#divinity: sun

[dailyadventureprompts]

Out of curiosity, how do you think one could spin a Good aligned blood religious organization. Like blood rituals are an easy clue for some scary evil necromancy etc, but I was still stuck on the idea of a religious order that heavily relies on blood magic for, I don’t know, fertility or life based magic? In which maybe the shedding of blood is more akin to blood donorship, or something where the real blessing is not in blood shed itself but celebrating the body’s ability to heal?

Deity:Sekhmet, Lady of Life and Slaughter

When the heat of your blood feels like the scorching presence of the sun, whether in anger or in fever or in passion, you will know she is with you. Greet her with a smile, and dig your teeth into your foes.

Setup: As with their patron, the cult of Sekhmet has taken many forms throughout history, ranging from healers to generals to blood-mad killers. The lion headed goddess herself was said to have been created as a judgement upon the world, a scourge against mortals for their disobedience towards the gods. As her priests tell it, Sekhmet was too fit for her purpose and would have driven the mortals to extinction, had the gods ( or some clever hero) not intervened and tricked her into drinking a lakes worth of booze adulterated to look like blood. 

Drunk enough to see reason ( and deciding she liked beer way more than she liked the taste of human flesh), Sekhmet relented, going on to become a protector and distributor of justice. It’s this incongruity of a “tame” apocalypse god that characterizes her worship to this day: Sure her breath is the killing heat of the desert and her displeasure manifests as plague, but that’s all the more reason to keep the goddess happy through cheer and good works. Sure in her time the Lioness devoured whole cities and cut down armies with sword and claw, but who’d dwell on awful things like those when we could throw a festival and get sloshed instead? 

Sekhmet’s doctrine is a sort of benign nihilism that appeals to those who have seen the very worst the world has to offer, soldiers, survivors, and the dishonored who know that the “goodness” of the world is a thin veneer over an abyss of unremitting horror, yet choose to try and make it better regardless. They embrace the dichotomy of a slaughter god that has chosen peace, adorning themselves with weapons, fangs, and blood-invoking paint while going about their lives as healers, hosts, and peacekeepers. Though the majority of folk regarded these bloodied acolytes with wariness, those that know the cult of Sekhmet know there are fewer truer allies to call upon in a crisis. 

Adventure Hooks:

While exploring the city, the party comes across the steps of a small temple laden with gold and other offerings, shadowed door open but seemingly unoccupied. Within they find the vivacious priestess Meryet, who’s otherwise pristine white robes are stained crimson around the edges, and who’s laugh is so deep and rich it makes their skin prickle in delight. She explains that the offerings are left by those who’ve received healing at this temple, an open display of their thanks and an invitation to those who would work in the service of the lioness. Meryet exalts the party to partake in divine slaughter: beasts, bandits, the unjust, anyone and anything who would improve the world should their blood run out upon the sand. She hints at wondrous rewards should the party wield their weapons in Sekhmet’s name, as the goddess observes all good works and would see them duly rewarded.

Plague has broken out in a settlement, followed shortly after by a series of grisly murders that are at first thought to be the result of attacks of a bloodthirsty animal. The apprentice of the local healer has gone half mad with loss and secondhand fever as the lady of slaughter whispers to him of those that are to blame. When night falls and his blood boils, he transforms into a great lion, hunting those who let the poor languish in squalor, or those who broke quarantine to see to their own amusements. He remains mostly unaware of these transformations, save for the grim satisfaction he takes every time he hears of a new victim.

The party are fortunate enough to be in town in time for a grand celebration, and end up running into a small congregation of Sekhmet’s devoted who are distributing pomegranate beer to the revelers as an offering to their goddess. The congregation is led by a retired mercenary who has plenty of stories to tell should the party be willing to listen over a drink, and might give them several leads on dungeons or other opportunities in the region. Shortly after they return from such an excursion, they find that the congregation has been censured and the mercenary jailed, on charges of tricking festival goers into consuming human blood. The faithful reach out to the party to investigate on their behalf, eventually pointing them in the direction of a power hungry  high priest of a much more significant temple who wishes to use the “degeneracy” of Sekhmet’s followers to shoulder out other faiths in the region and secure a religious hegemony.

Titles: The Lioness, she of the golden eyes and bloody tongue, the prowling doom, the life-savoring

Signs: Blood flowing like water, scorching solar heat, the calls of lionesses, scattered riches fangs and fruit

Symbols: A golden lion with a red chin/lower jaw, A solar disk stained in blood or with claws, a pomegranate being cut by a knife

Art

[dailyadventureprompts]

I want you to know I read your posts like the morning paper on my way to work- I love your writing and your material's tone and prose aligns a lot with the stuff I write! Wanted to request something to do with dead/forgotten deities- I've been thinking about a dead sun god from when people used to have a "principal sky deity" that has fallen out of favor, and what implications that might have.

Dungeon: The Empyreal Tombs

Setup: Phaetamir was an ancient god light and conquest, who rode out each day on his great solar chariot to survey his empire and encourage his devoted to acts of glory. To hear his priests speak of it, the empire of the faithful would push ever outward towards all horizons, just as the rays of the sun illuminated all corners of the world.

