cross purposes right now, and they probably will again. Zarthus believes Maylar is so short-sighted that while he will always be a local threat, none of his machinations will bring Scarterra as a whole to it’s knees.

The Compact primarily drafted by Khemra established day and night as a compromise between good and evil. Zarthus hates compromising with evil. He created the moon to deliberately undermine Khemra’s Compact. This pretty much sets the precedent for all of Zarthus’ interactions with Khemra to follow. What is frustrating to both Zarthus and Khemra is they know the other has good intentions. They both know they are right, so they are very bad at compromising.

Zarthus does not get along well with Greymoria mostly because Zarthus loves Mera and Greymoria hates Mera. Besides intervening when Greymoria’s Children start wrecking stuff, Zarthus’ mentors have also started worming their way into the magical economy, trading in regents, spellbooks, and magical items. Zarthus preachers tend to say that arcane magic is only as good or evil as the person wielding it.

Phidas creates systems of oppression and hides behind a thin veneer of respectability. This galls Zarthus on every possible level. Zarthus and Phidas may have the strongest most unyielding rivalry of any of the Nine.


The SCIENCE! of the Moon

The Scarterran moon does more than look pretty and regulate the tides. Zarthus loves to reveal hidden evils and sometimes moonlight does this literally. Remember the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie where moonlight revealed the undead nature of the crew of the Black Pearl. Some monsters are exposed by any moonlight. Some monsters are only revealed by the light of the full. Werewolves (and were-other animals) can shapechange at will, but the light of the full moon makes them look like hairy monsters regardless of what forms they are in. Most lycanthropes change into their war form anyway because they are going to attract hostile attention anyway.

Magical disguises are harder to maintain during the night of the full moon. This is not an insurmountable obstacle. Most dopplegangers only suffer headaches during the full moon. Even though King Drosst is not wearing is disguise of his own free will, he still gets a headache every night of the full moon. Is it any wonder why King Drosst hates Zarthus’ followers so much.

Zarthus Spirits

Compared to his siblings, Zarthus has more active spirit minions but not an overwhelming number of spirits. Zarthus prefers quality over quantity. While Zarthus has a mix of very powerful and relatively weak spirits, the average Zarthus spirit is fairly strong.

Zarthus likes to battle evil and he likes to give people a hand up, not a hand out. He’s got a few soldier and guardian spirits that fight Zarthus’ enemies, but he prefers his mortal followers to fight evil doers. One power Zarthus spirits commonly have that other spirits rarely have is the ability to shape change into magic weapons and armor. That way the spirit and mortal Lantern fight together, literally.

Zarthus likes uses Muse spirits. Not as violent as turning into a sword, but Muses help artists create, they don’t create for them.

Most Zarthus spirits capable of transforming thusly are not eager to stay in the form of a sword indefinitely. Usually Zarthus spirits only take the form of a magic item for the duration of a specific mission. It’s very common for a Zarthus spirit to aid a devout follower for a single mission of vengeance against the villain who killed the mortal’s father, brother, sister, and/or true love.

The go-to flying creature used by Zarthus aligned summoners is the owl. Owls are stately and powerful, and nocturnal. The go-to land is a cat. Same thing really. The go-to aquatic creature used by Zarthus aligned summoners is the swordfish. Because Zarthus is associated with rapier swords.


Zarthus and Geo-Politics

One of Zarthus’ core commandments is to oppose tyranny wherever it is found. The Lanterns have a culture of distrusting “the Man.” A lot of successful and failed coups alike have Lanterns involved in their conspiracies. Even if a prince is not a tyrant per se, they can expect Lanterns to complain about every controversial decision and tax hike. Scarterra is not medieval Europe but ask yourselves. Even if the Lanterns like the local ruler, they tend to view the ruler’s commands as suggestions. “How many medieval European kings were fond of freedom of expression for their subjects?”

You can guess that the Lanterns are rarely well-liked by the ruling elites.

Most princes view the Lanterns as adversaries within their own people. Unfortunately the Lanterns love glorifying martyrs. If princes respond to the Lantern with a ruthless iron hand, they may get the opposite reaction they were intending. On the other hand, rulers who constantly give in to every demand the Lanterns make appear weak and will only invite Zarthus’ followers to walk all over them. Most princes try to seek a middle ground of sorts.

Rather than make Zarthus worship illegal outright, some princes will try to limit the time and place Lanterns can gather. They frequently try to limit their rituals to within the Nonagon Plazas or only on Zarthus’ holy days. This doesn’t always work. Most areas with these rules have two temples, a public temple and a secret ”real” temple.

Princes that want to placate the Lanterns may accept Lantern advisors who their court (and they sometimes even listen to them!). A lot of court jesters are either Lanterns themselves or they were trained by Lanterns. Other princes try to win the Lanterns favor becoming patrons of art and music. Some kingdoms have a Zarthus friendly festival where they make the court jester King for a Day and the court goes through the motions of following the jester’s inane proclamations. Sometimes the king will let commoners address him with complaints at this time.

One compromise between princes and Lanterns that is growing increasingly popular is to have a suggestion box in the Zarthus temple and periodically give it to the prince’s ministers. For the prince, this preferable to people criticizing him openly in the streets. For this Lanterns this is preferable to being ignored altogether.

I haven’t figured out which lands have peasants and which lands have serfs, but rest assured, the Lanterns hate the practice of serfdom.


Most Lantern backed coups fail. Most of the coups that actually succeed collapse within ten years when their new government collapses. Apseldia is the largest and most powerful nation to claim Zarthus as their spiritual patron and their government has been intact for roughly two centuries. Apseldia is mercantile city state that is predominantly run by half-elf half-humans. They are not feudalistic and do not have hereditary titles (apart from rich land owners). The top political body is the Apseldian Senate which is loosely modeled after Ancient Athens in the real world.

Zarthus is not the preeminent god of many large realms but the wood elf nobles usually respect Zarthus and are fond of patronizing arts and music. The nation of Mondert respects him as a valuable addition to their communities.

Uskala is the most hostile place for Lanterns. The Lanterns are barely tolerated on Zarthus’ main annual holiday there, but Lanterns that make themselves known the rest of the year can expect to have the boots of oppression either metaphorically or literally kicking their faces in. The Elven Empire is not particularly Zarthus-friendly either, but the grey elf princes prefer to use red tape to keep the Lanterns in line as opposed to using naked force. Ironically, before they called themselves the Elven Empire, the nation of Lunatus was one of the few Second Age nations that claimed Zarthus as a state patron. The Lanterns have not forgotten this.

Any nation built on slavery can be safely assumed to not be a Lantern friendly place. In Kahdisteria, there are secret Zarthus cults as well secret Nami and Mera cults pulling the strings of many slave uprisings. Because of this, the Colassian Confederacy usually honors the Lanterns among them. In fact, the Lanterns claim to be instrumental in founding of the Confederacy. They were there, but their role was somewhat exaggerated. East Colassian Lanterns in human nations are more likely to work within the system than outside it. At the moment the East Colassian leaders and the Lanterns are united by a common enemy. It is speculated that if Kahdisteria falls, the marriage of convenience between the Lanterns and the East Colassian princes would collapse in less than a day.

Many nomadic barbarian peoples honor Zarthus, but it is rare for Zarthus to be a clan or tribe’s primary divine patron.

Zarthus Creatures

In most cases, Zarthus would rather impose his values on mainstream society rather than create isolated Zarthus-friendly pockets with a vanity race.

I haven’t officially assigned any creatures as being Zarthus creatures. The most likely candidates for Zarthus-friendly races are Chaotic good musically inclined races. This means satyrs, centaurs and other Fey creatures. The biggest impediment to me doing this is I’m not sure if I want Fey creatures to be subject to the Nine or if I want them to be outside the Nine’s tent.

Among freedom loving, musical monstrous races, it’s likely that Zarthus would have to share his worshipers with Mera, Korus, and Nami at the very least.


The Clergy

Most Scarterran priests and priestesses were formally trained, but all nine priesthoods give out honorary priest titles. It’s common to give out honorary priest titles to adventurers and long-term volunteers. Less commonly, nobles are made honorary priests or priestesses as a political move, but in general, honorary priests and priestesses are fairly rare.

The Lanterns are different. They give out honorary priesthoods like candy. The Lanterns have more honorary priests than conventionally trained priests and priestesses. Outsiders joke that a typical Zarthus religious service of fifteen people has twelve clergy and three parishioners.

One side effect of their mass recruitment is that only about a third of Lanterns have any divine magic powers, but about a tenth of the Lanterns wield arcane magic. That’s more than any other priest save Greymoria.

The vast majority of formerly trained Lantern priests and priestesses join up as adults or adolescents. Lanterns are free to take whomever they please as an apprentice and tailor the training however they see fit. New recruits generally learn on the job.

Whether they are formally trained or made an honorary priest, the requirements are fairly simple. They need to know the basic catechisms (which generally translates into having two dots of Theology or one dot of Theology and a high intelligence score). Zarthus’ priests and priestesses are required to have two unrelated useful skills. Commonly one of these skills is a form of art (painting, singing, poetry) and another skill is a either a practical trade or basic combat ability. Being able to cast magic, either arcane or divine is considered a useful skill.

It’s pretty easy to qualify, but a good Lantern is not expected to coast on her two useful skills. Most Lanterns prefer to become generalists with a wide array of talents rather than become exemplars in a single field.

It is commonly for Lanterns to sew all their proficiencies into their clothes (think of a sash of merit badges). A few Lanterns even mark their proficiencies with tattoos. Some critics, including some Lanterns, believe it is unwise to broadcast to your enemies what you can and cannot do, but the intent is to broadcast to a Lantern’s friends what they can or cannot do. The Lanterns are such a diverse group that it can embarrassing or even dangerous if a parishioner goes to a lantern for healing when the Lantern has no ability in mundane or magical healing. Likewise, the Lanterns don’t want people running to non-combatants for protection.

In addition to wearing their proficiencies on their sleeves (sometimes literally), the Lanterns have a well-deserved reputation as being a braggadocios lot. Lanterns are often a competitive lost. Think about Gimli and Legolas trying to kill more orcs than the other. You get a bunch of Lanterns together and you can expect to find dueling guitar solos, arm wrestling matches, and a wide variety of friendly challenges of all sorts.

Most Zarthus festivals include art contests, music contests, and even cooking contests. Sometimes the competitors work on their masterpieces for months in advance. Formal contests like this are usually determined by voting. Ideally there are nine neutral judges (or as close to neutral as the Lanterns can find).

Competitive boastful Lanterns is the norm, but it’s not universal. In areas where Zarthus worship is restrictive, the Lanterns develop a culture of subtlety.

Favored Souls

Zarthus has about three theurgists for every two favored souls, more than most of the Nine, but the world isn’t exactly drowning in Zarthus’ favored souls. I haven’t come up with a nickname I like for Zarthus’ favored souls. That might be for the better. The Lanterns make very little social distinction between Zarthus’ theurgists and Zarthus’ favored souls. It’s almost impossible to tell one from the other if the divine caster doesn’t tell you.

A few favored souls opt to be independent agents, but most will eventually join the priesthood of Zarthus. It’s not particularly hard to qualify as a Lantern priest or priestess.

