Divine Servants of Death and Magic

A key aspect in the creation of any "fantasy setting" city is the delineation of the religious presence in the community. In Bahar Dar, the dominant clergy worshiped Wee Jas, a D&D-pantheon goddess of Death and Magic. This was an ideal choice. Not only is Wee Jas an iconic antithesis of the naturalist Halfling deity Yondalla. In addition, the vague alignment of Wee Jas's clergy made it possible to generate a smattering of important NPCs with vastly different goals and demeanors. (Also, the Magic domain is way cool.)

The cleric above is Grand Inquisitor (a Defenders of the Faith splatbook prestige class) Prester John. He was the high priest of Wee Jas in Bahar Dar, and he eventually became the 13th acolyte of the Lich King Yared Mengistu. Prester John was basically the second most powerful/important person in Bahar Dar, after Governor Czarno. His powers as an Inquisitor made him very dangerous to would-be numbskullduggers who ran afoul of the smarmy hierarchy. Working alongside Prester John was Graham Athanasius (sheet at right), another cleric of Wee Jas and arch-smarmlord.

The "story page" for the "Divine Servants of Death and Magic" provides great insight into the role of these clerics in Bahar Dar, and to the widening scope of the campaign at this time. The story page is undated, but it was created sometime between 8/5/02 and 8/10/02. On the story page is the second use of the name "Yared Mengistu" in the Big Red Book. The writing goes on to detail how the priests use their authority to publicly execute "criminals" (i.e. undesirables) each week in concert with the gladiatorial games.

Indeed, the importance of Prester John and Graham Athanasius, and the priests of Wee Jas, ran through the entire campaign. Yared Mengistu was explicitly a vassal of Wee Jas, whose clergy also held sway in Ras Dashen. Both Graham Athanasius and Prester John made the Wildlanders' "list" of enemies to be dispatched. As previously mentioned, Prester John became Mengistu's 13th acolyte, and the inquisitor turned lich survived until the very last game session.

About midway through the time frame of the campaign, I developed my own pantheon for my campaign world. I based the system on the archetypes of divinity across many different systems, including D&D and Tolkein. Wee Jas, and the Tolkein Vala Aule, became merged into the god Golodun, whose areas of interest include magic and smithcraft. Like Aule and Wee Jas, Golodun has both good and evil worshipers. The name of Wee Jas was effectively phased out of the literature, with Golodun becoming an extremely prominent divine figure.

In addition to delineating the role of the clergy in Bahar Dar (highlighting their local and regional influence), the priest story page includes a few other interesting tidbits. It mentions that the only clerics besides those of Wee Jas to openly worship in Bahar Dar were priests of Farlanghn. This "travel god" later evolved into Aerandir, who is an both an important figure in the creation of the world and a widely-worshiped god whose clerics are tolerated in unusual places.

The story page also contains my drawing of the Doors of Durin - a famous Tolkien sketch of the entrance to the Mines of Moria. Originally, I had planned to use this drawing as a sketch for the doors of Zazamanc. However, the use was much too obvious, and I eventually created an original drawing for the doors of Zazamanc. This will be highlighted in a future post.