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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8979819" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 135: April 1999part 3/5City Stories: As usual, this column focusses on a particular temple in Raven's Bluff. This time, it's the inventor god, Gond. A lot of places want nothing to do with him due to the large number of explosions his worshippers cause in their pursuit of new clanky mechanical things. Raven's Bluff isn't nearly so conservative. A cleric of Gond was the architect of the city walls (which probably explains why it's only walled on two sides <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) and they've been part of the approved civic religions for centuries. They did manage to blow up their temple a couple of decades ago, but managed to finish an even bigger, shinier one recently so they've obviously got no shortage of funding. A significant percentage of that is apparently kid's toys, where you can just invent cool looking stuff without worrying too much about the practical applications. (as long as it's not too hazardous to play with, because all it'd take is the wrong rich kid losing an eye or finger to get a campaign going against them.) So they're relatively popular here because they stay connected to the community and emphasise the fun side of invention over holing up in your lab for years chasing some quixotic goal. That gives plenty of opportunities for adventurers to interact with them and get involved in the latest hunt for the right material components, or even join the priesthood and proactively create their own custom gear that'll let them adventure in style. The map of the temple isn't particularly detailed this time, but the description of the 4 main priests is pretty good, making them all interesting and distinct. Overall, solidly above average in worldbuilding and general game usefulness for this series.Wolflords of Malar: Having looked at the faith pushing the limits of technology, we go straight to the other extreme, as priests of Malar are generally not fond of civilisation and it's trappings, wanting to tear all that down and rewild the world into a massive happy (for them) hunting ground. This is particularly the case for the wolfwere branch, which don't even need to worry about clothes and weapons to be effective hunters. They've been undergoing a serious expansion lately, as Malar killed the Great Wolf Spirit, and since wolfweres aren't particularly bothered about ideology anyway, most of them saw which way the wind was blowing and switched religions. (granting better priestly spheres probably doesn't hurt either) So this is one group your PC's probably won't be able to join, (and definitely not in Living campaigns) but offers a fair amount of plot potential as adversaries. Wolfweres are able to mix up sneakiness and savagery quite effectively as it is, adding on an increasing number of their ranks with priestly spells makes them even more flexible in a way that will become much more common next edition. We're gonna need even more cold iron.</blockquote>

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