Malignant Powers

Countless malevolent forces circle Yane, but here are five of the more common Forsaken Gods--those evil powers who, while part of the world, work to subvert it.

ACAMAR, God of Evil Magic: [AK-ah-mahr]
LE Demigod of the Devils
Weapon: Staff
Color: Black
Omens: Falling stones, reflections, howling wolves, the number seven
Cleric Alignment: LE, NE, LN
Domains: Artifice, Community, Darkness, Death, Destruction, Evil, Fire, Knowledge, Law, Magic, Rune

Druids: No
Once an obsessed mortal, then a lich, Acamar  transcended life and undeath to become an infernal corpse-god with power over magic. Acamar weds a lich's obsession with knowledge to the infernal hierarchy's disciplined cruelty. Despite his arrogance and cruelty, he offers his knowledge generously. Often, the price is only the willingness to work the magic he offers.
 
ENGSUMA, The Ice Water Goddess: [eng-SOO-mah]
NE Primordial-Goddess of the White Gods
Weapon: Battle ax
Color: Ice Blue
Cleric Alignment: NE, LE, CE
Omens: Faces seen under ice, gusts that extinguish light, seals, orcas, sea birds
Domains: Animal, Darkness, Death, Evil, Repose, Strength, Water, Weather
Druids: Yes

The goddess of the freezing water beneath the ice, Engsuma is a harvester of souls. She loves hunger, cannibalism, and freezing, and favors ghouls (especially lacedons), ice zombies, and draugrs. Pirates honor her by freezing their enemies to death in salt water.

FLORETTE, Goddess of Agony Enbalmed: [flor-ET]
NE Godling of the Middle Gods
Weapon: Kukri
Color: Pink
Omens: Birth marks, scars, tattoos, butterflies, spotted animals
Cleric Alignment: LE, NE
Domains: Artifice, Death, Evil, Healing, Magic, Rune
Druids: No

An aspect of the Flayed Goddess of the Middle Gods, Florette focuses on the mortification of the flesh not for its own sake, but for enlightenment and power. Simani’s obsession with Florette (and her increased focus on metaphysics and conteplation) may have spelled the lich-queen's downfall. Florette encourages cults of mutilation and deprivation, especially among women and children, and surrounds herself with a coterie of mummy lords called the Thousand-Handed.

JOOMREI THAHN, God of Need: [JOOM-ray THAHN]
NE God of the Middle Gods
Weapon: Greatsword
Color: Purple
Omens: Bent coins, worms, starving animals, the number 100
Cleric Alignment: NE, LE, CE
Domains: Artifice, Community, Earth, Evil, Knowledge, Water, Weather
Druids: No

A god of robbers of all kinds, Joomrei Thahn is one of the great powers of the Middle gods, and has gained traction in Yane despite his lack of a strong undead focus. Elsewhere he is a god of greed and desperation, but on the Scarred Island, he emphasizes his power over the slow, consuming hunger of specters, shadows, and other ethereal undead. He also enjoys the worship of thieves, brigands, and merchants, the last of whom rely on Joomrei Thahn's banking network to maintain their supply lines with the mainland.
 
LATELLO, God of Royalty and Chaos: [lah-TEL-o]
CE Godling of the Hierarchy
Weapon: War fan
Color: Iridescence
Omens: Peacocks, the lotus flower, shimmering oils and smoke, stains, the number 26
Cleric Alignment: CE, NE, CN
Domains: Chaos, Charm, Evil, Glory, Liberation, Luck, Madness, Nobility, Trickery
Druids: No

When the Hierarchy fell, two true gods survived: the supreme Unconquered Sun, and his twisted, insane child, Latello. The chaos god's secret cult of poisoners, insane aristocrats, and revolutionaries spreads terror in the Remnant, but in Yane they seem more focused. Some whisper that Latello is not as insane as he appears, and has designs on one of the Ten Thrones of the Hierarchy, perhaps the Sun Throne itself. Demons serve him, and he has a particular fondness for vampires and death knights.
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The truth is that it's hard to write a boring bunch of demon gods. I've found it best to create evil gods the way Robert Rodriguez (apparently) makes movies: I start with a big list of cool things. What do I want the adventurers to fight? Degenerate aristocrats, frozen cannibals, malevolent foreign banking interests, painted mummies, liches...okay, that's five, let's stop there.

