Peklo the Hot Hell: a Brief Tour on Ten Electrum Pieces or Less, Part 1

One hell is really insufficient for the inimical side of the Hill Cantons' cosmology. The reality of the Cold Hell readers of Misty Isles of the Eld have experienced, What Ho, Frog Demons explores some adventurable connections to that other fell dimension, Peklo or more baldly the Hot Hell.

I have cut the long willow branches from their tree and dragging them thrice around where the red bull stomps the tall rye, I have made loving supplication to God S-d. Erecting the lead barriers and donning the Suit of Containment and issuing the mutterings of the Vulgar Hyperborean words of protection, I can tell finally of Peklo.

The Ludicists maintain that Zem, is just the dream projection of a great and cosmic game. That is of course heresy vile and ill-informed, but like most corruptions of the mind has an element of Truth in its inception. When great Overgod floated across the void, his ship left a wake from Demonspace. How natural, how predictable, how convenient, that it was that the ego-drunk Demons with their great arrow-like vessels penetrating the heavens would also follow shortly in their vessels.

The Sunlord in His Wisdom sternly warns us of the trap of timelines, intoning of expository history and the senseless capitalizations of portentous proper names but suffice it to say there was a time of Conflict between Overgod and the voyaging Captains. Overgod held his own trapping the inimical encroachers to an infinite in-between plane of psychic friction: the fell place we now know as the Hot Hell.

Lower and Upper Hell

The Two Hells each have their own two hells. Much like our world the Hot Hell is divided between a flat bedrock of daily existence and an upper firament. Unlike Zem with its orderly domed heavens and neatly bounded earth, the Lower Hell and the dark inky void Upper Hell are said to run dizzingly, terrifyingly infinite.

Upper Hell is a lifeless zone, a place of transit (astral flyover country if you will), eschewed even by the Captains. The void is punctuated here and there by the running lights of the hulking, ruined Vessels and cold rocky orbs. It is known to run over the Cold Hell, a pocket dimension closer and more imbued with its substance.

Lower Hell in comparison teems with demonic ecologies. While universally unpleasant and over-warm, the Lower Hell is a bewildering patchwork of fiendish bio-climes fecundly blossoming from the psychic projections of the deep anxieties, ugly archetypes and ego excesses of the adjoining dimensions. Here is the Malachite Scarp, a vertigo-inducing narrow-ledged cliffscape of barely perched stork-legged backward facing demons raised by the pure might of petty insecurity. There the polished bronze phallic towers and monstrous hot pink orchids of Vulvak, the Archtownship of Unsubtle Imagery.

Also striking are the teeming, squalid squatter cities thrown up around the wrecked hulks of the Vessels (more about those later). Lording over each vessel-city are the silver-suited Captains with the castes of the Crew eternally jockeying from the flaming-eyeball headed engineers up to the gargantuan, multi-headed Officers.

And those are just the thematically discernible sections, some areas seem to be a confusing stew of jarring elements. Great barb-vined patches of demonic tubers nestle up against tarpits filled with lamprey-faced life coaches, cellophane forests, and dung warrens of cold-calling bivalve psychic marketers.

In the Next Part we get into some of the hot spot (no pun intended) sites of Peklo.  

The Erol Otus DDG Pantheon

A few months back I posted on Google Plus about another chuckle-worthy find from my days as a tween DM. Among the coverless Dragon issues and ripped up modules that single time-misted, roach-infested box found in my mom's garage (the one with the partial key for Tree Maze of the Twisted Druid) has several cryptic loose leaf sheets.

This is perhaps one of the oddest and it took me six months to figure out what the hell I was thinking 35 years ago: that I tried to develop a pantheon out of Erol Otus's Deities and Demigods cover. I loved the shit out that cover (still do) with all its evocative weirdness and the simple fact that other than those ghostly pseudo-Egyptian it was totally independent from the contents of the book. It was a free-floating piece of Otus fever dream.

So anyway in its unedited glory, this is what I got...

Part 1: The Kutalikean Cover Pantheon

Halgorr, Major, Glory/Light/Scourging (sic), Lammasu, M/F clerics, Gold, Sunrise, Temple Hall. 600 hp.

Sinthimaxx, Major, Serpents/Deviousnes (sic), Vipers, M clerics, Secret Hall. 550 hp.

Vortok, Minor, Corruption/Chaos (Evil) , slime priests, lose (?) caverns. 300 hp, AC -10

Hatshepsut (LN), Minor

Shebaka (TN), Minor

Settnaknteh. (CN), Minor

Part 2: The Other Gods

So anywho scanning over Otus's equally wonderful title page illustration with its own made up gods, goddesses and divine critters, I just realized 12-year-old Chris missed a golden opportunity. I mean look how wonderfully this rounds out the weird fantastical cohort of deities on that cover?

Woe gets the best of it here with that Sarku-like lichy dead god and ichor-blasting tentacle fell god. Bonus points though for Weal's laser-ray pigeon god, Quetzalcoatl-ish, and Thundarr.

So who are these deities? What's their portfolio? 

The Four Contradas of Fever-Dreaming Marlinko

I've been really feeling the wind in my hoary-cliched sails this week.Not only did it feel good to get the Slumbering Ursine Dunes pdf out early to backers last week (and on sale at DriveThru), it felt even better to put the last touches on the draft of the Marlinko city adventure that was the first stretch goal of the Kickstarter. We had originally imagined it to be a smallish thing 20 pages as opposed to the 66 pages of the Dunes but it's already taken on a life of its own and is hitting around 40 digest-sized pages already.

What's invigorating about the writing I am finding is that in a long sandbox campaign you end up with a lot of dead ends or partially-developed material when the party veers off one way or the other. Having the excuse and motivation to really dig down into half-baked, left-behind ideas and places thus feels like a real treat. I never got a chance to really dig into the city adventures and high weirdness of Marlinko after it slipped from its place of prominence as the party's home-base roughly two and change years ago. And now I do. 

