Villain: Jysh'parun, Outergod of Unwelcoming Earth
As distant and ancient as a mountain, as scornful as an axebitten tree
Many philosophies debate and negotiate the relation of mortals to their environment. Some see nature as a thing to be tamed in the name of survival, domesticated, exploited. Others proffer a more symbiotic path, a holistic system to be protected and stewarded.
Beyond these there are the ravings of those claimed by Jysh'parun, who claim that mortals have no right to exist at all, and survive merely by the beneficence of the trees and stones. While all but the most foolish agree that heed must be paid to nature, none but those under the unwelcoming earths dominion would think that there is some geological-feudal hierarchy to which we must all submit.
This then is the paradox of the Unbowing Mountain: a god that claims the worship of things that do not traditionally think, but views nature through a distinctly mortal lens of domination and hierarchy. It's an absurdity bordering on being a joke, atleast until Jysh'parun's influence washes over the land and the forest marches off to war while the rivers start demanding tribute.
Adventure Hooks:
Having come into possession of a disused tract of land, a young farming couple were picking the stones from their new field in preparation for planting when they came across the petrified remains of some indescribable horror. Resembling nothing so much as a horse sized mandrake-root with teeth, they've reached out to neighbours, the sheriff, even the local wizard looking for advice about what to do... only to wake up one morning and find the thing gone. Theft or reanimation are both equally alarming possibilities, and the whole region has been on edge since.
Having been thought dead for years after being lost in a winter storm, a dwarven cartographer descends from the mountains claiming to be their mouthpiece and demanding sacrifices in their name. Her words at first go unheeded, at least until the glacial rivers begin to run with noxious acid, transforming back only when something living is thrown in. Farms and villages are drying out and grisly offerings of livestock now fail to meet her standards she claims the mountains will only be satisfied when the people of the realm throw their rulers in and swear fealty to the peaks on high.
The king's palace is in chaos after a coup took place in the royal gardens, specifically when the great tree that shaded his majesty's favourite thinking bench stabbed him in the back with one of it's branches and then skampered off to replant itself on the throne with the crown in tow. Before Anyone knew what was happening, greenery had overtaken the palace locking most outside while trapping certain vital hostages inside.
Inspirations: Something that's all too often lost in the "madness and tentacles" misinterpretation of eldritch horror is that much of the genre is spun off from the particular phobias of HP lovecraft. When we use the iconography without understanding the anxieties behind it, we risk creating a shallow B movie version of the horror we want our audience to feel.
To write good horror then, we need to draw off fears we understand, and with Jysh'parun I wanted to tap into climate anxiety in a way I don't think I've seen before. We've all resigned ourselves to the fact that climate change is happening, with the understanding that its being driven by the bullheaded egos and greed of people who are so powerful their perspective on life bears no resemblance to anything we could possibly conceive of. Translate their willingness to let us suffer for the sake of profit into a psudo historical fantasy context and you get the Unwelcoming Earth: widening sinkholes that demand tolls from passersby while an approaching tsunami proclaims the divine right of kings. It's not only absurd it's fundamentally idiotic but that it doesn't mean it won't destroy you and everyone you know.
Worshippers: Delusional druids and geomancers. Goliaths and dwarvenkind who get too into being "children of the mountain". Sentient trees, Living crystals, and other elemental entities who seek to put themselves "above" other forms of life. Corrupted primoridals.
Signs: Aberrations that resemble roots or stone spontaneously emerging from nature, acid flowing from normally clear running springs, statues of lordly alien figures carved from erosion, not tools. Proclimations in an unknowable script engraved deep under the earth or on monumental scale.
Symbols: A glyph resembling a mountain range or branches of a tree in the shape of a crown.
Titles: The Unbowing Mountain, The Insuperable, King of all Corners,
I was wondering if you could do something of a Monsters Reimagined for Luthic. It always struck me as odd that even though she is a deity of childbirth and fertility and motherhood she is evil simply because she is an ORC deity.
Monsters Reimagined: Luthic, Cavemother
There are no easy births: it always a matter of blood and broken bones and shit and curses and pain in the desperate hope of getting through it alive and maybe bringing something good into the world in the process. It would stand to reason then that the god who claimed birth as her domain would have to be strong, hopeful yes, but tough as old boot lather and not afraid to get her hands dirty.
Luthic is that god, who lends her strength to those who bear life as the process threatens to rip them apart, who councils with midwives, grannies, bonesetters, and village witches who keep the hardwon knowledge of the fever-herb and staunching poultice.
