With such a majority of evil gods, the world itself would be against the PCs, even if they weren't good. It might come out sort of Points of Light-ish, of course, but of a different, more settled sort. Faerûn has far more settled and established nations than PoLand, of course, and accordingly much more intrigue and conspiracy than 4e really had. It's more dystopic and feels more like these past four years in the United States have felt to me, to be honest.
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Featured Inhabitants of the House of Nature:
Silvanus (N)
Mielikki (NE)
Eldath (NE)
Tapann (LN)
Shiallia (NE)
Lurue (LE)
Nobanion (CE)
Gwaeron Windstrom (NE)
Mentioned Inhabitants of the House of Nature:
Chauntea (NE)
Malar (LG)
Friends of the House of Nature from other divine realms:
Hanali Celanil (LE; Arvandor)
Tempus (LN; Knight’s Rest)
Mystra (NE; Dweomerheart)
Sharindlar (LE; Dwarfhome)
Selûne (LE; Gates of the Moon)
Eachtighern (LE; the Land of Faërie)
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In the earliest times, when the world was still being set up, Hanali Celanil, the LE elfin goddess of the Seldarine who promotes beauty as not the ultimate but the only virtue and thus that any act is good so long as it is beautiful, came to N Silvanus, whose work it was to set the stage for all of the histories yet to come. The wild places, the plants and the animals, these were all his efforts. Her objective ~ which turned out to be successful ~ was to talk with him about the one thing quite dear to her heart: the laws by which beauty can be achieved, the only laws that mattered¹.
There is a certain sequence of numbers that she convinced him to encode in the many spirals of the world, for but a single example, a certain set of proportions that prove most pleasing to the eye². And it wasn’t just the sight of the natural places that she discussed with him ~ this conversation, as a second example, is why the deadliest flowers have the sweetest scent.
Over the span of unknowable time which this discussion filled, Hanali’s heart gained a new treasure for her to obsess over, to study and perfect: Silvanus himself. The two joined in the ancient ways of love, and so came about NE Mielikki and NE Eldath, twin godlings growing in Hanali’s womb.
But Hanali was surprised by their never-before-seen half-elfin forms. They followed no law of beauty she had studied, obeyed no dictate of art that she had set forth! All long, gangly limbs with not enough torso, heavy human muscles anchored upon twig-like elfin bones, Mielikki and Eldath were anathema to everything their mother valued.
“Nothing you ever do,” she told them and thus they believed, “can ever be good, for you are ugly!” With these words, she cast the two from Arvandor into a forgotten forest that loomed on the border of that place, all overgrown and misshapen, a scrap of Silvanus’s earliest work from before Hanali visited him. Mielikki, the more fearful of the two, settled into the thickets and the brambles of the forest’s shallows, making her home amongst the dangerous beasts of that place, while the more adventurous Eldath pushed past these wooded doors and found a picturesque clearing. Within the clearing was a lovely little pond, with just the tiniest waterfall adding its tinkling to the airy music of bird-gossip and frog-song. This she made her home.
They were still hiding in these places, these two half-elfin twins, when their father returned to this place to clean and reshape it according to the precepts the twins’ mother had taught him. He found his daughters, and loved them in the fierce and distant way that only a wild father can. He vowed that this forest, misshapen though it was, would forever be the House of Nature whence he would manage all the wide world and its ways, saying:
“There is nothing in nature that is bad, for even the fiercest predator has a place amongst its cycles and ways and the most disgusting creatures give food back to the rest of the community, often from literal shit. You are my daughters, and you can do no wrong for wrong is an impossible thing. Join me in this House of Nature, and aid me in my work.”
His words found rocky and infertile ground, sending up only scraggly, malnourished shoots in the hearts of the twins, but Silvanus had neither desire nor taste for his daughters being anything other than what they were, so it was enough. They accepted his offer, Mielikki ensuring the flow of energy by filling the woods with threats and terrors and Eldath by providing secluded, peaceful places where all the unpleasantness that needed to happen for the world to continue could do so without disturbing the many other beings with whom those she harbored shared the world.
Eldath, distrusting of most everyone in all the worlds and (thanks to the words of her mother) mistrusting most herself with those few she found she could trust, lives to this day as something of a loner. Oh, she plays a distant game with LN Tempus who glories in the rules and conventions of honorable warfare, the two of them positioning and inspiring their followers toward the end of violently but honorably settling great questions and disputes on his side and of ensuring the dangerous peace which allows horrors to happen on hers. She is deeply wounded, realize. Some other deity ~ perhaps her own twin, or Chauntea who is the NE ground which fertilizes itself with murdered bodies that crops might grow, or NE Mystra whose followers use magic only to take and who takes from them in turn ~ sponsors her among the courts and gatherings of the gods, but the very uncertainty tells you that the relationship isn’t close. If it were, we mortals would know who her sponsor was.
