#divinity: fire

[dailyadventureprompts]

Deity: The Radiant Unborn, Outer god of Nascent Calamity

“I know what I’ve done and I stand by my actions. Better that this world is a barren place free of warmpth or mirth than give that thing a chance to take root”

-Ymelie of Arrowgate, heretical witchhunter, taken as part testimony prior to her execution

Creation is a sacred act no matter how small or fleeting, which is what makes it so perverse when that act is suborned to the will of another. Luminaries forced to build weapons to practice their science, the artist who’s work is stolen for the glory of another,  young people forced to live a life they never would have wanted just to uphold a social order. The world is made darker by these cruel concessions, and in that darkness a cruel light thrives.

it has no name, no real will, its existence is charted in the wake of devastation it causes, rather than in a doctrine espoused by its followers. It is known by those who delve the occult mysteries of the cosmos as the Radiant Unborn and simply put: It turns creative potential into a bomb, feeding off what could be in a pyroclastic eruption of fire, flesh, and chaos.

Wretched Origin is a god in only the loosest sense that it distorts reality the way a god might, the way a body might be distorted by a high velocity impact transmuting what was once alive through several distinct phases until what is left is nothing but gore and tragedy. No one would call what it does a miracle: It begins first as a fever in the body of some poor victim forced to make some terrible and unwanted compromise, they grow worse as their flesh chars from within and they near the point of no return, at which point the Unborn blossoms within them and destroys everything it touches.

What is left behind in the aftermath can never be predicted. Some grotesque aberration may come into being as a bit of the far realm slips through, other times it is some avenging nightmare wrought to do their “parents” secret will, despite their remains still smoldering in a nearby crater. Still rarer are those times that the victim is left relatively unscathed, burnt and disoriented but left otherwise unharmed in a sea of devastation.

Hooks

The party is called to seek the apprentice of a in influential mage, after a disastrous experiment on the student’s part led to several deaths. Guilt ridden and feverish, the student wanders the city rehashing the equations they’d so carefully practiced, letting the Radiant Unborn take root in their mind. This whole fiasco was contrived by one of the mage’s rivals, who sabotaged the apprentice’s experiment by working a few of the outergod’s signs into her research materials. His aim is to have the apprentice blow up in the mage’s face, possibly taking out a rival and letting him advance his position. 

Some aberrations  seem to call upon Wretched Origin as part of their life cycle, spawning progeny in ways their alien anatomy might not allow. A plane hopping scientist has theorized that the outergod only became dangerous when it jumped to mortal life through eldritch cross contamination the way most plague starts off as a mostly harmless sickness in livestock. This scientist happens to have the past several decades as a brain-in-a-jar and has very few qualms about testing their theories through human experimentation.

All eyes in the tavern turn to the previously sullen young man (mostly  overlooked by the party)  as he rises screaming from his seat, dumps his drink over himself, begins steaming, and then barrels out the door to hurl himself in the nearest canal. Pulling him free of the murky and near boiling water, the party gets his story: Apparently he’s a journeyman sculptor, forced by his master to work on a statue for the very same magistrate who evicted his family in the middle of winter some years ago when he decided to collect on rents early. Resentful over the months of poverty and near starvation forced upon them, the sculptor feels like there’s something inside him trying to get out, with these burning fits coming on more and more as the day of the statue’s unveiling draws closer.

There’s one group that tolerates, and even welcomes the presence of the Radiant Unborn: Harsupex, those goreslicked oracles who prognosticate upon the future by picking through the guts of sacrifices, animal or otherwise. The viscera spilled by the outergod is held to be particularly potent when it comes to prophesying future calamities, though many who indulge in this fusion of forbidden arts ( what with needing a human sacrifice to invoke the Unborn’s presence) grow nihilistic or obsessed, either convinced the end is inevitable or else desperate to stop it. Some of these doomsayers go so far as to take on the scorching infection, using regeneration magic to stuff their own innerds back together to allow for repeated glimpses of a doomed future.

Titles: Wretched Origin, The Nova Blister, Weltwelp

Signs: Spontaneous Human Combustion, Viscera like shapes in flames.

Symbols: A Seven Pointed Star composed irregular, sometimes curving lines. Usually carved or painted in red. Seems to evoke entrails 

Followers: Other than the aforementioned aberrations, very few actively worship the Radiant Unborn, with a few profane magical traditions cultivating it the way a alchemist might cultivate a sprig of rare poison. To be Glib: It gets a lot of bang for your buck if all you want is to cause chaos at the cost of a ruined life or two.

[dailyadventureprompts]

I was wondering if you’d be able to help me flesh out a loose idea I had for a location that I’d like to include in my homebrew setting at some point.

It’s a theocratical city-state with a heavy bell aesthetic. Like, the city is absolutely littered with bell towers, and whichever divinity is worshipped here uses bell as their holy symbol. Aside from being situated in a seemingly peaceful stretch of grasslands, and world itself being somewhat high-magic… that’s all I have so far.

Any ideas as to what this place could be beyond the vague idea I’m sitting on? And what sort of adventures do you think could be had here?

I’d appreciate any help you’re willing to offer with this! Thank you!

Setting: The Plains of Stormgraven

"Leave it to fanatics to build their home in the one place the gods seem intent on wiping off all the maps.”

