#The artist goes by Derro

[victorgrwrites]

MY WIFE HAD A COMISSION DONE BY A FRIEND! JACK AND GORTASH! AAAAAAAA!

[dailyadventureprompts]

Deity: Cezil’Tek, Outer god of Loneliness, Structure, and the Emptiness of Perfection

“... You ever just get the feeling that some places just... didn’t want you there?” 

-Yheterra of the Argent Expeditions exploratory company

Setup: Among occultists there is a large debate as to whether the entity referred to as “ Cezil’Tek” is in fact an entity at all, or is instead some kind of abstract, parasitic philosophy that exists independent of such concepts as “Identity” and “Being”. These discussions are roundabout at best, and tend to gloss over the tremendous threat that this non-entity poses to mortal life across the planes. 

Like most outer-gods, “The Cutting Stillness” represents some overwhelming force that is anathema to a stable reality, in this case a fixation on structural and geometric perfection in opposition to the messy impermanence of living things. Eschewing a corporeal form, Cezil’Tek instead manifests as thoughts of disassociation and loneliness, or as oppressive objects and structures that serve no function besides to assert themselves over the viewer. These manifestations occur in isolated corners of reality, or in the minds of individuals who hold order above the good of the community or individual. 

Cezil’Tek has been referred to by some as a  “Fungus of the abstract”, appearing in isolated, sedentary places and spreading out, corrupting existence as it goes. While originally starting out as  merely thoughts or designs, manifestations eventually compound into barren ruins filled with featureless temples and meaningless monuments, populated by automotons or not-people. The latter might as well be part of the scenery until the attempt to cleanse their mathematically perfect realm of the blight of an intruder’s presence. 

Unlike most other extraplanar intrusions, Cezil’tek has no designs on world domination or remaking all of existence in its own form. It’s not a being, and thus lacks a will, instead seeking to reach a level of completion and stasis the way a violent chemical reaction or parasitic infection would, eventually burning itself out in time. The exact scope and nature of this “perfection” is usually determined by whatever mind(s) the Cutting Stillness took root in, being as large or small as their particular ambitions. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Puritanical cults or political movements can inadvertently transform themselves into seedbeds for Cezil’Tek’s philosophy to take root in, with the desire to remove vice or corruption giving way to wanting to remove desire itself. Workhouses or communes can see themselves corrupted into brutalist labyrinths, and the artists and architects of such movements can find themselves unwittingly working dimensional portals into their blueprints. 

Many creatures of the underdark find a strange reassurance in Cezil’tek’s stillness, with cults and other enclaves popping up among the drow, duergar, and derro. Quori and mirror-dwelling Nerra are often drawn across the interdimensional currents into Cezil’tek’s service, but tend to end up as abstract and strange as their ruler. 

Some claim that the Cutting Stillness’s compulsion towards conformity bears a striking resemblance to that of fragments of the broken plane of Mechanus, and that the outergod’s origin lies somewhere in that primordial disaster.  While unfounded, it does appear that Cezil’tek has taken residence in quite a few of these lost shards.

Titles: The Cutting Stillness, Form Perfected, The Enduring Ideal, Tyrant Geometry

Signs: Hostile architecture, rigidity and conformity of thought, faceless and featureless creatures, objects that observe some “ideal” form without any heed to the user such as a sword that is all blade or a goblet that’s just a filled in cone of glass.  

Symbols: Depictions of City Skylines, geometric mandalas, abstract sculpture 

[dailybestiary]

Munavri

(Illustration by Kim Sokol comes from the Paizo Blog and is © Paizo Publishing.)

After all this time, I think we finally have it: a worthy subterranean human race.  

Drow have elves. Dwarves have duergar.  Gnomes have svirfneblin.  Orcs have…well, orcs.  Halflings have no one cares (or dark creepers if you’re being kind).  You get the idea.  

But subterranean humans have tended to be confined to lost cities or are so corrupted/devolved by life underground that they are no longer recognizable human.  In the first category we have “basic”/Known World D&D’s Cynidiceans, Greyhawk’s Lerara (once again I’m pointing you to the excellent Dragon #241), and Forgotten Realms’ Deep Imaskarri.  In the latter, we have morlocks, dark folk, and even (in certain canons) skulks or derros. Those are great races, but none are what you’d call human anymore (and only dark folk really build civilizations of their own, rather than squatting in caverns or occupying ruins).  Unless I’ve majorly overlooked something, we’ve never had a human race that was both recognizably human and spread out throughout the Darklands/Underdark/Deepearth.

And then here come the munavris.  Are they human with a dash of something extra?  Sure, they’re telepathic albinos.  Do they have a distinctive culture?  Yeah, the telepathy and the need for genetic diversity have led to open minds and even opener relationships; they also worship the empyreal lords and fight in jade armor.  Can they go toe-to-toe with the drow and duergar realms?  They don’t have to, because they sail purple-sailed ivory ships across subterranean seas, battling urdefhans and retreating to jade islands that ward off aboleths. And to top it all off, they’ve got a neat object reading ability that lets them use almost any device—including weapons, armor, or spell-trigger items for a short period of time.  That alone makes them instantly iconic.  (And you can even play them as a PC race!)

All in all, I think the munavri are a real coup.  And they belong on the underground seas of your game world.

Based out of the sunken city of Mushroot, adventurers find a magical torc made of a metal they don’t recognize.  Assuming they can smuggle it past the duergar tax agents, their dark dancer fixer agrees to set them up with someone who can help.  He arranges a meeting with a strange, pale humanoid. The woman, who calls herself a munavri, barely needs to touch the item to recover the command word, and offers hints as to its origin. But she will not reveal more until the adventurers allow her to accompany them on their journey.

Most airships don’t do well on seas—and they have no business being underground!  But when a waterspout seizes the Falcon’s Promise and plucks it out of the sky, that’s where a party of adventurers find themselves: floating on a vast ebony lake in an unthinkably large cavern.  An encounter with a water orm goes badly when a jittery crewmember looses a harpoon at it.  They are only saved by the arrival of munavri corsairs, who warn them that far worse threats await them if they cannot get their ship aloft or under sail soon. (And how they will get back to the open sky is another question entirely…)

The Spear of Prophecy is a jagged shard of jade the size of a mountain erupting from the Stillwind Plains.  A monastery sits about halfway up, carved into the Spear itself. Pilgrims who go to treat with the light-shy, prophecy-spinning monks, oracles, occultists who dwell there have no idea that the monastery leads all the way down to a sunken sea miles beneath, patrolled by the monks’ far more piratical kinfolk.

—Occult Bestiary 34 & Pathfinder Bestiary 6 197

Personally, I’m not enough of a sci-fi or old-school psionics fan to really geek out over telepathy. If I were running a campaign I’d probably skip that and just concentrate on the advanced object reading—that’s an awesome enough mental power for any race.

On another personal note, I’m really conflicted by the munavri art. It’s excellently done and all the details are right—that jade armor even actually looks wearable!—but the overall sense is off.  I totally get how it happened…the art order was probably for an agile, good-aligned, albino human psychic race in jade armor…and the artist delivered.  But the pose is that of a fey trickster—every time I see it, I get the sense that if we filled in the white background, we’d see this munavri lounging on a toadstool chatting with Alice and the Caterpillar. For a sense of munavris as badass, aboleth- and urdefhan-fighting sailors of subterranean seas, Darklands Revisited’s art is sketchier in detail but more on point in terms of tone.