Most of the time, Zarthus favored souls are born into families of devout Zarthus worshippers. They are roughly equally likely to be born in civilized lands or barbarian tribes. A disproportionately high number of Zarthus favored souls are orphans or half breeds. Zarthus spirits are more affectionate than most of the Nine’s spirits. Half-spirit favored souls are fairly common. In many cases they are both orphans and half breeds because spirit moms and dads rarely stick around.

During Zarthus’ zodiac year, all normalcy goes flying out the window. Most of Zarthus’ favored souls are born into families that are hostile to Zarthus’ values. Sometimes traditional and conservative families have a wild eyed maverick child who wants to be nice to the peasants and introduce reforms. That’s annoying enough but if the black sheep of the family has divine magic powers that becomes worse than annoying. It’s dangerous. It’s said that in Uskala, noble families often abstain from sex from nine months before Zarthus’ zodiac year through the first three or four months of Zarthus’ zodiac year…just in case.


Factions, Schisms, and Heresies

Lanterns are an individualistic lot, and many Lanterns refuse to sully themselves with factional politics, but informal divisions have arisen. Zarthus has three broad missions for his followers (not necessarily in this order). 1) Help communities become strong, safe and self-sufficient. 2) Spread artistic creation and beauty far and wide, and 3) Oppose tyranny and expose hidden evils to the light.

Those who prioritize the first directive and nicknamed Homesteaders. Those who prioritize the second mission are nicknamed Patrons. Those who prioritize the third mission are commonly called Vindicators.

Both Homesteaders and Vindicators chastise the Patrons for being soft and weak. Instead of helping people in need they are spending their time and money on vanity projects and cozying up to princes and wealthy merchants who are hardly paragons of Zarthus’ noble ideals.

Both the Homesteaders and the Patrons chastise the Vindicators for aggravating people and monsters. When a tyrant king or an angry dragon vows vengeance on a Vindicator they normally don’t say “The Vindicators have wronged me; the Vindicators must pay!” They say “The Lanterns have wronged me; the Lanterns must pay.” Given that the Vindicators have more combat and stealth training, reprisals often hit the Homesteaders and Patrons because they are softer targets and they are easier to find.

Both Patrons and Vindicators sort of view Homesteaders as ignorant hicks who miss the forest for the trees. Sure, you can watch over a village of a hundred farmers all your life or you can create sweeping government reforms to help millions of people or become immortalized through grand works of art.

Not every Lantern identifies with one of these three groups. Given that Lanterns like to be jack-of-all-trades some view the factional name as insulting forms of address, but it’s the best way to categorize the uncategorizeable. It’s possible for a well-traveled Lantern to be called a member of all three factions at different times in different places based on what she is doing.

Apseldian Lanterns

There is some tension between the Lanterns of Apseldia and the Lanterns of everywhere else. Usually Apseldia is celebrated as the greatest political success of the Lanterns. A Zarthus backed coup has created a non-feudal state that has survived enemy invasions as well as famines and other hardships.

Lanterns are generally used to complaining about the government, but in Apseldia, the Lanterns essentially are the government. After two centuries in power, the Apseldia Lanterns have grown distinct from their counterparts elsewhere. Some Lanterns are even judges and peace keepers, two professions most Lanterns generally have a low opinion of. There are even Lanterns who collect taxes. Some hardline Lanterns consider that heresy.

Most Lanterns train on the job following a single mentor through the field, but Apseldia has a training monastery with a standardized curriculum that some whisper is not that different from a Khemra training monastery, just with more singing. Most Lanterns are inducted as initiates as young adults, but most Apseldian recruits are oblated as children. Most Lanterns have to aggressively recruit to maintain their numbers but the Apseldia monastery has so many people knocking on their doors that they cannot accept everyone who wants in. They have to have entrance exams. Something non-Apseldian Lanterns say smells like something Khemra temples would do.

Lineage

Most Lanterns are all too eager to name their full spiritual lineage. Spiritual lineage is different from someone’s family ancestry. As far as Lanterns are concerned, your lineage is your mentor, and your mentor’s mentor, and your mentor’s mentor’s mentor. And so forth and so on. If the Lantern is a spirit Loa, they might even be able to literally channel the power and wisdom of their past lineage.

Lanterns love to explain how they carry the legacy of famous heroes of yore, usually Lanterns are so individualistic they don’t go too deep into their famous spiritual ancestor’s philosophy, but a few do. Two lineages that are well known world-wide are the Lineage of Gariel and the Lineage of Tabrath. I will come up with more lineages as needed, but most famous lineages are local phenomenon not spread around the world like those of Gariel and Tabrath.

Gariel was a Lantern warrior who was in love with a Mera priest. When her true love was killed by Maylar’s minions, she swore vengeance and spent her whole life fighting Maylar’s Testers and spirits. Gariel’s lineage still takes the fight to Maylar on a regular basis, and they give Mera’s Tenders protection, whether they asked for it or not.

The lineage of Tabrath is losing prestige. Tabrath was a legendary warrior famous for slaying many deadly monsters. The old stories have Tabrath rescuing elderly villagers, young princes, and fair maidens, but Tabrath’s spiritual descendants sometimes lose sight of why they fight monsters. Some of them just want to collect trophies from monsters and show off their scars. Not all monsters act mostrously. Some dragons that are attacked where just minding their own business. Sometimes the local monsters only start attacking an area in response to some Lanterns poking them with sharp things.

The practice of boasting about one’s lineage is slowly fading away in Apseldia. 90% of Apseldia’s Lanterns all have the same lineage, so it’s kind of redundant to boast about it.

Mask Breakers

The Mask Breakers are not associated with a single lineage. Most Mask Breakers aren’t going to tell you who their mentor was anyway. As the name suggests, Mask Breakers represent those who really hate Phidas. Mask Breakers are developing their own subculture within the Lanterns. They are a lot more secretive and less apt to brag and boast. The Mask Breakers maintain a small number of secret temples that they don’t share the location with other Lanterns and they are developing some of their own rituals and tradition.

The most obvious tradition unique to the Mask Breakers is that they keep the masks of Phidas priests and warriors they slay as trophies. Another oddity is that they don’t use many lanterns in their temple décor, it’s too obvious.

Mask Breakers rarely identify themselves as Lanterns. They identify themselves as cobblers, cooks, tanners, blacksmiths and the like. They rarely identify themselves as artists and musicians, that’s too obvious. They want to move about unseen. They are not too proud to work as a stable boy if that can get them access to the stable of say, a corrupt Baron who is a puppet of Phidas’ priesthood.


Material Needs

Most of the Lanterns’ core followers are poor, so there are not a lot of donations filling the temple coffers. If a Zarthus worshiper is financially well off, they are probably going to funnel their donations to the Patrons to sponsor public works of art. That’s nice and all, but the Lanterns are so decentralized that it’s very hard for the Patrons to funnel any excess coins to the Homesteaders, Vindicators and countless roving iterant Lanterns.

That’s a large part of the reason the Lanterns want all their members to have at least two useful skills. A lot of Lanterns sing for their supper in taverns or hunt for the supper in the woods. Others can get work in a blacksmith’s shop or apothecary

While the Lanterns do not have as many spell-casters as they would like, most of their spell-casters learn how to craft magical items, at least simple ones like potions. A lot of Lanterns have substantial wilderness survival skills. Put these things together, and the Lanterns have a lot of herbalists that are good at finding regents and willing to travel to dangerous areas to get them. That makes the Lanterns a competitor against the Masks and Children for the local regent and potion trade. They might not have the selection of the Masks or the Children but most adventurers are less likely to assume a Lantern is automatically out to cheat them.

Some Lanterns moonlight as pickpockets, con artists or burglars, often viewing theft from wealthy Phidas or Khemra worshipers as a noble act. Other Lanterns view theft as a very serious crime and would not engage in theft if they were literally starving.


Priestly Ranks

Apprentice: Non-ordained member
Cleric: Full priest or priestess
Elder Cleric: Priest or priestess with a long tenure. Sometime this is used as an insult to mock someone for being over the hill. “I am honored to work with a Lantern of your…experience.”

That’s it, the Lanterns aren’t big on ranks and titles. What they are big on is bragging about their mad skillz.

A “proficiency” is generally considered to be something the Lantern has two or three dots in.

A “mastery” is generally considered to be something that the Lantern has three or four dots.

An “assembly” is generally considered to be three or more tightly related skills. One common assembly is to have healing magic, a high rating in Medicine, and Hearth Wisdom. Another to have a high rating in Brawl and Melee while also possessing some combat magic.

Even among the braggart Lanterns, it’s rare for a Lantern to rattle off all his proficiencies, masteries, and assemblies in one go. Usually they pick one and stick with in each verbal exchange. Charlatans and fakers are socially shunned if they are caught boasting of a skill they don't have.

More than rank, more than accumulated skills, the best way to get status among the Lanterns is to be popular and charismatic and that is hard to measure in concrete titles and slang terms. Because Lanterns love to boast (and they love to rib each other over failures) and because Lanterns are often bards and storytellers, it’s a good bet that most Lanterns already know of the reputation of outsider Lanterns long before they meet face-to-face.


Scaraqua

Zarthus is the middle of the divine pack status wise. He is the god of tides and that is important and all, but it’s something most Scaraquans tend to take for granted. Merfolk love art and beautiful things. A lot of Merfolk honor Zarthus as a god of art. Most other Scaraquans do have much of an eye for aesthetics and find the Merfolk’s obsessions with beauty trivial. Crab People, Cephalpod people and Karakhai generally view Zarthus as being a waste of time.

One major difference between Land Zarthus and Sea Zarthus is that Sea Zarthus is a lot less of a rabble rouser. The tides are fairly predictable after all. Also, most of the biggest patrons of art under the sea are wealthy Merfolk nobles. Sea Zarthus is still a foe of evil, but his Scaraquan followers are more likely to work within the system than outside it.


Hollow Earth

I haven’t worked out the details yet, but Zarthus is probably going to be somewhat of an underdog underground. But Zarthus is not going to roll over like a dog. He’s going to fight, like a different better dog. Zarthus is going to stand up for his principles as much as he can underground and he is going to work very hard to be a thorn in the side of Phidas and every other subterranean tyrant.




Anyway, hope you found this worth reading. I’m open to suggestions and feedback on fleshing out Zarthus and his followers further. I will answer any Zarthus based questions if you feel I left something out.

 

[Scalenex]

And Now For Something Completely Different!

/\ This is the situation I have dealt with for too long! Me and my three players. The joy of adulthood has kept one us from being able to role play for roughly two months.

That is why I've been writing so much background on my gods and goddesses! But the dry spell is broken. Huzzah. We played today. Odds are very good we will play next week or if not next week the week thereafter. Life is good.

Spoiler: Recap of last session back in January

So last we left off, the PCs killed Guldur the OCD lich. They gathered up his precious metals, gems, small library his regents and two magical items, one of which they destroyed (why would they keep a wand that heals undead, they are too heroic for that).

But there was a whole bunch of loot the PCs could not effectively carry away. Iron ingots, assorted non-precious metal, over a ton of coal, an alchemists laboratory and a working forge.

A dawn spirit of Khemra thanked the PCs for removing an undead scourge and the other heroic stuff they did against crime in King's Lake and gave them magical gems. The gems gave Aranil and Svetlana magic flaming weapons and Neshik got a battery of reserve mana points.