Anywho here's a sample of some of what the new material is looking like...

The Four Contradas of Marlinko

Marlinko was built around the squat, black bulk of the Tomb of the Town Gods, a structure that predates the rest of the city by an interminably long period of time. The ominous edifice sitting in its wide, cobblestoned, circular plaza has retained its position as the dead center of the city. Four wide avenues radiate from it at the cardinal points and divide the city into four contradas or quarters.

The four contradas do not reflect merely a geographic or class division but have deeply embedded cultural and psycho-geographical lives of their own. Each contrada organizes its own festivals, keeps its own histories, and pays fearful homage to the abstract-featured idol of its own unique “town god.”

Each contrada also maintains its own contrada hall (a large, well-maintained, ceremonial gathering place) where it keeps a collection of its own unique banners, ceremonial regalia, historical tapestries, mummies, and most importantly, the various trophies it has won in the single most important bi-annual event: the great chariot race that headlines the Ebon Horse Fair. Throughout the year, contrada trainers keep their chosen condemned convict-jockey revved up and ready for the Black Race. It is well that they do for the losers are hanged and the winner takes a trophy and his freedom!

Včelař (Sullen Apiarian) Contrada

The Northwestern Quarter with its great yellow-and-black beehive and mopey deodand emblazoned banner contains the greatest concentration of affluence and easy living in the city. The great painted-plastered town-manses of the wealthy dominate the coveted plaza and avenue fronts in this part of town.

Despite its wealthy cast, the contrada has a deeply-ingrained inferiority complex--due in large part to its century-long losing streak in the Black Race. The loss has become a self-fulfilling prophesy in recent years with the rash of suicides of convicts who consider being drafted into service as a SA jockey to be a death sentence anyway. Roving gangs of youths from respected families are quick to draw rapiers against any slight as to compensate for the wound to their civic honor.

Anfolf

Sullen Apiarian “worships” or placates Anfolf, the vaguely bee-headed town god said to be a rainmaker and bringer of both wealth and anxiety. When Anfolf in his glowing golden nimbus walked the streets of early Marlinko impressing the bearded Pahr immigrants just getting used to lives not spent on horseback, He was said to literally shower them with the sweetest of honey--and the swiftest of kicks...

Though it shouts “conspicuous consumption,” the yellow-limestone and quartz facade of the Sullen Apiarian contrada hall with its amber and lapis lazuli-encrusted honeycombed frescoes stands handsomely over its small, tight square. The contrada society itself is a broad one with a large burgeoning hierarchy of ceremonial officers arrayed in 27 ranks. Incongruously the higher, more labor-intensive (and not un-powerful) positions are held traditionally by the less affluent members of the contrada (or “temporally-embarrassed grandees” as they like to call themselves).

From here each contrada has a key focusing on the interesting and adventurable sites. Each ward description also has their own unique encounter and random building charts—many of which have triggers and hooks embedded in the escalating random event system of the Chaos Index. Encounter charts that have entries like this...

Maus. A wild-eyed  paranoid dressed in the long-robed, woolen hat finery of a rustic boyar. Maus rants and raves at the characters about the “Axis of Tindrthurn,” a secret postal and matchmaking service that he claims is trying to kill him. If the Chaos Level is 6 and over he is correct on all counts.

Beast Cults of the Cantons

The Hill Cantons Complete(ish) tier of the Dunes kickstarter offers backers a large array of booklets spun off by this blog and the campaign. One of which is the Cosmology of the Cantons, a catalog of the strange religious beliefs and myths of that odd world.

When Overgod begat the Little Gods in his great and long slumber, the first of the Little Gods little resembled today's humans and beasts of the field and forest. The First Beasts (or Zvir) were magnificent creations, walking tall and massive with verve and panache in their furry steps.

The great molding hands of Overgod, never much of a details kind of god, slipped on occasion. He was quite displeased with his own sloppy efforts regarding the Beasts. Overgod fretted and worried and after slow aeons of divine navel-gazing began to reshape his imperfect efforts. Here he would grab a creature and remold its marred proportions. There he tore off and flipped away an unsightly talon, gullet, skin flap or tail.

Most of the Zvir patiently suffered the celestial makeover and remain today in the form last given. Some however resisted and even evaded his great reworking maintaining what original forms they could under the strain of the long processes of the World-Dialectic.

Racial memory holdovers in the Weird keep a dwindling number of the First Beasts and their descendants as petty gods of sort. Occasionally even worship of the so-called Beast Gods grabs an especially isolated pocket of humanity on Zem. The barbaric blueskins that prowl the Northlands above the World Canal are especially said to be prone to such lapses.

Sect Characteristics

Attributed Alignment (A): Like humans, beasts attribute a single, approximate alignment to the deity and an aspirational doctrine for followers.

Bonus Spells/Powers (B): Special bonus spells and powers granted to faithful clergy or other temporal agents beyond their normal spell range. The number in parenthesis represents what level the power is granted. All powers are useable once a day unless otherwise specified.

Priesthood Class (C): Clerics are only found in the ranks of the most supreme of humanity's gods, the Sun Lord. All other clergy are vocational posts (with special powers/spells) eligible to certain classes as per their deity. Clergy will always be drawn from the anthropomorphic animals of a race or rarely from humans.

Domain (D): What humans consider the deity's area of control. Again the actual deity may consider his or her's brief to be something wider and may share or battle another power for jurisdiction.

A Highly Abridged List of the First Beasts

Vlenosh (Angry Sloth)
Under the molding hand of Overgod Lazy Sloth willingly became shorter (and more adorable), His defiant brother, Angry Sloth, however fled to the deepest folds of the new world. There seething in his unbridled anger issues he became unhinged, demonic even in countenance. From the sullen thoughts of this banished First Beast came lesser beings bearing his like and his hatred for all of creation: the Slothrog.