It is said that before she took her current form Luthic was a god of the dark and secret places of the earth, who first encountered mortals when they sheltered in her caves from the bickering of other gods and their aims during the primordial dawn age. The mortals were new, not yet knowing the design of thier own bodies, and when it came time for the first generation to give birth to the second, someone had to step up and help them through it. Like any mother Luthic encouraged them through their explorations, as playing with sticks led to spears and tools, and painting on stone walls led to art and language. When they were ready, she brought them blinking into the light, and then retired to a well deserved state of distant reverance as her adopted children took their place in the world above.
Adventure Hooks:
Like the great bear that is her crest, the cavemother likes to keep to herself much of the time, unless some idiot stirs up enough of a ruckous to wake her from her hibernation. This time it's some upjumped priest king that's convinced that if he can just impregnate the right woman he can sire a word redeaming chosen one. The only problem is that he's not giving the "right woman" much of a choice in the matter, and has decided to invade the party's homeland to search for and capture her. Luthic isn't going to stand for it, and appears to the party in the form of a local medicine woman to set them on the right path and patch their wounds along the way. Once they've earned her trust, she'll put an ancient bone knife in their hands sharp enough to cut through an army of zealots and imply that they should use it to feed the priest king his own cock. Something about a lession in not sticking it in where it's not welcome.
The caves marked off as sacred to Luthic are wellsprings of primordial power, resounding not only with the wisdom of previous generations but the energy of creation itself. Its said that if you pilgramage into their dark depths one might emerge remade, free of illness or debilitation, or reborn into a body more fitting of who they truely are.
Seeking the holiest of holy places to consummate his marriage to his longtime rival and off again on-again flame, an orcish champion has sought out a long-abandoned mountain temple dedicated to the Cavemother. His dreams of altartop honeymooning has been shattered however as he's discovered that the temple and surrounding highlands are overrun by the brood of Shub-Nuggrath and her cultists. Having perhaps bitten off more than he can chew, he requests the party's aid in ousting the "goatfuckers" from the region.
Titles: Cavemother, She of the Bitter Roots, Bellycarver,
Signs: Unnatural darkness, Rumbling in the mouths of caves, clawmarks in stone, particularly angry bears.
Symbols: The Orcish rune for cave entrance, The Cavebear, or the Jawbone of one.
Despite not being one of the more widely published deities Luthic has been one of my most requested gods to rework, and after I published my take on Gruumsh my inbox I got even more. Normally I won't go into the racial sub-pantheons more often than not because of how conceptually thin most of the entries are, but the asker (and a few others) rightfully noticed the oddness of having Luthic be marked out as an evil goddess despite her domains being centered around fertility, birth, healing, and the earth... all classic mother goddess stuff we could imagine any good aligned druid talking about.
It took me a little while to understand that Luthic's evil was strictly rooted in the idea that she was helping more orcs be born, orcs being a primary enemy of all good people and thus contextualizing a wholly unselfish and natural action as something counter to the forces of good. Remember kids, dig too deep into d&d and you WILL find genocide apologia waiting somewhere under the surface. The same goes for her healing aspect, which is repeatedly brought up as being crude and inferior to the medicine of other races (Her priestesses carry dirt to rub into the wounds of those they care for, because even though it's healing it needs to be gross and inferior because they're orcs and orcs are a standin for anyone the writers subconsciously think are gross and inferior).
That said, removing the one conceit that Luthic is evil ( and all the misogyny baked into her original writeups) we're actually left with a very interesting addition to our pantheon: A goddess who presides over the unpleasant and frequently gruesome process of pregnancy and birth, a fact of life for the historical-ish settings that most d&d campaigns but one that is seldom touched upon. I can easily imagine Luthic's acolytes being the ones to hand out herbs that deal with unwanted pregnancy or to be called for in the difficult case of a breach birth. Luthic likewise being the god who presides over caves because most of the more well-known deities that deal with the underground are specifically mining related, and there's a delicious tension there between between places below the earth that exist to be exploited, and others that exist as sacred, liminal spaces that we merely visit.
But see, amid the mimic rout / A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out / The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs /The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs / In human gore imbued.
Out—out are the lights—out all! / And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall, / Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan, / Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” / And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
- Edger Allan Poe
An avatar of suffering and madness, the worm god Torog embodies the worst aspects of mortalkind’s relation to pain: both in the cruel supremacy of those who inflict it, and in the desperate degradation of those they inflict it upon.
