#contemplative orders

God of empty places, oblivion, ruins. An apocalyptic god of unknown origin, Groetus is the distant and malevolent skull-like moon hovering over Pharasma’s Boneyard—a dispassionate observer who patiently waits for the end of all things. Groetus has no organized faith.

--- Starfinder Core Rulebook (2017)

Morilux: Shipyard of nihilism. Founded in 301 ag by a disillusioned shatori leading a cult of Groetus, the god of the end times, the spaceport Morilux provides its faithful populace a clear view of the dying star around which their planet, Astevint, orbits. Morilux’s squat, makeshift shelters are built amid twisting brass ruins that jut from the ground like the ribs of some dead metallic titan. A jagged chasm tears across the settlement’s center, above which perches Absent Abbey, the port’s primary religious building.

Originally, Morilux simply served as a refuge for doomspeakers to contemplate entropy. However, the nearby dwindling star attracted astronomers who have politely coexisted here for years. Morilux also seems to be a magnet for ruin, with an unlikely number of disabled starships serendipitously sputtering into the area. At first, the Groetans reveled in the dying spacecraft, but eventually, enough ships sought repairs that the faith developed a new tradition: imperfect repair. For a meager fee, Morilux’s nihilistic mechanics repair visiting spacecraft on two conditions. First, the crew must attend the Groetans’ religious gatherings (even if they don’t participate directly), afterward releasing any crew who wish to remain. Second, the starship’s repairs never bring it back to peak performance; the mechanics always leave or even introduce minor flaws that gradually contribute to the vessel’s eventual failure.

--- Starfinder: Ports of Call (2023)

Okay. So Groetus is actually a Pathfinder deity too. He’s the strange skull-faced moon hanging over the afterlife dimension of the Boneyard, waiting for the end of days where he’ll turn out the lights, as it were. But it’s his Starfinder incarnation that I first fell in love with, and almost entirely because of the above entry in Ports of Call.

Because. Look. He’s the uncaring god of doomsayers and nihilists, written about primarily by madmen. He’s not really that interesting? He doesn’t do much or say much. He really is hanging around just waiting for his job to finish at the end of days.

But. When you put his followers into a continuous situation. When you take a nihilistic cult and give them a community, give them a location, make what happens around it their problem, to the point where they have to begrudgingly interact. Like. Morilux is fantastic. ‘Look, all we’re trying to do is have a peaceful dying settlement looking out on a dying star to while away eternity while awaiting the end, and in order to stop your damned shipwrecks cluttering up the view, we’re going to fix you up just enough so that you can limp off and die somewhere else’. Like, it’s callous and cruel, but also kind of hilariously begrudging? Imagine arriving here, your starship dying around you, desperate for a port, any port, and you arrive here. Randomly. Flung out of the drift around this dying sun. And these incredibly dour and incredibly aggravated doomsayers on the nearby planet offer you only the barest skeleton of a repair, with the explicitly stated goal that you go do your dying elsewhere. The despair and the fury and the disbelief you’d have to feel. But you accept, because what else can you do? And you leave on a wing and a prayer to any other deity.

I also love how they had to … Groetus in his Pathfinder incarnation actually had an anathema against artificially extending something’s lifespan, as well as giving hope. In Starfinder he’s too minor to have stated anathema, but I don’t see why he wouldn’t still have that one. So Morilux is playing fast and loose, here. To repair something at all rather than accept its inevitable end is borderline heresy over here. But when you put your cult of nihilists in a continuous situation. When you give them neighbours and an actual temple and a space port to have to look after. Lines get blurred. So we work out some … theological work arounds, a little light heresy, that’ll just shunt the problem off onto someone else. Which is great. A living breathing religion here. Ironically, given the deity that’s in it. Heh.

I also just enjoy the aesthetic of his cults. He’s the god of empty places, oblivion and ruins. His temple-spaceport is built on a planet orbiting a dying star, amidst the titanic brass ruins of some ancient and unexplained civilisation, in a temple called the Absent Abbey. We’re here, we’re chilling, we’re contemplating the inevitable end of all things. (Or we would be, if people would just stop annoying us). Again, he gives me some Sunless Sea vibes. A weirdly charming cosmic horror. You know?

He's not the most interactive of gods. Mostly, he’s just there, a symbol of the inevitable end. But he’s got a weird little religion (or maybe more a bunch of weird little religions) built up around him, and I really do feel that they add a lot to the setting.