As all I knew about Incabulos came from his one paragrath write up in Complete Divine, all these new intricacies in what first seamed to be a generic plague god are very welcome.
Also, as I was reading this, the idea popped into my head of The Four Hoursemen of the Flanaess Apocalypse, and the idea hit of doing them by gods:
Death - Vecna
War - Hextor
Famine - Nerull
Pestilence - Incabulos
(Originally I had Nerull as Death, but I couldn't think of anyone for Famine, so I added Vecna and juggled them about, but now I'm thinking about swapping them around)
Finally, what I really like about the articles that deal with the Dark Gods, is that it makes space for worshippers who don't go about sacrificing nubile virgins every weekend. There are some good stuff for a DM to work with with those varient sects.
As all I knew about Incabulos came from his one paragrath write up in Complete Divine, all these new intricacies in what first seamed to be a generic plague god are very welcome.
Finally, what I really like about the articles that deal with the Dark Gods, is that it makes space for worshippers who don't go about sacrificing nubile virgins every weekend. There are some good stuff for a DM to work with with those varient sects.
Thanks a lot. It's especially gratifying to see people recognizing and commenting on the little parts I've gone out of my way to add.
These articles are a fun intellectual challenge to write, especially given on how I'm trying to create an overall worldview based on the god's portfolio, without making it seem caricatured. I'm also trying to show that good gods can have less-than-moral servants, and evil gods can have less-than-depraved servants.
Side question: How many more of these are in the loop currently?
Procan and Vecna are the ones I just recently completed, and so they're in the pipeline. That's the most fun thing of writing these profiles: extrapolating a god's moral beliefs and teachings from their basic portfolio, as well as trying to grey the colors up by making some of the evil gods a little less black and the good gods a little less white. It makes for an extremely interesting intellectual challenge.
Plus, I also enjoy messing with peoples' expectations: the church of St. Cuthbert is not an intellectually staid, conformist, rigid and doctrinaire faith; it's arguably one of the most intellectually fertile and intensely debated faiths in the Flanaess.
I got the idea from, believe it or not, Christianity. Despite radical critics who might portray religion as being intellectually deadening and mindlessly conforming, it's actually as rich with intellectual and philosophical debate as any secular school of thought, and so I created the Variant Sects section on purpose to show how the faiths can be evolving from within. More importantly, from a gaming standpoint, it also allows PCs and DMs some roleplaying flexibility in creating and running their clerics and paladins.
Finally, I also took care to point out areas where the various faiths are weakly supported or banned-too often, it seems to me, things like religions and militaries are only described when they're strong; I wanted to also show where militaries and religions might be weak. _________________ <div align="left">Going to war without Keoland is like going to war without a pipe organ. They both make a lot of noise and they're both a lot of dead weight, so what's the point in taking them along? </div>
Yes the Cuthbert one was the best read to date IMO. I could see the Christianity influence, especially since I've been embroiled in reading a huge nonfiction book on the Crusades.
Procan eh? *rubs hands* That's a new one for me. Excellent.
Yep. I've enjoyed this series throughout, as much as I did your "On the *insert you favorite humanoid monster race* of the Flanaess" series. The last two gods though have been my favorites.
One thing I've been interested in lately in looking at the worship of the various gods of Oerth is the factor of "incidental" worship of Incabulos (and possibly other evil gods) in the form of folk rituals carried out by fearful peasants seeking to avert the plague and such. You mention something like this but seem to indicate it being carried out through the medium of a priesthood. What I'm talking more about is some peasants who had a bad crop and a cholera outbreak going down to the crossroads to sacrifice a black goat at midnight to keep the Lord of Pestilence from wiping out the town, because that's what they did when Granny Weatherwax was a girl. No real active priesthood involved but Incabulos is getting worshiped so he's happy. Well, happy as a god of pestilence is going to be.
I too will be very interested to see what you make of Procan, especially in light of the Oeridian's history as steppe nomads, although I can see a transition from weather/rain god to tempestuous sea god.
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There are some good stuff for a DM to work with with those varient sects.