There are many mythologies that explain why the king crawls, usually painting him as a great and terrible divinity of the dawn age who was broken in battle with some foe, imprisoned within the underdark and crushed beneath its ever shifting weight. There Torog lingers, suffering eternally save when someone inflicts suffering in his name. To these individuals Torog grants power, blasphemous secrets, the promise of endless indulgence to their heartless desires. One would think that only the most twisted and broken of souls would worship such a foul god, but the worm wriggles its way into the hearts of many as there is always profit and power to be had in the subjugation and exploration of others. From the slave driver to the industrialist to the prison warden to the residential school instructor, few actively understand that their cruelty is a form of worship, or what exactly that worship is feeding.
Hooks
Travelling into a decrepit castle for whatever reason adventurers do, the party makes its way to the actual dungeon part of the dungeon, discovering disused torture chambers and a single cell that still seems to be occupied by some poor wretch begging for release. This is a lure into one of Torog’s many prison realms, a realm the party will have to escape but not after being marked by the crawling king’s agents for further collection.
Grotesque monstrosities have been lurking about the city’s underbelly: shambling tangles of wormflesh that sprout from the wounds and ruptures of humanoid corpses. There seems to be no pattern in who these, until the party investigates and discovers that one of the vessels was a vagrant and petty criminal that was sentenced to a workhouse some years ago. There they find the workhouse is operated by a puritanical social reformer that places strict emphasis on cleanliness, obedience, and piety. All the corpses turn out to be those who stepped out of line and died as a result of her “discipline”, but it’s not until the party notices that her dutiful but bruisemarked husband shows the sign of infection that they realize that her abuse is what’s allowing the worms to take root.
While excavating the foundations for the duke’s new estate, a group of workers stumbled across an unsettling statue and altarspace buried low beneath the earth. The duke ordered the altar torn down and work to continue, and since then has not known peace. Terrible accidents befall everyone who was on the digging crew that day, and the duke’s dreams are full of the earth yawning open to swallow him and everything he knows. The heroes are hired to break whatever nightmare or curse is preventing the duke from sleeping, but must deal with their patron growing increasingly paranoid unhinged as Torog’s influence over him grows. Should the party not play their cards right, they might end up imprisoned by their employer just as a colossal worm breaks through the foundations and begins ravaging the castle.
An aside from the author: I think Torog might be one of the best gods ever produced by the the greater d&d think tank, as I fell in love with the Matt Mercer’s presentation of him during the second campaign of critical role. Iconic, Thematically rich, and Adaptable, he’s EVERYTHING you want from an evil god whether you have him as a central antagonist in a campaign or the slightest hint of worldbuilding.
As it turns out, Torog is one of the few exceptions to my “people don’t worship evil gods” rule, as the evil that Torog represents is so insidious and far ranging that worship for him can occur without the worshipper even acknowledging it. Every society has people that perpetuate cruelty and restrict the freedom of others, and those are all the prayers the wormgod might ever need.
Also, for your benefit, Here’s a grand listing of all my Torog inspired adventures
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.
Dungeon: Rhoghor Slatebreaker and The Vault of Forgotten Verdicts
“Normally we’d do this slow; take it one chamber at a time, set up a grid system, document anything we find, and start making neat little piles of pottery to sort later. Sadly we don’t have that luxury on this site. We’re dealing with an isolated dig in the middle of hostile territory where what we’re looking for is likely to be just as dangerous as the stuff guarding it. This checks every box on the list of reasons not to do a delve, but we can’t risk those artifacts falling into the wrong hands.
Thought lost for months while charting the unexplored underdark, a roving orcish scholar returns to civilization with news of a legendary find. While having survived enough horrors of the depths to last a lifetime, the historian is eager to resupply and set back out, this time with a trustworthy band of adventurers at his back strong enough to survive the rigors of the journey and smart enough to understand that this will be more difficult than your average treasure hunt.
Monuments and ruins throughout the local subterranean realm speak of the ancient ambitions of a long dead conqueror, with long abandoned fortresses brooding over key chokepoints within the cavern complexes, and crumbling statues standing triumphantly over gathering places. These provide plenty of opportunity for dungeon delving, but only hints at a long buried lore that others wish to uncover.