I usually divide "bad guys" into two categories based on whether or not they could tempt a reasonable person. A mix of intriguing but evil powers and straight-up monsters works best. In Yane, Acamar offers knowledge and power without (immediate) obligation, Joomrei Thahn engineers situations where people must serve him and his network, and Florette, though unsavory, represents the sort of enlightenment and liberation that adventurers might not want, but can nonetheless understand. Engsuma and Latello, by contrast, are alien monsters.

Like with Yane's pantheon, I wanted a sense that these are the gods that just happened to wash up on the Scarred Island. They have little in common with one-another and they form no unified "society of evil gods"; other than Engsuma, they've had to twist their portfolios considerably to accommodate this new environment. On Earth, the gods we create bend to economic, political, and social forces; it will be interesting to see how "real" gods react to similar pressures.

A few stray thoughts on gods

Before I get on with the evil gods I want to talk about how gods are handled in most fantasy campaigns. Gods are often too distant to be interesting. Even in high-power campaigns they're kept in a walled garden of unapproachability, as if the only alternative is the party killing them one at a time like twelve-year-olds tearing through Deities & Demigods.

Gods that meddle--gods as characters--have more to offer. In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, you can take jobs (corrupt, dangerous, and highly thematic jobs) from the Daedric Princes, the game's demon lords. The gods, by contrast, gave you stat bonuses when you pushed the "use" button at their shrines. Consequently I remember half the Princes and their dominions but the only god I can name is Talos, and him mostly because of Skyrim and Jason and the Argonauts. Almost no D&D god is memorable, except for a few antagonistic powers (Lolth, Tiamat, Asmodeus). They're all evil, but what makes them interesting is not their evil, as such, but that they're all physical creatures. They're all characters, not power-dispensers.

Among Yane's pantheon, I like Coth because, as a sort of chained power, he has plot potential built in. Coth wants something, and not just the way gods want to "preserve the balance" or "fight evil." He's a prisoner; his motivations are immediately comprehensible. And as I review Yane's pantheon, the desire to invest the gods with physicality and motivation grows. Tirwein, the elf godling, is easy: he can physically occupy the Forest of White Owls. But (apart from Fanatin, the warding-god of the dwarves, who is uniquely unapproachable) I suddenly want to see all my gods manifested physically, as characters, in the setting: the Lacarni guarding the sea-breezes, Elicca walking from inn to inn, the Iconess physically instantiated in Keimia, and so on.

The Gods of Yane

Yane's location between several civilizations means it recognizes several pantheons, including the White Gods (the gods of the north), the Hierarchy (the gods of the "Perfect" Realm, now catastrophically diminished), and the Middle Gods (the gods of the Middle Ocean). Only eight gods have a substantial foothold in Yane:

* Coth, the Gray God of Lahaz
* Amiza (or Amiza-Lacarni), Messenger of the Gods
* Elicca, Goddess of Fire and Passion
* Fanatin, Demigod of Shields
* The Iconess, Goddess of Light
* Kuraltes, God of Conquest
* Tirwein, Elf Godling of Flowering and Rebirth
* Xarrion, Goddess of Intrigue

Each of these gods possesses a powerful--and often hidden--shrine on Yane that serves as a conduit for their power; while outside Yane their full manifestations have different motivations and goals, their aspects on the Island of Scars form a rough pantheon. There, they cooperate to oppose upstart gods and the malicious powers that plague Arkat Bay.

AMIZA-LACARNI, MESSENGER OF THE GODS [ah-MY-zah lah-KAR-nee]
CG Ecumenical Elemental-Goddess of the Middle Gods
Weapon: Longbow
Color: Blue
Omens:  Porpoises, broken staves, the number eight
Cleric Alignment: CG, NG, CN
Domains: Air, Law, Liberation, Luck, Rune, Travel, Trickery, Water, Weather
Paladins: No
Druids: Yes

A powerful and important goddess among the Middle Gods, Amiza found little traction in Yane until she fused with the Lacarni, eight local wind spirits. With their influence, she has become a goddess of sailors.