A: Chaotic Evil

B: Slow (4 or Slothrogs over 40 hp)

C: Slothrogs, lazy and evil human magic users

D: Malice, Sullen Lethargy, “B-side” Animal Demons

Grandfather Tyger

It came to pass many aeons ago in the murky depths of the Anti-Cantons that the Eldish prince Xzhilhaag inherited the vast protein plantations of his house. Xzhilhaag, a being so renowned for the sublimity of his arbitrary cruelty and the depths of his sadism that even the Eld found him noxious and tiresome, found himself more and more at odds with his brothers.

Through dark magic foul—and copious applications of a food-borne contaminant--he transformed his visage into that of a demonic cat and began arming a host of his hairless ape slaves  to aid him in his coming rebellion. That act, of course, was a dismal failure leading to his mortal death and spirit-exile back in the world mundane.

What is less known in that in his cat-form years on Zem he had an illicit, ill-matched and mutually denied amorous relationship with the noble First Beast of Smilodons, Queen Zub. Their congress resulted in the oddly-named and utterly sinister Grandfather Tyger (who has had no offspring).

A: Chaotic Evil

B: Eye of the Tiger (3): +2 to hit for 1d6 rounds when in the heat of the fight

C: Assassins, Weretigers, “Eldmen” (human slaves that pretend to be of Eld descent), Tiger Wrasslers

D: Killing for Pleasure

Koza (Regimental Goat)

While the divinity and worship of most First Beasts are utterly denied in the Overkingdom and the rest of Solarity, a few atavistic remnants manage to hold on.

Nowhere is this more obvious than among the Great Nemec Company of the Black Army (the Overking's standing army) who hold--and indeed do homage--to the seemingly immortal Koza, a First Beast nursed back to fighting pride by Oldemar the company's founder two centuries ago.

Woe unto the clueless backwater Pahr who calls this creature a mascot! For not only does he hold the rank of Subaltern in perpetuity (except for a brief moment three months in which he was demoted for spewing while on a bender half-masticated star tulips over the wool gown of the Over King's most beloved of illegitimate daughters) he is offered sacrifice and devotions by the men of the company.

A: Lawful Good

B: Stubborn Pride (1): morale raised to 11 for 1d6 turns. Horns of the Goat (5): a single head-butting attack of 3d6 hitpoints damage.

C: Fighters, Goat Majors

D: Military Tradition of the Absurd, Stubbornness

Slumbering Ursine Dunes and The Myth of Arctolatry

For years all my dungeon and wilderness keys have been nothing but the most ephemeral of affairs: a small, semi-organized mountain of stained and terse random bits of paper. My games for the most part seem to run fine with the occasional, jarring bit of discontinuity as the price.

At any rate, something has moved in me (all vain and seductive) to try and write all the various adventure sites I have run here in the last 5-6 years as something more publicly presentable. The Golden Barge adventure locale came easy and with that momentum I started fleshing out the surrounding mini-sandbox area of the Slumbering Ursine Dunes and related sites as a pointcrawl.

Punchline is that in a month's time I will most likely have the whole package out as some kind of cheap for-charity pdf (or bundle it up with the never-ending Live Weird or Die blog compilation booklet project).

So at any rate, this all has me feeling especially fine so to celebrate I wrote another eminently silly Hill Cantons myth.

Medved

It so came to pass that Marzana tired of her second life among the Foreign Gods. “My lover is feckless and my poses grow affected and languid,” the Queen of Winter exclaimed with a great sigh. “I shall cover Zem in the bitterness of my cold and start anew.”

And so the great mountains of ice drove Pahr and his family from the fields of paradise. With horse and wagon Pahr's clan divided amongst the three elder sons and wandered Zem. Stanko, the youngest and most broke in the head of the three, reasoned that the cold of the Northlands must be like the darkness before dawn and must surely give out to warm lands of milk and honey. Thus his followers made great coracles from udders shorn from Velesh's cattle herd and crossed the World Canal.

But neither warmth nor milk nor honey was to be found. For one hundred years they fought the blueskins of the North and the fell creatures of the boreal forest until at one great battle Stanko and all his kin but one were slain.

Sad and strong the boy Mirko was left alone and he said to himself, “I make peace with having no milk but warmth and honey perhaps are found with our kin to the south.”

And Mirko wandered and wandered the hills of the south enacting great acts along the way. Finally he came to the shores of the sweet-smelling sea and made content he rested.

Sleeping upon the sand he was visited by Old Bear. Old Bear had a great hunger and seized upon Mirko's leg swallowing it in a mighty bite. Mirko awakened and crying in pain “Sweet Svat” did battle with Old Bear kicking up great mounds of sand in the struggle.

With his spear he pierced Old Bear and laid him down. Hungered Mirko began to eat Old Bear. His belly full but saddened by having consumed such a noble foe he was approached by Younger Bear. “Why have you eaten the flesh of Old Bear?” Younger Bear asked. “He is not unlike you in that he yearns for honey.”

“Sometimes you eat the bear,” Mirko replied. “And sometimes the bear eats you.”

“Is that some kind of Northern thing?” Younger Bear asked, but Mirko only shrugged in answer.

Mirko was made sad again and though he had eaten and beaten Old Bear decided he would share what remained of his life with him as one.

So Mirko and Old Bear became Medved, the seeker of honey, ruling all bears and bearlings from the dunes thrown up in their battle until the world-dialectic turns again.

Religion and the Hill Cantons Part Four: The Hero-Cult of Adalfuns

Hero-cults of the Sun Lord play an important role in the confusing panorama of religious life of the Solarity-holding people of Zem (see this post for background). The cult of Adalfuns the Choate is one such aspect held dear by even the heretically-minded in the Hill Cantons.

The Chant of Adalfuns the 37^th Aspect of our Sun Lord Puissant

In the Free City (then, as now, a misnomer) of Aufhebensplota in the August Year of the Noxal Surrender (or 41,069) was born the hero Adalfuns, the love child of the cow maiden Welga and our most beloved and virile of divine presences, the Sun Lord--who is also by way of the shared godhead also Adalfuns.