Then the player characters failed a bunch of Perception + Alertness so a party of orc adventurers scouted them.

My new game system is in beta, so I'm constantly play testing new rules. Today we tried out a moderate reworking of how combat rounds and declared actions works. I can proudly say, the game is now slightly better mechanically than it was before. Combat is running a little bit smoother and the players have a little bit more options. Win-win.

The orc adventuring party accosts the PCs. The PCs roll well on their Intimidation rolls and they roleplayed their intimidation attempts well. They manage to talk the orcs into letting them go for a tribute of 150 gold. Since the PCs got roughly 10,000 gold worth of treasure from the dungeon, 150 gp is pocket change. That said, adventurers hate to part with gold. They made a lot of jokes about getting the 150 gold from the orcs' dead bodies later. Maybe even a little Anakin Skywalker. not just the men...

I reminded Neshik's player that he recently purchased a dot of Plant magic, and this lets him obscure the party's tracks. So he started using this power to make it harder for the orcs to relocate them again. It's really expensive in terms of mana to use this power constantly when you are pulling a heavily laden cart, but if he hypothetically obscured their tracks every hour or so, it's a lot harder to be tracked over long distances. Now that the PCs are trying to hide their trail, Bula the orc's tracker failed her rolls to follow the partially obscured trail and the PCs lost their orc tails.

I wanted to try out my new combat rolls so I had a pack of five pygmy trolls try to kill the PCs in their sleep. Aranil casts Alarm spell every night, so the alarm woke everyone in time to be combat ready. But the alarm only revealed the first troll. Pygmy trolls are quite stealthy, so as the combat progressed, new trolls popped up. "We're fighting one troll, nope two, nope three, crap five!"

The new combat rules made it a little easier for Svetlana's players to do cinematic stunts instead of just declaring "I attack him with my axe" a hundred times. Some of these stunt attempts didn't work, but one of these stunts was really impressive looking after 3 out of 5 trolls were dead, the two survivors had their tiny troll minds blown, so they ran away. But the players were not in a merciful mood, so they hunted the last two down.

Neshik spent the next day harvesting their livers for potion ingredients, then they finished traveling to the castle of Duke Zimoz without incident.

(I detailed pygmy trolls on page 28). I am pleased to say that Pygmy trolls do not need any stat modifications. They are nice and challenging but not too challenging.


The plan was always to tell the Duke about all the iron and coal up for the taking. They figured since there is a hostile tribe of orcs between Castle Zimoz and all the treasure, they would join the party to claim the supplies in case the Duke's men ran into trouble.

The PCs spent about two weeks of downtime. Neshik made healing potions because that's what he spends almost all his downtime doing. Aranil removed the magical traps on the spellbook they captured, and the Duke called up his banner men to mobilize some reserves.

The players told me they wanted to take on the Dirty Crow Orc tribe en masse before they demanded tribute from the local villagers again. But since the villagers paid their tribute fairly recently they were not in a hurry to take on the Dirty Crows.

Around page 27 or so, I mentioned Umara the half-elf was training a peasant militia to fight the orcs. What's the point of creating a supporting character if she is never used? I opted to introduce her now.

One of Duke Zimoz's advisors suggested inviting her along because Duke Zimoz does not have enough soldiers to fight the Dirty Crow Orc tribe.

With Duke Zimoz's full troop levy, his knights, and Umara's militia, and the PCs support, this coalition good guys could have fought the Dirty Crows toe-to-toe though the battle would be close.

But the players opted to do this instead \/

A random dungeon with two entrances is a good solution to being trailed by hostile Orcs. Duck in one entrance, wend their way through a mostly empty, unthemed dungeon, exit the other end.

A Team: The PCs went along with the Duke's son, Andrezj, their friend the holy warrior Udom, and the half-elf Lantern Umara.

Umara, Andrzej, and Udom are roughly on the PCs level, give or take a few experience points. Note, Andrzej is a potent fighter and he is borrowing his father's magic sword and armor, but Neshik is extremely paranoid about having to tell his friend the Duke "Sorry, your son and heir died on this adventure!" He gave him three healing potions and he has declared he will never move farther than the maximum range of his healing magic from the young Lord Zimoz.

B Team: Two knights (6 dice combat pools and great equipment), Umara's three apprentices (five dice combat pools and a bit of minor magic or in the half-orc's case, he hits very hard), 12 men at arms (five dice combat pools, light armor and shields).

C Team: Duke Zimoz's black smith, an engineer who is good at constructing boats and barges, and about a dozen or so strong men to carry stuff and tend the pack mules (three dice combat pools, simple weapons).

Between Neshik, Umara, and Umara's apprentices, the party had had lots of mana to cast Plant ● over and over again. The Dirty Crow tribe's scouts rolled poorly and did not realize that 30 men were traveling through their claimed territory, or if they did they don't know which direction they went. The magical track covering won't work when they are carrying two tons of iron and coal given as they would be moving much slower and leaving deeper tracks, but it's a nice start.

I didn't have any monsters or anything attack them on their long march. We are talking roughly 30 armed men. No casual goblin raider or hungry chimera is going to pick a fight with a group that big. A dragon might have picked a fight with them, but I didn't feel like a throwing a dragon at the PCs. Dragons should be major story events, not random encounters.

Anyway the good guys reached Guldur's dungeon. I decided that the area where the PCs fought Guldur had collected enough ambient magical energy from their last fight to coalesce into a giant belligerent earth elemental.

We had a brief but satisfying fight. The good guys took down the earth elemental like a well oiled machine. Aranil spotted the elemental well in advance, so the good guys were able to prepare. Aranil, Svetlana, Andrejz and the two knights took point after Neshik and Umara loaded up the front line fighters with buff spells. Flawless victory.

Umara and her apprentices found the secret dungeon exit that the PCs missed the first time. Now the good guys are ready to ferry all their supplies through the underground cavern.

And we were almost out of time before people had to go home, so this seemed like a good time to hit the pause button.



So I got a week, maybe two, to come up with interesting encounters for the PCs and their allies to encounter while hauling their goodies south.

I'm open to any and all ideas for what to put for interesting encounters. Runesmith, my favorite D&D Youtube channel. Created an Underdark video a mere couple hours ago. Not sure how much of this applies to Scarterra, but it's an enjoyable video none the less.

I know three things.

-A large part of their journey is going to be over water on slow moving barges.
-The PCs are going to discover the flooded remnants of lair a tribe of goblins who was displaced by the flood. (The PCs already fought the goblins and killed most of them on the surface).
-The PCs are heroes. They want to get 100% of the men they are taking with them out alive. They really don't want to tell the duke his son his dead.

So in other words, I don't to have threaten the PCs lives to challenge them. If this was a video game, we would call this an escort mission.

Non-Exhaustive List of Ideas.
-Guldur was putzing away in his dungeon yelling at dust bunnies and casting necromancy spells for decades. It's possible the caverns immediately below the dungeon have become saturated with dark energy and either spawned some free-willed rogue undead or spawned twisted elementals, either inverted water elementals or inverted earth elementals.


-Further away from the dungeon, the area was subject to a recent flood. The area might be suffused with magical energy spawning a large numbers of water elements or hybrid water elementals. They probably won't be malevolent, but they will be random. A water elemental could want to "play" not realizing that when blorp! play wrestles, mortals drown.


-The area where the goblin lair used to be might be haunted with goblin ghosts. Maybe some kind of carrion eating monster grew fat on all the drowned goblins. When the lair was active, it was teeming with cunning and deadly traps. Maybe some traps are still active. What sort of traps would still be intact after a massive flood?


-The Dirty Crow tribe of orcs was afraid of the dungeon of Guldur. Anyone who ventured nearby was killed by Guldur or the Wendigo guardian. The Dirty Crow Tribe never bothered attacking the dungeon in force. It is possible however unlikely that a daring band of orcs could piece together that the lich is dead and there may be stuff worth looting there. I probably want to save the Dirty Crows for later, but the option to include them now is here. That might be a ganky move because the PCs opted to travel underground to avoid the orcs.


-I probably need to have at least one type of animal-intelligence monster. Bestial threats that would be appropriate for the environment that I already have stats for include chokers, water trolls, giant snakes, rust monsters, or a Delver that devolved to a bestial state due to starvation. I'm not opposed to statting out new monsters if someone has a good idea.


-It's possible an intelligent monster or group of intelligent monsters took over the goblin's territory (maybe they even caused the flood). If I want a single very powerful monster I could include an Aboleth, a beholder, or a young dragon. If I want to include a group of intelligent monsters I could with a pack of Aranea, clan of Derro, or pack of Camasotz.

Given that the good guys are going to be toting barges and laden mules, it's extremely likely that any intelligent denizens are going to spot the good guys way before the PCs figure out they are being watched.

Derro are bat skyte crazy and Camasotz are literally blood thirsty bats, so they would probably attack just because they can. Aboleths, Aranea, dragons, and beholders are wily schemers though. These guys should probably have motivations more complicated than "I want to kill them all just because!"

Aboleths would be extremely dangerous foes. Even if the Aboleth doesn't kill anyone, it's likely some of the party would have their skin polymorphed. Those with their skin warped by an Aboleth have to stay damp and away from direct sunlight or they start to sicken and die. It takes ●●●● Purification magic to fix, so they probably have to keep any victims in intensive care for weeks while they look for a suitable healer. That might be too ganky to include.


-There could be friendly monsters: Myconids, Kalazotz, a benign dragon, or a delver. Delvers are pretty easy. Delvers eat metal ore, but refined metal is like intoxicating candy to them. If the PCs give a delver some iron ingots, a delver could be persuaded to serve as a guide or create new tunnels for them. Delvers speak Draconic. I don't think any of the PCs or NPCs speak Draconic but I could let a delver speak a little bit of the Common tongue.

I often struggle on how to incorporate friendly monsters into my games. I'm not sure how to handle the other friendly monsters. They say hello (Neshik might barter for regents because his player does that ALL the time), then they move on their way. Ten minutes of game play tops. I crave more.


-I could throw in a Questing Spirit of Maylar to try to kill some people, or I could throw in a Questing Spirit of Nami to put some non-lethal but otherwise time consuming obstacles in the PCs path.

 

[Aginor]

I often struggle on how to incorporate friendly monsters into my games. I'm not sure how to handle the other friendly monsters. They say hello (Neshik might barter for regents because his player does that ALL the time), then they move on their way. Ten minutes of game play tops. I crave more.

Friendly monster ideas from the top of my head:
1. Remember the Horta from Star Trek TOS? It was a monster hunter quest but the crew found out that the monster was just defending her eggs and was really friendly once they established communication.

2. the friendly monster is a clue that leads to places to visit. It seems to randomly appear at first, but it (or monsters of its kind) appear when some conditions are met. The group might want to find out what those conditions are, which leads them to...something.

3. the friendly monster is held captive somewhere, like on a Bandit camp or so. The group doesn't know why. But it might be happy to be rescued.

3a. Same as above but the monster isn't a captive, the party stumbles into a fight between monsters. Bonus: the fight may not be an actual fight but a monster mating ritual.

4. remember the Voyager Episode Equinox? A nice ethical dilemma presented there. As long as your players are not murder hobos that might work nicely.

