Deities of Marlamma
Gods infusing everything
The gods of the Marlammites are not distant abstractions; they are present and woven into the stone, the grain, the cycles of the moon, crops and cattle. Temples align with stars and with important celestial events. Rites mark the turning of Tenma’s moon. Blessings keep the walls standing, the wells clean, and the dead from walking. Every act, from firing a pot to making a meal to lighting a funeral pyre, is done with a god’s eye watching.
The greatest temple in Marlamma belongs to Siluru, whose hands cradle both womb and grave, whose special protection guards the city, and whose essence inhabits the physical body of the Empress. But others walk the hills too: the fire-born sun, the veiled moon and her wandering consorts, the storm dragon bound in the mountains. To live in Marlamma is to walk roads laid by divine hands, protected by divine walls, under the light of a very close sun whose name you know.
Major Gods and Goddesses
These are the gods without whom no city can rise, no bread can bake, and no baby survives to adulthood. Not remotely all the gods, but enough to get us started, surely.
Siluru, She Who Blossoms and Withers
- Domain: Fertility, decay, harvest, death, cycles
- Symbol: Stalks of wheat erupting from either a tangle of brambles or a human ribcage
- Appearance: A tall figure crowned with fruiting vines and bone ornaments, her robes layered in blossoms and burial shrouds. Her face changes — maiden in spring, deathmask in winter.
- Myth: Siluru walked from the lakebed before the first people rose from the clay. She sowed life into their hearts and rot into their graves, and declared both holy.
- Worship/Taboo:
- Her priesthood is divided: midwives and harvesters in one branch, undertakers and plague-tenders in the other.
- To waste food or destroy crops, even in war, is to insult her. To burn a corpse outside ritual is to risk her wrath. Communing with the undead will guarantee it,
- All first fruits are offered to her, and final breaths too.
- Her priesthood has mastered the spell 'Wither and Bloom' - obviously.
Yamut, the Fire-Born Son
- Domain: Sun, order, justice, fire, oaths, kings
- Symbol: A golden disc with eight outward rays
- Appearance: A warrior cast in firelight — youthful, stern, and veiled in flame. His voice sounds like bronze striking bronze.
- Myth: Yamut was born from the breath of Ulem (God of the earth and roots of the mountains) and given the heart of fire. He descended from the heavens with a spear of law to bind Drahal, the storm dragon.
- Worship/Taboo:
- Oaths sworn by Yamut must be kept — or the sun will bear witness to your failure.
- His rites are performed at dawn, never in shadow.
- He begat the first true king of Marlamma. Dynasties have changed hands may times since then, and now the line of Siluru flows through the Divine God-Empress.
- Solar eclipses are primal, terrifying events that happen with blessed rarity, only once in a generation, but they inevitably allow the dishonored dead and myriad abominations to cross over from the Danuat, the realm of monsters. As such they are dreaded and feared. Lunar eclipses are more common, and unnerving, but less dangerous.
Drahal, the Dragon of Storms
- Domain: Storms, the sea, calamity, earthquakes, chaos; not an evil god, but a harbinger of significant change.
- Symbol: A wave curling into a fang, or a lightning bolt striking a mountain peak
- Appearance: Seen in omens — a twisting stormcloud with a dragon’s voice, or a sea-serpent of glinting scales under thunder. No one sees Drahal directly and lives unchanged. To avoid attracting his attention he is generally not referred to by name, but rather as the Storm Dragon (everyone knows which one is meant) or the Holy Harbinger (specifically as an agent of change or bad omens, like the death of a ruler).
- Myth: Drahal once flooded the world with his oceans, devouring breath and tide alike. It was Yamut who struck him down, drying the land with his fire. After defeating the dragon, the people of Yamut bound Drahal with ritual and stone. His bones shape the mountains; his heart still beats beneath Marlamma.
- Worship/Taboo:
- Drahal has no temple in the city — only shrines in wild places. However he has several priestly orders, intended to supplicate rather than awaken his notice. The most prominent of these are Nephelomancers, navigation-skilled priests who are indispensable on a ship crew to read omens and portents in cloud shapes, winds, lightning, and the position of these clouds against the stars., and to invoke the favor of elemental spirits on sea journeys.
- Sailors leave offerings at cliffside cairns or whisper his name into clay jars tossed overboard before storms.
- To summon Drahal is possible… and unforgivable. Electrical and lightning magic is especially dangerous if the proper supplication isn't made to avoid Drahal's notice or jealousy before invoking such spells. As the Dragon-god of storms, he may get jealous or see such displays as a challenge.
Tenma, the Veiled Eye
Tenma is the goddess of the Moon, and the primary deity of magic. The phases of the moon each create different effects every month as they cycle from new moon to full moon and back again. The interactions of her five consorts - five planets in the Tergaith system with prograde and retrograde motion in the sky - create additional refinements to those effects. A chart listing all of those phases and effects will be added, but only her priests are truly fluent in all of these permutations, and PCs can always attempt a DC 12 Arcana, History or Religion check to recall the basics; some, like weapons magically sharpening themselves when Zirukhal is under Olyr, are certainly more well known than other more subtle effects.
- Domain: The moon, time, dreams, prophecy, cycles, hidden knowledge
- Symbol: A silver disc surrounded by five orbiting dots
- Appearance: A veiled figure in layered robes of silver and blue, her face glimpsed only in reflections or dreams. She may appear as an owl with star-feathered wings, or as a drifting orb accompanied by her five consorts.
- Myth: Tenma rose before dawn was born. She carries the secrets of time beneath her veil and taught mortals to track the stars. Her lovers — Zhenra, Olyr, Ithilun, Baruth, and Kelenna — orbit her still, shaping fate and magic with every phase.
