The Wyzard Setting Essays

Here are some setting essays for my OD&D game.

Known Gods

There are many, many beings of sufficient power to arguably merit worship. This can be construed as a matter of scale. A demonic imp with delusions of grandeur might eventually teach a troupe of small monkeys to bow down and give it offerings; the relation of a demon price to its human cultists is not different in kind.

Clerics may serve some particular god or another, but they need not. Their magic is a different path from the arcane, but it is equally self-sufficient for game purposes. Because of the great many deities in the world (which might range from a gigantic alligator of ancient and inhuman intelligence worshipped by a tribe of goblins, to an actual extraplanar being with plenary powers over the material world), there will never be a comprehensive list of them. If a player invokes or worships some given being, I'm inclined to assume that being exists, in some sense, if it can be fitted into the setting in any sensible way.

Still, for purposes of versimilitude, I will list a few deities and describe them, so that players can gain a sense of the setting as it exists in my head.

The Hungry Man

The world's psychopomp and most widely recognized deity of death. He appears as a huge but emaciated gnoll, with spidery limbs and a big sack over one shoulder. When a being dies, and the corpse is not properly disposed of, their soul is collected by the Hungry Man and taken away to the Empty Lands, a featureless gray wasteland of infinite size. He curses the dead with his own endless and insatiable hunger, so that they spend eternity tearing at each other's substanceless flesh in an attempt to fill the utter emptiness within. It is occasionally possible for unusually clever and determined souls to somehow find their way back to the world from the lands of the dead. However, their hunger follows them, thus resulting in the strong tendency of the undead to desire the flesh, blood, or life energy of the living.

The Cult of Forst the Sexton

Forst began his mission a century ago, burying the dead to deny the Hungry Man. His disciples spread his practices, and roam the world, attempting to properly set the dead to rest. Preferably by burying, but entombment or cremation if neccessary, even exposure or in extremis symbolic anthropaphagy. Anything is preferrable to a soul being condemned to the Hungry Man's hell.

They frown upon the practice of internment with grave goods. "A Rich Grave is a robbed grave" is one of Forst's maxims. "you can't take it with you" and "Life's for the Living" being two of his other proverbs.

Astronomy

Demons, arcane magic, and many other dangerous phenomena originate among the outer darkness where the stars wheel and laugh. Across the indigo gulf of time and space, horrors and unnatural power come to visit the world of men. Beware the ice-rimed creatures who descend from the sky, for their journeys have been long and their places of origin strange beyond reckoning. Who knows what ends they may pursue, so far away from their natural place in the cosmos?

The Moons

There are three moons orbiting the world, spaced evenly around a single orbital period. Thus, at almost any time, there is at least one moon in the sky, and many nights there are two. One bears a reddish cast, the other a bluish one, and the last is a dark slate gray. They are considered to be the primary sources of magical power in the world, and also rich with demonic and other entities who may be summoned by some means or another. It is thought that there are likely entire civilizations dotted about their surface, perhaps of incredible antiquity.