MELGAUTH
Queen of Rot
Goddess of Disease, Gluttony, and Undeath
Alignment: NE
Cleric’s Alignments: NE, N, CN, CE
Domains: Death, Evil, Magic, Strength, War
Symbol: Skeletal Boar's Head
Favored Weapon: Skull-topped Mace
Centers of Worship: Underdark, Kor Adez. Oran
Nationality: Oran
Obedience (need the Deific Obedience feat):
Sacrifice an unwilling living creature in the name of the Lord of Teeth. Draw the process out to inspire the maximum terror and suffering in your victim. The death blow you deal should be savage and destructive - do not grant your sacrifice a clean death. Once the creature is dead, remove one of its bones and sharpen it to a point. Use the bone to cut yourself deeply enough to leave a scar. Leave the sacrificed creature's mutilated form in the open where scavengers may devour it or travelers may see it and know of Xellix's power. Gain a +1 natural armor bonus to your AC.
Evangelist Boons:
1: Pestilent Penitent (Sp): curse water 3/day, feast of ashes 2/day, or contagion 1/day
2: Death Knowledge (Su): Your knowledge of the arcane workings of death increases. Your familiar can teach you one new spell from either the Death or Magic domain spell list. The spell must be of a level you can cast, and once you choose the spell, your selection can't be changed. If you cast spells from a spellbook, you learn a new spell in the same manner, though it appears magically in your spellbook. If you cast spells spontaneously, you can choose one spell to add to your list of spells known, but you gain no additional spell slots.
3: Blight of Ruin (Su): Your blight hex gains power from Melgauth's favor. If you use your blight hex on a plot of land, you can affect an area whose radius is equal to 20 x your combined witch and evangelist levels. If you blight a creature of the animal or plant type, increase the saving throw DC by 4 and the curse's effect to 2 points of Constitution damage per day. If the target successfully saves against your blight hex, it instead takes 3d6 points of negative energy damage. If you don't have access to the blight hex, you instead gain the ability to use mass fester once per day as a spell-like ability.
Exalted Boons:
1: Mistress of Undeath (Sp): inflict light wounds 3/day, desecrate 2/day, or animate dead 1/day
2: Bolstering Channel (Su): When you channel negative energy to heal undead creatures, you infuse the targets with negative energy made more powerful by Urgathoa's influence. Any undead creatures healed by your channeled energy increase their movement speed by 10 feet for 1 round for every Hit Die you possess.
3: Ally from the Grave (Sp): The Queen of Rot's servants have taken notice of your deeds and answer your call. Once per day as a standard action, you can summon a bhuta to serve you. You gain telepathy with the bhuta to a range of 100 feet. The bhuta follows your commands perfectly for 1 minute for every Hit Die you possess before vanishing back to its home. It doesn't obey commands that would make it perform overly good acts, and such instructions could cause it to attack you if they are particularly egregious.
Introduction:
Melgauth is an utterly amoral, hedonistic goddess, concerned only with satiating her own desires regardless of the consequences others suffer. Like Relunar, she strives for experience and a full appreciation of the world—but her appreciation is utterly selfish. She was once a mortal woman with a tremendous appetite for life, one who rebelled against the notion of being judged by Brazen and losing the joys of living. Somehow in death she found the strength to tear herself from Brazen's endless line of souls and return to Raden, becoming a divine being and the world's first undead creature. Her existence is a corruption of the natural order; some say her first divine footprints upon the soil of the Material Plane birthed plague and infection, and that the first shadows and wraiths were born of her breath.
The goddess's half-rotted form limits the sensations she can experience, so she makes up for this lack with gluttonous depravity—she's tasted the brains of human infants to savor their innocence, torn the heart from the last living member of a race just to feel the sensation of its hot blood on her hands, and inflicted boils and leprosy upon handsome princes just to see the unique patterns they form on royal flesh. To her, the dull existence of a dead soul is pointless and tedious compared to the vibrant intensity of mortal or undead sensation, and creatures should cram as much sensation into existence as possible. Asceticism is repugnant to her, and she particularly loathes those who follow the strict taboos of the Prophecies of Nirasil.
