A god of riches and horrors beneath the earth, protector and jailer of the departed souls, grim Dispater rules many realms with a stern hand and an iron will. Often cursed and seldom praised by mortals, it is this god's cosmic lot to keep order in the underworld, where the caverns of the mortal plane intersect with the labyrinths of the underdark and the shadowed halls of the dead.
While his worship overlaps with many other gods of death, few pray to Dispater as his heart is thought to be as cold and unmoving as stone, hardened by the grim work of keeping the domains to which psycopomps and other terminal forces deliver souls, ensuring that they neither have the chance to escape nor that they are picked off by fiends or other malign spirits.
Judges and other arbiters sometimes swear by him, especially when handling matters of life and death, as do miners, bankers, and others who work in precious metals or stones, as Dispater has a connection to caverns and other buried places. His clergy collects tribute in the form of those soft, perishable things that cannot be found below the earth: grain and livestock, flowers and wine. Their sacrifices of these things are said to pass on to the dead themselves, after their lord has taken his due tithe.
Adventure Hooks:
A monstrous bat haunts the countryside, endlessly harrying a graverobber who pilfered from a cemetery consecrated in Dispater's name. The exhausted scoundrel just so happens to have taken refuge in the same country inn as the party, passing himself off as a peddler who was shaken down by bandits. When the bat attacks that night (as he knows it will) he hopes to use the chaos to shift some of his plunder into the heroes' packs, diverting the creature and the divine wrath it represents.
Rumour is, if you find a trail of archaic coins scattered along the road, following it will lead you to one of the mysterious grey merchants, traders from the underworld who deal in memories and mementos cast off by the dead. Woe to anyone who attempts to harry or cheat the merchant though, as they travel under the protection of the lord below.
Shortly after a resurrection of a partymember (that may or may not have gone wrong), the heroes are approached by a dour devil in clerk's garb who insists that they need to follow her into the underworld to help clear up some post-mortality paperwork, or else their friend's soul might be held in litigation for a literal eternity. "Clearing up" in this case involves helping to clear out a field office somewhere in the shadowfell overtaken by the unquiet dead, fending off hostile spirits while the devil and the deceased do a lightninground of signatures on the relevant forms.
Behind the scenes: Hades has fascinated me since I started learning a mythology, and that fascination has only grown as I've traced the idea of him through history and popculture.
Like all the other Greek gods, Hades gets a roman makeover in Pluto; god of earth, the underworld, and wealth. One of his titles "Dis Pater" literally means " Father of Riches", as the earth contains both mineral wealth and the wealth of good harvests.
Because of his association with the underworld Pluto/Dis Pater starts to get adapted into emerging Christian Mythology as the devil, as his realm of of Tartarus (and its punishments reserved for the most wicked) likewise becomes Hell (which exists to torture anyone who sins and doesn't believe).
Fast forward about a millennia and a half and you have the creators of d&d making all the different names for the devil into a rogue's gallery of different fiends. With Dispater's connection to greek mythology completely forgotten he gets sectioned off as the extra schemey member of hell's boyband, at once brilliantly adept at making plans and driven mad with his own paranoia. While this makes him a little more interesting than some of the other devils, it just wasn't enough for me in the end, so a revamp had to ensue.
I wanted to take things full circle and use Dispater's name to bring my own Hades analog into my game's mythology, a god not of death but specifically the underworld, fully drawing on the connotations of both afterlife and underground. Playing with motifs of kingship and a "death and taxes" sort of legalism also makes for unique themes when it comes to the subjectmatter of mortality: Dispater as death is owed tribute by natural and divine law, but that relationship also grants protections to the tributary. Imagine a paladin of Dispater saving someone's life from unlawful execution because they are owed a righteous death.
Thanks as always to @5ecardaday for the monster stats
It's said they found the god in the old tombs, in that forgotten quiet where long eras had worn away all the epitaphs. They drew in a breath of the still air and on their exhalation the god took flight into the world on vulture's wings.
