Gods of the old Faith
In Balgrendia, worship of the Old Gods is not merely common—it is the marrow of daily life. The so-called New Faith has no foothold here; its missionaries are met with suspicion, driven off with harsh words or sharpened steel. The people do not debate the existence of gods—they know them to be real, if distant, and not always kind.
Foremost among these powers is The Queen of Dreams and Shadows, sovereign over all other deities and keeper of the ancient Shadowbound Pact. Beneath her, the rest of the Old Gods are honored, though rarely as they are in The Empire. Isolation, fear, and generations of oral tradition have shaped their worship into something darker, more visceral. Many deities are still recognizable from Imperial faith, albeit cloaked in new names and more harrowing aspects. In some communities certain of these deities have taken on local incarnations, worshipped in forms understood only by a single valley, town, or woodland parish—like the figures remembered in old Guthram or its neighboring settlements. These local gods may bear different faces or stories, but they are still facets of the same ancient powers - or at least that is what their followers claim to believe. In Breckheim County, Virelich would be a prime example of this.
What in the Empire might be a harvest god is here a god of bone-sown furrows. A storm deity there is a wrathful wind-haunter here. Even the most familiar gods wear stranger masks in Balgrendia—reflections twisted by the land’s cruel winters, haunted forests, and the ever-unpredictable fair folk. Revered still, but approached with wariness, their rituals demand not just faith, but caution. For in Balgrendia, every god is a god of consequence.
Foremost among these powers is The Queen of Dreams and Shadows, sovereign over all other deities and keeper of the ancient Shadowbound Pact. Beneath her, the rest of the Old Gods are honored, though rarely as they are in The Empire. Isolation, fear, and generations of oral tradition have shaped their worship into something darker, more visceral. Many deities are still recognizable from Imperial faith, albeit cloaked in new names and more harrowing aspects. In some communities certain of these deities have taken on local incarnations, worshipped in forms understood only by a single valley, town, or woodland parish—like the figures remembered in old Guthram or its neighboring settlements. These local gods may bear different faces or stories, but they are still facets of the same ancient powers - or at least that is what their followers claim to believe. In Breckheim County, Virelich would be a prime example of this.
What in the Empire might be a harvest god is here a god of bone-sown furrows. A storm deity there is a wrathful wind-haunter here. Even the most familiar gods wear stranger masks in Balgrendia—reflections twisted by the land’s cruel winters, haunted forests, and the ever-unpredictable fair folk. Revered still, but approached with wariness, their rituals demand not just faith, but caution. For in Balgrendia, every god is a god of consequence.