 

[Paradoxical Pacifism]

Synopsis: Phidas believes in promoting order and rewards those who support order and punishes harshly those who do not. Nothing is worse in his eyes then violating a sworn oath or contract. He is commonly viewed as the father of money and trade. He maintains the safeguards that prevent the Void from consuming Scarterras. He gained his nickname of the Scarred Lord and association with masks from taking serious injuries to the face while fighting Turoch. Phidas believes that since he suffered the most fighting Tuorch he deserves the biggest share of Scarterras. It said that Turoch vowed revenge on Phidas above the others so Phidas and his followers tends to be on the forefront of efforts to battle demons and Turoch cultists.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't remember you developing much of the primitive/barbaric nations and races such as the wood elves that much. imo, reading Phidas wasn't as interesting as reading Mera, since the latter's ideals and objectives clashed with the world. With Phidas, there isn't much going against him or most of the gods that adhere to law as of now. But i did like how his followers leverage nations for influence and vice versa. That was pretty cool.

 

[Scalenex]

Huzzah and hurrah. Divine feedback!

Correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't remember you developing much of the primitive/barbaric nations and races such as the wood elves that much.

This is correct. I have not developed the primitive barbaric nations much. The Wood Elves, the Mereshnari Humans, and the three kobold tribes are the only large groups that I have my usual multiple pages of words of fluff about.

Also, my Wood Elves are semi-civilized,sort of pastoral farming. They plant low maintenance (it's helped that they have a lot of Plant magic). Most Wood Elves spend about seven to eight months living nomadic life cycles, checking on their crops whenever they pass through the area. Then they spend the four to five months of the late fall, winter, and early spring living off their crops.

I haven't figured out the exact numbers, but most nomadic groups are about 50-100 elves and the Winter Camps (which use permanent buildings despite the name "camp") tend to be made up of 10 to 30 nomadic groups. I'm still fuzzy on some of the details on how the king or queen runs the nation as a whole. I suppose a noble Lord or Lady is in charge of each Winter Camp. And the Lords and Ladies report to the king or queen. I feel I like need more layers of power than that since humans have knights, barons, counts, dukes, and kings in that order.

Aranil's player wanted to play a Wood Elf noble. We haven't gotten deep into the weeds yet. Aranil is of the noble House Anastasia this is either the third or fourth elf character he has played with that surname), but he is not the heir apparent of the house unless a lot of his relatives die. But just like with humans, even non-inheriting high born have more social privileges.

Aranil's house is out of favor in the halls of power because either the current head or the previous house head has a reputation for being a fool. We need to figure out the details but he either lost of a lot of money or got a bunch of elves killed, not through maliciousness but through incompetence.

Anyway, both nobles and commoners practice the Rumspringa tradition of taking a few decades to explore the wider world. Aranil's player has said that he is playing a heroic character for somewhat selfish reasons. He is hoping if he spends most of his Rumspringa doing noble deeds that he can restore his house's reputation or at least his own.

Aranil has been pretending to be a commoner elf when traveling abroad though he is not lying. He is just sticking to his first name and is letting people assume his social status.

reading Phidas wasn't as interesting as reading Mera,

That was not intentional, but I have noticed it too. As mentioned, I find Mera the most interesting of my gods. Ideally all of my gods would be very interesting, but with nine major gods, they cannot all be utterly fascinating.

since the latter's ideals and objectives clashed with the world. With Phidas, there isn't much going against him or most of the gods that adhere to law as of now.

That was sort of my plan all along. All three Lawful deities (Phidas, Khemra, Hallisan) are very well entrenched in civilized society. All three Chaotic deities (Maylar, Nami, and Zarthus) are generally working at cross purposes with civilized society. The three Neutral deities (Greymoria, Korus, and Mera) are sort of straddling the line.

I guess my geopolitical thing about Phidas is that people know he's a sleazeball but people cannot dislodge him because Phidas is too useful to throw out altogether.

 

[Scalenex]

“Mal” is Latin for “bad.” It pops up in fiction a lot.

The shocking twist villain in Inception was nicknamed Mal.

One of Green Arrow’s nemesis is an evil archer named Malcolm Merlyn.

The Malfoy family is full of bad guys in the Harry Potter series. Narcissa Malfoy is an implied Narcissist. Lucius Malfoy, sounds like Lucifer, aka the Devil. Draco, kind of a like a dragon.

The Disney channel series the Descendants (the descendants of villains), one of the characters is named Mal.

General Grievous was a really dumb name for a Star Wars character. I detest that wheezing CGI robot.

The witch in Sleeping Beauty is named Maleficent which literally means evil.

The villain mastermind for most of the Spawn series was a demon named Malbolgia.

Cracked.com had more villains with “mal” in their name somewhere, but I cannot find the article I’m thinking of. The point is basing a villain’s name off “mal” is a very lazy and hack strategy for fiction writers with no subtlety or creativity to designate who is the villain is.


Maylar in Great Detail


A brief disclaimer. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a lighthearted story, sometimes I am in the mood for something dark and twisted. Whether a story is rated G or a hard R, Maylar and his minions are going to be on the cutting edge of evil.

Greymoria represents the evil of psychological horror, Phidas represents institutional corruption, and Maylar represents evil that is direct physical threats.

I’m not going into the details on the dark stuff. I’m not sure if the stories I want to tell are going to go full Game of Thrones or be more like a Disney version of the King Arthur myth. Rest assured, if a story can involve extremely dark stuff, then Maylar can and will be involved.

I’m keeping this thread on the lighter side of PG. In a few years, I may get to run my game for some little kids at which point Maylar can be a G rated villain that robs stage coaches. If I find myself running a game for some edge lord adults, I can go into full horror movie stuff.



Maylar “Last One Standing” “the Kindly One” “The Scourge”
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Priests’ Nickname: Testers of Strength. Short form, Testers.
Favored Weapon: Spear
Common Symbol: A hand holding a blood soaked spear
Divine Tool of Power: A Spear forged from Turoch's heart.
Primary Dominion over Nature: Disease and Decay
Primary Gift to Mortals: Hunting and animal husbandry.
Favored Magic: Animal, Hexing, Wrath
Synopsis: Maylar strongly believes that whatever does not kill mortals makes them stronger. If something does kill them they probably didn’t deserve to live anyway. With the death of the weak, the cycle is renewed and the strong benefit. Maylar believes strongly in testing mortals frequently to make them stronger. Maylar is said to be the ultimate origin of all diseases. Maylar promotes conflict between the various races and peoples, but also encourages mortals to succeed at physical challenges of other sorts. Many cultures claim Maylar was the father of hunting and animal husbandry.
Priests and Primary Followers: The stereotypical Maylar priest is a chaplain to a violent marauding force. The most feared Maylar priests act as subversive agents serving to aggressively “test the strength” of populations that seem to have gotten soft. A growing number of relatively benign Maylar priests have cropped up in very harsh areas where they provide support to those whose hardiness meets their approval. Temples are rare and most priests are iterant. They are generally free to recruit whomever they wish and indoctrinate them as they fit. Those who survive by violence often worship Maylar primarily. Herders and hunters tend to worship Maylar often (along with other deities). Maylar is also commonly worshipped by those who view themselves as hardy and self-sufficient.
Common Times to Invoke his Name: Maylar is called the Kindly One because it is feared that by insulting him one invites disease. He is often prayed to for mercy from illness. His name is also invoked occasionally before beginning a physical challenge or after completion. It is said that if someone dedicates a difficult physical task to Maylar after completion that the person will be free of disease for at least a year if the deed meets his approval.
Basic Tenets: -Test the limits of your strength and those of others.
-Elevate yourself by any means necessary, and never grow complacent regards to your own strength.
-Those who can endure your testing will become stronger, those who cannot endure it should serve those who can in some way.
-If the weak cannot be used, destroy them. Thus the cycle of life can be renewed.


Maylar Portfolio includes but is not limited to: Disease, decay, hunting, animal husbandry, murder, debauchery, cunning in battle, war, strength, toughness, Darwinism, terror, orcs


Social Darwinism and the Power of Propaganda

If a lie is repeated enough times, people will believe it. Sometimes even the liar will believe it. This has happened to Maylar. Maylar likes breaking things, taking things, and hurting people. “Survival of the fittest” and “That which does not kill you, makes you stronger” were just empty mottos Maylar spouted off to justify his evil and selfish actions. Initially. Now Maylar is a true believer in his dogma.

If you give Maylar a few million years, he might have a redemption character arc. Its unlikely Scarterra will last long enough for this to occur, my world is only about 50,000 years old. Maylar is probably 10% less evil in the Third Age than he was in the First Age though no one, including Maylar, has figured this out.

So Maylar never stopped having his mortal followers and spirit minions attack people for no reason to “test their strength.” In the First and Second Age, if the target of this “test” handily defeated Maylar’s proxy, than Maylar would swear vengeance and send more minions against the disrespectful mortal.

In the Third Age, if the target of one of his “tests” overcomes the obstacle with true strength, Maylar will shrug and say “I guess he is strong” and then move on with his godly life. They might have to fight a Maylar creature later, but they are not going to ruthlessly hounded constantly for the rest of their short lives. This is a very small change, but a benign faction of Maylar is growing in numbers and political clout.

The fact that once someone proves themselves, they don’t need additional tests, at least not all the time, might lead to the creation of new diseases. The real world has all sorts of diseases that you only get once. A lot of diseases are far more mild for children than adults. That would go along with Maylar’s values. He does not normally want to “test” children as hard as he test adults.


Godly Rivals

Maylar was the one who struck the death blow against Turoch. He did this by playing possum after taking a glancing blow, then he sucker punched Turoch when his back was turned. Maylar and his followers may crow about being bold and direct, but Maylar is not afraid to be a hypocrite. Cowardly tactics are permissible if they ultimately lead to victory.

It’s a poorly kept secret that Maylar would love to slay or dominate the rest of the Nine. He’s not sure how to go about it though. He thinks Mera is the weak link in the Nine, but he cannot touch her with Zarthus or Hallisan always read to defend her. Maylar thinks he can kill Zarthus or Hallisan fairly easily, but he would be tired and weak from the fight, so if he kills Zarthus or Hallisan the other one will destroy him while he is vulnerable. And that’s assuming all the rest of the Nine stay out of the fight. which seems unlikely.


Maylar is deeply in love with Nami. Or whatever a very evil depraved person calls “love”. “Unhealthy obsession” is more accurate than “love”. Nami is the only one of the Nine that Maylar considers his true equal. On the mortal plane, their followers work together fairly often, usually on terms dictated by Nami’s followers.

Maylar admires Greymoria’s utter ruthlessness. He is perhaps a little scared of her. Maylar’s only real complaint is that Greymoria is not very direct or prone to taking risks. Still, on the mortal plane, their followers work together a lot. The Children and the Testers have so many shared enemies they cannot really afford to fight each other.

Do you know in kung fu movies how the quiet shy guy is often secretly a badass? This kind of how Maylar feels about Korus. Maylar is pretty sure Korus is a lot stronger than he lets on. Maylar is surprisingly gentile when he “tests” Korus afraid of literally invoking nature’s wrath.