COTH, the Grim Gray God [Koth]
CN elemental godling (church is LN) of the White Gods
Weapon: Battle-ax
Color: Gray (or rust)
Omens: Rust, drabs (parrot-crows), head wounds, the number thirteen
Cleric Alignment: Any
Domains: Darkness, destruction, earth, law, liberation, strength, rust*
Paladins: Yes
Druids: No
* domain unique to Coth

Centuries ago, Coth was a crude barbarian totem, joyless and chill, disinterested in his followers. But a priest yoked him and, through ritual agonies, twisted him into the shape of a gray patriarch suitable for mass worship. His people died away but his cult proliferated, becoming a major religion that now dominates much of the North.

The Church of Coth is rigid, hierarchical, dogmatic, and stoic, but Coth’s true nature gives his powerful servants an independent streak that its (mostly nonmagical) hierarchy despises.

ELICCA, Goddess of Fire and Passion [EL-ik-kah]
CN primal goddess of the White Gods
Weapon: spear
Color: Orange
Omens: Blood, burning brands, elk, torn bark, the number two
Cleric Alignment: CN, CG
Domains: Animal, chaos, charm, luck, fire, trickery
Paladins: No
Druids: Yes

A goddess of campfires, love, and mating of animals and people. Her priests and priestesses tend roadside inns and raise great fires to mark their locations in the cold and the dark. Once they demanded flesh or oaths of obedience as the price of spending the night; now they accept money and have become a powerful banking institution. Many coins in Yane are stamped with Elicca's sign--a red elk with a burning crown.
FANATIN, God of the Barred Gate [FAN-ah-tin]
LN Archon of the White Gods
Weapon: Warhammer
Color: Black
Omens: Closed doors or gates, scorpions, images reflected in still water, the number four
Cleric Alignment: LN, LG, LE
Domains: Artifice, community, earth, law, protection, rune
Paladins: Yes
Druids: No

A minor aspect of the Allfather of the Dwarves (one of the great powers of the White Gods), Fanatin gained importance to the dwarves of the Temno Mountains when they hid for centuries from the undead. He is now their primary god. The followers of this distant and unapproachable god have been known to go mad trying to decipher his will; heretics whisper that he is no god at all, merely a bundle of magical power, and that explains his silence.

THE ICONESS, Goddess of Light
NG Demigoddess of the White Gods
Weapon: Longsword
Color: Gold
Omens: Lions, rabbits, sunlight cast on screens, strange clouds, the number twelve
Cleric Alignment: NG, LG, CG
Domains: Community, Glory, Good, Healing, Knowledge, Liberation, Magic, Nobility, Sun, War
Paladins: Yes
Druids: No

A mortal who rose out of the chaos of the north to help forge the Holy Kingdom of Keimia, the woman now called the Iconess represents an impossible mystic ideal toward which knights and scholars can both strive. She is attended by twelve radiant spirits (angels) who interact frequently with the other White Gods, trying to secure a place for the rather earnest people of Keimia in the harsh north. She also has connections to the Great Bear, a significant Keimian druidic spirit, and is sometimes pictured riding him.

KURALTES, God of Conquest [koor-AHL-teez]
LN God of the Hierarchy
Weapon: Spear
Color: Brown
Omens: Rams, pigs, broken earth, treacherous vines, markings on walls
Cleric Alignment: LN, LG, LE
Domains: Artifice, Community, Destruction, Glory, Plant, Protection, Strength, War
Paladins: Yes
Druids: No

The Perfect Realm began its long decline when its gods died, though no one knows how it happened. Only the Unconquered Sun survived, and it scrambled to fill vacated posts among the Ten Perfect Thrones of the Hierarchy. To replace the overthrown god of war, the Unconquered Sun found Kuraltes, a minor god of fences. Suddenly promoted, Kuraltes struggles with his new role in the pantheon of what everyone now calls the Old Realm. He has gained some respect as a war god for the hard-pressed people of the Scarred Island, for whom the Iconess can seem too soft and Coth too joyless. Kuraltes is also a god of vegetation and a patron of woodworkers, who celebrate him by creating and ritually destroying vine-shrouded wooden rams or other animals that represent the god.

