#pharika

Pharika, God of Affliction

Song of the Serpent’s Child

Hear now, O mortals, the tale of Skathos, the isle where Pharika hides her cruel gifts, where the sea does not promise salvation, but trial.

A boat cut through the heavy waves, a fragile craft upon the laughter of gods. There came a father, steady in his hand, broken in his heart; there came a mother, her lap burning with fever, holding a child wrapped in cloaks, little Leonore, five years only.

my localization of mtgjp's comic

Villain: Kallebonna, Stone Cold Crimelord

I hope for both our sakes you can finish this job. You want your brother back and I don’t want his ugly polluting the next concrete foundation I pour. 

Setup: Crime can be a sucking wound in the guts of a city, bleeding out lives and prosperity, or it can be a malign illness, working unseen to the slow degradation of its host. If boss Kallebonna had her way, crime would be an ossified pillar upon which the entire city could rest, an irreplaceable part of its own rock hard skeleton. 

Taking the underworld by storm in a flurry of petrification and hostile takeovers, Kallebonna carved out a space for herself among the city’s criminal class over thirty years ago that none have been able to wrest her from since. Despite her loansharking and the people she takes as collateral, the gorgon boss likes to think of herself as a keeper of the peace, ensuring the city’s power players cooperate with her guiding philosophy of “Play nice or I’ll have one of my men take a sledgehammer to your loved ones”. Kallebonna facilitates her threats by using agents to spy upon those who begin accruing influence within her city, determining who in their life would provide the greatest emotional collateral and then spiriting them off for a visit with the gorgon. 

Adventure Hooks: 

A caravan the party has been hired to guard is attacked by a band of mercenaries disguised as common bandits. Using Diversionary tactics, these attackers forgo the wealth of the caravan to instead target a specific crate, which the party only barley manage to wrest from their hands. Opening the box reveals a statue of a beautiful young man carefully dismembered and packed in such a way to minimize the risk of damage during transit. unbeknownst to anyone save the mercenaries’ mysterious benefactor, this statue is in fact the petrified lover of a powerful noble, being sent off to one of Kallebonna’s allies after his beau got in deep with the crimeboss over gambling debts.  The mercenaries will try again at some point in the future, and the caravan master’s contract (as does the party’s) specifies that she needs all goods delivered in tact in order to receive her pay.  The players may end up inadvertently working for a kidnapper, especially after the criminal contact spins a yarn about the statue being the last image of a dear friend that his enemies wish to cruelly steal away from him.     

Over and over again the local magistrate comes down like a hammer on the party’s criminal dealings, quashing their enterprise, putting bounties on them for seemingly minor infractions, and throwing them into the darkest dungeon should they ever be caught. In that gloom, the lawkeeper will approach the party and explain her plight.  One of her children has been abducted by the gorgon crimeboss, and she needs the party’s help in finding and retrieving their petrified body.  Kallebonna has numerous staches, ranging from the walls of tenement buildings she owns to an abandoned saltmine turned fortress to a warehouse off the city harbor where bodies lay deep below the surface. Discovering these hideouts and which one the magistrate’s child resides in is going to take some careful infiltration, to say nothing of heisting a marble statue from under the nose of Kallebonna’s loyal gang. 

thirteen-jades

Medusae?

As a fan of greek myth, I find the story of Medusa fascinating, in no small part because its a thematic clusterfuck that likely resulted from a few different stories getting sandwiched together.  Lets untangle some of these threads (mostly based on different versions I’ve heard, and how they bare relevance on the whole heroes slaying monsters thing): 

Medusa was a priestess of Athena who had an affair with Poseidon ( One of Athena’s main rivals regarding the founding of Athens) and defiled one of the goddess’s temples in the process. Unable to take revenge upon her uncle ( who was both family and a god) Athena curses Medusa to be a horrid monster. She also cursed her sisters for some reason.

Medusa was beautiful and was assaulted by Poseidon,  again unable to take revenge on her uncle ( but far more sympathetic this time) Athena makes it so that no man can ever touch or even LOOK at medusa again. After her death, Athena takes medusa’s head as an emblem on her shield/breastplate (not literally mounting the head there, how weird would that be?) as a symbol of her silent scorn #girlboss

The hero Perseus is tasked with killing Medusa by a king who wants him out of the picture in order to marry his mom. The gorgon in question is set up like all good mythic greek monsters, insurmountable by brute force and requiring a clever trick to overcome. (Mirror shield, give or take winged sandals and helm of invisibility).  Perseus, the mad lad, actually gives the king what he wanted, ending up turning him to stone in the process. What’s weird is how little Poseidon or Athena really feature in this tale (not at all and as vague guide respectively), which you think they would given how invested they are in Medusa’s creation. 

D&D also does this thing of making one signature monster into an entire species, trying to give a lone individual an ecology that somehow makes sense ( how do medusae reproduce and raise young?) 

Personally I’m very fond of the Theros god Pharika, mistress of venoms and cures as an origin for Medusae, much like how I have my Yuan-ti, Medusae are the results of a potent transformation brought about by alchemy and the snake goddess’s blessing, allowing the bearer to not only remake their own flesh in her image, but violently transmute the matter of others with but a glance. This allows you to treat a medusa’s appearance both as a random act of divine interference or as the culmination of some mad venom-mage’s ascension, much like lichdom. 

Edit: 

A helpful follower with more in-depth knowledge of greek mythology sent in this: 

Which makes total sense, and is inline with everything I know about Ovid (the transformation kink should have given it away), and while I knew about the “Medusa and her Sisters were born of Typhon+ Echidna” version, I failed to mention it in detail. My bad. 

Hippocrexe, oracle of affliction