Klothys

God of Destiny

Klothys is the God of Fate and Destiny on Theros. She is associated with red and green mana. Klothys has a mask on either side of her face, which implies she's a goddess with three aspects. Her long hair twists around her horns. She holds a large distaff with a spear-like tip in her left hand, which is laden with strands of her hair. In her right hand, she dangles a suspended spindle, which she uses to spin her gathered hair into the threads of fate. Her eyes are covered to signify that Destiny is blind and impartial. Her thumb has a sharp golden nail to cut the threads of fate.

She, alongside Kruphix, is one of the oldest gods.

The Binding of the Titans

Long ago, the titans had been sealed away in the Underworld by the combined might of the gods, and it was Klothys who volunteered to serve as their eternal jailer. While Erebos ruled his realm beyond death, Klothys acted as an eternal seal to ensure the titans remained imprisoned.

Believed to have sprung into existence during Theros’s earliest days, Klothys is the god of destiny and, along with Kruphix, one of the plane’s original deities. She oversees the order of the cosmos, ensuring that all things remain in their proper place, knowing how easily the cosmic balance could be undone if she were not vigilant. On the heels of a near-catastrophic upset of the cosmic order—the rise to godhood and subsequent defeat of the satyr Xenagos—Klothys has emerged from the Underworld for the first time in mortal memory to untangle the strands of destiny and set the world right.

Klothys typically appears as a woman with six curling horns and an impossibly long mane of pale hair that cascades around her horns, drapes over her eyes, and spools into her spear-like weapon and the various other spindles she carries.

Beneath her outward calm, Klothys seethes at the way mortals and gods alike have pulled apart and rearranged the threads of destiny to feed their petty ambitions. Her peaceful mien falls away in the presence of such villains. In her rage, her red-glowing eyes come into view through the veil of her hair, and she wields burning strands of hair as a devastating weapon.

Klothys’s Influence

Klothys is the embodiment and enforcer of destiny. Largely forgotten after ages spent in the Underworld, Klothys has only recently emerged, brimming with silent frustration at the state of Theros.

Each strand of Klothys’s hair is part of the fabric of destiny, the natural order that underpins all existence. Her followers claim to see these strands woven into all things, granting them understanding of cosmic truths and insights into how the future should unfold.

Klothys withdrew to the Underworld ages ago to keep watch over the imprisoned titans and ensure they couldn’t escape and destroy the order she had established. Due to this undertaking, she is also the god of secrets best kept quiet and powers best untouched.

Klothys’s Goals

Once content to oversee and preserve destiny from the Underworld, Klothys now endeavors to undo the cosmic damage caused by Heliod, Xenagos, and ambitious mortals in recent years. The ways in which they ravaged reality to realize their selfish dreams has threatened Theros, and only by untangling the strands of destiny can Klothys set things right. The status quo she seeks to restore, however, comes with a cost in mortal casualties and societal upheaval that would accompany this process. She intends to humble the same institutions that condoned or committed these crimes against Theros. When her efforts have laid low the proud, the defiant, and the exploitative, then Klothys will have restored the natural order and ensured the world’s survival.

Divine Relationships

Klothys views many of the gods with disdain, considering them to be complicit in Xenagos’s theogenesis, Heliod’s acts of arrogance, or both. She reserves special contempt for Heliod and his champions, relishing every opportunity to teach them humility.

Klothys also clashes with other gods associated with order and progress, seeing their defiance of the natural order as a dangerous affront. Ephara’s ravenous colonization, Iroas’s passion for overcoming insurmountable odds, and Karametra’s taming of nature all run the risk of inspiring ambitious mortals who lust for ever more power and strain to break away from their proper place in the cosmos.

Klothys respects the other gods whose interests balance creation and destruction, such as Thassa, Purphoros, and Nylea, considering them better attuned to Theros’s needs and destiny’s myriad outcomes. Nylea shares Klothys’s delight in the world’s natural cycles. Purphoros’s willingness to build and demolish appeases Klothys—as well as the fact that he despises Heliod as much as she does.

Klothys’s relationships with Erebos and Athreos are complicated. Ages spent in the Underworld with Erebos have driven home for her how arrogant and tyrannical he is, as ready to commit the same sins as Heliod if given the opportunity. Even so, Erebos and Klothys maintain a level of mutual respect. Until recently, Klothys and Athreos were unflappable allies. But now her emergence from the Underworld has blurred the borders between the realms, as she draws horrors into the mortal realm with her and thereby raises Athreos’s ire.

Of course, Klothys trusts no other god as much as she does Kruphix, who also recalls Theros’s earliest hours. The two have a deep respect for one another.

Worshiping Klothys

Klothys doesn’t trace her origins to mortal devotion, and she has languished in obscurity for almost the whole of human history. Unlike the other gods (except Kruphix), she doesn’t need worship to sustain or empower her, and she doesn’t seek out reverence or demand it. By and large, mortals are irrelevant to her, except insofar as they have played a role in tangling the strands of destiny by defying nature’s order.

Myths of Klothys

Klothys is barely remembered in the mortal world, having sequestered herself in the Underworld while human civilization was in its infancy. Some surviving myths speak of a personified “destiny” in a way that vaguely suggests the possibility of an actual god’s involvement.

