AZZATAR
The Darklord
God of Hate, Pain, Darkness
Alignment: Lawful Evil
Cleric’s Alignments: Any
Domains: Darkness, Death, Destruction, Evil, Law
Symbol: Bloody Shackles
Favored Weapon: heavy flail
Centers of Worship: Kor Adez
Nationality:
Obedience (need the Deific Obedience feat):
Persuade a creature to allow you to inflict a small amount of pain on it. This can be as subtle as thin needles under the skin or as overt as a lashing with a whip - whatever the subject agrees to. If you can legally procure an individual, such as through legalized slavery, you may use a purchased subject instead. If no suitable individuals can be located, coil a spiked chain into a nest and kneel on it, letting your weight sink your knees into the spikes. Whip your own back while chanting praises to Azzatar. Gain a +2 sacred bonus on saving throws against spells that deal hit point damage.
Evangelist Boons:
1. Unbending Faith (Sp): protection from chaos 3/day, arrow of law 2/day, or pain strike 1/day
2. Strike of the Endless (Ex): Three times per day, you can make a strike of the endless against an opponent. You must declare your use of this ability before you roll your attack, and if your attack misses, the strike is wasted. You make an unarmed strike against your target, and if you hit, your target must succeed at a Fortitude save (with a DC equal to 10+ 1/2 your Hit Dice + your Wisdom modifier) or be blinded for 1d4 rounds. This ability doesn't work against creatures without eyes or who see by means other than vision (such as with blindsight or tremorsense). If you have a ki pool, you may spend 1 point from it to increase the saving throw DC of this ability by 4.
3. Agonizing Blow (Ex): Once per day, you can make an unarmed strike that deals agonizing pain to a single target. You must declare your use of this ability before you roll your attack, and if your attack misses, the strike is wasted. You make an unarmed strike against your target, and if you hit, your target must succeed at a Will save (with a DC equal to 10+ 1/2 your Hit Dice + your Wisdom modifier) or be blinded for 2d6 nonlethal damage each round for the next 10 rounds as terrible pain rips through its body. Additionally, during those rounds, your target is nauseated, and you gain a +4 circumstance bonus on Intimidate checks against it. If the target succeeds at its saving throw, it instead takes 1d6 points of nonlethal damage per round for the next 10 rounds, and is sickened for those 10 rounds. If you have a ki pool, you may spend 1 point from it to increase the saving throw DC of this ability by 4.
Exalted Boons:
1. Obscurement (Sp): obscuring mist 3/day, invisibility 2/day, or deeper darkness 1/day
2. Path of Darkness (Sp): Once per day, you can use shadow walk as a spell-like ability. When you reach your desired endpoint along the shadow path, you materialize direct;y where you desired instead of being shunted in a random direction as you normally would. Furthermore, if you use this ability on an unwilling creature, the creature takes a -2 penalty on its saving throw.
3. Fleshrending Ally (Sp): Once per day as a standard action, you can summon an interlocutor kyton to serve you. You gain telepathy with the interlocutor to a range of 100 feet. The kyton follows your commands perfectly for 1 minute for every Hit Die you possess before it vanishes back to its home on the Plane of Shadow. The interlocutor refuses to follow any commands that would cause it to act in an overly good or chaotic way. Such commands earn a spiky snarl of disapproval, or could even cause the kyton to attack you if the command is particularly egregious.
Introduction:
Azzatar is a twisted, cruel god who defiles flesh to bring pain and misery. He represents ever-present pain, emotional darkness, consuming envy, and debilitating loss. Unrepentantly evil, he finds only brief joy in the pain he causes others. His very existence is a corruption and parasite upon the world. His alien mind constantly seeks new ways to oppress, humiliate, demoralize, and destroy others. His stated desire is to flay every living thing until the entire world is an intertwined mass of bleeding flesh writhing in pain-wracked ecstasy. He whips the minds of serial killers, guides the hands of torturers, and plays the nerves of the suffering like a master bard.
Azzatar offers no great wisdoms, no promises of universal truth, no guarantee of rewards in the afterlife. His strange mind sees little difference between this life and the next, and he tortures living flesh and dead souls alike with hideous pleasure and delicious pain. It's possible that the bleak nihilism may be part of some more elaborate master plan incomprehensible to even his greatest priests, but so far the method of the message is that existence itself is pain. His faith is lawful, following the natural hierarchy of the strong preying on the weak, whether for food, entertainment, sex, or proof of dominance.
The Church:
The god's horrid affection attracts evil sadists, demented masochists, and those whose spirits are so wounded that only overwhelming pain distracts them from their sorrows. When prisoners left to starve in oubliettes cut their own flesh just to remind themselves they exist, the Darklord is there. Jilted lovers who make sick plans to avenge themselves or plot petty cruelties for their unfaithful mate feel his touch upon their souls.