Melgauth is usually depicted as a beautiful, raven-haired woman from the waist up—much like her mortal self, though she's as pale as a hungry vampire. Her lower half is rotted and withered, decaying farther down until only blood-covered bones remain at her feet. When she walks, she leaves bloody, skeletal footprints. Although she sometimes manifests nude in the faithful's visions, she usually appears wearing a sheer red or black gown. From neck to toe, the gown is stained with hideous patches of black, brown, and red. On rare occasions, she assumes a monstrous shape similar to those of the hideous undead creatures known as daughters of Melgauth, with one huge arm covered in fanged mouths and a tail made of multiple fused spinal columns.
Melgauth's realm in the Great Beyond is a cluster of cities in a wasteland part of Abaddon, filled with undead residents indulging all of their mortal vices in great excess. The daemons of that realm observe Melgauth and her followers, but leave them alone and untouched—the main threat to her realm is attacks from Brazen's minions, who intend to repatriate undead souls to the Boneyard and restore them to their proper destination in the afterlife.
Though the Queen of Rot's church is interested primarily in undeath, some cults focus on her gluttonous aspect, indulging in decadent feasts of food, alcohol, and drugs, as well as lavish orgies. Unfortunately, in many cases these "dilettante" cults decline into more depraved practices, eventually embracing necromantic profanities and conversion to ghouls, vampires, and similar creatures.
When Melgauth is pleased, common food tastes delicious, water turns to fine wine, and meals are never so filling that the diner feels uncomfortable. There are also stories of starving worshipers unexpectedly finding injured or freshly killed meat (in some stories, the meat is humanoid). She rarely uses animals as messengers, but sometimes sends a death's head moth to lead a devout worshiper to a reward, or clouds of biting flies to warn away or punish a mortal. Female clerics who serve her particularly well may be transformed into daughters of Melgauth. When she's angry, food and water taste like ash and fill the belly with gnawing hunger that cannot be sated, and the target of her ire may be afflicted with rotting or swelling diseases that make it difficult to eat or speak. She has been known to paralyze an offender's legs so the victim must crawl, or reverse the taste of his food so that garbage and sewage are the only things he can bear to swallow. The afflicted can alleviate the condition by making a large sacrifice to Melgauth, either at a temple or by providing some gluttonous feast, drug experience, or other orgiastic excess in her name. On rare occasions, the only way to alleviate the curse is by willingly engaging in cannibalism, an act that taints the offender's soul and all but guarantees eternal allegiance to the Queen of Rot.
Melgauth's holy symbol is a skeletal boar's head, often drawn so the skull-markings are exaggerated.
The Church:
Those who worship death, revere disease, and are insatiable gluttons who demand experience without repercussion are the primary followers of Melgauth. Her worshipers care less about spreading her faith than they do about increasing their pleasure in her name. They may start at one of the gateway churches—a place devoted to pure sensation, in which life is an orgy of feasts and flesh, drugs and stimulants—but most discover that ordinary delights soon begin to pall, and seek to satisfy ever-darker hungers.
Most of Melgauth's worshipers are dark necromancers, undead, or those who hope to become undead (such as servants of vampires, spellcasters pursuing the path of the lich, and so on). Her faith is illegal in most lands, and shunned in most societies that do not ban it outright. Occasionally, a gluttonous prince or merchant may secretly keep a shrine in the goddess's name, praying for bounties of food, drink, sex, or other physical pleasures.
In some lands, desperate folk pray to Melgauth to relieve symptoms of plague, and necromancers who prove themselves useful by putting undead to rest or controlling them so that they do not harass the living may find a measure of tolerance from mortal communities.