Setup:  Once the sight of a great transgression against the divine, the grand pastoral realms now known as Stormgraven are today an expanse of calm, rolling fields, tempest haunted badlands, and expansive, half buried ruins that only hint at the calamity still echoing through the plains to this day. 

There are three sorts of people who live in the region: 

Scavengers looking to pick through ancient ruins, (which can be sorted into “academic” or “tomb raiding” types respectively) There’ve been ruins so long in the plains that this group has solidified into it’s own ethnicity with cultural rites, festivals, and a nomadic, adventurous flair. 

Simple farmers wanting to make good use of land despite the rustlers looking to steal their livestock and the cyclones looking to steel their houses, mostly made up of descendants from a long fallen empire. 

The Resoundant, a community of religious exiles from a neighboring kingdom who fled to the plains after they lost a generations long civil war that they also started. Fleeing a “decadent and ungodly” homeland some two centuries ago, they’ve built themselves a great polis warded from the region’s hostile weather by it’s innumerable sacred bells. 

These three groups push against eachother with varying levels of hostility: The Resoundant hire the scavengers to clear out ruins for them to ensure the land is safe for settling, but believe the treasures pulled from deep undergorund belong to them by divine right. The Farmers are happy to feed the holyfolk in exchange for warding against the storms, but chafe under the increasingly restrictive religious duties that are added to their lives. The scavengers bring plenty of outside coin into the region with their trade, but seem more than happy to turn bandit when times are lean. 

Hallowtoll, the great city-state of the plains is where all these peoples and conflicts mingle together, a turbulent place in the otherwise peaceful plains, or the only calm eye when storms sour the countryside. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Hired by outsiders to delve a particular ruin, the party finds themselves at odds with a scavenger-band who’s been exploring the region for generations. Does the party clash with the locals, or make their way past their initial foux-pas to work with them? How about sharing their wealth with the band, rather than some outside historian who decided to lay claim to it? 

Forced to stop their travels by a windstorm that threatened to blow them off the road, the party shelters alongside a farmer-enclave built partially under/into a hill. it’d be a fine, folksy time getting to know the families and townsfolk sheltering there with them, if not for the  quarrelsome Resoundant preacher who’s seems intent on finding fault with everything and every one. On the fourth night in, and with no signs of the storm clearing up anytime soon, The preacher is murdered, leaving the party with an Agatha-Chrsitie style mystery to solve. There’s also the added threat that if the culprit isn’t found and the Resoundant find out, there’s a good chance that the enclave will come under threat of some more retributive members of the faith. 

The belltowers of Hallowtoll are a wonder all unto themselves, with families and priests alike competing to see who can built the biggest, grandest, and loudest tower in their region. Older towers are often left to crumble as newer projects capture the attention of their patrons, creating a warren of urban dungeons rife for exploration. Likewise, all this fevered building is likely to attract the attention of certain strange forces of architecture that come to dwell within the abandoned geometries. 

History: The source of the gods ire is the Olgracian dominion, a state over two millennia gone that none the less managed to offend the gods so bad that the heavens still havent forgiven them.  The Olgrac were a proud people who worshiped a god of forge and field, and so had a surging, well armed populace that they used to subdue their neighbors into vassaldom.  This was typical for just about any empire through history, but what made the Olgrac different was their habit of taking home the statues and idols of their neighbor’s gods in chains to represent their defeat, and throwing the priests of defeated nations into their forges to create weapons infused with divine magic. Needless to say, the other gods didn’t like this, and collectively summoned a windstorm of such magnitude that it leveled the Olgracian capital,  blew out the priest-eating forges like a candle, and ripped the mostly-innocent forgegod into so many pieces that not even their name is remembered to this day. The storm raged for a century, scouring the dominion from the earth and providing such a good deterant that just about everyone stayed away from the Stormgraven plains until a few centuries prior to the present day. 

Further Adventures: 

The forge-god is not dead, but scattered, ripped asunder into a number of aspects that subtly long to be reunited. Once contemplative and mostly peiceful, the forge-god now has a desire to revenge himself on the other gods, and will seek to rebuild the Olgrac dominion using the Resoundant as their new chosen people, coopting their faith and their resentment against their exile for its own ends. 

Here’s some idea for some aspects: 

An ever-burning ember of creativity and skill, which has come into the possession of the master of one of the Hallowtoll Bellfoundes. the master’s mind is now full of ambition and drive, and bells worked in fire of this ember whisper the forgegod’s influence to those that hear them. The forgemaster also has cannons on the brain, and is testing out various designs. 

A mummified hand and forearm found in a ruin. which points the way towards great treasures of the old empire. Currently in possession of a scavenger band that’s gone full bandit, gathering other outlaws to itself and following the “relic’s” direction for even greater plunder. Unbekonwsned to any of them, they also happen to be gathering weapons and artifacts of the old empire that are important for the forgegod. 

A scarred stone, sheer enough on one side to be used as a grand table, that gives the lands surrounding it bounty and fertility. A secret circle of elders among the surrounding farmer enclaves know the secret of the stone, and meet to sacrifice troublesome members of their groups or unmissed outsiders upon it to ensure its gifts, buring the bodies in the earth around it. On this makeshift altar the other aspects must be gathered, at which point it will crack, and the forgegod’s new body will walk free. 

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