Needless to say, Phaetamir and his followers made a lot of enemies, and it was perhaps inevitable that someone would seek reprisal against them on a deific scale. The sungod's doom eventually came out of the desert, when great spirits of storm and dust knocked Phaetamir from his chariot and quenched his fire beneath an endless tide of sand, dousing his light and burring his capital forever.

Though centuries past and its players all but forgotten, the ghost of this calamity lives on in the shadowfell by way of a nightmarish labyrinth known by delvers of the dark realms as "The Empyreal Tombs". Resembling nothing so much as a city-sized monument to the sungod collapsing in on itself, the tombs are a quite literal metaphor of Phaetamir and his faithful being crushed by the weight of their own hubris.

Adventure Hooks:

As a dread domain there is no one entrance to the Empyreal Tombs, as crossing over the barrier into the shadowfell may be deceptively simple: A party seeking shelter from a sandstorm in a long abandoned temple may find themselves trapped in winding passages after the floor collapses. A historian researching ancient cultures may be riven with dreams of burning while being buried alive, and pull the party in as they try to help. A trapped chest may open filling the chamber with impossible sand, leaving the party to dig them selves free only to discover their environment has changed drastically.

Innumerable dangers fill the tombs, ranging from subterranain dust storms and crumbling architecture to paniced specters of those who lived in Phaetamir's capital screaming as they're stuck beneith rubble. Trying to help these pitiful souls only has them cling on to their supposed rescuer as the walls or ceiling begin to squeeze in, making every potential cry for help bait for a grisly death. While innumerable shadowfell monsters have made their homes in these halls, perhaps the worst are the echoes of Phaetamir's most famous warriors, literally burning with their desire to conquer and driven on by feral zeal.

In the deepest level of the tombs where the heat is sweltering and the air ripples like a marriage, there is a cenotaph: a great slab of stone that acts as both altar and grave marker to Phaetamir, massive so as to contain enough room to write all of the god's many victories. The stone lays upon the body of Phaemtamir crushing him for eternity, allowing his impossible heat and occasional to escape through the thin crack as his spirit pushes against its weight. Those that would seek to remove the altar or plunder the treasures that lay heaped upon it in offerings will have to contend with Diavadess, a formless demon of shadow that was destined to wrestle with Phaetamir at the end of time to decide the empire's ultimate fate. Denied its apocalypse, Diavadess merely waits.

The Cult of the Hidden Sun is known to appropriate Phaetamir's iconography and long abandoned sites of worship, seeking to tap into a shared cultural history spread across the breadth of the now fallen empire. The cult is not above hurling non-believers into the Empyreal Tombs, or in using its winding passageways as transport between their hidden places.

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So, I have been making my own pantheon for a setting by ‘rolling’ on the gods section of the “Motif-Index of Folk-Literature” and what I got for a chief deity was: Mother of the Gods, Supreme God, Culture Hero as Trickster, and God of Dawn. So far I have come up with the idea that the goddess overthrew a previously tyrannical sky/night god either by using trickery to kill them or imprison them and taking over the position as supreme god of the pantheon. Do you have any other ideas that I could use to flesh the goddess out?

So usually when you have a "usurpation of the pantheon" type event in mythology, its a parallel to a cultural/ethnic shift in the region with the old gods being the patrons of that previous culture. Greek mythology is actually a great example of this as there's an initial creation story ( primal chaos gives birth to the earth and sky) then an initial pantheon ( the titans who were birthed from earth and sky) and then a secondary pantheon (the Olympians) who overthrow the titans, who are either killed, imprisoned, or married into the existing pantheon, you then have the emerging pantheon of greek cultural heroes, who if they stuck around long enough before Rome/Christendom took over might've ended up getting deified themselves and overthrowing the Olympians.

The combination of elements you've gotten is very interesting, but actually presents us with an interesting character arc as you've already hit upon. Rather than the night sky (which still happens every night) I'd say that this goddess overthrew a deity of harsh and terrible winter, an event that just so happened to coincide with the end of an ice age.

Here's how I'd set it up: The "Ethnic" god of these lands was a river god, bringing fertility, bounty, life, all that fun stuff. This god had a sibling (younger or older it doesn't matter) who felt snubbed for the position of chief god/unloved, and so brought down an endless winter upon the land, freezing their brother and usurping his place as king. The winter lasted so long that the fields dried up, the animals died, and the offerings stopped, and so and this usurper turned to devouring people (and perhaps other gods) in his hunger for worship and flesh, reigning over a half forgotten dark age.

In comes our trickster, who's family have been one by one eaten by the mad god of winter, until it's just her and (insert sainted family member here). Red-mawed winter comes to devour that person and our trickster says "I bet I can find something more glorious for you to eat, so if I go and get it for you to eat instead, will you spare my family?" "That sounds great" says Red-mawed winter, " But I'm hungry now, so you have to get back to my temple on the riverside by ( insert possible deadline)" Commence heroic quest into the east with unlikely supernatural aid, eventually culminating in trickster getting the sun and placing it in (seemingly innocuous container that will become part of the iconography of the religion, chest, urn, amphora etc) before carrying it back to the palace of Red-mawed winter in the west ( which just so happens to mime the sun's passage across the heavens, and line up with the origin of this river). Red mawed winter is greedy to have this bright and shining prize, but upon taking it out of the vessel, the sun unleashes summer in it's fullest force, melting the ice, freeing the rivergod, and turning red-mawed winter into a pile of bones and bloody slush.

