Because we got into the Perun/Velesh conflict last night and it may be relevant to your goals/understanding of...
Because we got into the Perun/Velesh conflict last night and it may be relevant to your goals/understanding of what's happening in the campaign world, Vilem explains a few things about Old Pahr religion (based on some old notes from my campaign notebook):
1. That the Pahr religion is a “softshell” polytheism, a loose doctrine that accepts that there are other gods and divine forces. Some Old Pahr doctrine teaches that these gods are just archetypes but the dominant belief is a simple shrug of the shoulders and loose if vaguely contemptuous acceptance of “those crazy foreigners and their over-complicated, demanding gods.” The Sun Lord and Solarity in general even gets this treatment.
2. That a key reason for this is an old belief that the Pahr gods and people are not “of Zem”--that they wandered into this world during the so-called Second Exile at a point in the northeast of the steppes. Old Pahr maintain that they are in the Third Exile, while the Pahr of the Cantons mostly maintain a loose cultural nod to the traditions around the Second Exile and scoff at the TE view as a bunch of hillbilly fundamentalists.
3.Old Pahr believers are not henotheists like in most D&D religion where most practitioners hold and pray to a single god among many. Only priests, fanatics and monomaniacs typically worship a single deity most everyone else will worship all of them if they believe at all. (A big exception is Pahr Solarists who may maintain a small, household shrine to say Radehost or Svat as a cosmic bet hedge.) So though the priests or druids of Perun and Velesh would prefer that their flocks not worship the other god, they are pretty much powerless to forbid cross-worship.
4. Only the Pahr gods currently listed in the HC Cosmology have enough “divine juice” to produce spells for clerics. Velesh may be having a comeback since you freed him and with the opening of the Temple.
5. The Pahr gods like many divine beings in Zem could proliferate at one time. It's unclear if this is a symptom or a causal agent in their current eclipse, but they cannot produce any more. Stormchild was the last godling produced by this pantheon.
6. There are a host of minor Pahr gods and godlings considered dead or nearly-dead. The major considered-dead ones from the pantheon include: Horz (Sun God presumed eaten), Chernaboc/Biliboc(the Black God/White God, a dual-being), Mokosh the Mother-Hen, Perun, Krasnik the Fire-Boyar, Povika the Gravy Urn-Bearer.
I rather like this crappy weird watercolor of an artifact-stealing Veles (depicted as an Albino Minotaur!) riding a boar away from a pursuing bear (clearly Medved).
ReplyDeleteare there any known sacred places for any of those considered-dead gods?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the roundup and clarification. This is very helpful, especially since I missed the initial Velesh/Perun introduction way back when and have been playing catchup (see my confusion re: whose axe was down at the bottom).
ReplyDeleteOh, that is cool. Wish more of that went into the HC Cosmology. Second edition?
ReplyDeleteWell ones that you or Vilem knows about:
ReplyDelete1. Krasnik the Fire-Boyar had a great temple-workshop on a mountain. The location was only revealed to initiates but it said to be somewhere in the mountains to the northeast of the Hill Cantons. The Rarog were his sacred servants and may know more.
2. You encountered (and witnessed her death) an aspect of Mokosh in the Rubicand Caverns in a site sacred to her.
3. Perun had a massive 400-stone pillar in the Translittoral Canton of Heimutbach that was central to his worship but it was torn down by the Overking and the stones were used to build lavatories.
Where is Heimutbach?
ReplyDeletewe should also research stories on the other five axe copies
ReplyDeletei have more cleric questions, i will formulate them to less than blather
ReplyDeletecole long I misspelled it above: http://hillcantons.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-hill-cantons-wilderness-crawl.html
ReplyDeletewhere is that map in relation to Marlinko,etc?
ReplyDeleteThat canton is directly north of the Hill Cantons map. It's the borderlands area one over in other words so just a little further than the distance to the Feral Shore.
ReplyDeleteWish we got to play more sessions of the wilderness crawl.
ReplyDeleteYeah me too and the Survival wilderness one. I can't remember why I ditched the first other than maybe time/energy commitment.
ReplyDeletei actually think a entire hangout session of chris as vilhem and us asking questions about relegion would be a fun night, if we planned out the correct beverages and munchies first
ReplyDeleteAre they not the same?
ReplyDeleteAlso, if it is appropriate for a lower-level party, maybe we could commission a FLAILSNAILS team to explore it for us after the Misty Isles playtest?
Hoimatbuch is where (effected with the traditional mid-range Black Shapka Optional degree of formality) Malý Hoimatbuch-Zlatokopka-Gertschaft-Leipov-née-Hamezd, Sub-Wildgravate Overseeing the Backwoods Lunatics of the Not-Quite-the-Šuma beyond Lakomec Creek but before the Scrubby Bit with All the Starving Wolves, Holdings Most Heathen and Uncivil but Not Yet in the Weird by the Caprice of Our Most Puissant Sun is.
ReplyDeleteJust south of the Marches of Nur, where there be WARBEARS.
James Aulds I need to work on my Willie voice/persona. Maybe I should get stoned.
ReplyDeleteRobert Parker they are close geographically but different. The survival one was on a pointcrawl map.
ReplyDeleteIs there a great book of phar religion or is it scatter shot in many books and scrolls. What are clerics of the whole pantheon called. How.many do we have at the temple.
ReplyDeleteWhere can we get Elder Scrolls-style holy books of the Pahr?
ReplyDeleteThere is no codified liturgy and no central text of any kind. Oral tradition is most important but some mysteries and myths were transcribed into tree bark slabs and carefully preserved by local high priests and archdruids. There is a huge range of regional variation of belief even between neighboring valleys.
ReplyDeleteRobert Parker I know a guy in Marlinko who get you one real cheap.
ReplyDelete