- Worship/Taboo:
- Her priests are astronomers, mathematicians, mages and dream-readers.
- Temples to Tenma double as observatories, built with open domes and sacred sightlines.
- To speak of prophecy under a waxing moon is blessed. To speak of it under a waning moon is dangerous.
- Her phases not only demarcate tides, time and the cycle of fertility and birth, but also shape the nature of magic itself.
- A significant amount of time and effort is expended on predicting lunar eclipses and interpreting the magical effects of comets as they pass through the heavens, and the knowledge of the mathematics involved is hoarded carefully. Solar eclipses only occur during Tanuvra (New Moon), while Lunar eclipses only occur during the Kinur (full moon).
- The Consorts of Tenma:
- Olyr – The Red Dancer, associated with war and blood rituals, zigs and zags in retrograde
- Ithilun – The Pale Mirror, a slow-moving ice giant, invoked in oaths and funerals
- Zhenra – The Flickering Eye, vanishes for weeks, associated with betrayal and revelation
- Baruth – The Twin Flame, appears as two worlds that split and rejoin; lover or sibling
- Kelenna – The Green Seeker, brightest before dawn, goddess of planting and spring, seen as Tenma’s errant daughter
Mythology & Lore
Marlamma's religious mythology is rich and varied, and includes tales of the Gods, their conflicts, the creation of Tergaith, the creation of humans, myths about the founding of cities and the building of wonders, myths about natural phenomena, and many tales of heroes, both heroes of war and those who vanquished mighty monsters.
Cosmological Views
Tergaith is the middle world, a crystal sphere surrounded by a darker outer realm of magic and monsters called the Danuat, the vast night sky and lands beyond which the impure soul of the dead has to pass through to reach Ain, the Garden of the Gods and source of all light. Funerary rites are focused on empowering the dead to reach Ain, and also on ensuring the dead don't remain in the mortal realms to threaten the living. Souls who fail to pass through Danuat may be forced to rest for a time in Gloel, the realm of the unworthy dead, and those who are truly unworthy will be trapped in its gloomy darkness for all time. Taken together, these realms are referred to by priests as the Four Partitions.
Priesthood
Each major deity has its own priestly orders and vocations, but they generally have at least a few things in common. First, both mathematics and writing have an element of magic in them, and the contemplation or production of either equations or writing often routes through a scribe, which is a class of priest. Mundane writings such as receipts and mundane mathematics like tax calculations are readily available to all, but literacy is far from universal, in part because the writing system is so complex and the mathematical symbols are so cumbersome.
Priests are considered to be the transmitter of divine messages, often in the form of prophecy, which in this case simply means the utterance of the god, whether with or without a fortune-telling element. As such they try to embody the ethics and tenets of the faith more visibly than the common person.
Their education and access to information sets them apart from common people, which in turn gives them access to more wealth and power, but there are large segments of 'working class' priests devoted to the gods of rope, bricks and pottery, as well as the seafaring, weather-interpreting priests of the Holy Harbinger.
Civic Gods of Common Folk
Ezzurah the Potter
- Symbol: A cracked water jar mended with gold
- Offerings: The first finished pot of each batch, fired with incense ash
- Cult Role: Worshipped by artisans and builders; potters often double as lay priests. Working class priesthood.
- Myth: Ezzurah shaped the first mortal's body from riverbank clay and baked it in Yamut’s fire.
- Taboo: Breaking pottery intentionally is a grave insult to Ezzurah — doing so without apology can cause leaks, sinkholes, and stillbirths
Vogal the Binder
- Domain: Rope, fabric, weaving, thread, unity, social contracts
- Symbol: A three-strandes cord
- Offerings: Twined grass, old cords, ceremonial knots
- Cult Role: Oversees marriages, legal contracts, caravan security, and irrigation channels. Every rope crossing a stream is ritually tied with a Vokhal’s knot.
- Myth: Vogal bound the hands of the first thieves and wove the noose of the first execution.
- Taboo: ?
Naldua the Watersweet
- Domain: Water purity, wells, cisterns, rainfall, thirst. Note that Drahal is the sea god, while Naldua is more concerned with the water itself, and at smaller scales.
- Symbol: Three drops falling into a bowl
- Offerings: Clean water poured from a left hand, or the first scoop from a new well
- Cult Role: Priests test for poisoned or cursed water; every public cistern has a basin for Naldua’s blessing
- Myth: Naldua tasted the poisoned tears of Drahal, distilled them through her body, and spat out the rivers.
- Taboo: The creation of cursed or unholy water is an abomination to Naldua.
Hammat the Brick-Mother
- Domain: Brickmaking, shelter, heat, mortar, ovens
- Symbol: A trowel crossed with a baking paddle
- Offerings: Ash, cracked bricks, bread baked in old ovens
- Cult Role: Oversees construction and cooking. Temples to Hammat are often built as community hearths.
- Myth: Hammat learned to bake bricks by watching Siluru dry leaves. She taught the people to build “earth that stands like stone.”
- Taboo: Houses without a hearth are said to anger Hammat. Bread baked magically on cold stone is a funerary food.
Tazmir of Flocks and Herds
- Domain: Domesticated animals, herds, fertility, cunning, judges
- Symbol: A crooked shepherd’s staff wrapped with a horned snake
- Appearance: Sometimes a tired goatherd in dusty robes; sometimes a white ram, bull, or goat hidden among the flock. In wrath, he comes as a wolf walking upright, with the horns of a ram.
- Myth: Tazmir was once a beast himself, shaped by Siluru to watch over the herds of the first people.
- Worship/Taboo: His name is often whistled, not spoken, to avoid calling him down.