TIRWEIN, Spirit of Flowering and Rebirth [teer-WAIN]
CG Elemental Godling of the White Gods
Weapon: Scimitar
Color: Green
Omens: Flowers, heartbeats, owls, thorns, the words of children
Cleric Alignment: CG, NG, CN
Domains: Animal, Chaos, Glory, Good, Healing, Plant, Protection, Travel
Paladins: No
Druids: Yes

The elemental godling Tirwein experiences alternating bouts of sleep and wakefulness, rising whenever he is needed to heal a land inhabited by elves or fey. He is currently active in the White Owl Forest and Muro Forest, working to restore the land after the long blight of Simani. He lacks foresight, though, and has no plans in case the Necrotic Empire returns.

XARRION, Goddess of Intrigue: [Zah-RYE-on]
CN Demigoddess of the Middle Gods
Weapon: Rapier
Color: White
Omens: Music, panicked animals (especially horses), rumors, chance meetings, the number five
Cleric Alignment: CN, CG, CE
Domains: Animal, Chaos, Charm, Darkness, Liberation, Luck, Magic, Trickery
Paladins: No
Druids: No

The Middle Gods have a proper god of “thieves,” but Xarrion represents something a touch more aristocratic and elegant: she is the goddess of lies and tricks, moonlight robbery, swindles and revolutions. As a goddess of “words that have power,” she is also Yane’s nearest thing to a goddess of magic. The Arcane Lyceum has little interest now in the Hierarchy’s magic god (Temulo, formerly god of knots), though Xarrion has focused Yane’s spellcasters away from written magic and toward the spoken word and the creation of items…and especially the breeding of monsters, which she loves. Her celebrants dress like horses and flagellate themselves to drive off evil spirits.

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Thoughts:

I worked hard to keep the gods to a manageable number while still offering deities for most roles. Most of the gods are more or less my own invention; the term "The Iconess" derives from someone else's campaign (I cannot remember where on the Internet I first heard it), but the goddess behind the name differs from its original conception.

I look forward to seeing Coth--the god himself, and his priests--in my game. I love the idea of a Crom-like god of granite winds and cold peaks beaten into the shape of a palatable Patriarch. Not enough D&D religions feature serious conflicts between the gods and their followers.

Next Up: The Malignant Powers!

Yane: The Map

Yane and its sister island, Sathini, occupy Arkat Bay, a coldwater bay surrounded on three sides by the continent of Tandelume and crossable to the north for about three months of the year (four, if you're willing to risk being trapped in the ice). Roughly 100 miles across, the larger and more inhabited island, Yane, has a cool, rainy climate that has given rise to thick deciduous-coniferous woodland. Sathini, protected from the ice wind by its larger neighbor, sees a mix of scrubby pine forests, rolling hills, and rocky beaches.

For centuries, the dead ruled Yane from the necrotic empire of Ahn Resh to the east. Humans served as cattle or experimental subjects, herded into lightless gray cities for the convenience of their corpse-monarchs. This nightmare persisted until an invasion from the Holy Kingdom of Keimia, to the west, shattered the complacency of Ahn Resh and drove its undead lords from the island. In the time since the liberation, Keimian garrisons have fallen into corruption, greedy pirate-barons from the south have established near-lawless city-states on the island of Sathini, the elves and dwarves have left their hiding-places, and always, the dead wait with their customary patience for a time when they can return to claim what was once theirs.

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Thoughts:

For my return to running Dungeons & Dragons, I wanted a manageable area for exploration. Rather than starting at some insane resolution (whole continents or whole planets), I sketched out a rough landmass and picked an interesting location for a starting island. Yane, with its history of conquest and war, is a bite-sized chunk of adventure covered in necropoli and ruins, with several factions that could break into open warfare. Yane's small size (not much bigger than Jamaica) means that eventually a party will outgrow it, but I'm hoping to get at least a half-dozen levels out of the place.

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Next Up: The Gods of Yane

The Island of Yane

There is currently a non-zero chance I'll get to game in the next few months, so I've been hard at work on a Dungeons & Dragons setting called the Island of Yane. I plan to roll it out here over the next few weeks for your reading pleasure. This should go without saying, but if you plan to play in my campaign, please don't read any of the content here.

Oh, but I'm excited! Up next: a rather ugly map.

Game Systems That Push Back

As I analyze what I want from a game it's increasingly clear that my chief criterion for a game I like is this: I want a game that lets me come up with a concept and then supports multiple ways to build a character like that.