Maylar finds the fact that Phidas believes his injuries suffered means he deserves more power laughable. Maylar respects that Phidas is seeking power but believes his methods are foolish and cowardly. Maylar views Phidas as more of annoyance than a true threat.

Zarthus and Maylar are very often at odds. Maylar is a horrible person, and generally has no shortage of enemies. What makes Maylar and Zarthus slightly different is that Maylar views Zarthus as a worthy foe. Sure Zarthus must die, but at least Zarthus gets to die on his feet and not on his knees. This worthy foe attitude carries over when the Lanterns and Testers meet in the mortal plane.

Maylar believes the trappings of civilization are a crutch the weak use to appear strong. Khemra devotes herself to propping up this crutch. Khemra must be removed. The Keepers and the Testers fight a lot in the mortal plane.

Mera is a weakling who has based her entire life’s mission to coddling the weak. Maylar’s followers seek to destroy or at least traumatize Mera’s followers at every opportunity.

Hallisan embodies Mera’s flawed principle of coddling the weak. Hallisan utilizes Khemra’s weakling tool of civilization to create false strength. Like Zarthus, Hallisan is capable of holding his own in a fight. The Testers and the Guardians often fight each other on the mortal plane with no provocation necessary. They hate each other on principle.

Maylar Spirits

Maylar has a lot of spirits. He especially fond of deploying “questing spirits.” When the rest of the Nine deploy a questing spirit they are either guarding a specific holy place or treasure (only one who is worthy may wield the Sword of Power) or they are trying to teach someone a lesson, or test one of their faithful to see if he or she is ready for more responsibility.

Maylar questing spirits are usually more brutal and literal. They are testing to see if mortals are strong, cunning, and tenacious enough to survive what the spirit throws at them. Many spirits blur the line between questing spirits and other types, especially punishment spirits. If someone defeats a spirit sent to punish them for being weak, I guess they weren’t weak. They passed the test. If a Soldier spirit opts to aid one of Maylar’s faithful, they will usually require the mortal demonstrate their strength first in some fashion.

Maylar questing spirits become “little gods” fairly often. An area gives the spirit offerings to placate its wrath. Sometimes these spirits even grow fond of their tributaries and will defend them from outside threats. This is closest thing Maylar has to true guardian spirits.

Gaunts are emaciated spirits that spread disease. No one likes Gaunts.

Maylar theurgists are fond of using summoning magic. The default land creature is a wolf. The default air creature is a vulture. The default sea creature is a shark.


Maylar and Geo-Politics

The Shepherds of Men are improving the image of Maylar’s Testers slightly, but only slightly. In most civilized nations, Maylar’s worshipers are barely tolerated at best or actively persecuted at worse.

Most of Maylar’s temples are secret temples. If a city has a Nonagon Temple Plaza, there is a good chance the Maylar temple is a farce, built and crewed by Keepers of Khemra or Stewards of Korus.

Generally speaking, it is accepted that humans, elves, and dragons were crafted jointly by all the Nine working together. Many elves, especially wood elves and grey elves, claim that Maylar was not involved with the creation of elves. The nations of Loren and the Elven Empire generally view Maylar worshipers as vermin that must be expunged. The dark elves of Kahdisteria have a small but very fanatical Maylar following that among other things, oversees gladiatorial fights among the slave population. Maylar has publictemples in Kahdisteria that are actually run by the Testers. Still the dark elves in general don’t care for Maylar much. He is an ally of convenience to Greymoria and little more.

The half-elves of Apseldia allow for public Maylar worship, but this mainly done symbolically with the goal of flipping the middle finger to the Elven Empire.


Maylar is despised by most dwarves. Meckelorn and Stahlheim view Hallisan as their main patron. Mondert views Mera as their main patron. To pretty much all dwarves, Maylar is a god of the dwarves’ enemies. That doesn't mean there are no Dwarf Testers. Dwarf society produces more malcontents than they care to admit.

Thanks to the efforts of the Shepherds, the Testers have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps away from “Menace that must be purged” to “barely tolerated annoyance” in the nation of Kantoc. That’s actually pretty impressive considering how powerful Hallisan’s priesthood is in Kantoc.

There might be a few petty independent barons with a Maylar-friendly warlord calling himself king, but these petty kingdoms rarely last very long. The most famous such warlord was Mordock the Conqueror who conquered most of West Colassia, but his chosen heir did not wield half of his charisma or raw might and was deposed in less than a year.

Among human lands, the most Maylar friendly area is East Colassia. The Shepherds of Men are a very large faction in the interior of the continent. The land is arid and unforgiving and the herdsmen have to fight off lions, gnolls, and dark elf slavers. For the Shepherds, that lifestyle is almost paradise. The men of the Colassia Confederacy have proven themselves to be strong by simply surviving.

Among civilized lands, Maylar worship is more popular but even then barbarian tribes that really take Maylar’s philosophies to heart tend to bite off more than they can chew. Tribes that follow a less reckless deity often are more likely to grow and thrive.

(don't worry I'll cover the Shepherds in detail soon).

Maylar Creatures

Maylar created the first orcs in conjunction with Nami. Maylar created the first gnolls in conjunction with Greymoria. It is unclear who created the first Scale Giants, but in the Third Age, most Scale Giants are paragons of Maylar’s ideals though they are generally not very pious.

In a lot of ways, gnolls are a creation that has gone horribly right. The gnolls can barely stop fighting each other long enough to attack soft weak civilized folk. If the gnolls didn’t breed so fast, they would have been driven to extinction a long time ago.

The Karakhai or sharkmen are Maylar’s chosen people under the sea.

I’m open to creating more Maylar creatures for both land and sea.

The Clergy

To be a priest or priestess, all a character in my setting needs to do is buy two dots of Theology and meet whatever requirements their priesthood makes them do. In Maylar’s priesthood, there is only one requirement: be strong. Testers do not generally discriminate in favor of spell-casters or against them. Priests and priestess are expected to be strong. It matters little if the strength comes from a magic spell or the tip of a spear.

The vast majority of new Testers are inducted as young adults as opposed to being inducted as children, unless the new child recruit is a son or daughter of an established Maylar priest or priestess. There are few if any formal training protocols. New recruits travel with their mentor and learn on the job. Any Tester can recruit whomever they choose as an initiate. In general, mass recruitment is viewed as a good thing. It is not uncommon for a Tester to have three or four apprentices at any given time.

Contrary to what they boast about, it is not true that “Two apprentices die for every apprentice who passes,” but training for new recruits is rough. I am sure it’s not surprising that the Testers of Strength make their new initiates engage in brutal tests to prove themselves. Tests of endurance and tests of combat are common. Divine magic is sort of a test. Usually a Maylar theurgist does not get his or her first dot of divine magic until after he or she does something impressive.

If one Tester kills another Tester, is it not required, but it is strongly encouraged that the victor of the fight adopt the defeated Tester’s apprentices and complete their training. The Testers fight each other a lot, but not every fight is to the death. Haka dance offs, staring contests, arm wrestling matches, full wrestling matches, and duels fought to first blood are all pretty common.

A single dot of divine magic in the Wrath domain lets a spell-caster converting bashing damage to lethal damage or visa versa. For D&D veterans not familiar with White Wolf’s d10 system, “bashing damage” is very similar to “subdual damage.” Since Wrath is a very popular magic domain among the Testers, two warriors can wail on each other with large battle axes and the loser is knocked unconscious rather than sliced into ribbons.

Even if only a small fraction of Testers die at the hands of another Tester, the Testers are expected to do difficult and dangerous things a lot. This is why despite having very aggressive recruitment practices, the Testers of Strength are not especially numerous compared to most other priesthoods.


Maylar empowers more favored souls than any of the rest of the Nine. He has roughly as many theurgists as he has favored souls. A little bit more than half of Maylar’s favored souls are born to Maylar’s devout worshipers while the rest are seeded about the general population. Maylar sews his wild oats so much that Maylar’s favored souls don’t get much direct guidance from Maylar spirits, at least not as much as other favored souls commonly receive.

While only a small minority of Maylar’s favored soul rebel against the expectation of their heritage, Maylar produces more renegade favored souls than the rest of the Nine combined. Periodically, Maylar will send Questing spirits to test his wayward children. If Maylar’s favored souls prove they are strong, Maylar is usually not that peeved if they are preaching values not in line with his official teachings.

I have not come up with a widely accepted nickname for Maylar's favored souls and that's probably okay because despite their numbers, they are hard to spot. Outside the few rebels, Maylar’s Testers generally don’t make a big deal of Favored Souls. Favored souls and theurgists are generally treated the same. In most cases, Maylar's core followers do know or care if a particular Maylar spell-caster is a favored soul or a theurgist. Most of Maylar’s enemies don’t care either.

Maylar’s Testers do not actively try to look for divine bards, but they are not very picky when they pick up new recruits. Maylar has more divine bards than most of the Nine behind only Zarthus and Nami. Look up New Zealand haka for an idea what a Maylar divine bard would sound like. Now picture orcs doing that.


Material Needs

Donations? Pah! The Shepherds might get some donations once in a while, but most of the time if a Tester wants something, he steals it. They might say they are taking “donations” but “tribute” or “extortion” is more accurate.

Remember in The Dark Knight, where the Joker set millions of dollars on fire? The Testers like stealing things, but if they cannot carry everything worth stealing they will throw it away or destroy their excess wealth. The Testers do not normally need a lot of money. Maylar does not have many temples. Most of Maylar’s temples are not very lavishly decorated and they have very small staffs. Most of Maylar’s followers have high ratings in the Survival skill and can live off the land for long periods of time.

With Maylar’s followers, there is an exception to every rule. If look hard enough you can find a Tester who is sitting on a throne of gold and demanding every possible extravagance, but this represents a personal greed and not an institutional greed.


Factions, Schisms, and Heresies

Apart from the Shepherds, most of Maylar’s Testers consider themselves a faction of one. Apart from the Shepherds, Maylar’s Testers rarely form coherent groups not held together by intimidation and naked force. Apart from the Shepherds, the factions that arise among the Testers are mostly informal. These are faction titles given by Maylar’s enemies, and apart from the Shepherds, the various factions generally disdain the labels given to them.

Shepherds of Men

Let’s talk about the Shepherds, or as their full title is the Shepherds of Men. Their order is fairly new, but it is growing rapidly. The Shepherds are the red-headed stepchildren of Maylar’s family. Maylar is the patron of animal herders and hunters, but most animal herders and hunters do not want to associate themselves too deeply with Maylar because Maylar is a dick.

The Shepherds try to spread Maylar’s values in a peaceful way and make sure hunters and herdsmen worship Maylar more than once or a twice a year. Most radical of all, the Shepherds don’t attack people unprovoked and call it a “test.” If you are a hunter, shepherd, or cattle herder that means you work longer hours, endure extreme heat and cold, and periodically fight dangerous predators. Remember in addition to the dangerous animals that real world medieval outdoorsmen had to deal with this is a fantasy world with dangerous fantasy monsters.

The Shepherds say that if a person survives in a harsh environment, they have already passed Maylar’s test. They have proven they are strong. The Shepherds actually provide combat assistance, healing, practical advice, and spiritual services to ordinary people living in rugged or frontier areas. They support communities rather than literally try to destroy them.