Though his adolescent years were spent happily if rowdily knocking the jaunty caps off of local dilettantes and earning the inexplicable nickname of “Wonder Hans” with the local maidens, the wanderlust that runs raging in his divine veins took his course and he struck out from home for the Path of Heroes: helping other beings in shuffling their mortal coils and the carting away of their possessions.

So it came to pass that Adalfuns entered the Hill Cantons in search of the Horned Oracle. Crossing the River Trvna on the road to Ostrovo he was startled to hear a great stirring of the water behind. Glancing over his magnificently broad shoulder he saw the hairy, horned mass of the bukavac hovering mid-air.

“What ho, bukavac?' Adalfuns cried. “why do you make ready to leap upon my rippled and ample back?”

“I lack sustenance and wish to dine upon the delectable substance called man-fat,” answered the bukavac reasonably.

“Surely my toned and muscular form would provide poor and gamey fare to your refined, if monstrous palate.”

“Ah but that is where we differ, oh man-flesh on the foot,” answered the bukavac, “I have found delight in the prodigious marbling of a well-seasoned fighting man.”

“I will happily share in my man-fat, but for a contest of logical conundrums. If you win, you crush beneath your mass and consume the entirety of my body. If I win, I shall lop off my right arm and present it to you. In either case your avaricious belly finds nourishment.”

“While I take exception to the libelous characterization of my abdomen, I agree to such a contest.”

As Adalfuns began his exposition his dextrous hands sought out unseen contents from his magic backpack (of which it is said that the desired item always laid on top).

“Baromil wears a scarlet doublet on Sunlorday, Jirimil wears a black one on Blackgoatday and Alena wears a woolen wimple twice a week. Timosz is wearing a burgonet. What day of the week is it?”

“That make entirely no sense,” said the bukavac in an exasperated tone. “I shall make ready to leap upon your ample back.”

“Oh no, wait there is a second part,” said Adalfuns as he hurriedly and steathily whittled behind his back. “There is a blood apricot-laden cart leaving Heimotbuch traveling at four cantonal potato-leagues an hour while another such laden cart leaves Muth travelling at two leagues per hour. Where and when do the two carts meet.”

“But again...” Before the thoroughly confused and enraged bukavac could ready his banter, Adalfuns took the 10-foot sharpened stick from behind his back and thrust it into the gleaming red of the great beast.

“Sweet fuck,” said the bukavac in tremendous pain. “You have blinded and cheated me.”

“But that was exactly my point,” quipped Adalfuns in a line that sounded good on his tongue at the time, but on further reflection later seemed cheap and breezy. Whistling a saucy tune he hitched up his pack and made way to Ostrovo for a steaming pile of halushky.

A: Chaotic, Good (one of the few aspects of the Sun Lord so)

B: +1 to hit when using a piercing weapon (3), +1 to surprise if engaged in conversation with a being before combat (6).

C: Fighters, Rangers, Fey exiles from New Hampshire

D: See the Sun Lord.

The Hill Cantons Cosmology “Appendix N”

One for the “showing my work” file, some of the inspiration points that went into the religion and cosmology series. Another post on the terrifying inimical gods of the Anti-Cantons may be in the making.

Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions, Douglas Bachmann's Dragon article in #40 (the Weird and its cosmic juxtaposition to human civilization, the association of humanity with Law, the waxing/waning of gods being tied to the amount of human worship and the reduction of “Faerie”)

Jack Vance's Lyonesse, Dying Earth, and Planet of Adventure novels (absurdist satire of religious mores, weird gods and weirder religious doctrine)

Leiber's Lankhmar stories especially “Lean Times in Lankhmar” (more satire, petty gods and apotheosis)

Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Mediterranean hero-cults, Hellenistic and Roman sun-cults, Theosophy, Jewish neoplatonism and mystical traditions, Piper's Lord Kalvan, Early Christian theological disputes (Sun Lord sects, Ha-Vul the Antagonist and to a lesser extent the Silent God)

Hussites (and Taborites), Mormon feminist views on the Heavenly Mother, William Blake's poetic mythology around the Triple Goddess (The Celestial Lady and her secret heretical societies)

Slavic folklore and pagan mythology (Pahr Old Gods, folk customs, and a number of godlings)

Hindu and Native American creation myths (World Turtle)

M.A.R Barker's Create a Religion In Your Spare Time for Fun and Profit and Mitlanyal (general inspiration, the concept of distinct aspects for gods)

Gary Gygax's article on Five-Fold Alignment in Strategic Review.

Robert Graves's White Goddess and Mary Renault's Theseus books (the Mistress of the Mountains and the religion of the Kaftors)

Occultist and Slavic Neopagan theories and art  (Hyperborean origins)

Clark Ashton Smith's Hyperborean cycle (Youndeh and other elements)

The Eternals comic Jack Kirby (space gods, duh)   

Religion and the Hill Cantons Part Three: Godlings, Atrophied Gods and Also-Ran Deities

Continuing this series on the religion in the campaign. Parts one and two here and here.

Godlings

Gaxx the Jerk-King sets forth in his time-misted Annals of theFive-Fold Path that “puissant and sage paragons who follow alignment to the absolute letter of its definition must eventually move off into another plane of existence.” Such must be the case as despite humanity's seemingly inexorable march toward monotheism a bewildering number of godlings on the rise have joined the ranks of demi-gods, fallen gods, and nature spirits that densely pack most corners of the Weird with their Immanence.

Kostej the Deathless

The Ursine Master

The Mistress of the Mountains

Svatek the Guardian

The Horned Oracle

Moon Calf

Vul the Drowned

Ježibaba the Witch-Bitch

Firuabakir

Water, Wood, and Hill Spirit-Gods

The Half-Gods of Marlankh

Civic Gods

Atrophied Gods

Even beings as powerful as gods face inevitably sunset. Without the power of veneration they coast on for years living on past glories, perhaps regaining a spring in their step here and there when fashions revive a pocket of faddish worship.

