Long ago, thousands of years ago, the region that is now Sunndi and the Tilvanot Peninsula was a group of Flannae city-states. These states had long been at war with the elves.
It's not that the elves were intentionally cruel to the people of what would become Sunndi and the Tilvanot. It's true they were disgusted with the human consorting with their froglike neighbors, but they didn't hold it against them. It's just that the elves thought it natural that humans and other lesser races should live in toil - the myths of those same races usually agreed with this view - and what did it matter, in the ultimate scheme of things, if their labor was for themselves or the elven kingdom?
The humans didn't see it that way. Their god, Zarus, spoke to them and told them they were the chosen race, born directly of the Oerth and owing nothing to the gods of the elves. Zarus taught that it was humans who deserved to rule, and to help them do that he invested some of himself in their greatest king, who became an avatar of Zarus, the instrument of his will upon the Oerth.
This was the folly of Zarus, and his fall. The gods of Oerth had made a pact among themselves never to interfere directly with human societies. Zarus thought himself above the pact, above even all the other gods put together. They proved him wrong.
Zarus' realm in the Outer Planes was destroyed by the other gods, the allied gods of elf and dwarf and hobniz and gnome. They confronted him on his golden throne and slew him in his place of power, then sealed the throne away in the center of a mountain. With Zarus destroyed, the humans of the Flan city-states in what would the Tilvanot Peninsula and what would become Sunndi would be forced to decide the outcome of the battle with no more divine help than what was allotted to them by divine law. Other gods like Pelor and Obad-hai would not break the pact.
In time, the humans won their independence from the elves on their own merits, and the foundation of the Kingdom of Ahlissa was made. At least for a time, humans and nonhumans lived in peace.
One mystery remained: what had happened to the god-king, the last avatar of Zarus? The elves had found nothing, nor the king's subjects. It was thought that the god-king had died with his god.
The bullywugs, the toadfolk, care little about anything. The universe to them is a cold, hungry place. Their alien gods, too, are thought of mostly as vast, open mouths eternally demanding to be fed. The bullywugs care little about anything, but they care about feeding their divine patrons. They sensed the power of the last avatar of Zarus, desperate for a place to hide, and they offered him one within the maw of their god. On a stony frog-shaped altar in the middle of the Vast Swamp, a god-king was fed to Ramenos. In the layer of the Abyss known as Smaragd, a fragment of a deity was digested over the course of a thousand years.
Much later, a man of a new, pale race wandered into the swamp. His name was Wastri and he was searching old ruins for power. Little else of the man he was would ever be seen again. Somehow he unriddled the symbols on the ancient altar and learned how to open the portal, and somehow the last undigested remnant of the god Zarus reached out to the first human body he had encountered in a thousand years, and entered it.
The creature that resulted was not the Wastri that had been, but it was not Zarus either. It was twisted by the agency of the bullywug magic and by the substance of the god Ramenos, but a core of Zarus' personality remained. It was, at this point, little more than hate, but it remembered one thing: it remembered the elves and their allies were responsible for its suffering.
As the semi-divine creature who still called himself Wastri gathered together his army of disaffected humans and bullywugs, he remembered little else. He did not remember that his golden throne could not be destroyed by such power as the gods of elves and gnomes and dwarves and hobniz had to offer, and that if he sat in it he could remember, and Zarus could live again.
Excellent post rasgon. An insidious way to bring Zarus into the campaign I must say not to mention giving Wastri some more oomph rather than being some comic relief.
Well done, however I am a little leary about the constant divine conspiracies behind every major villian - a little goes a long way.
Well it is viable, I kind of like Wastri, as the uber-SB follower protrayed in the accessory (self-delusion) indeed.
As for Zarus, I think he has great potential to shake up the established divine order but given his prosetyzing bent, I think it would be more feasible as a faith that is introduced via trade routes between the far west and the Flanaess through missionaries rather than as a convoluted shadowy artifact transformation return plot using Wastri.
Tharzidun and Vatun have already cornered the market
Blasphemy! May Zarus have mercy upon your soul. Or not. This heresy, if one were to dignify it so, runs contra to the revealed word of Zarus in His Book and that of His progeny. Such postulates are the obvious work of self-loathing humans, who fancy elves and dwarves superior to themselves and concoct fables to defame their own race. Best that Zarus scourages such weaklings, unappreciative of and unfit for the mantle of humanity and the responsibility of being, truely, superior beings! Elf lover, cucolded by dwarves! Lickspittle of goblinoids, footstool of gnomes!
Ware the wrath of Zarus! Soon, his true form in the Flanaess shall be revealed. Lo! Zarus, God the Father of Man, shall send his first born Son to harrow the sons of men and gleen from the bloody fields of the Flanaess the souls of Man fit to be so named.
In Zarus' holy name! Die now! Lest you shame your heritage further with such prattlings. The Son of the God of Man will not be so merciful.
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