Deity Drop 7: Chavazvug
Out of our vacation with the monitor demigods and we immediately hop back into fiends, starting with our first of a truly nasty, but actually interesting lot, Chavazvug of the qlippoth lords!
For those who aren’t aware, the Outer Sphere forms the outer shell of the cosmos of the Pathfinder setting, with the various outer planes like Hell, Heaven, Axis, and so on forming along that inside edge.
However, if we liken the Outer Sphere to an eggshell, that begs the question of what is outside of that egg, and what to do with the big fracture on one side.
Indeed, the plane of the Abyss is a series of chasms and cracks not unlike the shell of a hard boiled egg that has bounced a little too hard on the counter. It is possible that the vast rifts of the plane were all burrowed by Rovagug, or fractured as a result of him entering the cosmos as a whole.
Either way, before the advent of mortal sin and demons, it was the qlippoth that ruled the Outer Rifts. Indeed, they are among the oldest outsiders, and may very well have originally wormed their way into the rifts from the outside, making them originally denizens of whatever madness and unreality exists beyond the pocket of stability that the cosmos represents.
It’s impossible to say what the qlippoth were like in those early times, or indeed what their relatives outside reality are like now, but we do know they are all alien and inimical to the laws of reality we all know and accept in the most disturbing and hazardous ways.
What’s more, with the coming of demon-kind, these ancient spirits were overwhelmed by the sin-spawned fiends and driven back into the deepest depths of the plane. Whatever goals the qlippoth had before, they were all unified (as much so as chaotic evil beings can be) against the demon threat, but also against the fuel source that gave rise to their hated foe: mortals, who with their free will have the capacity to sin and thereby feed the abyss new souls to be converted into more of their fecund opposition. As such, every qlippoth hates demons, and they seek to destroy mortals as well in some hope of reclaiming their home plane by starving demons of sinful souls.
And the qlippoth lords are the greatest among their kind, powerful monstrosities of unique form and bordering on divine power, allowing them to grant power to worshippers. However, qlippoth lords care nothing for mortal worshippers save for their use in summoning forth their lesser kin to devour the mad cultists first and anyone else they can get their claws on next until banished or put down.
These minor divinities have to be careful though, for more than one of their kind has gotten too popular with mortalkind and become infused with enough mortal sin to transition in nature to a demon lord, making them traitors to their own kind.
However, even with those goals, each qlippoth lord’s methods are different, and such is the case with today’s subject: Chavazvug.
While other qlippoths hate demon-kind and mortals with equal passion, Chavazvug leans most of his hatred upon the demons first and foremost, and constantly raids against them, rising from his boiling lake home to range far and wide in the Abyss on suicidal runs destroying as many demons as possible until finally someone manages to put him down, only for him to return all too soon to do so again, a constant thorn in the side of demon lords and wicked gods of the Abyss that must be dealt with at least once a week on average.
Make no mistake though, Chavazvug is no ally of mortals. Chavazvug is something you see coming while on the Abyss and flee from hoping that you’re out of his perceptive range by the time he’s done slaughtering the demons that attracted his attention in the first place.
Chavazvug is also known as the Crawling Inferno, an appropriate name because, despite looking like a 50 foot tall pile of organs atop a set of seven spidery legs, the fiend demonstrates the classic qlippoth trait of defying logic by also being constantly superheated to the point where such organs should surely combust, but do not. Indeed, the horror constantly steams with their extreme heat, can spew superheated acid from every horrible orifice, and the very sight of their horrible form induces feverish discomfort that can cause even fire elementals to become susceptible to their burning.
If Chavazvug can be said to have a home, it is a nameless lake of boiling bile and other foul seepage, from which they emerge each time they rejuvenate. However, he spends no time there, only ever leaving it to lay waste to the parts of the Outer Rifts where demons rule. If there is a secret to putting him to rest permanently, it may lie in it’s depths.
Having no care to establish cults of mortals, the majority of The Crawling Inferno’s worshippers are solitary pyromaniacs that revel in destruction and hope to one day spontaneously combust (not by their own deliberate action, but as a final glorious reward for emulating their deity). However, as Chavazvug is also concerned with monstrous recursion and rejuvenation, I can imagine some cults of his might crop up with him as a patron to those that come to believe that being reborn as horrible monsters through some curse or corruption to be a form of apotheosis.
It is unknown what exactly Chavazvug thinks about other divinities beyond his seething hatred for demonkind. He probably also hates all other evil divinities purely because their presence inevitably spreads sin even if they seek to bring souls to other planes or personal realms far from the Abyss. If he spares any thought for goodly or neutral divinities beyond them getting in the way of the qlippoth goal of mortal and demon annihilation, it is unknown. (He’s not exactly the most talkative mountain of meat).
As his personal crusade against demonkind is constant and solitary, Chavazvug probably doesn’t consider any other qlippoth to be his servants, but it’s likely that he has attracted a fanclub of sorts that follow in his wake to pick off stragglers and survivors of his rampages, and answer the call of would-be summoners seeking his servants in hopes of overpowering lesser mages to go on a rampage.
Though not inclined to offer divine magic except as a side effect of worship, The Crawling Inferno does grant access to the Chaos, Evil, Fire, and Repose domains, with the Ash, Entropy, Smoke, ad Souls subdomains, all of which reflects not just his fiery nature, but also a constantly reviving destroyer that destroys fiend and mortal soul alike.
No qlippoth lords have been explored in 2E yet, so Chavazvug has no stats there quite yet.
He does have a lesser obedience though. For those that torture a living creature with brands and meditate on the results, the worshipper gains some measure of protection from fiery effects. Furthermore, they also are blessed with a few minor spells, namely those that inflect fiery harm either simply, in a following pillar of flame, or a spreading array of burning beams.
Curiously, qlippoths have not been mentioned AT ALL in Starfinder, and while they almost certainly do exist, this does mean we have no word on Chavazvug’s status in the far future. Presumably he is still around though, waging his continuous bloody crusade and inspiring monstrous pyromaniacs and maybe even evil evolutionists.
That does it for today, but tomorrow we tackle a different sort of evil, one that got a little bit revised late into 1st edition!