Many of Maylar’s Testers believe the Shepherds are weakling heretics that need to die, but when the Shepherds fight the other Testers, the Shepherds usually win these fights. The Shepherds are recruiting new members faster than their rivals are killing them. One of their major sources of recruits is rebellious favored souls of Maylar who do not want to hitch their wagon to Maylar’s legacy of hate and violence.

As of yet, the Shepherds remain an exclusively human group.


The Decadents

Generally speaking, Maylar detests cities. Generally speaking Maylar detests the practice of hereditary birthrights in mortals (you should take your wealth, not be bequeathed it). Maylar is often a hypocrite. The Decadents represent secret Maylar cultures hidden in urban areas. Most of the Decadents are the sons and daughters of nobles or other wealthy people.

The Decadents indulge in debauchery filled parties and acts of hedonism that fit along well in the court of Emperor Nero or Caligula or to use a Warhammer reference, like a Slaaneshi party. They inflict cruelties on peasants for fun and use their rank and social privilege to avoid punishment for these acts ala Elizabeth Báthory.

Other Testers find the Decadents distasteful because of how they show deference to highborn individuals. Some of them view this deference as a mark of weakness. Thus lowborn Testers may force them to defend themselves to prove their strength.

The Bearers of the Ill Wind

The Bearers of the Ill Wind are the most hated priests of Maylar. Most Bearers are actually unconnected individuals and groups. Like most Maylar factions, the Bearers’ name is a name given to them by outsiders not themselves. What unites the Bearers is the delight in spreading disease by both supernatural and mundane methods including poisoning water sources with bloated corpses. Some groups and individuals spread disease indiscriminately. Others operate as extortionists, infecting a populace than offering healing services to the highest bidder.

Even other Testers find the Bearers distasteful because of how indirect they are. Some of them view their skulking stealthy terror tactics as smacking of cowardice. Thus, more direct Testers may force them to defend themselves to prove their strength.

Maylar’s Raiders

When orcs go on a warpath and start attacking civilized lands in full force, there is usually one of Maylar’s Testers commanding the horde, or one of Maylar’s Testers is serving as an advisor/puppet master of the warlord commanding the horde.

Not just orc war parties but goblin raiders also have a Tester pulling the shots. Same gnoll raiders, or human brigands, or kobold raiders. Or urban thieves guilds. Or pirate ships. Maylar is not picky. You get the idea. If a large group of people is using trickery and or violence to steal things, there is a good chance that one of Maylar’s Testers is either leading the effort or is in the leader’s inner circle.

Sometimes other Testers find the Raiders distasteful because they rely on hordes of minions to do most of their dirty work. Thus, more individualistic Testers may force them to defend themselves to prove their strength.

Peacebreakers

Civilization is a crutch of the weak, but when civilized nations go to war, they glorify Maylar. Peacebreakers ultimately want to fan the flames of war and coerce nations to go to war with each other. They assassinate messengers, fan unrest, steal ransom or tribute payments. Anything to goad people to fight. Peacebreakers can also provoke fights between rival nomadic groups. Some will also fan the flames or religious conflict trying to goad priestly factions in the Nine to attack their rivals more fiercely (in truth this is not very hard). When two nations are already fighting, the Peacebreakers want to prolong the conflict. They will often provide aid to the underdog in the war.

Sometimes other Testers find the Peacebreakers distasteful because they operate in the shadows and get other people to do the killing. Most honest Testers may force them to defend themselves to prove their strength.

Maylar’s Necromancers

There is a major theological debate amongst the Testers. Is necromancy the best invention since sliced tendons or is it an affront to great Maylar?

Some Testers believe wielding necromantic magic as the ultimate expression of Maylar’s values. You make your defeated foes serve you in death. That’s great for the whole strong dominating the weak thing.

Some Testers believe wielding necromantic magic is the ultimate perversion of Maylar’s values. A necromancer is hiding behind dead losers because he doesn’t want to get his own hands dirty. This is the weak hiding behind others.

There are necromancers and anti-necromancers in every Maylar faction (even the Shepherds). Necromancers and anti-necromancers fight a lot to test the strength of the other. You get the idea. If Maylar's Testers have a disagreement they usually resolve it with fists or blades.

Infernalists

It might attract challengers, but being nice to people doesn’t make a Tester a heretic. Again it might attract challengers, but fighting in a cowardly way doesn’t a make Tester a heretic either.

There are some evils so great that even evil fears them. That would be Turoch. Testers of Maylar who have the slightest whiff of infernalism face the wrath of their former fellows as well as their old enemies.

Unfortunately, a lot of Testers seek a short cuts to gaining power and the minions of the Void offer such a short cut. The Testers easily lose more recruits to infernalism than any other priestly faction.

Priestly Ranks

About half of Maylar’s priesthood are divine spell-casters. About half of Maylar’s divine spell-casters go through the motions to become priests or priestesses. Status and power amongst the Testers comes from strength. The Testers do not care if that strength comes from a magic spell or the point of a spear. Magical power is not a guarantee for attaining high rank. Be strong and do impressive things.

I doubt Maylar’s priesthood has a global system of ranks and titles but I should probably come up with something.

Neophyte: A very young apprentice. Contrary to popular opinion, Maylar’s Testers do not force small children to fight. A lot of times Testers skip this stage and try to recruit older children and adolescents straight as initiates.

Initiate: An apprentice who has begun to take on some basic responsibilities and burdens, including combat and finding his or her own food.

Brother/Sister: A full member of Maylar’s priesthood.

Hunter/Huntress: A full member of Maylar’s priesthood that focuses on stealth and wilderness survival. Most Hunters and Huntresses have at least three dots in Survival and Stealth.

Blood Mystic: Generic term for a favored soul or theurgist of Maylar.

Blood Warrior: Generic term for a priest or priestess of Maylar with no spell-casting powers.

Great Blood Mystic: A Blood Mystic of great repute. The title is informal so there are no formal requirements, but most Great Blood Mystics have either reached five dots in one domain of magic or they have reached three dots in three separate domains.

Great Blood Warrior: A Blood Warrior of great repute. The title is informal so there are no formal requirements, but most Great Blood Warriors have five dots of Melee or Brawl and at least three dice in Athletics, Dodge, and Archery.

Scaraqua

Under the sea, Maylar is the Mother of Sharks. The Karakhai are the most fervent worshipers of the Many Toothed Mother. Very few Scaraquans who are not Karakhai worship Maylar, but that’s fine. The Karakhai are numerous and strong.

Sea Maylar is a little bit less belligerent than Land Maylar. Merfolk can generally reason with the Karakhai somewhat more easily than humans can reason with orcs. Reasoning with gnolls is almost impossible.


Hollow Earth

I haven’t figured out the details, but Maylar is probably going to be a middle tier god underground. Most of the bad guy creatures underground are of the sneaky, scheming sort rather than the brute force sort, so Maylar is probably going to be a bit more subtle and less direct when he manifest his/her divine will underground.


Anyway, hope you found this worth reading and my constantly putting up divine profiles hasn't scared away my thread's readers. I’m open to suggestions and feedback on fleshing out Maylar and her followers further. I will answer any Maylar based questions if you feel I left something out.

 

[Scalenex]

Tying my broad setting in with my RPG plot

Both writers and RPG game masters frequently miss the trees for the forest. An intricately woven fantasy setting serves no purpose if it does not lead to interesting characters and interesting stories.

So far, the RPG campaign I'm running has many characters affiliated with Maylar but none of them have had played a major role yet.


Murash is a Maylar priest roughly on par with one of the PCs, maybe a little better statwise, but given that players wield their characters more efficiently than the game master can with NPCs, I doubt he would win in a fair fight. He doesn’t have to make it a fair fight. He could easily get twenty veteran orc warriors to back him up. With a little bit of work, he could probably mobilize a lot more.

Murash is the second most powerful religious leader in the Dirty Crows and he wants to do something impressive to catapult him into being the first most powerful priest in the Dirty Crow. He doesn’t want to kill the more powerful priestess because he has a crush on her. Anyway, it was Murash’s band that accosted the PCs and shook them down for 150 gold. Maybe he will get the idea of taking down the PCs for the street cred he is also dimly aware that they will not go down easily.

Even by orc standards, Vakgar is very strong and very dumb. Murash has groomed Vakgar into being a loyal puppet. Murash hopes if Vakgar hones his rough edges on combat technique he can depose the Dirty Crow’s war boss. Then Murash can be the power behind the throne.

Bula the huntress is much less powerful than Murash magically, but she is a lot smarter than him and could probably take him in a fair fight. Bula is debating whether to make Murash her puppet or to feed Murash enough rope to hang himself and then set herself as the Dirty Crow’s number one priestess of Maylar.

Anyway, the PCs do know any of the orc's names and visa versa, but they know each other's faces.



Very early on, the PCs thwarted the plot of a human Maylar theurgist who was serving as Villain of the Week during the period of my campaign where the PCs traveled from village to village fighting the Villain and/or Monster of the Week.

Anyway the villain theurgist wanted to goad the Dirty Crow Orcs into stopping with the tribute thing and start attacking fully. He stole the tribute from two villages and tried to frame the other villages for the theft. The PCs tracked him down, killed him, and recovered the tributes.


Ujarek is a Shepherd and his is the recognized head priest of Maylar in Fumaya, for what little that title is worth. Ujarek gets essentially zero temple donations so he spends most of the time combing the wilderness for regents, then returning to King’s Lake to sell his regents, or make to make potions and scrolls and sell those. Ujarek has been peripherally involved with almost everything the PCs have done so far.

Ujarek sold scrolls to the Villain of the Week the PCs fought. He sold scrolls and regents to Neshik. He sold potions to Etch’s crime syndicate. He sold potions and regents to the priesthood of Greymoria who then supplied aid to the PCs against Etch. The Children of Greymoria are his best customer. They have a bottomless thirst for regent and they do not have the wilderness survival skills to get their own regents.

In theory, Ujarek could try selling regents and potions to both sides of the fight between the Dirty Crow Orc tribe and the humans of the northern Fumayan lands. He is probably not going to.

Ujarek is very formidable. He’s a competent healer, potion crafter, warrior, stealth expert, and wilderness survivalist, but Ujarek is only one man. Ujarek has had to kill three Testers of Maylar in self-defense. If Murash found out there was a human priest of Maylar in Fumaya endorsing the Shepherd’s view, Murash would probably want him dead. Ujarek cannot defend himself against a pack of orcs by himself. Bula the Huntress can probably kill him single-handedly.

The Dirty Crows do not know Ujarek exists. Ujarek doesn’t have any inside information on the Dirty Crows either but he has made the educated guess that the Dirty Crows includes some Testers of Maylar who would kill on sheer principle

The players told me that they would like the PCs to help stop the Dirty Crows from extorting the northern villages. Ujarek could be a powerful ally, but at his point there is nothing Ujarek can provide that the PCs cannot find somewhere else. They can get lots of cheap Regents from their ally Duke Zimoz. Their new friend Umara he Lantern has comparable wilderness skills. He could be a powerful asset to Umara’s militia if they were able to find common cause though.


Felicja Wiern is another Tester NPC I wrote a shorter background for. Lady Wiern is the younger sister to the queen of Fumaya and is a spoiled brat. Felicja is also a Decadent and has enough access to the halls of power to be very dangerous. She could try to sabotage defense efforts against Swynfaredia or she might just commit assorted atrocities for fun.