Most classless point-buy systems, though I can respect them, offer me no visceral satisfaction when creating a character because there's only one obvious way to create any given concept. Want to be a swashbuckler? Get a high Dexterity, crank up your Rapier skill, and select swashbuckler-related Advantages. Breezily simple, and ideal for many purposes, but in some perverse fashion, I would rather feel my hands sink into clay when building a character rather than swimming through air.

In the opposite fashion, old-school D&D-style games are frustrating because other than the handful of concepts the game supports, there's no way to build most characters. Want a swashbuckler? Ask your DM to carve out exceptions for you because otherwise the rules say you'll be sub-optimal to the point of total ineffectiveness.

By contrast, robust class systems (and a few robust skill-and-power systems) offer multiple routes to a single core concept. In D&D3/3.5/Pathfinder, you want a swashbuckler? Right out of the core book, you've got the obvious choice (a rogue), rangers, certain fighter builds, bards, maybe one or two other classes if you rope in supplements. You've got a system that pushes back and gives you chewy mechanical ways to build different kinds of swashbucklers, or dragon wizards, or pyromancers, or whatever nerdy stuff you want.

(One of my frustrations with the monk when I ran D&D3 was its lack of conceptual flexibility. The strict, limited power progression meant that there was only one concept associated with the monk class: the "monk" concept.)

In creating Genius: The Transgression, this goal of mine reaches its deranged and borderline-ridiculous zenith, where for almost any given mad scientist concept, you can find a home in the game's 5x2 structure (ten groups total, built along two axes,  so all characters belong to a "job" group and a "personality" group). And each option gives you a bit of mechanical "pushback" to your concept and a lot of narrative and conceptual pushback. If you want to play a "plant scientist," the obvious choice is the Progenitor Foundation, but less obvious choices create weird new juxtapositions that are inherently interesting. What about a Direct Plant scientist? King of the plant people! What about a Navigator (the "combat" Foundation)? A knight of thorns? Spore guns and vine grapple-hooks? Likewise, the personality axis yields strange, chewy results that enrich whatever concept you've envisioned. Genius' classes don't just support your core concept, they distort it through a prism of unusual assumptions that, I hope, gives you more ideas than you started out with.

D&D Novels: They Are Bad

Breaking news, right?

In high school I probably read a combined total of around a hundred million words of D&D-inspired fiction. That sort of thing should prevent me from ever becoming a real writer, but I think I learned something from the experience.

D&D novels, like most media tie-ins, are bad. Among other reasons, they're bad because they cannot use one of the most important tools in the speculative fiction writer's arsenal: the ability to tie the plot to the world's setting.

The best fantasy (like the best science fiction, which is one of the many sub-genres of fantasy that is fun because it's easier to believe it could be real) derives its plots from the rules of its world. The Lord of the Rings loses its power if you remove its underlying metaphysical and moral assumptions about the nature of loss, power, and the need to preserve the past. If The Lord of the Rings isn't conservative (in almost every sense of the word), it's nothing, and since the first wave of Tolkien clones hit in the 70s, critics have lamented the inability of Tolkien's imitators to understand that you can't separate Tolkien's plot from his own personal views.

D&D fiction goes further than that, creating an enforced bubble of artificial reality (the D&D rules) in which the plot must take place, but the D&D rules don't make for good metaphysics, for obvious reasons: a deep, metaphysically robust game system makes for a bad universal fantasy system. So D&D writers, who are not all terrible, substitute familiarity for the metaphysics-as-plot link that fantasy needs. Instead of building a story around a magic system (think Elantris; in fact, go ahead and think of almost any good speculative fiction), the writers parade before us one familiar item after another--here is a magic missile spell; here is a paladin; here is a beholder.

I'm writing this because, like with Lieutenant Worf, it's a lesson I learned too well, and I'm increasingly aware that my comic tips in the opposite direction: without a proper understanding of the metaphysics of The Water Phoenix King setting, the plot is incomprehensible from top to bottom. Tolkien, at least, had evil ghost-wizards trying to take over the world; by contrast, WPK's antagonists don't necessarily even look like antagonists until you understand the underlying rules of reality that motivate them.

It's interesting to see how many elements of my own writing--including things that I'm increasingly convinced aren't very good--are reactions, and overcompensations, to the terrible rubbish-entertainment I consumed as a kid.