Trickster ends up Marrying the Rivergod (who cedes her authority over the land as she saved his life) and having lots of kids to repopulate the ranks of the devoured pantheon, the bones of Red-mawed winter are imprisoned in a deep vault/scattered across the earth/whatever you need for them to be evil relics later in the campaign. Trickster now rules as the Summer queen, with day being when she presides over the land and night being when she goes back to visit her husband.

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Settlement: Idisimar of the Deep Wells, The City Without a Prayer

“The city’s had half a hundred names since it was founded; Idisimar, Usimat, Rau-tarmajin, titles shift whenever some new force rolls through the region and plants its ass in the throne up in that palace. My people however? the well diggers? well, they’ve been here forever, so long we don’t even have a name and will be so long as the water remains. In all that time we’ve learned something: you can feel when one of those shifts is about to happen... the city’s name stops fitting quite right, and you start looking around for who’s going to roll through and give it a new one. 

Feels a bit like that now...doesn’t it?”

-Gashur of the house of builders, city guide and bastard heir to the fourth aquafer 

Setup: To be king of the desert you must first control the water. This is the lesson learned by the many successive dynasties that have ruled the oft conquered city of Idisimar, each growing fabulously wealthy on the trade and agriculture that support the city, only to be picked off by an upstart rival looking to pinch a bit of the goodlife for themselves. 

The latest of these would be rulers are a pair of lovers:  The ruthless raider and blademaster Ni’mat and her husband, the guileful seductor Talib Dawngraced. Ten years ago in the heat of their youth and passion these two raised a bandit army and conquered the city, ousting the previous ruler and installing their plunder hungry followers as enforcers and minitractors along the many traderotues that the city serviced. 

For just over a decade, these two have held claim to the rich aquafers and vaulted cisterns of the city, which the the two set to protecting and developing the way another ruler might guard a vein of rare and precious ore. Where the previous rulers let the city's infrastructure to crumble in favor of the riches it could provide, the lovers usurpation led to unprecedented development that has continued to this day, ensuring there is always plentiful work for builders and diggers as aell as the city's numerous merchants. 

Recently however a dark pall has been cast over the city of deep wells: the lovers have banned all itinerant lriests from entering the city, amd have expressly forbid public servicies of faith, going so far as to even place dissenting sects under house arrest within their temples, having their army of desert cutthroats nail the buildings' doors shut and throw supplies in utilizing a window.

Adventure hooks

The sudden prohibition on priests has created a strange pavilion of tents and makeshift shrines with different groups (some of whom consider the others heretical) forced to rub elbows and fight for favorable spots. A real-estate holy war may be brewing, worsened by the overcrowding and congestion created by the city’s faithful being forced to migrate outside the gates in order to attend services. 

While the believers may be in crisis, their burrowers may be facing another: The diggers and aquatects that tirelessly repair and expand the city’s stockpile of fresh water have hit an odd snag: a creeping crystalline growth that appears to be spreading out of a newly discovered cave system and into the rest of the city’s system of cisterns and subterranean waterways. The spread is contained for now, but the engineers worry that such unpredictable growths could see vast amounts of the city’s water rendered tainted and undrinkable for years: effectively meaning a choice between plague or drought. 

Idisimar is located at the head of a fertile river valley that leads out to the sea, and a primary stop on the desert spiceroad. Trade goods and exotic wonders of all kind pass through this well situated settlement, and the party is sure to be able to find a merchant in need of their aquisitional abilities, or a caravan soon to set out in need of guards. 

Background: After proving themselves surprisingly benevolent rulers after their first decade of usurpation, the lovers find themselves restless, weighed upon by the realities of controlling and managing a realm and settling into roles that neither of them truely imagined when they first set out.  Conquering Idisimar had been in many ways an act of mutal love shared between the two, proof that their affection for one another could overcome any obstacle.  Neither is willing to admit that perhaps they would be happier abdicating and moving on with their lives, as that would mean that something had defeated them. 

Into this vacuum of doubt and mounting stress stepped a particular advisor. Whether a servant of Heliod, the more zealous aspects of Pelor, or even The cult of the Hidden Sun, this mystic was able to convince the lovers that they were infact being put to test by the greatest of all gods, who disapproves of the theological anarchy that festers in their city. Surely one central god, ruling over the others, would bring order to the city, just as it would cement the lovers authority over it as the gods chosen rulers. 

Talib has been taken in by this claim, eager to restore what may have been lost between the pair in the intervening decades, throwing his political influence behind the cult’s growth. Ni’mat is in contrast stuck with indecision. Her skills were always more practical, tactual, and these ephemeral matters of omens and divine order has left her fretting.