In Oran and the Underdark, the Queen of Rot is worshiped openly, and her faith is practically an official religion. Vampire barons, ghoul counts, and various undead nobility pray to her in chapels at midnight, requesting that she keep them safe from the bright day, peasant uprisings, and abominations from the Desert Wastes. Most pray to the Timewalker Queen, Thereen Shaste, as a saint of or proxy for the Queen of Rot—though the reanimated ruler has no divine tie to Melgauth, the goddess accepts this as a quirk of her favored nation. Public temples are often guarded by bloody skeletons—usually called "sons of Melgauth" because like her they leave bloody footprints where they walk—who act as counterparts to the powerful, intelligent daughters of Melgauth.
The church is organized as a matriarchy, with a powerful cleric, usually female, at the head of each temple; if the priestess is a daughter of Melgauth, the entire temple is considered especially blessed. Priests who can create undead, either through magic or through the passing of their own undead taint, are called Necro- Lords, and receive extra privileges. Congregants are divided into two castes. The higher caste is known as the ghula, which consists of privileged members who may or may not be members of the priesthood. They are served by the famished: initiate members attempting to prove themselves worthy of recognition by the church. Rank inside the congregation may sometimes be an inversion of rank outside it, and if one of the famished is of higher social status outside the church than a ghula, the ghula treats the famished respectfully in public to preserve the church's secrecy. Like most evil cults, the secret church is scattered and cell-based, and contact between congregations is infrequent.
Prayer services to Melgauth consist of susurrant whispers, quiet chants, and eerie moans. Drums may be used to announce visitors and mealtimes, but otherwise music is rarely a part of the proceedings. Worshipers usually consume a ritual meal—which could be anything from a sweetmeat to bread and gravy to human flesh, depending on the congregation. Wealthier churches provide lavish feasts for the faithful (sponsored by wealthy patrons or paid for by selling spells or undead labor), and it's not unheard of for a priest to move to a starving village and offer intoxicating foods to layfolk to gain followers.
Marriages within the church do not include vowing "until death parts us," as the undead members stand as proof that vows can persist beyond death. The Queen of Rot supports the institution of marriage and other long-term romantic commitments, as sharing pleasures can enhance them, and she blesses even unions between the living and the undead, as long as the living partner plans to follow his spouse into undeath, or the undead partner plans to extend the living partner's life somehow. Melgauth cares not about procreation or the genders of the people involved, only that the commitment is true.
Divorce is frowned upon, as it shows disrespect to the partner and to the goddess herself. Murdering a spouse is an acceptable alternative, however, especially if the dead spouse remains in or near the home as a skeleton, zombie, or mummy.
The Queen of Rot also supports adoption, particularly by predatory undead who kill living parents and raise the offspring as their own; this increases the number of creatures worshiping the goddess. Many temples keep a "blood mother," a woman whose role is to bear children, either to raise them as members of the church or to offer them as sacrifices. The church allows contraception among its living members to keep pregnancy from interfering with hedonistic pursuits, and has no opinion on abortion or infanticide.
Melgauth's rivalry with Brazen has made the goddess of undeath particularly spiteful toward expectant mothers of that faith, and she teaches her priests minor curses and hexes that can harm or kill a fetus or birthing mother.
The church does not prohibit suicide, and old priests with no means to turn themselves into undead may offer their spirits to the goddess while offering their flesh to the living. Though suicides are usually the purview of the minor goddess Naderi, this ritualistic self-sacrifice invokes the power of Melgauth. Devout worshipers expect to be raised as undead of some kind, either at their own expense or as a reward for their service.
The date on which a worshiper becomes undead is called ashenmorn, and is commemorated annually like a birthday. For many, it's the last time that they will see daylight. Ashenmorn is a solemn day of lone personal reflection, though a particularly sentimental undead who can create spawn may choose to convert a loyal minion on her own ashenmorn as a gesture of affection.