-The Silent Testimonies, book 1
A god not of death, but of the dead, Nerull presides those aspects of the mortal coil that lay beyond the Raven Queen's domain of mourning and memory. Someone must keep vigil for the departed long after their names have passed from the memories of the living, and so that duty falls to Nerull, who's chosen people are the spirits that have lingered in the world far longer than they were ever alive.
Beyond the dead, the vulture’s faithful are an eclectic lot. Itinerant gravetenders, scholars of forgotten tongues, Bonesetters who's experience with embalming helps them minister to the living. To Serve Nerull you must first die, though this is often symbolic.
Unlike his fellow carrion-bird death god, Nerull's following does not frown on the use of necromancy, or the existance of undead. Ghost stories, whether vengeful or sorrowful are considered holy for the way their memory transcends time. The exception to this reverence of course are those trapped in suffering, and the "hungry" dead who feed on the living. Pain and want are after all the purview of life, and Nerull dispatches hunters and psychopomps to ease such spirits along their way.
Adventure Hooks:
While out on their travels the party encounters a procession of grey pilgrims, masked and shrouded, all silent save for the leader of their procession who carries a staff jingling with bells and welcomes the party to sit by his fire. He tells tale of conflicts across the realm, new and old, shared with her by her flock, and invites the party to walk along with them the next day if they wish to see something splendid. Should the party agree to such unsettling company they will walk until sunset when they come to a hillside dotted with loose stones, where one by one the pigrims will walk out and begin constructing their own cairns. The procession leader will thank them for their observance, not many are so kind to the unnamed dead, and will reward them with answers to five questions before departing on pallid wings.
After inexplicably befriending one of Nerull's agents (and possibly his daughter?) during one of their adventures, the party are liable to be put out when they don't see their favourite psychopomp for a while. Queue sightings of a foreboding spectre that's knocking one by one on the doors of the city at night, sending people into a panic. Imagine their surprise when it turns out this wraith has a message for them... their favourite omen of doom has been kidnapped by a necromancer and her boss (dad?) wants them to get her back.
The Vulture's work is never done, and this time he's decided to enlist the heroes for aid. Perhaps there's an undead spirit that needs to be quieted, perhaps there's something sinister at work in a ruin once consecrated in his name, perhaps it's just making sure they clean up after themselves after their latest stint of tombrobbing. Regardless, Nerull can offer the heroes something far beyond coin... closure with the dead, ensuring visitation with a loved one for some much needed closure.
Titles: The Vulture, The Bonesorter, Dead Ned, the weary reaper, the vagabond end.
Signs: Plants too dry to rot, the voices of the departed carried on the wind, skeletons rearranged into trees or gardens.
Symbols: A scythe or sickle entwined with flowers.
I think I know what may be happening....You’re trying to atone me, and I didn’t do anything wrong...You want to know what I’ve always hated about mortals? why I spit on your forgiveness, why I loathe your redemption? To reach a hand down to somebody they need to be beneath you,
And I’m Beneath Nobody.
Brennan Lee Mulligan as Asmodeus for Exandria Unlimited: Calamity
@pikablob was asking about my ideas on devils and mentioned Asmodeus in the process, and while I’ve already done a monster’s reimagined on devils, I figured it was a good opportunity to talk about my take on the biggest of big bads. To summarize, I like to go back to the mythological roots of devils less as agents of a universal evil but as individual manifestations of judgment, looking to test or punish mortals for their failings. This ( along with Brennan’s showstopping performance in calamity) gave me the idea of an Asmodeus as the ultimate critic of mortalkind, an entity that can see all of our flaws and nothing of our virtues.
TLDR: There are many evil gods, wicked things that preside over cruelty and misfortune in all its forms, but there are few that would claim to be the god of evil itself. Though to hear the lord of all hells tell it, there is nothing touched by mortals that is NOT evil: no act that is not in some way rooted in self interest, no moment of self determination that is not a transgression, no soul that is not some way corrupted. To allow the Father of Sin into your heart is to accept that people are fundamentally wicked creatures deserving of punishment, and that punishment cannot come soon enough.