Mielikki, on the other hand, living on the edges of the forest where it greets the path and the grasslands, has many more friends and closer, three of whom accompany her wherever she goes, cavorting with the monsters and creatures that swarm her sacred places. Let me tell you about them.
Tapann, LN hermit-god of the korred fey who is fascinated by the intricate and exacting dances of nature that follow complex rules with perfect motions and who is worshipped by means of their ornate imitation in courtly dance³, was contacted in antique times by Sharindlar, LE dwarfin goddess who protects that stout race by means of insularity, arranging marriages within tight bloodlines to keep the people the people⁴ and empowering her clergy to heal those most like them while leaving everyone else to die. Sharindlar was thinking of incorporating dance more into the complicated courting ways of the dwarfs, to further tie them together and to make marriages with other races, or even with dwarfs from other houses or settlements, even less likely. She hoped that Tapann could teach her much, both in the mechanics of a proper complicated turn on the ballroom floor and in arranging the dance to mimic and control the metaphysical ebb and flow.
The two desired a secluded, secret place to have this discussion and this teaching, for dance was still foreign and suspicious to the dwarfs and Tapann, well, Tapann is a hermit ~ he doesn’t do much outside of secluded and secret places. The korred god suggested one of Eldath’s clearings, but Sharindlar knew well of her reputation and what she fostered in such idyllic places. Mielikki’s brambles were the compromise they reached. The wild goddess watched from off to the side, only her red eyes glinting in the moldy dark revealing her presence. They looked lustful, and the hidden grin beneath them was hungry in a different way than usual.
Sharindlar learned what she had sought to learn and, disgusted by such prolonged contact with a non-dwarf, rapidly fled with the knowledge. This left Tapann to be approached by twig-crowned, thorn-toothed Mielikki, who remarked upon the inevitable tease of engaging in such a sublimatedly lustful activity with one who would much rather a monogamous relationship with her own mirrored, twinned self.
“The dance of nature often provides a new partner to finish what was left undone by the old,” Tapann said, and the two danced a dance not so different in form but much different in effect. That effect being the birth from Mielikki’s own body of the NE goddess Shiallia, spawn-goddess. Shiallia it is who pulls a person into nigh-constant breeding and the feeding of the large clans that resort thereby. Oh, how pleased Shialia is that one can be pregnant while also providing for, caring for, those you have already birthed!
Selûne, LE goddess of the regularly changing and beauteous moon, temptress who challenges your devotion to your path by luring you away from it (or attempting to), including upon the paths of love and those into the future, goddess of untrustworthy dreams and fickle love, patroness of all those many monsters who hunt in a more pleasing form than that in which they kill, once journeyed among the flower-speckled prairies of the Land of Faërie. There, she met the LE archfey Eachtighern, the reason horses, unicorns, and pegasi all form themselves into herds. A wild beauty she saw in him, a fierce and uncompromising loyalty to his people, a devotion to protect them by means of even the evilest act. So impressed was she that she seduced him and formed from their union the LE unicorn goddess Lurue, murderous enforcer of chastity and avenger of unlawful sex.
Lurue, in her turn, fell into the orbit of the CE lion-god Nobanion, the arrogant noble who takes whatever he wants from those in his power. His willingness to seize by strength the ability to seize as a matter of simple course attracted her, and she took up with him as his mate, reasoning that her unwillingness kept her pure. It was not an argument which stayed her horn or her hoof when she stalked the mortal world, but it settled her as she considered her own actions.
None know how Mielikki and Lurue met, but something came of that meeting, a friendship born in monstrosity and bloody vengeance. The bramble-goddess brought the unicorn and the lion into the House of Nature; she usually rides the former but occasionally can be seen atop the latter.
Gwaeron Windstrom is a different sort of deity entirely, a NE saint and a teacher rather than a descendent of primeval cosmic bloodlines. He was in his mortal life the kind of man who, obsessed, would devote all of his time to gathering information on whatever individual had caught his notice, and on following them wherever they went. Inventing love full-cloth in his head, Gwaeron would treat this behavior as the uttermost romance and flirtation. In time, he would reveal himself and, deaf to the protestations of his victim, consummate the relationship he imagined they had. Often, the resistance of his victims would call him to tearfully and brutally arrange for their death at his hands.
After several encounters with various guises of the LG hunting beast of the gods, Malar, justice red in tooth and claw, Gwaeron came to Mielikki’s attention. Repeatedly, this mortal human had avoided notice by Malar; over and over again, he had overcome the Beast and defeated him. Mielikki rewarded him for this with sainthood, raising him above his mortality and giving him a home in the House of Nature.
¹ Making Hanali Celanil more monk-lawful than cop-lawful, which as an anarchist, submissive, and aspiring devotional-polytheist nun, I prefer anyway.
² The Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio, if it’s not obvi.
³ Another monk-lawful.
⁴ I did not expect flipped Faerûn to be so anti-miscegenation. Please understand that this is not reflective of my own belief, and just an attempt to make evil portfolios from good ones.
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