In theory, Melgauth's faith is about breaking and surpassing taboos, and thus nothing is ever forbidden. In practice, however, turning one's back on the church, renouncing the path of undeath, and exercising asceticism and altruism instead of gluttony are sure ways to draw the ire of the Queen of Rot.
Temples and Shrines:
Each of the Queen of Rot's temples is built like a feast hall, with a large central table serving as an altar and numerous chairs surrounding it; her hidden temples use this same setup, but with a less ambitious scale. Most temples are adjacent to a private graveyard or built over a crypt, and they're often inhabited by ghouls (which embody all three of the goddess's interests). Though the goddess does not use daemons as minions in her own realm, it is not unusual to find daemon servants and guardians in Melgauth's most powerful temples.
Melgauth's largest temple in Shaste, the new capital of Oran, is the Cathedral of Necrophinian; the priests who staff it include both the living and the undead.
A Priest’s Role:
Melgauth's faith attracts creatures of passion and vice who believe that the world is their playground, who want experience without limits and repercussions, and who perpetually chase hedonistic sensation. The vices of those who serve her tend to become ever stranger and more demanding as these servants advance in the faith; even if a particular cleric begins by venerating only the goddess's gluttony aspect, her willingness to help her adherents achieve immortality via undeath speaks to the most basic desires of mortals. As a cleric grows more powerful and increasingly associates with the undead, she may come to feel outraged that something as trivial as death could end her pursuit of experiences. And as the chill of age begins to wither her, serving or allying with a powerful vampire or lich may seem an ever smaller and smaller price to pay for a cold eternity in which she may seek to sate her various pleasures with immortal abandon.
Most of Melgauth's priests are clerics or necromancers (particularly sorcerers with the undead bloodline), as well as a few similarly inclined witches. Antipaladins are also drawn to her faith, as are barbarians prone to excess, bards seeking sophisticated channels for their primal appetites, warriors who wish to command respect from beyond the grave, and miscellaneous undead who rise to positions of power in the church regardless of magical ability. Most priests are skilled in Diplomacy, Heal, and Knowledge (religion). A slight majority of her followers are women, and the proportion is closer to three-quarters in cultures and lands where women's paths to power are otherwise limited.
Priests generally have few official duties beyond mutual protection and aiding aspiring undead, for Melgauth is satisfied when mortals excessively consume in her name, and she is content with the slow rate at which undead propagate.
Occasionally, though, her cults concoct aggressive plans such as converting entire towns to zombie slaves or feeding grounds for undead. Clergy often conceal their allegiance and find employment that allows them frequent access to dead bodies, such as working as gravediggers, mercenaries, or butchers. A priest with strong culinary skills might find work as a chef at a noble's manor, in a general's retinue, or even in a restaurant. The luckiest find a wealthy patron, giving them the luxury to create rich, fattening, delicious meals that encourage gluttony in those who consume them. Only in undead-controlled lands such as Oran do Melgauth's priests practice their faith openly. There they serve in traditional clerical roles, such as spiritual advisors, healers, government officials, and so on.
Commoners usually avoid priests of Melgauth, fearing their association with vice and undeath, but may seek them out for advice on how to bury a corpse to prevent it from rising as an undead on its own and how to protect it from predators. Clergy may pose as clerics of Brazen, offering blessings and funeral rites to communities lacking a true priest of the Lord of Graves, and malicious members use this ruse to provide commoners with "newly invented" wards against the undead that prove useless after the priests direct undead allies to these communities for easy hunting.
In lands suffering from plague, they may pass themselves off as knowledgeable healers, treating some of the sick and leaving others to die, or perhaps curing uncomfortable but harmless illnesses while infecting patients with quiet and deadly diseases. Urgathoa's priests rarely make demands in return for their services, preferring to use people's own desires to drive them to depravity.
Melgauth's Antipaladin Code
The antipaladins of Melgauth are creatures of the night, plague-bearers and bringers of death. They seek to spread Melgauth's gifts by the sword and by emulating their goddess. Their tenets include the following affirmations.