Bio: Ruling from the lowest depths of the pit, Asmodeus sits a throne surveying an empire built on torture and damnation and deems it insufficient. There is evil in the multiverse and that evil is called mortals, things gifted with the tiniest spark of life who every day choose the wickedness of existence. His purpose is to be the scourge that drives the animal towards the slaughterhouse, to take hold of mortal life and shape it into useful purpose, with the only useful purpose being the ultimate destruction of all wicked things
The hypocracy of being an evil god punishing evil does not for a moment shake Asmodeus. Spirits cannot choose their nature, nor can animals, but mortals which live in the intersection choose to be evil every day, and worse yet, have the capability to choosing evil at any time. In spite of his divine status, and in many ways because of it, Asmodeus is actually incapable of perceiving good in mortals, believing that good intentions or earnest affection are yet more lies and hasty justifications that mortals buffer themselves with to excuse their faults and selfish action. None can then judge the atrocities he commits because none are without sin, even if to find that sin he needs to peel back layers of causality and unconscious feelings to find a thread of wrongdoing.
To purge the universe of the blight of mortals Asmodeus cultivates power and fear: Power in the form of legions of devils and devoted servants who’s hateful hearts he feeds like a furnace, fear in the form of agents which sow division in mortal hearts and a myriad of private hells filled with infinite forms of torment.
Swear to serve Asmodeus, say his mouthpieces, and you will be spared the infinite torment when the boot on your neck breaks through to your spine, or when his hordes come to put your home to the torch. Give up on the falsehoods of hope, love, and kindness, visit punishment on others and you may be rewarded for your service
Behind the scenes: I’ve talked quite a lot about how d&d uses the idea of objective evil as a staple of its worldbuilding, and how in doing so it ends up falling face first into pro genocide rhetoric. In attempting to make badguys that the party is 1000% justified in killing on sight it ends up stumbling into some very fucked up thought experements. Monsters in vanilla d&d arn’t just evil because they do bad things, but they do bad things because they are inherently evil: They pillage, they enslave, they despoil, not because these things benefit them ( as it invariably gets them killed by adventurers) but because these acts serve as an outlet for their wicked natures.
If our heroes’ enemies are fundamentally evil, then any action which opposes them must be good, and any pillaging, enslaving, or despoiling the party does can be excused provided the targets belong to the designated ingroup. This is almost identical to the reasoning that was used by crusaders, conquistadors, slave owners, and fascists, and what is now being used by the evangelical to deny people rights and life-saving aid to this day.
What I wanted with Asmodeus was an entity that looked at the party like a group of murderhobos look at an orc: an ugly brutish thing that is only useful in so far as its suffering and death can benefit them. Maybe it’ll be funny if they make it beg for its life. The party feel they’re justified in this because they know the orc is objectively evil ( because the books said so), just like Asmodeus is justified in plucking the souls from mortals and making them suffer for eternity because he knows, in his flawed omniscience, that they are deserving of it.
Signs: The sounds of tortured souls wailing from below, symbols of power glowing red hot, the manifestations of lesser devils.
Symbols: A five pointed star made of jagged metal, a black throne or crown atop numerous bodies.
Hello Mr. Dapper! Love this blog and your many reimaginings of classic dnd deities and creatures. I was curious about something: Considering your dislike of purely evil gods and DnDs future focusing on the guy, what are your thoughts on Vecna?
Deity: Vecna, the Whispered One
My task of overhauling d&d’s villanous pantheon was started by a simple critique: that if god was evil, there still needed to be a reason for people to worship it. To go with one example, So many of the death gods in d&d want to kill everything that lives, yet they’re still presented as having legions of followers who are happy to die for them in opposition to the party. You can say “Oh they’re just brainwashed, crazy cultists” but that’s just bad writing and thematically empty, neither of which I want for the sort of games I run.
Vecna is actually an interesting case study in that he’s an outwardly wicked deity that has a theme which people would actively want to follow: As a god of secrets, Vecna is the patron of any who will sacrifice anything to learn the answer to their problems, or conversely, the ones desperate to ensure their own secrets will never be known. The story of Vecna as a mortal mage who attained first lichdom, then godhood is an aspirational one for all those power mad occultists out there, a common enough demographic in the d&d world both as villains and as player characters.
