#loviatar

dnd villain/unpleasant fellow i needed to exorcise from my head. Marrow, a lich and the head of a Loviatar temple. The deity helped create his phylactery, so he could serve her eternally. Undeath also lets Marrow be rather creative in his worship of Loviatar...

Priests of the Faerunian Pantheon via "Faiths and Avatars"

I think there's a certain level of like... separation from reality when it comes to the way some fantasy writers look at "evil groups". There's a desire to see Evil People tm as something beyond human, incapable of having a domestic life in the first place, incapable of being happy. Seeing them as people who just live to do cult rituals. Which I think is lame and wrong. People who do bad things are in general, still people who can feel and think just as deeply as Good People tm. So I'm poking at that with Khal.

Another things fantasy writers tend to do with Evil Churches is make their dogma really flat or kind of anti-intellectual, in a way. Which can work. Sometimes the drive to do bad is just money or power or something and people use faith as a front. Sometimes the flatness is intentional. But if you want to build a genuine religion with people who genuinely are driven to live by this faith you gotta give some substance to why the people involved believe in the church the way they do.

I do actually think the forgotten realms did something interesting and kind of nuanced with Loviatar, and with Dambrath as well. (I definitely wanna talk more about Dambrath eventually.) There's rules and expectations to how one should deal and receive pain in Loviatar's church, what's too much and what is warranted, philosophy behind what you gain from it and why. There's talk of the importance of relief or even pleasure as an antithesis to pain, and the concept of abstaining. These are not people with a mindless desire to Hurt. This is a religion that is so well grounded as something one can just become part of that there was a year in the forgotten realms naming scheme called the year of pain, because so many people were converting.

These are people with strong philosophical beliefs around suffering and pleasure and honor and personal betterment. And it's awesome. So I'm doing something there, too. Khal'roth is someone who, socially, often gets kind of profiled into being seen as the big violent unpredictable brute whose primary drive is to Hurt for Hurtings Sake. But he's not?

"Did he spank you growing up, or go straight for the cat-o'-nine?"