There is no centralized church of Azzatar, and independent churches are content to cause and revel in the small bit of pain and misery they are able to inflict upon their corner of Raden. As a lawful faith, however, each sect has a clearly-defined hierarchy, based on physical power, endurance, willingness and ability to endure pain, and similar elements related to church practices.
Services to Azzatar always involve torture, whether performed on slaves, prisoners, or willing members of the cult. The more exquisite the agony, the greater there offering to the Darklord, and particularly skilled torturers can keepa victim just shy of passing out for day at a time, using magic or drugs to keep themselves awake for these extended "prayer sessions."
In the church, a superior priest is usually called "master" or "mistress" and equals and inferiors are addressed by name without title.
Temples and Shrines:
Temples of Azzatar are, for all intents and purposes, torture chambers, and often function as such even when not in use for religious ceremonies. Because of the unique and often disapproved practices which take place in the church, temporary temples are kept fairly simple with decorations brought in specially for services. In more remote areas, believers might make impromptu shrines in places where violence and pain have occurred.
A Priest’s Role:
Aside from the rare church-demanding duties, clerics of the Darklord have a single goal: bringing pain to the world. In the absence of moral and immoral guidance from their patron, most choose their own paths and use Azzatar's gifts to serve their own desires. Their deity is largely indifferent to mortal affairs, but still grants spells in response to the proper prayers. Many clerics seek power without responsibility and aren't particularly zealous. In other words, being a priest is a secondary calling to them, leaving them most of their time to focus on their obsessions with conquest, wealth, magical power, and so on. Some join the church because they tire of the conventional delights of a decadent lifestyle and seek the thrill of darker indulgences. Those who zealously join the church are usually mad or damaged individuals with a history of torturing animals. Such unbalanced sadists tend to rise to the highest ranks in the church of Azzatar because of their innate lust and desire for pain.
Adventurers:
Some people have been scarred by the things they have seen, or by the things that have been done to them. They lose the ability to feel, or they feel too deeply, and find release through physical affliction of heir flesh. Others are simply sociopaths and madmen, full of hatred for the world as they see it, or else decadent monsters with a penchant for cruel fetishes. Whatever their motivation, those who choose Azzatar as their deity are empty of pity and empathy; they are utterly amoral and merciless. The followers of Azzatar are called Azzites, and outside the faith the word is usually followed by spat curses or spoken in frightened whispers. For followers of the Darklord, pleasure and pain are two sides of the same glorious coin, and they seek to enrich themselves and others by granting both freely.
Clothing:
The church has no official formal garb, though most priests dress in fetishistic version of their god's own garments. Body modification and self-mutilation are the norm, and in some cases these experiments are so extreme that worshipers' flesh interweaves with their clothing to the point that removing it can kill them. Members of the church quickly learn how to keep wounds clean and free of infection, as well as how to keep them from the public eye. Those whose alterations are severe and cannot pass as normal often disguise themselves as lepers or monstrous half-breeds. Particularly skilled and clever members of the cult have been known to skin their victims, tan them into supple leather, and war the skin as a disgusting garment over their own wounds. Many of the church's flesh-artists are known for their ability to preserve facial skin so it can be worn like a mask, allowing wearers to pass inconspicuously for short periods of time under close scrutiny.
Holy Texts:
Azzatar's holy boom is the Flayed Umbral. It is usually bound in and made of flayed human skin. It contains all known fragments of lore and prophecy spoken by the god's prophets. The words are scratched onto the surface of the leather and stained with blood to make them readable. Older copies may have notes trying to interpret some of the more ambiguous phrases. The collection of quotes is extremely disjointed, and no two copies have the exact same order, sorting them by date, topic, or seemingly at random. Through the ravings of madmen, these comments tell the god's story from his own perspective, speaking of the exhilarating knowledge he discovered beyond the stars.
Holidays:
The faith of the Darklord has few holidays but, Azzatar being the god of darkness and all, regular worship generally occurs on nights of a new moon.
The Joymaking: The less flesh a person has, the more concentrated the sensation of plain and pleasure in the remaining flesh can be had. In an effort to concentrate the sensation of pain, this practice allows the wealthiest and luckiest of Azzites to have their limbs and non-vital organs amputated so that they remain a helpless head and torso, destined to live the rest of their lives as the subjects of limitless torture.
The Eternal Kiss: This holiday takes place on the first new moon of the year. This annual sacrifice lasts eleven days and often involves using the victim's entrails or cries of pain as soothsaying tools.
Aphorisms:
Abandon Your Tears: In a cult that worships pain, tears are evidence of weakness. When tortured victims cry, it shows they have not embraced their pain, and thus are unenlightened. When cultists are tortured, they love their pain and refuse to shed tears, focusing their energy on savoring the broad bloody line between agony and ecstasy. This aphorism is an admonition to the victim and advice to the faithful.
