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Deity: Heironeous, The Vindicator

Let our hands never falter, sparing evil the sword Let our hearts never waiver, letting weakness take root Let our march never end, lest the task be left undone

Champions, zealots, fools. All these words describe the followers of Heironeous; patron god of those blinded by duty and self righteousness. From the guards who rough up vagrants for the sake of social order, to the patriotic songs sung by soldiers on the way to invade a land they've never seen, to the teacher who’s convinced they can instruct through pain, because sparing the rod really does spoil the child.

It is a terrifying thing after all to be in the wrong, to have no easy answers, to be filled with doubt, and so the Archpaladin and his clergy intercede to provide the fearful populace with direction, with easy answers, and with scapegoats when necessary.

Adventure Hooks:

The party are asked by some troubled parents to look in on the local chapterhouse of the Invincible Vanguard, who took over for the town's royal garrison some years ago. A number of youths, bored of life in their sleepy little town decided to sign up with the Vanguard a few months past and have not been seen since. The Heironeian are cagey to say the least, but through their investigation the party might stumble across the same awful secret the kids did during their initiation, as well as their ultimate fate.

A beast rampages through the countryside, sowing fear, destruction, and rumour wherever it goes. Defeating it is no easy task, but one of the local lords is willing to pay a high price should the party bring him its head as proof. Imagine their surprise when a few days later a group of Heironeian paladins are paraded through the street carrying THEIR trophy aloft, claiming all the credit and with that same lord backing their claims. It seems the party has been part of a cruel PR stunt, however will they make this right?

A series of inexplicable mishaps and borderline disasters that plague a frontier village have come to a head with one of the Vindicator's itinerant preachers convinces the locals that devilry is the source of their woes, pointing the blacksmith's tiefling apprentice. It's up to the party to prevent the kid from getting strung up, and make the villagers see reason before there's an out and out witchhunt on their hands.

Setup: From the outside, with the perspective of history, it’s easy enough to see that there’s something wrong with faith of Heironeous, how their temples and icons venerate violence, whether it be martial glory or the suffering of martyrs that needed to be avenged. How their liturgy teaches the faithful that sympathy to outsiders, questions to authority, even the smallest of doubts are weaknesses to be overcome.

But the Heironeans are the ones fighting off the monsters encroaching on your village when the baron won’t pay for garrisons or adventurers, and it’s their priests who come to hand out food to the hungry and say there’s work the town over building their new fortress, and it’s their inquisitors who stand in the market square telling the crowd that all the awful things that happened these past few years is the fault of sinful, faithless rulers, and if only they could be led by righteous men (and it is always men) and expel the social parasites then truly this realm could be one beloved by the gods.

That’s the grift, the Heironeans seize on a crisis or a fear and offer to put your life on a better track, nevermind that it’s a permanent war footing where you and your family and neighbours are conscripted to roles based on how you’d be most useful, and disagreement amounts to insubordination.

Heironeans say they’re justified of course because evil is always out there, the one true evil, Hextor, the grotesque, six armed lord of bloodshed and suffering who wishes to make slaves or corpses of all the world and the heavens besides. He is jealous of Heironeous you see, his twin brother, who is propheciesed to be the only one who can defeat him. Hextor never rests, always spawning more evil in the world, and anyone could be his follower without even knowing it... all they’d need to do is work to subvert the will of the archpaladin and they’d be abetting the scourge. You don’t want to be an agent of evil do you? Then tithe to the church, enlist in the vanguard, obey your betters, marry early and within your kind and have more children to carry on the fight when you are too week, raise them up right, kneel when you are told, submit. Do all these things and the Vindicator will know you are good, and worth fighting for, and will forgive your mortal failings.

There is a deeper lore, behind even what the faithful or even most of their leaders know: that Heironeous and Hextor are the same being. Sometimes it is the monster wearing the golden hero like a mask, sometimes it is the bright and radiant warrior casting a most wicked shadow, sometimes it is simply that the god of war and slaughter has two faces, fair and foul, both righteous, both tyrannical, both hungering for blood.

The cult of Hextor is a secret order within the faith, membership offered only to those chosen by their god or those that see the worship of the archpaladin for what it really is: Violence for the sake of power, power for the sake of violence. They are secretive, deflecting rumours of their existence onto puppets and figureheads that they manipulate, going so far as to create false-cults to the Scourge to draw the faithful’s attention and ire. Any fault in the church can be blamed on Hextorian infiltration, any opponent that challenges them is but an agent of the Scourge.

Titles: The invincible, the vindicator, the archpaladin / the scourge, the herald of hells

Signs: Oddly serene visions of violence and pain, wounds or blood on the image or relics of martyrs or weapons of champions, prophetic nightmares about the victory of Hextor.

Symbols: A white hand or clapsed around a silver lightning bolt/ a black gauntlet clutched around six red arrows

Inspiration: Cruelty cloaked in the guise of righteousness is not an original concept but after writing about how d&d has weird habit of using a frankly childlike view of morality in order to justify its violence the same way that IRL hategroups do, I wanted to play around with the concept.

Likewise, I felt my campaigns needed a solid “badguy with the aesthetic of goodguy” villain and I was tired of using overzealous followers of the dawnfather or bahamut to fill out the roster. Specifically, rather than bad people in service to an ostensibly good god (who are objectively real in the setting and thus would try to oust the bad apples), I wanted to create an evil god that used the trappings of goodness to dupe average people into doing bad, the same way that has happened over and over again historically in our own world.

I ended up choosing Heironeous for this villain makeover because like a lot of other default d&d deities I find the base form of him painfully one note, he’s the paladin god of paladins and he has hero IN HIS NAME. That said, he has a twin brother Hextor, god of war and tyrants that serves as his dark mirror and there’s thematic meat in that... Merging the two into one god gives us this delicious setup where the theology of Heironeous creates the problem and sells the solution, benefiting no matter who wins in the supposed cosmic power struggle.

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