Rumor around the underground trading posts speaks of unusual movement in the depths, usually disorganized or isolationist factions like the derro, mindflayers, or duergar launching expeditions into neutral territory on the hunt for something big. Investigating these rumors leads the party to scattered notes involving ancient battles, consultations with undying ghouls, and a patchwork trail that leads into a section of deep canyons known for being plagued by violent geological activity.
Setup: Like many tyrants of the primordial age, the ancient orcish King Olzivogg thought he could take it with him. All the treasures looted from rival civilizations, all the weapons bestowed upon him by the warlike gods that had wrought his people for the purpose of expanding their dominion, all the fine things he had coveted and won by strength of arms and coldness of heart. To this end he built himself a fortress tomb, an altar to his own eternal glory, and had his most loyal followers seal themselves inside in order to complete his internment.
When the surrounding caverns collapsed, they were almost forgotten over the intervening centuries, until a recent earthquake once again joined them to the expanse of the underdark. Forces now pull warriors and warmongers toward the ruins, unwittingly compelled to open the old king’s tomb and reawaken the legacy left buried there for so long.
One of those who has felt the call is the “Rogue Archeologist” Rhoghor Slatebreaker, infamous among sellswords and scholars alike for his attempts to finesse the line between the “snatch and grab” blunders of adventurers and the methodical exploration of academics. Perhaps it is some ancestry traced back to Olzivogg’s court that draws him, perhaps it is his finely tuned awareness of the underdark’s dangers. Either way, Slatebreaker is intent on finding the old king’s vault, taking what he can for posterity, then destroying the remainder before the ruins give birth to any more conquerors.
Challenges & Complications
Having just suffered through a recent earthquake, the region surrounding the vault is an unstable nightmares of lurking rockslide and patiently hungering canyons. The disturbance has likewise opened up many unfamiliar cavern networks, letting strange and dangerous new creatures intermingle even as they are forced from their habitat by the terrain shift.
Lantern light reveals glorious sights within the Vault of Forgotten Verdicts, ranging from the treasures of long dead empires of the pimordial age, to the skulls of megafauna slain by Olzivogg’s warband, to an army of 433 lead-cast soldiers posed throughout the vault’s chambers to symbolically serve and watch over and serve their king. While these wonders are many, the shadows conceal terrors in equal measure, crowned by a balhannoth sustained by the magical energy produced by all Olzivogg’s treasures. This aberrant beast lurks in vaulted ceilings and seeks to ambush tresspassers, potentially overwhelming them lest they discard their magic items to blind it
Olzivogg’s clan were raised by a number of gods, but primarily Orcus, who rewarded the king for acting as his instrument of worldly judgement with endless chances for glory and expansion of his realm. This patronage extends even past death, as the goat-horned god will animate the King’s small army of gravetenders and sacrifices as a defense against a party set on stealing the tomb’s contents. Though little more than bones, each one cuts a terrifying figure, ragged burial shrouds crowed by horned circlets and wielding a corroded bronzeage blade.
Among all the gifts given to the king, Ruiner was the greatest. Made from the bound essence of an unwitting earth elemental, This sentient adamantine maul sleeps since the death of her master, but in her time had the power to split mountains with a single blow. Even while dreaming she possesses enough power to bring the ceiling down on the player’s heads if the party don’t decide what to do with her. The only hope of stopping the sudden collapse is to attune to Ruiner, “waking” her up and filling her in on just how long she’s been out. Possessing the restless soul of a warrior, Ruiner is unwilling to let herself be talked over by her wielder, or to defer to them when she thinks a course of action is stupid. She is not above using her earthquake powers to topple a house just so she won’t have to sit through a boring meeting on her partner’s behalf.
Backstory: For generations the tomb was a site of worship in the empire he had carved out of the caverns, until the divinely gifted hammer he had been born to wield and had won so many battles with began to shake the earth in its hunger for battle. The trembles started gently, no different from any other one might expect living so far underground. Then their homes started to fall down around them, and they panicked. The faithful went to the steps of Olzivogg’s temple, thinking he was somehow mad at them for their impiety. In just a few weeks, the old empire collapsed in on itself, literally in the form of all the rock spilling down to crush them, and also abstractly, as the citizens tore eachother part in ever more grisly displays of faith.
Though he may claim that his epithet was gained by being a premiere tomb-robber, Roghor infact gained the title during his student days, desperately curious to learn but stifled and frustrated by the seemingly endless rituals of academia. Cooperative but highly focused on the task at hand, the orc talks with a contagious passion and extreme knowledgeability surrounding history, but completely ignores most social customs in for the sake of “efficiency”