Many of the Old Pahr deities, like those of the Kaftors and Boreans before them, have faded to shadows. Who knows—indeed, cares--these days of the cosmic wrestling between Chernobog and his brother Bilibog? Or the Cattle Raids of Velesh? The aching pain of the Great Stonefisting? All-powerful world-shattering gods slowly become autumnal backhills gods and then--before the longer midnight of sleep claims them--they finally slump into mere godlings.

Marzana

A few able-toed fallen deities manage to adapt to their downshift, sometimes recasting themselves with entirely different briefs and personas as they adapt to their new station. Marzana, the old Pahr goddess now coasting a head above local godling status, is widely suspected to be Mara, a chthonic goddess of legendary emotional iciness. It is said that after running hot for a while with the jet-set gods of the Latter Hyperborean successor states as a trendy “goddess of bittersweet remembrances, poised languidness, and doleful fashion” that she had a tremendous row with a divine lover and in that baleful fallout covered the world in ice.

Like Radegast she ekes out a life mainly as a Hill Cantons folk festival patroness (and tiny pockets of worship) where a rag-filled, garlic-bedecked straw effigy of her is dragged through the streets toward the local water source while being dipped into every puddle, pond and mud mire along the way. At water edge the effigy is burned and a nearby tree festooned with gaudy baubles. Druids (either real if a pagan community or symbolically draped with granola if a Sun Lord-fearing community) march behind the procession chanting “it's not much, but it's a life.”

A: Neutral

B: Ice Arrow (3), Reincarnation (11)

C: Female druids, magic users

D: Winter, Dead and Rebirth, Emotional Distance

The Silent God

Rumored to be the Father of the Sun Lord, though the increasing tight-lippedness of his dwindling congregants makes the true nature of this god and his doctrine a head-scratcher for most. His symbol is nine-pointed star. Complicated esoteric equations and schematics are often associated with savants that follow him.

A: Lawful (Good? Evil?)

B: Confusion (5)

C: Any but must be born into the faith

D: Inscrutability, Stoic Continuity, Guiltmongering

Click to enlarge

The World Turtle

Jarek the Nagsman, Marlank bon vivant and sage, maintains that the World Turtle that the Hill Cantons rests on swims through time in a series of dialectical mini and macro cycles upwards to the End of History. The other planes, he contends, may be the antithesis or synthesis of the present of the HC--but of course that's absurd heresy.

At High Summer, the shortest night of the year, Altnoc, is celebrated by placing a turtle shell (for the WT naturally) inside a wagon wheel and rolling into an enormous bonfire while celebrants plait wreaths of nightshade and jump across the blazing logs in defiance of the demons who dwell Beyond the Veil.

Perhaps troubling for the continuing existence of the world, very few actually worship the World Turtle anymore.

Hyperborean “Space Gods”

The Late Classical Hyperborean period suffered from a surfeit of power-intoxication best personified by the wicked, vying Necromancers' pursuit of divine transformation. Lying in state in the Cerulean Vaults far below the surface streets of Kezmarok they spend millenia pondering dream logic and building up the will to metaphorize into beings of pure energy. Small cults nestled in the Undercity continue service and worship of them.

Zirran the Golden

Nezar the Aborted

Hisvart the Underwhelming

Onig the Prober

Religion and the Hill Cantons Part Two: the Outlier Deities

Following up from the last post on religion and the HC campaign, the remaining two “outcast” deities of Solarism and the pagan old gods of the Pahr. The last post will finish the series up with the myriad godlings and inimical gods (and an “Appendix N” of all the various half-baked sources in the cosmology mix).

Habeka the Celestial Lady

A spurned and feisty female deity (also called the Lady, She Who We Shall Not Mention, or the Triple-Goddess) whose now-heretical followers seek to restore her place in the Divine Family. While her relative divine status is disputed, her location and lack of mobility is not: she is currently chained to the Great Hearth constellation—a situation she and her followers greatly resent, naturally. Men of learning attribute the nourishing twice annual Blood Rains to the Lady's periodic revenge beatings of the Sun Lord with her star-forged silver chains.

Her followers are divided among three bickering secret societies: the Evening Star, the Morning Star, and the Starry Void lodges. The first two societies are mostly moderate and socially egalitarian factions with a strong base artisans and denizens of the Borderlands. The Starry Void is a zealous, secretive, and lotus-addled crew who are rumored to dabble with the Mysteries of the Outer Void.

A: Neutral (Evening Star), Chaotic Good (Morning Star), Neutral to Chaotic Evil? (Starry Void)

B: Darkness 15' foot (3), Commune (7), Meteor Swarm (15)

C: All classes but Clerics and Druids. Magic users, Monks and Assassins only for the Starry Void.

D: Co-Ruler of All Creation, Mystery, Motherhood

William Blake's The Night of Enitharmon's Joy (often called Hecate)

The Antagonist, The Fallen Demiurge, Ha-Vul

A third malicious yet lawful entity, carefully never called directly by its true name, is often attributed to the Solarist religious grouping. Some in the borderlands believe that the god has no real substance and is merely a folk legend maintained by the Sun Lord's spiritual lords to scare some moral purity into the dullard minds of Corelands folk. Others say that this entity is the collective spirit of that fell domain known as the Anti-Cantons and a brave few maintain that he may even be a wayward, malicious aspect of the Sun Lord himself.

A: Lawful Evil only

B: reversed spells only. Cause Light Wounds (2)

C: (Anti) Clerics

D: Rigidity, Corruption, Being a Dick

Pahr “Old Gods”

The gods worshiped by the Pahr people of the Overkingdom and Kezmarok before their conversion.

Svat the Four-Faced

Distant, vaguely warm Father Figure god, head of the Pahr Pantheon but greatly diminished in power to the point of his fading from existence outside of the four-faced wooden pillar shrines. It's unclear what we does all day and when he gets home he sits by the fire, smiling distractedly. 

A: Chaotic Good in some aspects, Neutral in others.