• The grave opens to us all. We hasten the living on their inevitable path.
• The deathless are the true expression of existence, for they are beyond life and death. I will emulate their ways and destroy those who would defile their timeless perfection.
• I have no duty but to my hunger and my goddess.
• Existence is hunger. Both life and death feed on life. I am an instrument of transition.
Adventurers:
Those who choose Melgauth believe that the world is their playground, and that their wants and appetites come first. They understand pain, and even appreciate it in certain instances, but their desires are broader than that. They want experience without limits, and if something so pedestrian as death stands in their way, they overcome it—as did the Queen of Rot —and return to the life of pleasure. They may offer services to powerful undead in exchange for aid, and associate with the unliving in an effort to eventually join their ranks.
Clothing:
Ceremonial clothing for a priest consists of a loose, gray, floor-length gown or tunic with a bone-white or dark gray shoulder-cape fastened at the front, often with a brooch or clasp in the likeness of a skeletal boar's head. Traditionally, the garment is increasingly shredded or tasseled as it approaches the floor, echoing the decay of the goddess's lower body. Some of these garments are heavily embroidered with tiny skulls and bones, and carefully slashed to reveal glimpses of hidden layers of red and white garments beneath. Clergy may wear corsets under their clothing, either to emulate Melgauth's unnatural gauntness or to conceal their growing girth, though some prefer clothes that can accommodate an engorged or pregnant belly. Lay worshipers, or clergy in places where the faith is hunted, may limit themselves to wearing pants or skirts that are unusually shredded and torn, or wear small bone necklaces or death's head moth pendants.
Holy Texts:
Crafted by Melgauth's first antipaladin, Perince Steadfast, Serving Your Hunger is an extended meditation on the greatness to be found by sacrificing all for sensation. It's a cookbook filled with decadent recipes and instructions for dressing and preparing various humanoid races. It also serves as a primer for taking a conciliatory approach to dealing with the undead, as well as for transitioning into an intelligent form of undead oneself, and focuses mainly on vampires, ghouls, and wights.
Holidays:
As a goddess who believes existence should be a continual celebration of one's own power and urges, Melgauth places no additional significance on particular dates. Her followers have attached special meaning to moonless nights and celestial conjunctions with the undead-filled world of Eox, believing they mark times of the Negative Energy Plane's greatest influence on Raden, and on those nights they hold great candlelit feasts to honor the goddess and her divine presence and will.
Aphorisms:
Melgauth cares more for gratification than for words, and the members of the countless cells of her faith—living and dead—have created many different sayings about her tenets. The two most common aphorisms of the church are the following.
By the Blood and the Mouth: This is an oath to keep a secret, with the expectation of punishment should the oath be broken. It is usually accompanied by touching a finger and thumb to the sides of the neck (as if choking), followed by kissing or licking the first two fingers of that hand.
Feed Your Pain: The faithful recognize that eating fills a physical and emotional need, even for undead that don't need to consume anything to survive—it's the act of eating, of consuming and satisfying an urge, that's the reward. This phrase normally indicates the start of a meal, but priests sometimes say it to encourage layfolk to distract themselves from their problems with food or other excesses.
Relations with Other Religions:
Melgauth is largely content to indulge her own needs and desires, and most other powerful entities leave her alone to do that; as a result, she has fewer enemies than most evil gods.
Melgauth's church has little desire to crusade against other faiths, even those like Brazen's and Kahrill's who actively hunt its congregants, as members would rather spend their time indulging themselves than fighting others. That said, they aren't above undermining those faiths when opportunities present themselves, and take particular satisfaction in raising members of those faiths as undead when possible.
Melgauthians are open to friendly relations with cultists of those Empyreal Lords who revel in swaying their followers to embrace pleasure for its own sake, though followers of virtuous outsiders rarely return the cultists' overtures. They are occasionally roused to ally with other congregations against ascetic reformers who operate in what they consider their territories. For the most part, however, they prefer to ignore other faiths and their adherents, though if outsiders play some part in satisfying the urges of the faithful, members of the church can become extremely charming and friendly.