The players have told me that they enjoyed the city adventure I ran where the PCs had to do a mix of detective work, socialization, and combat to defeat the crime syndicate that was strangling the City of King's Lake. The players also told me that they like variety and would prefer to do things other than have urban adventures. We are in the middle of a big wilderness adventure. Then it's strategy planning to take on 400 orcs.

Maybe after all that, the players will be open to another city adventure. Lady Felicja is very much a city villain. By that point, Felicja will have been weaving a spider's web of evil for over a year without any heroic PCs even knowing there is a threat they need to stop. She has been a Maylar priestess for at least a year before that. I'm sure she could have a full network of underlings and be almost as dangerous as Etch.

I have not written out stats for Lady Felicja yet. She might be a potent threat by herself or she might be a paper tiger, but her real power is going to political, not combat or magic. There is nothing to say she cannot be a political threat who can handle herself in a fight. That makes a more interesting final confrontation.

 

[Scalenex]

First, something completely different!

I found a guy that is like Shad only a lot more historically accurate. Modern History TV. He doesn't read stuff and speculate. He tries things out himself.

I do not know where this guy gets his money! He has a fair bit of land, multiple horses and money for armor and swords. I think he might be a professional horse trainer. He trains horses for historical situations that do not pop up very often these days and he has authentic historical armor.

And now back to our regularly scheduled show.

Very good chance I'll get to run my RPG today. Not guaranteed but a good chance.

Okay the player characters and a bunch of of allies want to use mules and barges to move tons of iron and coal underground to bypass hundreds of miles of wilderness patrolled by the Dirty Crow orc tribe.

It's going to take weeks to move all the stuff, but I'm not going to make them roleplay out every day, that would be boring. But I will make the players describe how they are going to deploy the men. Who is taking point, who is guarding the rear. Who is going to be carrying torches, etc.

The big challenge is not to defeat the monsters, the big challenge is not to let the monsters eat any of their 40 friends.

First Encounter, Salt Elementals: Necromantic magical energy has been collecting under Guldur's dungeon for decades.

This dark magical energy created some inverse elementals, also called twisted elementals or undead elementals. In this case Inverse Water Elementals, also called Salt Elementals.

The underground walls are very damp and their puddles everywhere, except when the Salt Elementals. When things dry up real quick, the PCs will hopefully be on alert. If not, they will be surprised.

Salt Elementals can punch people but their real power is that they severely dehydrate everything around them and can temporarily (or theoretically permanently) sap someone's physical attributes. I'll try throwing three of these guys at the PCs. If the PCs are cutting these down way too quickly for my taste, I will have more appear.

Undead Elementals are not very sophisticated monsters, so they will attack who ever is on point, unless the bulk of the humans and mules are only a short distance away from the front lines in which case they will try to force their way through the front lines to dehydrate as many living creatures as they can.

Spoiler: Stats for Salt Elementals

Medium Salt Elemental

Willpower 4 Lethal Soak 6
Dexterity 4, Strength 5, Stamina 6, Appearance 1, Charisma 1, Manipulation 1, Intelligence 1, Perception 3, Wits 3
Abilities: Alertness 1, Athletics 3, Brawl 3, Dodge 3, Intimidation 3, Stealth 2
-Dehydration Attack: A mortal struck or even touched by a Salt Elemental needs to roll Stamina (difficulty 6) or take three minus successes in physical attribute damage. Salt elementals heal lost health levels for every physical attribute damage they inflict. They can even gain up additional bruise levels, but these extra health levels disappear at a rate of one per hour.

Just being near a salt elemental they need to roll Stamina (difficulty 6) or take a single level of physical attribute damage.

-Salt elementals inflict bashing damage on most living creatures with their brawling attacks relying on their ability drain to take down opponents.

-Salt elementals inflict lethal damage on non-twisted elementals and inflict three bonus dice of damage when fighting water elementals or water based hybrid elementals.

Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, OK, -1, -1, -1, -3, -3 Destroyed

Once the salt elementals are dead or evaded somehow, the tunnels will become damp again until eventually the PCs and their friends will have to transfer their goods to makeshift barges to ferry over increasingly large ponds and lakes.

Second Encounter, the Goblins' Lair: The goblins the PCs and Duke Zimoz's men have been tangling with have not been particularly well organized or clever. That's because their underground home was flooded and they were expelled to the surface rather suddenly.

The flooded remains of the goblin's original lair is now haunted. When the flooding hit, most of the goblins fled, but the goblin chieftain drowned trying to save his treasure. Now he is a ghost. Time to playtest the rules I came up with on page 18.

The PCs and their allies only have two means of harming a ghost. Healing magic and one Silverwood cudgel carried by Lord Zimoz. Even then, the goblin only has a couple powers that can hurt the living. He can only use his major powers six times before he is forced to rest.

Maybe he can capsize one of the flimsier barges. He can hurl four projectiles (probably iron ingots because they are everywhere), afflict 2-10 people with bad luck, or inflict someone with a non-life threatening but debilitating disease.

To make the encounter harder, I'm going to toss in a six to a dozen "Drowned" Drowned are a type of mid-tier zombie resulting from people who literally drowned. Compared to tier one zombies, Drowned are a little bit faster and a lot stronger, and of course they can swim. They will try to drag people off the barges and drown them. Misery loves company.

The goblin chieftain's ghostly powers can do little more than inconvenience the PCs and their allies but if the chieftain went all poltergeist while they were fighting off aquatic zombies, that can be a deadly combination.

If the PCs detect the chieftain's ghostly signs or figure out they are entering a flooded goblin lair, they can have their minions hold back. If they miss the warning sides, the goblin chieftain will wait till the vulnerable laborers in the middle of the convoy are in striking distance.

As for traps that survived the flooding. The poison has probably been washed out and diluted. I'm thinking the goblin chieftain might be able to telekentically flip a lever and drop boulders from the ceiling, but only once. There might be some pit traps if someone is wading in the water carrying a heavy load and accidentally steps in a very deep pool.

If I really want to make things harder, I can have giant poisonous centipedes swimming in the water. The centipedes would have originally been in a pit trap or a rigged box but now they are roaming free.

Spoiler: Goblin Ghost and Goblin Zombies

Former Goblin Chieftain

Willpower 7 Lethal Soak
Dexterity 4, Strength 0/3, Stamina 0/3, Appearance (inverse) 3, Charisma 3, Manipulation 3, Intelligence 2, Perception 3, Wits 4

Abilities: Alertness 3, Animal Ken 2, Archery 2, Athletics 2, Brawl 3, Crafts 1, Dodge 3, Empathy 1, Expression 1, Hearth Wisdom 1, Intimidation 3, Investigation 1, Leadership 2, Legerdemain 3, Melee 4, Stealth 4, Subterfuge 3, Survival 3

Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, -1, -1, -1 -1, Destroyed

Handicaps: Mobility (Stuck haunting lair), Conjuration (accidentally reveals self with slime, salty foot prints and other ghostly stuff)

Common Powers: Embodiment (appear and speak freely), Lifeforce Manipulation (spend Willpower to cause minor disease or numb pain), Animal Control (calming to animals rather than frightening)

Intermediate Powers: Telekinesis (spend a willpower for 4 telekinetic feats at Wits + Strength)

Advanced Power: Ghost can spend a temporary Willpower point to activate a field of good luck and/bad luck for one scene. Roll Manipulation + Subterfuge. Every success effects two targets. A subject with good luck gets a -1 difficulty break on all rolls, a subject with bad luck gets a +1 difficulty penalty on all rolls. A single subject can be double dinged to the make the modifier -2/+2.

Drowned Zombie Goblins

Willpower 0 Base Soak 3, Bludgeoning Soak 6, Piercing Soak 5
Strength 5, Dexterity 4, Stamina 5, Charisma 1, Manipulation 1, Appearance 0, Perception 2, Intelligence 1, Wits 1

Abilities: Alertness 1, Athletics 3, Brawl 3 (+1 grappling), Dodge 2, Stealth 2

Special

Mindless: Immune to charm, compulsion, and illusion spells
Undead: Harmed by heal spells. Immune to poison
Tireless: Zombies do not sleep and never suffer fatigue

+1 difficulty for enemies to hit because of small size. +1 penalty to Strength checks.

Health Levels-OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, -3, Destroyed

If the PCs want, they can look for the goblin chieftain's treasure. A few hundred gold, a few hundred silver, and a few hundred copper pieces. Most of it is underwater so it might be more trouble than it's worth to dredge up.

Third Encounter, Playful Water Elementals

At the deepest part of the underground river, there is a font of elemental energy, that spawns wild water elementals. These will not be innately hostile, but they are playful and concepts like "drowning" are alien to them. They can could also sink a barge or two for funsies.

The PCs could try to kill them with magical fire. Unless they present an overwhelming force early to frighten the water elementals, this will trigger a fight to the death.

The PCs could just grin and bear and take the flotilla past the water elementals being extra careful. Or they could try to create a fun distraction to lure the elementals away from the flotilla.

If the PCs are ambitious they can look for magical regents here because it's a magical font, but of course most of them would be underwater making them difficult to collect.

Spoiler: Water Elemental Stats

Typical Medium Water Elemental
Willpower 4 Lethal Soak 5
Dexterity 5, Strength 4, Stamina 5, Appearance 1, Charisma 1, Manipulation 1, Intelligence 1, Perception 3, Wits 3
Abilities: Alertness 1, Athletics 3, Brawl 2, Dodge 4, Intimidation 2, Stealth 2
-Water elementals a -3 difficulty break on stealth when hiding in bodies of water. They get a -1 difficulty break hiding in wet areas on land such as muddy holes.
-A target grappled by a water elemental begins to drown.
-All water elementals inflict lethal damage with their brawling attacks.
Health Levels: OK, OK, OK, OK, -1, -1, -1, -3, -3 Destroyed

Fourth Encounter, the Delver

Delvers are big stony monsters that eat ore and really like refined metal. When the water begins to thin out, a delver is going to smell the iron or and below in Common "Metal give!"

If the PCs or their allies decide the Delver is a threat, they have a monster fight on their hand.

If the PCs opt for the peaceful approach, they can bribe the Delver with a fairly small amount of metal. The Delver can make help them navigate the underdark and create new tunnels to make things easier. The delver knows where many of the natural hazards are. A delver guide could cut their eight week trek down to six weeks easily.

Or the PCs can be murder hobos and try to gut the delver's corpse for regents.

Spoiler: Typical Adult Delver Stats

Typical Adult Delver Stats
Delvers prefer to fight in their tunnels to avoid being flanked. Delvers expecting trouble or of a paranoid bent often honeycomb their territory with tunnels blocked by just a few inches of stone that they can easily dissolve through. These tunnels are useful for both surprise ambush points and emergency escape routes.

Willpower 8 Lethal Soak 13 dice (counts as a hard armor target)

Dexterity 3, Strength 9, Stamina 8, Appearance 1, Charisma 2, Manipulation 2, Intelligence 3, Perception 4, Wits 3

Abilities: Alertness 4, Animal Ken 1, Athletics 3, Brawl 4, Crafts (stonework) 4, Hearth Wisdom 2, Intimidation 2, Stealth 4, Survival 4

OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, -1, -1, -1, -1, -3, -3, -3, Incap


-Large: Delvers are very hard to miss, Melee, attacks against them are at -1 difficulty. Ranged attacks against them are at -2 difficulty.