B: Pass Without Trace (2)

C: Druids, Fighters

D: Formerly all things. Unclear what current domain is other than his veneration by the unemployed and harassed Pahr fathers.

Radegast

Old Pahr name Radhošt. He is still widely revered during harvest rituals throughout the cantons as a folklore symbol even by Sun Lord worshipers.
A: Chaotic Good

B: Resist Drink (1), can voluntarily elect to drink three times as much as normal without becoming inebriated. Friends (2). Cheat Fate (5): Reroll a single die roll. Otto's Irresistible Dance (15)

C: Fighters, Rangers, Thieves, Mountebanks, Magic-Users

D: Hospitality, Games, Ludic Activity, Generosity, Fermented Drinks and the “Dionysic Soul”.

Storm-Child

Reputed by certain esoteric orders to be merely the half-human offspring of one of Radegast's many dalliances with the female half of humankind, he is undoubtedly the most beloved of the Lord of Hosts' children and his cult flourishes to this day in the backhills of the borderlands. His followers' abodes are instantly recognizable by the littering of children's toys, many teeth-marked, throughout their living space. Not one for subtle interventions Storm-Child demands the attention of mortals he encounter. Many of the “touched” ruffians, mountebanks and picaros that style themselves “adventurers” spread too-consistent tales of hearing the godling's howls carried by a far wind while deep in the Weird.

A: Chaotic Good

B: The Squalling (2), Shocking Grasp (4)

C: Fighters, thieves, half-ogres

D: Thunderstorms, Willfulness, and Dice

Religion and the Hill Cantons Part One: Sun-Lord Sects

I continue to plug away at Live Weird or Die, the obsessive compilation of house rules, variant classes, and Hill Cantons setting whoha. As the project grows it becomes unclear who I am actually writing for. The players? A broader audience? Or just myself?

At any rate I find it a pleasureable place to go in my mind when work gets overwhelming and it's helped fill in the holes during play so I take it as a good place to “procrastitask”.  And because the players have been recently eager as of late to suss out the various big-ticket cosmic mysteries in the campaign, I have been pounding the keys on the religion chapter.

Below is part one of that chapter, headed up by the simple system I am using to spit out the necessary D&D mechanical information. You will note my moving away from Clerics as a universal class for deities and one specifically tied to the ostensibly monotheistic dominant religion detailed here.

The first painting from Mucha's Slavonic cycle

Sect Characteristics

Attributed Alignment (A): the hyper-powerful beings called gods exist beyond the human-derived theoretical framework called alignment. In fact, many stories of the antics of the gods clearly show them acting in ways inconsistent with alignment behavior and it's not an infrequent occurrence for many of the most powerful gods to have distinct aspects, manifestations, or incarnations that act wholly in a different alignment mode (though never in the one directly in opposition). Of course, that doesn't stop humans from attributing a single, approximate alignment to the deity and an aspirational doctrine for followers.

Bonus Spells/Powers (B): Special bonus spells and powers granted to faithful clergy or other temporal agents beyond their normal spell range. The number in parenthesis represents what level the power is granted. All powers are useable once a day unless otherwise specified.

Priesthood Class (C): Clerics are only found in the ranks of the most supreme of all humanity's gods, the Sun Lord. All other clergy are vocational posts (with special powers/spells) eligible to certain classes as per their deity.

Domain (D): What humans consider the deity's area of control. Again the actual deity may consider his or her's brief to be something wider and may share or battle another power for jurisdiction.

Solarist Sects

Most of humanity in Zěm (the world that the Hill Cantons reside in) lives nominally under a single, yet highly fractious and localized religion called Solarism. As the centuries have rolled on this body of religious doctrine has been thought by sheltered Coreland practitioners to be the single “theologically correct” world view ruled (or at least dominated) by a single godhead, the Sun Lord. Though open to fierce debate two other “entities” the Celestial Lady and the Antagonist are recognized--to varying degrees--as part of the religious umbrella.

Paradoxically the more monolithic Solinaity has grown the more hyper-nuanced, locally-differentiated, contradictory, contested and absurd it's actual real world practice has become.

A: Lawful Good (with odd, rare Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil aspects)

B: by sect below

C: Clerics only

D: By doctrine all things human, but Illumination, Glory, Warmth, Sustaining the World, Heroic Activity, All Things Related to the Sky and the Sun,.

It is known that in the post-Hyborean period that the Sun Lord roamed the world conducting great feats. Achingly similar stories of his virile prowess and —the bullwhipping of the Unachus, the jilting of the White Goddess, etc--are told throughout the known world. One school of contemporary thought maintains that the Sun Lord was merely a mighty folk hero, a fleshy mortal sac like you and I, another that the many and diverse manifestations are the work of many separate local heroes. The more orthodox hold that he was an existent god, who manifested himself everywhere as hero and concealed his divinity as a test of humanity's worth.

The Sun Lord (his true name is banned from mention) drives the Chariot of the Heavens along the wheel-rutted troughs of the Dome of the Cosmos daily. The god spends the winter months dining with the ancient divine “space god” luminaries of Hyperborea. Some savants believe that the god is in reality a godhead of 313 “Rays” and that many old gods have been said to be usurped, absorbed or even eaten this way.

The faith is currently divided into 31 Houses of Orthodoxy over seemingly absurd doctrinal differences (whether sign of the sun is clockwise or counter, how many fingers used, the number of wheels on the Sun Chariot, etc.)

The Sun Lord grants special favor to his servants that walk the path of prim and orderly weal (LG), they gain access to the full range of spells and bonus powers. Clerics that have lapsed into Chaotic Good can use the full range of spells but not the bonus ones, while those who have decadently slipped into Neutral (a sad majority of this class, really) are limited to the first 3 levels of spells. Perversely Lawful Evil clerics gain access to all levels of only the reversible spells—though clearly they gain such nefarious power from secret affiliation with the powers of the Anti-Cantons or Ha-Vul the Antagonist (see Part 2). Chaotic Evil clerics do not exist.