Cults of Vecna worshippers likewise make sense as the whole point behind the historical practice of mystery cults was that those at the upper levels maintained their power through control of information and access to secret learnings. You want to learn how to do magic? To speak to the dead? To protect your secrets from being known? Put on this ominous robe, learn the secret handshake, and don’t forget to drop your tithe intto the altar’s collection skull. Think of it like a forbidden knowledge based MLM.
Here’s some adventure hooks:
While many of the whispered one’s acolytes dedicate themselves to discovering to the delving of arcane mysteries, others focus their attention on more worldly secrets. A powerful noblewoman is being blackmailed by a worshipper of Vecna not only for personal enrichment but also as an act of devotion, after he uncovered proof of indiscretions that would ruin her reputation. While she’s too afraid to go for help herself and risk exposure, a devoted servant has seen her hidden suffering and has contacted the party for aid.
Barely disguising its fiendish nature, a devil in service to Vecna approaches the party with an offer to reveal the secret intents or weaknesses of their enemies, if only they will deign to meet its terrible price. While this information could do great good, or even save lives, just how low are the heroes willing to stoop?
Seeking out the aid of a powerful mage, the party discover the old man on the brink of nervous collapse, having looked to deeply into the void and filled his mind with visions best left unmentioned. Haunted by nightmares both real and imagined, he needs their help in quieting his mind through the gathering of rare ingredients and the distillation of a potent elixir. The process is not without risk however, are the party willing to help if it means erasing the information they need from his head, to say nothing of potentially lobotomizing the poor wizard?
The outbreak of war is much like a birth of a child; when it wants to happen, it’ll happen, whether you were ready for it or not.
- Brenna of Windspoke, Diplomat
Setup: After years of political tension, an invasion fleet heading for the kingdom’s capital was blown disastrously off course, half wrecking itself upon a beach of a town more than a province or two away. With their element of surprise completely ruined, the invaders have decided to make use of this impromptu beachhead and take the local fortress for themselves.
What a shame then, that the party is IN that fortress on unrelated business, and are now being pressed into its defense, the first of many skirmishes they’ll have with this impromptu adversary.
Challenges and Complications:
With no time to study the terrain and develop a siege plan, the enemy commander is forced to use blunt-force tactics to establish her beachhead, landing as many troops as she can a few miles up the coast from the fortress and sending ships to blockade the harbor. Even disorganized and recently disembarked, her force is more than enough to overwhelm the local garrison, and the players can expect successive waves of increasingly dangers foes as she manages to unpack more and more of her warships’ holds.
Disaster of disaster, the king’s brother was visiting when the invaders made land, and with the blockade closing in and troops mustering on the beach there are increasingly few opportunities to get him to safety lest he become a hostage. His young son is missing however, brought along to gain some valuable political experience and run off to play with some of the other castle children when politics got to boring for him not to sit still. The Royal guest won’t leave until his son is returned, possibly requiring the party to search the castle and town to find his whereabouts.
As much help as she would have been in the coming battle, the town’s wizard has left several days ago to ride the winds of the massive storm and see how much lightning she could bottle. If the party can make it past the wards that guard her sanctum, as well as the guardians summoned in its defense, they may be able to find a few tools useful for the upcoming siege.
Adventure Hooks:
The Unexpected Invasion can make a great starting adventure for a campaign focusing on epic battles, forging a cast of castle servants and unexpected guests into their kingdom’s defenders and giving them the first bitter taste of war. After the castle falls ( and it will fall, for our party are not yet heroes with the strength to defend it) the characters are taken as captives. Months later, laboring in the hastily constructed enemy shipyards, the party goes through the motions of their captivity while counting the hours till the other captives’ plan for an escape is set into motion. A chance for things to go awry arises however when they overhear that a missive containing vital enemy intelligence has made its way to the head of the camp, something that could give the kingdom’s other defenders a fighting chance against this foe. Do they stick to the plan, or risk it all to strike back against their foe?