Experience Without Limits: This phrase has two meanings. It indicates that the cult seeks physical sensation beyond the normal limitations of mortals, mixing pleasure and pain to reach an experience on a new level. It also means that an Azzite should not let the rules of normal society dictate limitations to her goals and desires - if she wants to taste her sister's blood, or open her neighbor's chest to kiss the beating heart, so be it. There is an unspoken acknowledgment that everyone has this right, and thus the aggressor may later become the victim, for it is only natural that the strong dominate the weak.
Relations with Other Religions:
Azzatar has little concern for the dealing of other deities. As long as he can play with his many toys, the Darklord has no need for any alliances, wars, or diplomatic dealings. While often the target of vengeance from Raden's good deities, Azzatar himself does little to instigate conflict. That said, he is not above torturing followers of other faiths, and does so whenever possible. The only one safe from his evil ways is his sister Relunar, though he grants no such immunity to her faithful.
Realm:
Warped and corrupted by his presence, Azzatar's prison realm of Zatarkain was supposed to last for all time, sealing him deep within the Plane of Shadow and isolating him from the rest of creation. Yet some evil gods felt his presence would aid their constant wars of leverage and power, and a frailty within the god's binding was shattered and ended his imprisonment, allowing him to reenter the world. Rather than abandon his prison, however, Azzatar displayed his returned power by remaking it. Today, the god of darkness's domain exists as a region of complete and utter blackness, seen from the outside like a great obsidian wall rising from the ground and piercing the clouds above, dominating the Shadow Plane's landscape for miles. While no light violates its borders, the same cannot be said of the screams, as a hellish, wailing cacophony endlessly issues forth from the domain. Rarely, one of the god's petitioners bursts free as well, usually panicked and covered in lacerations, only to scream even more as his momentary—and likely orchestrated—freedom ends with the gloom extending out like the arms of a great black kraken, wrapping around him and dragging him back to his torment. Virtually nothing is known of the domain's interior, even by the god's followers, as with exceedingly rare exceptions, only Azzatar's deific servitors enter and exit the domain.
Planar Allies:
Namilion the Unquenchable (human vampire): Once a rapacious Azzite lieutenant, Namilion fell prey to a vampire and rose as an undead predator. Members of his own church captured and tortured him. He is a handsome middle-aged man with stark blond hair, prominent canines, and long elegant hands lacking fingernails. His entire abdomen is ripped open and empty—a wound his formidable regeneration has strangely never healed. When he drinks blood, it drains just as quickly out of his wounds. As a result, he is continually ravenous, and is prone to falling upon helpless foes to drink them dry. If conjured, he appreciates creatures he can feed on, large supplies of blood, or magic that can temporarily sate his hunger. He is a lawful evil human vampire fighter 5.
The Prince in Chains: This horrid amalgam of exposed flesh and writhing chains shaped like a wolf serves as Azzatar's herald. Originally a noble spirit-wolf who, according to legend, sired Dou-Bral, the Prince in Chains has been reduced to a travesty of its former self by the attentions of the Darklord. Once noble, the Prince in Chains seems to revel only in pain—its infliction and its receipt—and sees in it a fundamental truth of life's very existence. It delights in the pain experienced by sentient beings more so than the sufferings of dumb animals, but is not above torturing and slaying a beloved pet or animal companion for the nourishing reward of anguish caused to its owner. The Prince in Chains wanders the depths of the Plane of Shadow and patrols the lightless steel labyrinths of Zatarkain, seeking others with whom to share its epiphanies of pain. If summoned to the Material Plane by a servant of Azzatar, the Prince in Chains enjoys given human flesh to consume after a bit of playful torture. Azzite clerics view a wound bestowed by the Prince of Chains as a near unparalleled blessing, though few can hope to survive such an honor.
Manva Xeel (unique kyton evangelist): Also known as the Fiend Whose Wounds Are Like Wombs, this creature is an unnaturally tall and lithe kyton evangelist whose weapons continually abrade and slice its own flesh to reveal half-formed eyes, wagging tongues, and cysts that drop living maggots. This elf like thing never touches the ground with its feet, wrapping itself tightly from the calf down so that its pallid flesh never touches bare earth or stone. Manva Xeel speaks through a permanent wound in its throat. It has a fondness for wines, exotic drugs, and living slaves. Nobody knows its gender, and it may have surgically removed any evidence long ago.
For Faithful Characters:
Priests of Azzatar that follow his tenets and graces often are granted special powers by Azzatar.
- Using favored weapon in combat that causes a wound that would cause a scar (critical hit), heals the priest 50% of the damage caused.
- Priests who wear armor that leaves their skin exposed during combat and are wounded, revel in the pain and receive a +1 profane bonus to hit per wound received.