Supernal Orthodox Temple of the Puissant Sun Lord

The official religion of the Overkingdom with an established and widespread hierarchy through most of human civilization. Projecting itself as a monotheistic (if syncretistic) religion, the Temple ostensibly dominates the Overkingdom spiritually. The Temple itself holds a tight monopoly on the manufacture and distribution of the Seed of the Sun (gunpowder), which does not work in the Weird.

A: as above

B: Light (1), Continual Light (4), Disputation (6): priest lays down such a mighty and byzantine line of theological polemic that the listener must save as vs. a Confusion spell, only usable on humans who understand Vulgar Hyperborean (the common tongue of the realm)

C: Clerics

D: as above

The Ultra-Orthodox Patriarchate

The official religion of Kezmarok with the Patriarch as its supreme spiritual head. Though astoundingly rigid in its doctrine and intolerance of other sects of the Solianity, they are shockingly tolerant of other “apostate” religions to the point of allowing their open (if regulated and taxed) worship.

A: as above

B: Smell Heresy (2): priest can smell out in a 20-foot radius followers of other houses, Continual Light (4), Disputation (6) as above.

C: Clerics

D: as above

Minor Houses

The Thousand-Faced Myrmidons

A martial order of clerics and lay-brothers who emphasize and centralize the hero-cult manifestations of the Sun Lord.

Brothers of the Other Mother

Orthodox monastic order that promotes the veneration of a less divine “Marian” like mother-figure to the Celestial Lady.

Followers of the Cleansing Rays

An ascetic order of ultra-orthodox followers that believe one must drop away all care of the material world and devote yourself to full-time basking in the rays of the sun and other devotional acts.

Brethren of the Supernal Skies

A mystical and martial order of monks devoted to a heretical reconciliation—cosmic “remarriage”--of the Sun Lord with the Celestial Lady. Nominally at war with the Other Mother cult.

The Quadraligists

An orthodox sect that dogmatically maintains that the Sun Lord's chariot has four wheels and four wheels only. In mutual and heated conflict with the Two-Wheeled School of Immanence and the Troikaites (who go as far as to say at times that the chariot could be in fact a sled).

The Fustians

It's unclear what they actually believe other than a highly contrarian worldview that involves the shouting down of opponents.

Primitive-Reconstructionists, Heimtbach Conclave

Orthodox sect that maintains that the Sun Lord has a single aspect to be venerated among all others. There is internal confusion however on what that aspect is, paralyzing their spread.

The Cult of Storm-Child

Of the so-called Old Gods (really quite new by some reckonings) of the Hill Cantons, Storm Child, is one of the select few pagan deities tacitly tolerated by the Lords Spiritual.

Though he is reputed by certain esoteric orders to be merely the half-human offspring of one of Radegast's many dalliances with the female half of humankind, he is undoubtedly the most beloved of the Lord of Hosts' children and his cult flourishes to this day in the backhills of the borderlands. His followers' abodes are instantly recognizable by the littering of children's toys, many teeth-marked, throughout their living space. “Storm-Childist households can look a little harried now and then,” opines the great Bombasticus but they have a good time.”

Not one for subtle interventions Storm-Child demands the attention of mortals he encounter. Many of the “touched” ruffians, mountebanks and picaros that style themselves “adventurers” spread too-consistent tales of hearing the godling's howls carried by a far wind while deep in the Weird.

Thanks to the ever-replenishing wonders of the Sublime Source of Crowds, details of the cult are offered here today, the day of his celestial birth. I will be making use of the wonderful D&Dized adaption of Runequest cult info that David from Dungeons Down Under has available for download here.

Deity Name: Storm-Child, The One Whose Cries Rend the Sky

Area of Control: Thunderstorms, Willfulness, and Dice

Following: Elderly eccentrics, stubborn children, gambling den operators, those who are Chaotic yet Good-natured and resist authority.

Organization: informal, horizontal network of localized Circles.

Clergy: Storm-Child has no regular spell-casting clerics as such. However adventuring classed types of any variation (and suitable alignment) may elect to become vocational lay-priests.

Duties: Each morning the lay-priest must greet the dawn with a loud shout of “Deeeeeee”. Once a month a sacrifice must be made to the local Circle of 10 gold suns times the level of the character. Failure to do so will mean being stripped of all powers granted by the demi-god.

According to the savant Allandros, priests of the Storm-Child have a tradition of eating dice on high holidaty. This is done to devour the luck of those inimical to the faith. 1x/level/week, a priest of the Storm-Child may devour dice while thinking of a particular foe. That foe will have a -4 penalty to all die rolls for d10 days. However, the Storm-Child's priest must save vs paralyzation or suffer the Curse of Teeth (see below).

Powers Granted: vocational lay-priests can assume special powers at odd levels beginning with the third. To assume the appropriate power the priest must sacrifice the equivalent of 500 gold suns times the character level worth of goods that delight the Storm Child (jeweled polyhedral dice, toy wagons constructed of rare woods, fish sticks and the like).

Non-Listed Spells: All Spells can only be cast when wearing no or leather armor.

Available at 1^st level (500 suns sacrifice):

The Squalling. Once a day, summon a brief and violent windstorm that sounds like screaming and wailing. Mechanical effects could include knocking down foes, doing damage (buffet, or sonic), deafness, immense irritation (especially in parents). (Spell created by The Elder Isles' famed storm-brother, James Stuart).

Shocking Grasp. (see rulebook)

Available at 3^rd level (1500 suns):

The Curse of Teeth. Usable once a week. Anyone failing a saving throw vs spells becomes subject to a terribly painful curse.

Firstly, a random (4d8) number of teeth will become loose and fall out over a period of 1d4 days. This in itself isn't particularly painful, though the shock of losing teeth and temporary blood flow may be the equivalent of a single HP of damage per day.

