D&D 5e Character Concept: Hag-Touched Cleric of Jergal
Since I’ve been talking about Jergal today. I wanted to do something with the idea that his faithful are those who take care of the dead. Undertakers, gravediggers, etc. But. There’s a couple of ideas here:
“He is rarely acknowledged directly, except for being mentioned at funerals and among those who practice the custom of writing the name of the deceased on a sheet of parchment and placing it in the corpse’s mouth. This rite is common in places where an individual’s grave or tomb isn’t marked with the person’s name.”
“His faithful send their annual recordings of mortality to holy sites where records of that sort are kept.”
--- Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide (2015)
Jergal’s faithful write the names of the dead, and then send those names to places where such records are kept. And that got me thinking … What about the dead whose names aren’t known? Who gives them back their names, who sees to it that they can be recorded?
So I wanted to do something with that. A character who goes looking for the lost dead, and who tries to find out who they were, to restore their names to them, to send their name and the news of their death to the places such records are stored.
Jergal has two domains (arguably I believe it should be three, since Grave suits him much better than Death), Death and Knowledge. And while I could make a Grave Cleric for this, Knowledge suits so much better. Their domain spells fit much better with someone who’s going to have to investigate things, and Speak with Dead for free doesn’t hurt either. Also, you know. Knowledge is also just one of my favourite cleric subclasses?
So I’m picturing … a scribe of the dead. An investigator. Someone who comes to examine bodies, to try to find clues, to try to identify the unnamed dead. I thought briefly of a military officer? Identifying the dead of battle. But I think we’ll go for something looser, something that will allow an adventurer to emerge. A cleric, an investigator, who travels a circuit of towns and villages, and who looks into bodies that turn up where they weren’t meant to be. The unknown dead.
We’ll give her the Investigator background, then. Give her a decent Intelligence score alongside Wisdom. But I was wondering what species to make her. I was thinking of possibly Reborn or Dhampir, someone who’d been one of the lost dead herself, but I’m not sure Jergal is too keen on the undead. But. While I was looking at Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft for those two. There’s a third cursed lineage in that book. Hexblood. And maybe you’d be like, how would that fit? Thematically. We’ve been running with death, and now we want to take a sidestep into fey? But hexbloods can be born from dark deals. And bheur hags, perhaps my favourite of the hag types, are winter hags who delight in inspiring cruelty. Such as ‘murdering a traveler for a winter coat’.
She was born in a harsh winter. She grew up bearing the obvious signs of a bargain with a hag, the icy, bluish skin, the crown of gnarled graystaff wood that grew from her temples. But it wasn’t until she was nearly a woman grown that her parents finally told her why.
The winter was so harsh. They were starving, and isolated in their cottage, and her mother was pregnant, and they were so afraid that, even if they didn’t die themselves, they’d lose the baby instead. Her. So they … they made a bargain. With the witch of the woods. They made a deal. Enough food to get them through the winter, to guarantee the strength of deliver their baby alive and well, in exchange for …
Because bheur hags so love cruelty. In exchange for the lives of three strangers. For the murder and butchery of the next three travellers who passed their cottage, to fill the hag’s own cookpot. Three lives for three lives, food for food. Isn’t it fair, dearies?
She was nineteen when she finally learned that, in exchange for her life, before she’d ever been born, three strangers had been left butchered, nameless, and incomplete in the woods around the cottage. The bits the hag wouldn’t eat, the heads, the small bones. She was horrified. Appalled. And she … for some reason, she ran out to try and find them. The remains, whatever was left of the remains. She wanted proof, maybe. Or just to know who’d died for her. And she found them. Some bones, a skull, a few scattered personal effects. But nothing … Her parents hadn’t known who they were. Had gone out of their way not to know who they were, when they knew they’d have to kill them. She didn’t know their names.
So she went to find out. She packed a bag, she gathered her few effects, leaving her silent, guilt-stricken parents behind, and went to try and find out who these three people had been. By mundane means, mostly, asking after travellers, but it had been nigh on twenty years. People just didn’t know. So she turned to magical means instead.
She’d only found one skull, and the strangers hadn’t been related. Speak with Dead would only get her one answer. So instead, she sought out a cleric of Kelemvor, a cleric of the grave, who was able to cast the Commune spell, and begged their services. For whatever reason, perhaps the nature of the request, the spell connected with Jergal instead. And she asked him if he knew the names of the strangers who had been murdered for her twenty years before, and if he would be willing to share them with her. Via the cleric, the Scribe of the Dead answered yes.
But Jergal had a question of his own in response, motivated by perhaps some vague curiosity, and he appeared in her dream that night to ask her what she intended to do with the names she had received. And she answered, had to answer, that as much as it churned in her gut, as much as some part of her felt it was a betrayal of the parents she loved, good parents, that she would use the names he had given her to let people know what had happened to them. To inform the authorities, their local lord. And to try and find their families, so at least they’d know what happened to them.
Jergal did not respond to this, though he seemed to accept the answer. She woke up the next morning with no divine blessing. Only horror, and grief, and tired determination. And she did do what she had promised. She went out into the world and tracked down those families, and admitted what had happened to those they loved. She saw her own parents destroyed.
And she found … a calling. Born out of horror and of guilt, but also of the knowledge of how many more bodies might lie unnamed and undiscovered out there. How many other families who would just never know what had happened to those they had loved. She … made arrangements. With the local powers, with town guards and the local lords and the various militias and rangers in the area. If there are unclaimed bodies, let me try to put a name to them.
By mundane means, as much as possible. But sometimes magic was necessary. She went to that same cleric of Kelemvor several times, both for Speak with Dead and for Commune, and every time they used the latter, it was Jergal who answered. Until finally, out of something that might have been respect or something that might have been simple aggravation, Jergal came and offered her a more permanent arrangement. For her to serve him directly, to become a cleric herself. For him to arm her with his magic and his symbol in the service of the forgotten dead.
Without hesitation, she accepted that bargain. It was a much better one, after all, than the one that had led to her birth.
So. We have a cleric. A hexblood investigator, a knowledge cleric of Jergal, the Final Scribe. A young woman with sharp eyes and a tired face, with skin the faint blue of a frozen corpse and a halo of grey wood about her head, bearing the skull-and-scroll of Jergal as her badge of office. A woman that most of a province knows they can call when unknown bodies turn up, when someone stumbles across the lost and forgotten dead.
I think I’ll name her Moira. For the fates, you know? Moira Eulogia, because lets be on the nose about these things. A woman born from horror, a woman firm in her calling. A woman who’s made a name for herself as a champion of the dead, who’s earned herself some allies and some enemies because of it. Among them, an inscrutable, and perhaps exasperated, god of the dead.
Moira Eulogia, investigator, and cleric of Jergal.