With the keep taken and their surprise attack on the capital thoroughly derailed, the invaders disembark and begin launching attacks into the kingdom’s heartland, ceasing towns and treasure, and knocking the monarch’s bannermen off the board before they can ever muster their forces. This leaves the kingdom a patchwork wilderness of battlefields and holdouts, a breeding ground for ghouls, bandits, and deserters that the party must cross if they are to seek allies.
Periodically throughout their adventures in this wartorn land, the party will meet with an old woman who picks over the battlefields of the dead, seemingly perfectly comfortable as she fills her pack with bloodied spoils and pries rings from rot-bloated fingers. She refers to herself as Nana Nemain, and will cheerfully dole out directions and cryptic advice while she goes about her grisly work. In fact Nana Nemain is an aspect of the goddess Morrigan: spirit of war, death, magic and fate, who has taken an interest in the party’s doings and just how they’ll affect the outcome of this blunder born war. If the party heed her unsettling advice, things will turn out well for them, but if they scorn her humble scavenger persona she’ll likely turn to outright mocking them over time.
Monsters Reimagined: Orcus, The Dead God, Patron of Unbroken Oaths
What’s wrong? : I’ve never been a fan of the default Orcus, as his role of “demon god of undeath” mixes a few too many of d&d’s default baddies into one catchall cult. There are more than enough demon gods, undeath gods, and demons of undeath to go around without having to have a major being that’s all three.
Likewise, Orcus’s stated goals usually default to something along the lines of “ Kill everything in all worlds, including the dead things” which is... kinda dull thematically speaking? Its one of those “I’m going to destroy the galaxy” plots that bad hollywood blockbusters rely on when they can’t figure out a way to directly motivate their heroes. Also, who the hell would worship a god who’s philosophy can generally be described as “omnicidal” ? its a cartoon villain theology that doesn’t get much more complicated than “ bad for the sake of bad”.
To that end, lets rebuild Orcus into something that’ll be widely useful in multiple campaigns, with unique motivations and themes that’ll help inspire our future writing, then detail a few adventure prompts below the cut.
What’s worth Salvaging?: Lets get it out of the way first that the IRL mythological Orcus is way more interesting than his d&d counterpart. A cthonic god of the underworld, oaths, and curses, largely revered by country-dwellers and made a part of pagan festivals involving the depths of the earth. The god/spirit that punishes you if you swear a false oath or break a true one is an AMAZINGLY useful concept for us when it comes to constructing narratives, and is far more believable a thing to worship/call upon than “the destroyer of all things”.
As Orcus is essentially the ultimate evil/Mega-Satan in the d&d universe, he’s got a lot of canonized history for us to pick over, but generally it involves jumping the shark moments of escalation as each new edition attempts to make him more of a threat than his last outing. One interesting fact is that Orcus died ( multiple times) and has been resurrected (multiple times) to the point where resurrecting Orcus is the primary goal of a lot of villains, which is a rich vein for us to mine.
To Bring it all together: Orcus is dead, and has been for a while. Once a keeper of the underworld and ancient tribal law, this god of deep caves and binding words was slain in a great turning of the world. This defeat is often attributed to Erathis the Lawbearer, or some other god of progress and civilization, representing the transition from ancient laws of blood-price and eye-for-an-eye to more modern concepts of justice and due process. Orcus is still worshiped in the pagan countryside, and the common people still swear oaths by him and call upon his spirit to preside over secret judgements. The odd thing is, these oaths still work: due to his unique nature as a god of unbroken promises and of the underworld, the definitively dead deity is somehow able to reach past the veil of oblivion to make good on compacts struck on his name. Call upon enough of the ancient laws sculpted into the ancestral stone, proclaim your challenge right and just, produce the correct sacrifices, and the goat horned god of pacts will pull himself from beyond the veil of death to mete out the old justice on your behalf.