Secondly, new teeth appear within the targets skull and begin to push their way through the gum line and into the mouth, taking 3d10 days for all of them to come through after the last one has dropped out. This is massively painful and for each day during this phase the target must make a Saving throw vs Spells. Success indicates they are only at -2 to all rolls due to the pain. Failure indicates they are essentially debilitated and are at -6 to everything. Powerful Anaesthetics (like booze) will numb the pain, allowing normal activity, but probably carry their own risks...(Again thanks to James, what a mensch.)

Taboos and Bans: Followers of the Storm-Child are not allowed to eat food sitting at tables but must consume all sustenance while wandering around their place of rest.

Holidays: According to the writings of Bomasticus, Storm-Childist families conduct a seasonal ceremony commonly called the Howling Jubilee “in which normal social hierarchies are inverted. Household servants exert temporary control over  policy, boss their overseers and definitely speak their minds. Domestic animals are taken off lead and their grooms are expected to pick up the collars and wear them for a little while. The Littlest One rules. This is apparently a vestige of the days when we all slept in the same room with dogs, and there have been times when the inversion has applied with magical force in larger circumstances: curses and even quests rebounding on their casters, restraints untying themselves and blocking the business of the secular authorities, crib gates somehow popping open on their own. Such phenomena please the Storm-Child.”

Cosmic Secrets of the Hill Cantons Revealed

This will only make sense if you have read yesterday's post about campaign artifacts—and even then it may be a stretch. 

As always you must click to receive the embiggenation. 

The Distant Mirror of Fantasy Religion

Growing up, there were three topics my mother, the Southern Lady, instructed me to avoid in polite company: money, politics, and religion. Like much of the rest of her advice, I spent a good chunk of my life ignoring her missive (often proving her right), but not in gaming. Except for the occasional lapse of passion, I have tended to studiously avoid those hot buttons with my fellow gamers.

However, today we are going talk about religion; how it plays in our campaign worlds and how its shape in those worlds often reflects our own attitudes and approaches to the subject.

Last night, over a glass of cheap Portuguese wine (or three) I hunkered down to read M.A.R. Barker's essay “Create a Religion in Your Spare Time for Fun and Profit.” It's a thoughtful 28-page piece arguing against the usual hodgepodge, sloppy introduction of gods, mythos, and religion into fantasy rpg campaigns. Barker, fortunately, also spends a good chunk of the article getting at the range of questions a world builder can and should ask to have a deeper approach. (The essay is available here for the slightly too-high price of $4).

One observation he makes--which jives with my own recent thought train about how our gaming can often be a distant mirror of the world we experience—is that: “both science-fantasy fiction and fantasy role-playing games are created by and for people of THIS time and THIS generalized Western European heritage...It has to be underlined again and again that we are creatures of our own cultures, bound by them, limited by them, and unable to produce anything that really transcends them.”

While I bridled and got huffy a little at the cultural determinism of that statement, it did produce one of those little cartoon light bulb over the head moments.

Ding.

Yes, I can imagine and enjoy even the seemingly alien religions of exotic settings (cough, cough, Tekumel), but my own worlds' religions mirror sometimes closely, sometimes distantly my own attitudes about things supernatural. When I think about it, the Hill Cantons are firmly in the former camp.

See I was raised a good American cafeteria Catholic. My family slogged its way to a mass every odd Xmas or Easter and tended to pick and choose what it followed and didn't. Settling into adult life, I have tended to bounce back and forth between a skeptical agnosticism and an appreciation (if somewhat heretical) of the solace of the Church. Add in a Special Lady Friend who is Jewish and a failed attempt to write a novel about the Hussites, then you get something of the vague ballpark that is my spiritual life.

Now back to the HC. Vaguely renaissance Counter-Reformation Catholic Church check. Heretical movements in said Church check. Looming cosmic chaos check. Hosts of cosmological add-on bits and pieces taken what I had been reading that year check, check, and check.

Now here's where the strange twists--also part and parcel of my spiritual ballpark--weave in. I have often described the cosmological fabric of the campaign to be something like: imagine if Jack Vance wrote a Lyonesse-style fantasy about Bohemia in the mid-renaissance. Remember in Vance's work, religious doctrine is often treated like he treats most human mores, he exaggerates their absurdities mostly for comic and satirical effect (mostly gently).

Vance also tends to stretch the fabric even when working with an-almost historical setting, alongside early medieval Christianity in Lyonesse you have a crazy quilt of historical pagan and utterly fantastic religions. It's hodgepodge, but hodgepodge that works alongside that reoccurring theme.

Thus while the Supernal Orthodox Temple of the Puissant Sun Lord has a (mostly off-stage) trace of menace with its monopoly on gunpowder (thanks to Piper's Lord Kalvan) and the intellectual life of the lands outside the Weird, it is mostly an institution characterized by an inward obsession with layers and layers of absurd-seeming theological differences.

The players have helped co-create and perpetuate this through most of the life of the game, most notably Desert Scribe whose fiddly scholar of a character, Mandamus, who feels confident enough to extemporize about this or that element. Confident because he knows that I will play along to that spontaneous creation with great relish (I think).

In one exchange, we follow the lively disputes of the many temple schools on the correct way to make the circular sign of Sol Invictus: whether it's three fingers moving in a clockwise fashion with a pinky flourish at the end, four moving in counter-clockwise sans flourish, or as the ultra-orthodox demand with the whole hand. In another whether the Sun Lord's chariot has two or four wheels. To which Brad's now-dead Cugel character retorted incredulously with “now you just are talking about a cart.” I can barely choke back the laughter at the table.

There is more to set out here to bolster the close mirror case as they stand-in for interlocking pieces of my own mental architecture: the bickering heretical sects of the Morning and Evening Star societies who follow the spurned female deity; the heavy themes of astronomical happenings and numerology; the world-weary pathos of the older, forgotten gods, etc. But I think you get the drift.

Maybe this rings all wrong for you out there. Maybe your own campaign's approach to religion doesn't reflect the idea sets you trundle around in your head in the slightest. Maybe this navel-gazing just bores you full stop.

Or does it? Do you get beyond the bounds of your own time and place or is it a mirror reflecting some piece or the other of your life?