Quote:
Originally Posted by VonKatzen
Nehushtan, who was probably of the winged serpent type.
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Oh, that's a good point.
I couldn't resist including a minority group whose religion rejects the anthropomorphism of deities practised by the polytheistic majority, and worship the sun and the moon without attributing names or human qualities to them. They are called the
Nisutu ('Kindred'), tend to live in special quarters of urban areas in the Untheri Empire, have historically been subject to various legal restrictions and persecution and, obviously, allow me to play with various aspects of Jewish culture.
The PC martial artist / bard / master of tantric lore, Rasul Khamsin Mubtasim, visited a middle-aged sage and physician by the name of Malachi Elgezar, but discovered that due to the strictures of a religious day of rest, the man was unwilling to discuss what Rasul wanted to discuss*, as it came under the heading of 'business'.
Instead, Rasul spent a couple of hours politely making conversation with the man in his study, steering clear of any subject with connotations of 'business', but hearing Malachi's views of various acquaintances, his views on his adopted homeland** and the trials and tribulations of being a single father to a spirited girl, whose friends and interests were alarmingly beginning to be from outside
Nisutu society. When she came home from temple, Rasul was invited to eat lunch with the small family, with apologies that the food had been prepared the day before, due to restrictions on cooking with fire on the day of rest.
All in all, Rasul felt that he had wasted most of a day on a pleasant, but ultimately pointless diversion, but an offhand comment that he would enjoy making the acquaintance of a woman named Gula, the proprietress of Karallu ('Beatitude, bliss, jewel'), an establishment that Malachi described as 'a convivial social salon', led him to decide to visit at least one other place before writing the day off entirely. Long story short, Rasul discovered that Karallu was an opium den, Gula was a powerful necromancer, underworld figure and a priestess of Tiamat, and that she was just right for Rasul's underhanded schemes against the Tiamat cult.***
The lesson, of course, is that just because someone is a good family man who follows religious restrictions to the hilt it doesn't mean that he's not intimately familiar with the underworld of dragon worshippers and drug users. And that someone can be surprisingly affable and seemingly harmless while apparently belonging to a thoroughly evil cult.
Nehuhstan is a nice-sounding name, too, and I might decide to have ancient cultic practices in the area remembered by
Nisutu sages rather than by the majority population (who've spent a long time under the tyrannical rule of a God-King who tended to get irate when history recorded details he wanted remembered differently, such as anything to do with other gods than him). That would make it plausible for the PCs to use the Kindred name for any ancient religious symbol they find.
*Rasul is impersonating a spy for the Cult of the Dragon and wanted to obtain the names of local contacts in the allied (for now) Tiamat cult. While Malachi never confirmed it, Rasul suspects that he is also a spy for the Cult of the Dragon and the visit was prompted by a suggestion from a character who accepts Rasul's cover identity and wants to help him do well on his clandestine diplomatic mission.
**Malachi has lived in Unthalass, the capital of the more-or-less fallen Untheri Empire, for about twenty years. His original homeland is the city of Mourktar, in Threskel, a former province of Unther, but independent now for some four centuries.
***Rasul is a recovering villain, now in the service of a benevolent deity and a righteous cause, but maintains that skulduggery is a mitzvah (as his new friend Malachi would no doubt say) when performed against evil organisations with nefarious goals, whose high priestess has officially declared him anathema.
Quote:
Originally Posted by VonKatzen
Many river deities and their relatives.
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Yesss...
It would make sense for there to have been a deity associated with the river that runs through the city and has flooded it on numerous occasions. Judging by the fact that enormous dragonic turtles and various sea serpents are linked to times of such floods, that river deity might have some reptilian connections of its own...