Godhunters

The Godhunters are an occult order dedicated to seeking out and eliminating those they deem unworthy of immortality. This includes any immortal being that is still bound to a material form or lacks the ability to attract dedicated worshippers - in short, any immortal who is not an established deity, as well as those who seek to attain immortality.

Structure

The Godhunters are a widely variable organization. Some members are members of court with quite a lot of political power, granting them access to a great deal of information regarding events in the kingdom. Others are mere common folk, often bartenders, thieves, or spies, who keep their ears to the ground for rumours of people seeking immortality. The Hunters operate in mostly autonomous cells, each group only knowing how to reach a few others, and have not had a formal leader in centuries.
Historically, the organization included a martial arm, made up of powerful warriors and magi dedicated to the cause, but this has proven to be far from sustainable: with the Godhunter's success, there are so few people mad enough to strive for immortality that it is impossible to maintain a force with sufficient experience to take on such threats when they do arise. Now, they simply monitor those powerful enough to take on such a challenge and hire them as mercenaries when they are needed. The rewards they offer are quite lucrative, often including rare artifacts or large sums of gold fincanced by members who rank among the political elite.

History

The Hunters of the Profane Immortal were born in the ashes of the Ancoran Empire, in hopes of preventing a similar downfall from happening again. It is well known that the disaster that ended the Empire was an experiment involving the magical Anchor in the capital intended to tap into the energies it had absorbed over the centuries it existed, and those who founded the Godhunters believed this was intended to propel the Archmage to an ascended state of being, making him a god with no worshippers.
There is a theological theory that was widely discussed in the last decades of the Empire that the reason so few beings ascend to godhood is due to some primordial entity beyond even the gods that seeks out and destroys those who seek immortality, and the few who do ascend are those who survived and gained enough power to persist despite this entity's protection. The founding Godhunters believed that this entity had caused the backlash that destroyed the Archmage attempting to ascend and that the capital of the Empire was collateral damage. In an effort to prevent such a disaster from happening again, they reasoned, they could take on the role themselves, making more targeted strikes to eliminate those who seek to attain godhood without wiping out whole population centres just because they happened to be close by.
In the seventeen centuries since, the organization has grown both more secretive and more pragmatic. The theory of this primordial entity has long since been discounted by mainstream scholars, and even within the organization there are many who do not truly believe such a being could exist, believing instead in the cause of curbing the ambitions of those powerful and mad enough to attempt to ascend beyond their mortal limits. After a deadly private war between the Godhunters and a cult of powerful magi that sought the power of lichdom in the 400s AE, the public face of the Godhunters was disbanded. After all, anyone intent on attaining immortality will likely seek to sabotage a group dedicated to preventing them from reaching that goal.
Today, the Godhunters persist in secret, having agents active in every kingdom of the Sleeping Lands, as well as in a few settlements in the surrounding Wildlands.

Founding Date

2 AE

Type

Secret, Occult

Alternative Names

Formal: Hunters of the Profane Immortal.