The Awakened

The Awakened are a group that rejects the deities and seeks to remove their influence from the world.

Public Agenda

To free people from the lie that they need the deities and allow them the chance to awaken their true potential.

History

According to legend the group can trace it's history back to the second age, when a group of scholars published a treatise on Awakening the true potential of the mortal races. Describing how magic and psionics could replicate some of the powers of the deities the document went on to question whether there was still a need for these powerful beings. Needless to say, most of the organised religions condemned the ideas it proposed and the authors were labelled as heretics. Most copies of the work were burned and the scholars who had penned it were forced to flee from more than one lynch mob. All of this outrage helped to give the text an air of forbidden mystery, ensuring it was sought out by those who had grown tired of the influence of the deities.
Over the course of several centuries the text was copied by hand many times, and the message in the text was gradually changed from a scholarly question about the role of the deities to a call for people to throw off the shackles of the deities by any means necessary. This more radical text became the basis for the founding of the group that would become known as the Awakened. Originally a small band of malcontents brought together by a charismatic gnome named Tervi Windermoot, the group used the adapted treatise as the basis for their ideology. Under Tervi's leadership they began plotting how to expose the folly of worshipping distant beings.
The plan the group developed was brutally simple - remove the deities' representatives and places of worship to force people to stand on their own. Despite their many grievances with the churches the group were at first reluctant to commit outright murder so they started by targeting places of worship. Lacking resources or experience the group at first hit easy targets, like shrines in villages, which they burned to the ground. A letter was left at the site of each attack, detailing the groups agenda and signed Those Awakened to Our True Potential.
The Awakened as they became known were largely ignored until their activities began affecting towns rather than villages and hamlets. By this time the group's message was already rooted deep in the rural areas, and their membership had increased tenfold. In attracting more members the Awakened had acquired people willing to do more than just destroy property and as they moved into the towns their targets changed from buildings to religious leaders. Many of the early attacks were stopped as Tervi had no practical experience of arranging murders and was reluctant to turn over planning to anyone else. Eventually though the lack of success and too many arrests of members of the Awakened forced Tervi to relinquish control of the group's violent activities, though Tervi remained nominally in charge.
As the intensity of the Awakened's attacks increased so did the response from the various lands they weer operating in.  With many members of the group being inexperienced in subtlety and misdirection the capture of one member usually led to the capture of all members in an area, and the leaders of the Awakened were forced to hide the existence of diferent parts of the group from each other.  When Tervi passed away the remaining leaders of the group decided that they would have the best chance of succeeding if they went their separate ways and stayed ignorant of each other's activities.  While this split their resources it proved a successful strategy for the groups long term survival.
Numerous organisations have claimed to have wiped out the Awakened, but somehow a remnant always survives.  They were there during the Necromancer War trying to lure clerics to their deaths at the hands of undead.  They were there during the Days of the One pointing out that their warnings had proved true while trying to undermine Oliver's clerics.  They were there at the founding of The Empire trying to prevent any religion from gaining influence in the imperial court.  And they are still around today, a threat lurking in the shadows, waiting for a chance to remove all traces of the deities' influence.

Awaken your true potential

Type

Illicit, Other