Titles: The dead god, punisher of broken oaths, the judge below, the weight of the earth, the old goat, Grim Keeper ( often shortened to Gemikar among dwarvenkind)
Signs: evidence of pagan ritual, though only after the fact, whispers from below the earth, words spontaneously carved on old stone (especially oaths that have been, the names if the guilty, broken or old laws), fires glowing green, unexplained lights in the darkness.
Symbols: goat related iconography, especially skulls since his death, a bearded man with horns bearing a mortal wound posed in a place of authority (if the statue dates to before Orcus’s death, the wound will be inflicted by damage to the statue).
Servants: In addition to mortal worshipers who keep to the old ways, Orcus is regularly called upon by denizens of the deep wild who bear no love for the justice of cityfolk, such as druids, satyrs, or giants. In his role as judge of the dead, Orcus also bears sovereignty over wretched shades, and his name may be called upon to bind demons, or to summon old warriors from their crypts. Holy sites to orcus are usually protected by these drauger, who will endure forever so long as their oaths endure.
Adventure Hooks:
Even when he was alive, Orcus was not a merciful god, and after death his scorn has become all the more colder and arbitrary. A child mimes an old oath they heard their gran once mutter and their sibling ends up perused by a demon intent on dragging them to the underworld, a merchant cheats the wrong peasant at cards and wakes the next morning to find themselves a corpse until they can repay their debt thirtyfold, walk by the wrong toppled stone without paying respects and find yourself surrounded by dead men who take your trespass as challenge. In many of these cases justice must be subverted rather than served out, as Orcus’s magic holds vicious retribution in preference to peace or order.
Old shrines to Orcus were located in natural caves and wells, meaning that adventurers will often stumble into them in the part of larger dungeon or wilderness exploration. These shrines will usually contain challenges or other tests of mettle, with rewards and punishments manifesting from the shadows thrown by the flickering green ghoul-light that denotes the dead god’s presence.
The clashing of ancient tradition with modern arbiters of authority often means that the more zealous priests of civilization see the worship of Orcus as a practice to discourage, whether through proselytization or active witch-hunts. To this end, many worship him in secrets, using hidden hollows or isolated glades of standing stones. Adventurers may be asked to spy on such places during rites by busybody priests in exchange for favors, or be dragged there in the depths of the night to receive justice from wronged peasants.
Necromancers and Diabolists are often frustrated by the dead god as while many seek his patronage for knowledge, power, or vengeance, Orcus tends to only answer those who have a “legitimate” claim. To this end these villains seek out rare volumes detailing ancient rites, school themselves in ancient lawcodes, and induct themselves as priests of the old religion.
In many of his depictions, Orcus wields a skull mounted on a scepter as a sign of his authority. Many legends pertain to its abilities and origins, made no less convoluted by the fact that mortals have been putting famous heads on sticks since their inception, leading to all manner of twists in the myth. Hundreds of possible “wands of orcus” exist, scattered about ancient reliquary vaults and curated collections, some mere imitations others enchanted focuses with their own power, some divinely gifted with a spark of the old goat’s authority. Zealous adherents of Orcus often seek out the most portentous skulls to mount on their own staves, caring little if these prospective relics happen to be attached to a living person’s neck.
Setup: Just as there is no singular death, there is no singular underworld. Many rivers that carry lost souls between many cities of the dead, and many final thresholds that can lead you to either. The Gate of Lull is onesuch threshold, a once imperious marble arch long stained by the shadowfell’s pervasive gloom.
Presiding above a stretch of oily water frequented by ferries of the departed, it was once a welcoming edifice where attendants would hang garlands of flowers and play music to welcome new residence of their necropolis.
That was before the nighthag and her minions took it. Now the Gate is presided over by a band of shadowfell cutthroats, who ambush traveling souls and psychopomps for ransom or sale on otherworldly markets. Most guides now know to steer clear of the Gate of Lull, or to warn those traveling along the oily river to take another course, but ancient maps still show routes passing under the gate, and can lead travelers directly into the hang’s clutches.