-Stony Skin: Delvers soak damage with their full Stamina + four dice. They count as a hard armor target.

-Slam Attack: Delvers can inflict bashing or lethal damage with their flipper like hands as they see fit.

-Corrosive Slime: Delvers emit a corrosive slime that can dissolve rock. It can also be weaponized against organic beings. Organic beings struck by a delver’s slam attack are exposed to the slime, suffering two dice of lethal damage per turn until they wash it off or until three turns have passed. The corrosive slime inflicts double damage against metal or stone targets.

Delvers can suppress their slime production to strike a target without exposing them to slime if they want to pull their punches for whatever reason. Delvers also will suppress their caustic slime when trading with fleshy races so not to accidentally harm their allies.

-Stone Shaping: Delvers can choose to adapt their slime to soften stone, rather than simply dissolve it. This lets them alter stone similar to a wizard using the Stoneshape spell. They can roll Dexterity + Crafts if they are going to try to make specific shapes or constructions.

-Tunneling Sense: Delvers have eidetic memory when it comes to tunnels they have visited. Even if knocked unconscious and brought to an unfamiliar place, they can always find their bearings to known landmarks underground.

Delvers have dark vision at a range of 60 feet. They are also very good at sensing vibrations underground which also has an effective range of 60 feet.

Fifth Encounter, a Giant Snake

It will try to eat people. Not all encounters need to be complicated. The giant snake is capable of handing wet and dry environments and probably likes using the delver-created tunnels. If the PCs befriended the delver, the delver can help them bypass the snake, or the delver can beat the snake into a bloody pulp for them.

Spoiler: Giant Snake Stats

Giant Snake
Soak of 8 dice, counts as a soft armor target
Strength 8, Dexterity 3, Stamina 6, Perception 3, Wits 3

Abilities: Alertness 3 (smell+1), Animal Ken 1, Athletics 3, Brawl 3 (constriction +1), Dodge 2, Intimidation 3, Stealth 3, Survival 4

Willpower 5, Health Levels OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, -1, -1 -1, -1, -3, -5, Incapacitated
Attack: Constriction (Strength+1 lethal), bite Strength +3 lethal.

Venom: Stamina difficulty 7 to resist, take three levels of physical attribute damage minus successes rolled.

Sixth Encounter, Rust Monsters
Once things dry out and the good guys have switched from using barges to uses mules, they will eventually attract rust monsters.

Rust monsters are pretty small and not that deadly, but they like to rust metal to destruction and eat the rust. The PCs and their allies are carrying tons of iron ore.

Pretty simple encounter. If the PCs spot the threat early, no real harm done. If the PCs are caught flat footed, their loot could easily be cut in half.

If the PCs really did a good job befriending the delver, the delver can probably spot and drive off the rust monsters pretty easily. After all, delvers and rust monsters are direct competitors and delvers are much larger and smarter.

Rust Monsters, at least the way I designed them, they are dog sized monsters that are not very individually threatening. A solid blow will probably one-shot them. Even the rust monster lives, most will run if wounded. Rust monsters can be deadly in large packs, Given how the PCs are transporting a literal ton of metal very slowly, they can attract very large numbers of rust monsters.

Spoiler: Rust Monster Stats

Typical Rust Monster Stats
Strength 3, Dexterity 4, Stamina 3, Perception 2, Wits 2
Willpower 3, Health Levels OK, OK, OK, -1, -1, Incap
Abilities: Alertness 3 (finding metal +1), Brawl 2, Dodge 1, Stealth 1
Attack: Bite for three dice of lethal damage. Their antennae can corrode most non-magical metal very quickly. Striking with the antennae requires Dexterity + Brawl just like conventional attacks.

-Rust Monsters possess Darkvision and receive no penalties operating in total darkness although they are colorblind.

-Rust monsters can smell metal with the acuity of a bloodhound smelling living creatures.

Six encounters is probably plenty, but if anyone has any good ideas, I'm all ears (or all eyes, because I will read your response rather than hear it).

 

[Scalenex]

Dungeon Chapter of the Campaign is Over, let the War Chapter Begin

So the players navigated all the encounters and managed to get all the people they brought with them back alive.

This sort of marks the end of a story so I gave away more session experience than usual.

They took a bunch of downtime. Neshik’s player and Aranil’s player continued their pattern of character advancement. Neshik’s player doubled down on the things that his character is already good at and Aranil’s player continued to broaden his character into a better jack-of-all-trades. Neshik now has Healing and Crafts magic domain at ●●●● and his mundane Crafts skill (which ties to the Magical Craft magic) is now also ●●●●. Aranil raised his Stealth, Enigmas, Melee, Arcana, Abjuration, and Survival by a dot.

Svetlana’s player wanted a special animal companion so she spent a few points to buy an animal companion and sunk experience into Charisma and Animal Ken to able to interact with her mighty puppy better.

The Duke didn’t have much money to pay the player characters for their services, so he bequeathed the player characters roughly 1000 gold pieces worth of workable Silverwood from his treasury which Neshik crafted into a bow.

They took about 6 weeks of downtime. Now that Neshik can make permanent magic he opted to cash in about 4000 gold pieces worth of the treasure into a fairly badass magical bow for Aranil. During all this downtime, Svetlana was playing with and training her new puppy and Aranil was going through a training montage with Umara’s peasant militia.


The next thing the players want to do is to stop the Dirty Crow Orc tribe from extorting the northern villages.

Umara has roughly 400 men in her militia and the Dirty Crow tribe has roughly 400 warriors. The problem is, an orc soldier is WAY better than a human peasant militia man.


Orcs get a -1 difficulty bonus on all strength rolls and they have a bonus dot of Strength relative to humans. Normal orcs have six health levels (sort of like hit points) and normal humans have five. Orcs hit harder and they can withstand hits better.

Given that Umara’s militia has been training for several months and the orcs have been training with weapons their whole lives. That means that the average militia man is going have a Dexterity + Melee/Archery/Brawl combat dice pool between 3 and 5, with most having four dice.

A professional human soldier usually has between 4 and 6, averaging 5 dice. Knights and nobles who trained as knights (most men in Fumaya) would have combat pools between 5 and 8 dice.

An adolescent orc is going to have a combat dice pool of five dice. Most orc warriors have a 6 or 7 combat dice pool. Elite orc units boast 8 dice combat pools. Orc warlords boast 9 or 10 dice combat (10 is the absolute best a character can get without magic). That means orcs are going to be able hit more often and be hit less often.


A straight up fight means 400 seasoned orc warriors would slaughter 400 humans with pathetic ease. They could probably beat 1200 militia men without much problem, especially since the militia would probably break and flee when they lose 200 men and only take out 10 or 20 orcs in return.

Granted player characters can kill a lot of orcs. Even then, they probably shouldn’t march against the orcs in an open field. The player’s plan is to harass the orcs with hit and run attacks until the tribe gets angry enough to mass all their warriors in one place and attack en masse. Then hopefully the orcs can be goaded into attacking fortifications and running through booby traps.

The PCs are staunch allies with Duke Zimoz. Duke Zimoz can muster about a dozen or so knights and 500 men at arms, and maybe 1200 militia men if he chooses, but he is probably not super eager to throw away his men’s lives defending the lands of Count Coward. Duke Zimoz might have one or two wizard retainers that can cast useful battlefield spells. His general has a little bit of divine magic, but he is mostly just a very good fighter. Duke Zimoz’s son is a formidable warrior (8 dice) and a competent leader (6 dice), but again the Duke is not eager to put his son into mortal danger to defend Count Coward’s people.

It the PCs can convince Count Coward to pull his head out of the sand and defend his own people, he has about eight knights and 350 men at arms and maybe 600 militia men. He would normally have more militia reserves but at this point many of them follow Umara rather than their Count.


The players are still trying to figure out a plan. They are certainly going to try to visit the Castle of Count Coward and I need to come up with notes and plans to make it a fun role playing experience. I need to put some thought into this. My current concept is that Count Coward (technically Count Polnoc) is partially senile and partially mad with grief. He has is a tired old man and he survived all of his sons and most his daughters, to disease, monsters, random accidents, and maybe one or two lost to orcs. His only heir is his nine year old grandson and he is extremely paranoid about his grandson dying.


Aranil’s player is pondering if they can take out the Dirty Crow’s warlord or primary advisors that they can cripple the tribe’s ability to coordinate their efforts. Neshik’s player is pondering using catapults and alchemists fire for a combat edge. Svetlana’s player is not very interesting in the planning aspects of a battle. She is very much a fan of the Kick in the Door style of roleplaying. She wants to play the battle out but not plan the battle out.



There are a lot of different ways to figure out mass battles in table top roleplaying games. My favorite is to give the PCs a simple mission that is part of the main battle. If the PCs win their portion than their allies also win. If the PCs lose their portion, their allies also lose. That normally works, but it would not necessarily work here. In this case, the orcs have the edge in strength, dexterity, health, willpower, and skill. Since the humans helped the good guys gain a new forge and a bunch of metal and coal, the humans will have closed the equipment gap.

The orcs will win if the PCs cannot figure out how to recruit substantial reinforcements, assassinate the orc leaders, or come up with some brilliant trap or means of splitting the Dirty Crows up and engaging them piecemeal.

Good times.

The Dirty Crows have a pretty simple organization. Chief Urluhg is in charge and priestess Silug is the power behind the throne. Both Urluhg and Silug are considerably more powerful than player characters are. Urluhg is not dumb, but he's not very smart either. He is average by orc standards which means he is slightly below the average humans. He does have basically every combat trait at the maximum.

I figure there are about a dozen especially bad ass orcs that are roughly on par with the player character's stat wise. About half of these are loyal lieutenants of Priestess Silug and/or Chief Urluhg and the other half are "loyal" lieutenants.

Below the lieutenants are maybe another dozen or so orcs that are below the PCs status but above the average orcs. Maybe they have a couple dots of magic or above average mental attributes.

If the PCs can assassinate Chief Urluhg, that means the lieutenants are going to engage in a series of duels to establish a new chief and at least one or two of the losers will die. The challenge period will buy the PCs some time, but guaranteed the new chief will organize an attack on the humans to prove his mettle and Priestess Silug can make sure the attack is tactically sound.

If the PCs can assassinate Priestess Silug, but Chief Urluhg lives, then it would probably be pretty easy to goad the chief into attacking through a booby trapped valley or into some kind of ambush.

If the PCs can assassinate Silug and Urluhg the new chief and new head priest may decide that pulling back and leaving the humans is a good short term plan. Unless Murash takes over in which case it's time for a reckless attack in Maylar's name!

The best case scenario would be to isolate and kill the twelve or so mid level lieutenants. If Umara and the PCs opt to stage hit and run raids against the orcs, then it's mid-level lieutenants that would be the most important. As bad ass as orc warriors are, they aren't the brightest or most perceptive. They really need their leaders to help them fight guerrilla fighters.


The player characters have roughly three, maybe four months of in-game time to gather allies, stockpile weapons, and/or build traps and fortifications. At which point the orcs will start asking for their next tribute payment.