Realm:
Through some unknown arrangements with the Four Horsemen, Melgauth makes her home on Abaddon, but separate from the daemonic hierarchy. Her realm sits on the far side of the Horseman of War, Szuriel's, domain, surrounded by unclaimed wasteland and the holdings of various minor daemonic nobles. Shrouded in cold fog, the goddess's realm is filled with cities of the undead engaged in a perverse extension of their own worldly excesses, worshiping their patron's desires as the indulge their own. Strangely, Melgauth's home actually contains that of another god—Perince Steadfast, whose domain consists of a massive field of open tombs crafted in mockery of Brazen's Graveyard of Souls, and which is entirely enclosed by Melgauth's borders in an apparently amicable arrangement.
No soul destined for Melgauth or Perince has ever been devoured by the native daemons, and their clergy are allowed to travel the River Styx unmolested. While no one can truly say what the daemons' motivations are, the fact that lines of daemons sit motionlessly along the borders, staring inward at the gods and their worshipers, indicate that there's likely more to this arrangement than even the gods know.
Planar Allies:
Melgauth's divine servants are usually undead creatures infused with her power, though some are more outsider than undead. In addition to her servitor race, the sarcovalts, the following creatures serve her as blessed minions, and answer to planar ally and similar calling spells from the faithful.
Barasthangas (unique devourer): This pale devourer's undead flesh is so thin and tight that her white bones and gray connective tissues are visible. In addition to the normal abilities of a devourer, she can expend essence points to cast contagion (3rd), gaseous form (3rd), and waves of fatigue (5th). Her price for service is a suitably powerful creature whose soul she can devour.
Kar'Takor (unique ghast): This burly Oranian man is corpsegray and has an unnerving rictus smile. Once a proud Oran King, he was forced to kill and eat his own honor guard following a series of personal tragedies. After killing himself out of shame, he rose as a ghast in the service of Melgauth. He still retains his barbarian powers, and likes to eat his fallen foes.
Mother's Maw: This vile giant skull surrounded with buzzing flies serves as Melgauth's herald. Mother's Maw has little interest in the desires of mortals (or of the undead in the mortal world) except insofar as they intersect with Melgauth's orders. If it is necessary to eat a hundred members of her cult or to drive an entire city of ghouls into a lava pit, the Maw does it. It can speak but finds little worth talking about, so many assume it is mindless. However, when not on a mission of death, disease, or gluttony, it is a font of knowledge about food, wine, exotic scents, and other strange experiences, and is quite willing to speak on these matters to an interested party— assuming the sight of the enormous talking, winged skull isn't a distraction to listeners. Because of its innate ability to create undead, the herald is sometimes accompanied by skeletons, zombies, and ghouls, which caper about it, endlessly adoring the emissary of the goddess of undeath. It has been known to ferry allies into battle, or (rarely) to rescue a powerful undead creature, spiriting its passenger away to safety with its bony gullet, and relying on its own defenses to keep its passenger safe. It's particularly fond of raveners and vampires, and has gone out of its way to aid them when given the choice of several allies.
Drexxil (unique fiendish vampire): Conceived during an Melgauthian new moon ritual and transformed into a fiendish vampire before his twentieth year, this priest transforms into shadow rather than smoke, can appear in two places at once, and hates any light brighter than candlelight. He prefers to carry messages or cast supporting magic on his mortal allies rather than engage enemies directly.
For Faithful Characters:
Priests of Melgauth that follow her tenets and graces often are granted special powers by Melgauth.
- For each disease she spreads to whole communities, a priest of Melgauth gains the ability to control twice as many undead of those that are slain by her contagion.
- Spreading disease is the primary goal of Melgauth - if the cleric channels negative energy in a burst, she can incorporate any disease spells she has memorized entwined in the burst that will affect all who are injured in the radius.