Rage of Titans. The greatest threat to the young world of Theros was the godlike race of titans, born from the same swirling chaos as the world itself. Before any order could be imposed on the world, the titans had to be contained. Kruphix and Klothys worked together to imprison the titans in the deepest pits of the Underworld. Klothys voluntarily bound herself in the Underworld to keep the titans imprisoned, but that is, after all, the nature of destiny: once the natural order of the world had been put in place and preserved, no further action should have been required on her part to maintain it.

The Smoking Strand. Hidden far from civilized coasts lies a strand of Klothys’s hair that she purposefully plucked. Knotted in on itself, the strand appears as a seething ball of dense smoke. Any who touch the strand risk having it invade them, infecting them with a pernicious destiny that Klothys herself tore from the natural order. None can say what terrible destiny the Smoking Strand drives its possessor toward, but the ruins within which it lies might give some hint—caverns burrowed deep into a mountain of petrified bodies, the twisted obsidian corpses of humanoids and animals alike.

Twins at War. The newly formed gods Kruphix and Klothys emerged from opposite sides of the roiling tangle of possibilities that eventually gave birth to Theros. At first the two battled for supremacy, but they soon realized their conflict left their young world vulnerable to dangers from both inside and out. Putting their rivalry aside, the pair agreed it was better to share and have something than let their struggles destroy all creation.

Walkers of Woe. The nightmarish creatures known as woe striders are said to be products of Klothys’s punishment. These beings descend from an age when some mortals learned to unshackle themselves from the strands of destiny. To what end is a question lost to time, but Klothys put a quick end to these blasphemers and eradicated nearly all knowledge of their methods. Ever since, the shades of these accursed mortals have walked the Underworld as woe striders, monstrosities endlessly seeking strands of destiny that they might use to replace their own discarded lots.

Klothys’s Champions

Alignment: Usually neutral

Suggested Classes: Barbarian, cleric, ranger, warlock

Suggested Cleric Domains: Knowledge, War

Suggested Backgrounds: Folk hero, hermit, outlander, sage

Most champions of Klothys believe it is their destiny to fulfill a particular role or seek answers to omens they struggle to understand. They are passionate about punishing those who violate the cosmological order.

Klothys’s Favor

Klothys hasn’t had a mortal champion before. Upon emerging from the Underworld, she created a host of Nyxborn agents to help her restore Theros to its proper path. You might be one of these so-called Agents of Destiny (if you choose the Nyxborn supernatural gift, described in chapter 1), single-minded in the purpose for which you were made. Or you might be among the first of a new cadre of followers of Klothys. The Klothys’s Favor table suggests some possible connections between the god and a mortal follower.

Klothys’s Favor

d6	Circumstance
1	Your family suffered during the rise of Xenagos, leaving you with unresolved rage.
2	You swore yourself to Klothys, offering your service in exchange for reprieve from a mundane destiny.
3	Born under an ill omen, you were victimized by your neighbors’ superstitions before realizing that you were destined to serve Klothys.
4	You lost a loved one to the upheaval that followed Klothys from the Underworld. You planned revenge, but were awed at the sight of her and devoted yourself to her service.
5	You were a champion of Heliod until the emergence of Klothys showed you the danger of Heliod’s hubris.
6	You don’t know why Klothys has shown interest in you.

Devotion to Klothys

To follow Klothys is to accept the natural order of the cosmos and your place in it. It means accepting your destiny even as you strive against the bonds of fate. As a follower of Klothys, consider the ideals on the Klothys’s Ideals table as alternatives to those suggested for your background.

Klothys’s Ideals

d6	Ideal
1	Devotion. My devotion to my god is more important to me than what she stands for. (Any)
2	Stewardship. Preservation of the natural order supersedes the needs of civilization. (Neutral)
3	Humility. It is hubris to aspire to a higher place in the natural order than we are given. (Lawful)
4	Vigilance. Those who defy or manipulate destiny are menaces that must be stopped. (Neutral)
5	Fury. The world must be cleansed to make way for a new start. (Chaotic)
6	Protection. When gods or mortals go mad with power, it’s the powerless who suffer, and I mean to keep them safe. (Good)

Earning and Losing Piety

You increase your piety score to Klothys when you expand the god’s influence in the world in a concrete way through acts such as these:

• Defeating a creature that has stepped out of its place

• Repairing a significant wound dealt to destiny by the gods’ ambitions

• Teaching people about Klothys, her nature, and her return

Your piety score to Klothys decreases if you diminish her influence in the world, contradict her ideals, or threaten the integrity of destiny through acts such as these:

• Undoing a deserved punishment or curse suffered by another creature

• Willfully destroying a natural wonder

• Assisting a creature in undermining the natural order or exploiting destiny

Klothys’s Devotee

Piety 3+ Klothys trait

As a devotee of Klothys, you can manipulate the bonds of destiny that invisibly entangle every living thing. You can cast command with this trait a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum of once). You regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest. Wisdom is your spellcasting ability for this spell.

Klothys’s Votary

Piety 10+ Klothys trait

You can cast clairvoyance with this trait, requiring no material components. Once you cast the spell in this way, you can’t do so again until you finish a long rest. Wisdom is your spellcasting ability for this spell.

In addition, you have advantage on saving throws against being charmed.

Klothys’s Disciple

Piety 25+ Klothys trait

You develop a second sense, allowing you to intuit the tug and pull of destiny. You can’t be surprised, provided you aren’t incapacitated.

Champion of Destiny

Piety 50+ Klothys trait

You can increase your Strength or Wisdom score by 2 and also increase your maximum for that score by 2.