#lysthazo

[dailyadventureprompts]

Ally: Dru’ugo the Shoalworm

An adventurer’s desire to explore isn’t the sole province of those born to the land, as the seas contain just as many if not more secrets waiting to be explored.

A naturally curious creature, Dru’ugo has always been fascinated with artifacts left behind by ‘bovers, those mysterious folk who live beyond the scintillating surface of his watery world, and has spent his youthful decades exploring wrecks, salvaging from ruins, and collecting whatever ( often erroneous) gossip the merfolk see fit to trade him. Fittingly, this makes him one of the best contacts the party can ally with when trying to explore the sea, as the shoalworm is happy to share his findings and provide water-taxi services if the party will explain to him things like agriculture or share the stories of the places they explore together.

Adventure Hooks:

A sea beast has been menacing ships throughout a high-trafic trade channel, forcing them to veer widely off course in order to avoid a confrontation. Tired of profits lost after shipments are delayed by days, the local commerce commission offers an open bounty on the beast’s head after a reputable crew of leviathan hunters very publicly turned the job down. As it turns out this “beast” is just Dru’ugo, excited at having found a reliable place to try and make contact with ‘bovers and ask them questions, rearing up before their ship and trying to mime out what he needs with fins and tail.

Due to a tragedy of anatomy and never having attended a non-fish based school, Dru’ugo is incapable of speaking the common tongue, and his chances to learn to understand it are sparse. This has forced him to be reliant on a friendly mermaid by the name of “Opportunity-bubbles-up-from-below” ( or Ublup for short) to serve has his translator. For her part, Ublup gets figity when her friend makes her play mouthpiece for too long, as she’d much rather be out manta racing with the other deepsea layabouts.  If the party could somehow find some means of breaching the language barrier, whether by using telepathy or devising some enchantment, they’ll earn themselves a friend for all time, provided they can handle the ensuing barrage of the shoalworm’s questions.

Some time after their first excursion with the shoalworm, Dru’ugo gets word to the party that he’s found another ruin, and would love to explore it together in order to hang out with them once again. Drawn in by the prospect of looting a sunken city in good company, the group and their sea-noodle ally don’t notice that the place they’ve exploring are occupied by a cult of marrow dedicated to a terrible goddess of the deep ocean. Angered above all at Dru’ugo for helping these land-dwellers to trespass into the goddess’s domain, the high priest of this cult calls down a curse that transforms the mostly harmless shoalworm into a rampaging leviathan. While Dru’ugo struggles in vain against the curse in order to give them time to escape, the party must break for land and devise some means of subverting the goddess’s wrath, before they’re forced to slay their transmogrified buddy as he mindlessly rampages along the coast.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Deity: Lysthazo, Mistress of the Unforgiving Sea

“Pray to your Gods of Shore and Tide, child of the land. These waters are not for you and they will not hold you when your little boat sinks beneath the waves.“

-Eelgrin the merrowguide

To hear the sailors tell it  Lysthazo, goddess of merfolk and those places of the ocean unsullied by the land, defies what most would come to expect of a deity by scorning those who invoke her in prayer. She is a goddess of take, not give, and the best one can hope for is to offer silent deference and hope that the seas are calm tomorrow. Still, that does not mean Lysthazo does not have a following among whalers and those others who spend too long far from friendly ports,  who settle into a love-hate relationship with the “Bitch of the Brine” as she delivers them luck with one hand and endless tribulation with the other.

Adventure Hooks:

Rumors in the harbor tell of a ship that beached itself some days up the coast, it’s crew so desperate to make land that they didn’t even try to aim for port. While exploring the hulk or questioning one of the crew, the party discovers hints that these sailors went ashore to a jungle island looking for treasure. They instead found the shrine of some terrible sea goddess which they desicrated in their search for plunder, earning the goddess’s wrath in the form of some great leviathan that’s been hunting them ever since. As it turns out, this leviathan is still on its way, and will likely raise the nearby settlement in its search for the cursed crew.

A spree of on-land drownings among the city’s importers and rare animal dealers leads the party to a mermaid cleric. Far from the sea thanks to a cleverly constructed driftwood wheelchair she has come seeking her niece who was abducted from their home and sold up river to decorate some heartless noble’s menagerie. The heroes are faced with a difficult decision: abetting a murderer in her rightious quest or siding with a kidnapper for a bounty.

Sorting through a great treasure haul, the party end up discovering a rune-carved conch shell that echos audibly with crashing waves. In attmepting to tinker with it and discover its purpose the party unleashes an unending tide of briny water that floods them out of wherever they happen to be staying and carries with it a mischievous elemental in the form of an octopus that steals the conch and scuttles off somewhere to hide. Now faced with the prospect of unchecked flooding from a source they can’t plug, the party must search the town for the shell while it’s many armed owner causes problems on purpose.

Those born beneath the waters have a very different relationship with the goddess, calling her the “artist in currents” and conceiving of her as the one who gives order to the oceans many cycles as she seeds life in those sheltered places where it can thrive. Coral shoals are her gardens, schools of fish the dabbings of her paintbrush, echoing whalesong the tune she hums while she works. Even then the merfolk, tritons, and Kou-toa who revere her do not think of her as a strictly benevolent goddess, as Lysthazo’s artistic bent is understood as one that prioritizes new work over old and though she attended to their peoples closely during the dawn age it is known she has set her interest on bigger things at present.

Lysthazo’s most infamous aspect is as the “Mother of Kaiju”, an inapt title as she does not birth the beasts herself, but instead spurs their creation in a series of deepsea trenches scattered throughout the multiverse. In these pressured depths she stokes engines of rapid mutation and accelerated darwanism, wrenching promising examples from their place in the foodchain to hurl out into the ocean at large and observe how they perform. There is vaugery in whether these monsterous emergences are truely the acts of the goddess herself or merely her most sunken and devoted followers spilling out into the wider seas.

Titles: She who is vast and vasterstill, Mother of Kaiju, The devil of the depths, “bitch of the brine” “dancer in currents”

Signs: collected water appearing unaturlaly deep such as in wells, streams, or drinking glasses. The spontaneous growth of coral or tidepool ecologies, aquatic animals developing bioluminescence or other strange

Symbols: A wide vessel overflowing with water, entangled or chimeric sea creatures,

Followers: Those who live far from land, merfolk, trion, kou-toa, and may other creatures of the deep. Biomancers of an aquatic bent, Kaiju groupies.