Wednesday, September 17, 2014

Beast Cults of the Cantons

The Hill Cantons Complete(ish) tier of the Dunes kickstarter offers backers a large array of booklets spun off by this blog and the campaign. One of which is the Cosmology of the Cantons, a catalog of the strange religious beliefs and myths of that odd world.

When Overgod begat the Little Gods in his great and long slumber, the first of the Little Gods little resembled today's humans and beasts of the field and forest. The First Beasts (or Zvir) were magnificent creations, walking tall and massive with verve and panache in their furry steps.

The great molding hands of Overgod, never much of a details kind of god, slipped on occasion. He was quite displeased with his own sloppy efforts regarding the Beasts. Overgod fretted and worried and after slow aeons of divine navel-gazing began to reshape his imperfect efforts. Here he would grab a creature and remold its marred proportions. There he tore off and flipped away an unsightly talon, gullet, skin flap or tail.

Most of the Zvir patiently suffered the celestial makeover and remain today in the form last given. Some however resisted and even evaded his great reworking maintaining what original forms they could under the strain of the long processes of the World-Dialectic.

Racial memory holdovers in the Weird keep a dwindling number of the First Beasts and their descendants as petty gods of sort. Occasionally even worship of the so-called Beast Gods grabs an especially isolated pocket of humanity on Zem. The barbaric blueskins that prowl the Northlands above the World Canal are especially said to be prone to such lapses.

Sect Characteristics
Attributed Alignment (A): Like humans, beasts attribute a single, approximate alignment to the deity and an aspirational doctrine for followers.

Bonus Spells/Powers (B): Special bonus spells and powers granted to faithful clergy or other temporal agents beyond their normal spell range. The number in parenthesis represents what level the power is granted. All powers are useable once a day unless otherwise specified.

Priesthood Class (C): Clerics are only found in the ranks of the most supreme of humanity's gods, the Sun Lord. All other clergy are vocational posts (with special powers/spells) eligible to certain classes as per their deity. Clergy will always be drawn from the anthropomorphic animals of a race or rarely from humans.

Domain (D): What humans consider the deity's area of control. Again the actual deity may consider his or her's brief to be something wider and may share or battle another power for jurisdiction.

A Highly Abridged List of the First Beasts
Vlenosh (Angry Sloth)
Under the molding hand of Overgod Lazy Sloth willingly became shorter (and more adorable), His defiant brother, Angry Sloth, however fled to the deepest folds of the new world. There seething in his unbridled anger issues he became unhinged, demonic even in countenance. From the sullen thoughts of this banished First Beast came lesser beings bearing his like and his hatred for all of creation: the Slothrog.

A: Chaotic Evil
B: Slow (4 or Slothrogs over 40 hp)
C: Slothrogs, lazy and evil human magic users
D: Malice, Sullen Lethargy, “B-side” Animal Demons

Grandfather Tyger
It came to pass many aeons ago in the murky depths of the Anti-Cantons that the Eldish prince Xzhilhaag inherited the vast protein plantations of his house. Xzhilhaag, a being so renowned for the sublimity of his arbitrary cruelty and the depths of his sadism that even the Eld found him noxious and tiresome, found himself more and more at odds with his brothers.

Through dark magic foul—and copious applications of a food-borne contaminant--he transformed his visage into that of a demonic cat and began arming a host of his hairless ape slaves  to aid him in his coming rebellion. That act, of course, was a dismal failure leading to his mortal death and spirit-exile back in the world mundane.

What is less known in that in his cat-form years on Zem he had an illicit, ill-matched and mutually denied amorous relationship with the noble First Beast of Smilodons, Queen Zub. Their congress resulted in the oddly-named and utterly sinister Grandfather Tyger (who has had no offspring).

A: Chaotic Evil
B: Eye of the Tiger (3): +2 to hit for 1d6 rounds when in the heat of the fight
C: Assassins, Weretigers, “Eldmen” (human slaves that pretend to be of Eld descent), Tiger Wrasslers
D: Killing for Pleasure

Koza (Regimental Goat)
While the divinity and worship of most First Beasts are utterly denied in the Overkingdom and the rest of Solarity, a few atavistic remnants manage to hold on.

Nowhere is this more obvious than among the Great Nemec Company of the Black Army (the Overking's standing army) who hold--and indeed do homage--to the seemingly immortal Koza, a First Beast nursed back to fighting pride by Oldemar the company's founder two centuries ago.

Woe unto the clueless backwater Pahr who calls this creature a mascot! For not only does he hold the rank of Subaltern in perpetuity (except for a brief moment three months in which he was demoted for spewing while on a bender half-masticated star tulips over the wool gown of the Over King's most beloved of illegitimate daughters) he is offered sacrifice and devotions by the men of the company.

A: Lawful Good
B: Stubborn Pride (1): morale raised to 11 for 1d6 turns. Horns of the Goat (5): a single head-butting attack of 3d6 hitpoints damage.
C: Fighters, Goat Majors
D: Military Tradition of the Absurd, Stubbornness

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