Adventure hooks:
A party exploring the underworld for the soul of a lost friend may find themselves fighting through the Gate on a rescue mission. The Hag has ghouls, minor fiends, and many more foul minions under her command, not to mention her potent eldritch abilities. Should she be cornered, she will toss a gaggle of her captive souls into a river, and teleport away with the rest. The party will need to waste time figuring out if their friend ended up in the shadowfell’s cursed waters, or if they were spirited off with the hag.
The hag is able to continue her wretched trade because she has a most vital hostage, the son of the death god who rules over the nearby necropolis. Should the party ingratiate themselves among the afterlife elite, they may be able to bargain for favors with the queen of the necropolis, provided they rescue her son from the hag’s torment.
The Party hears of an old pothole-cave deep in the hinterlands, once used for pagan rite. Rumors about such ruins collect as they gather dust
The icon of an old, primordial god stands watch over the site, glouring and stern in its gaze even centuries after its name has been forgotten. In some stories, the icon is said to speak, perhaps even come to life, though these stories are often in conflict as to whether it dispenses helpful riddles or devours would be intruders alive.
There’s said to be a doorway under the statue’s feet. Conflicting reports say it may lead to the burial chamber of some forgotten thane, a temple vault full of treasure, or perhaps the underworld itself.
Even if the door does not prove fruitful ( for many over the ages have tried to enter and the few that claimed to succeed could hardly be believed), there is still a sprawling cave system connected to the pothole, the lair of some rare and exotic species of monster. A site surely of interest to a party looking for rare components, and possessing some sturdy sets of boots.
Backgorund
If the party does their research, they’ll find that the pothole is infact a holy site dedicated to the ancient deity Orcus (Yes I know there’s a demonlord by that name, but the mythological/my version is cooler), a cthonic god of primal strength in who’s name the ancients made their oaths. knowing that Orcus was keeper of the underworld, those that violated their oaths would incur his wrath, and would be forever barred from their final rest. Worship of orcus faded at some point in the pre-recorded past, as folktales suggest the oath-god somehow died, and was no longer able to fulfill his duties as caretaker or bargain keeper.
Setup
Exploring the cavern reveals it to be your average cave-dungeon. Echoing vaults, flooded and concealed chambers, a panoply of lurking monsters and lingering undead for the party to clash against in lantern light.
The real fun begins when the party discovers a ritual site, well maintained and only vacated i the past few years. Apparently those with an interest in witchcraft had resurrected an old ritual that properly completed, would allow them to invoke an echo of Orcus and receive a boon. The party is free to leave without engaging in the ritual, but where would be the adventure in that?
Challenges and Complications.
The ritual is simple, though daring. The party must forgo all magic ( items included), and proceed through the cavern by the light of a ritually prepared lantern of green fire. The light of this lantern will reveal hidden signs that will guide and instruct the party, along with secret chambers and passages that were not previously there. Should the party use magic, or the lantern go out, the ritual is failed, and the party will have to try again, often facing different challenges as the cavern shifts.
Some challenges include:
Sending one party to search for an object in a dark pool, while the rest fend off waves of skeletons.
Ferry the light across a windy chasm with a rushing stream at the bottom.
Finally, defeat a cave beast such as a direbear or troll, anoint the party with its blood, and then offer its heart to Orcus as proof of your victory.
Rewards and Outcomes
In addition to the plunder gained from delving the cave itself, The Old God’s Cauldron has many rewards for a group willing to take a chance on primeval magic.
Those that began the ritual anew apparently discovered that transforming into an animal before the ritual began didn’t count against the “no magic” rule, and had developed a formula for potions that could turn them into bats or wolves. The research notes suggest that a bear would also be possible.
Speaking in an echoing voice, as if speaking from deep undergorund or far in the past, the icon of Orcus will inquire about what boon he might bestow. Arms sacrificed to him by ancient warriors, blessed by their time in his keeping, the lore of the dead and the divine, coins and gems representing the mineral wealth of the earth, or even passage into the underworld, such as he can manage.
Further complications arise if any of the party happens to be an oathbreaker; having deceived or bore false witness against a friend, a kinsman, or a liege. In such a case, the statue of Orcus will animate, and the party will have to fight one last duel ( magic is allowed this time) to prove their ally’s honor.
