Important NPCs: New Edomites
New Edomites
Lord Aholibamah Is a powerful wizard of some prominence magically and socially, being one of the oldest members of the Council of Lords. He is the founder of the Magician's Guild of New Edom and is also the founder of the concept of bonding all spellcasters. While he is generally a decent honest man he is also ruthless when it comes to the security of the country. Aholibamah was one of the original founders of the New Edomite Republic and has never forgotten the tyranny of King Obed. Austere and ascetic in his habits, his only affectations are a strangely twisted staff of pale wood that is said to give him a great many more spells than even he should be able to cast and the blue robes and black sash of his office. While he does not stand on ceremony his sense of authority is stern and uncompromising.
Lord Aholibamah is more likely in fact to be friendly and down to earth with ordinary folk like innkeepers, shopkeepers, huntsmen, farmers and the like rather than with officials and officers of state, among whom he has a reputation of being very particular and sharp. While this is the case, and while he is capable of intriguing with the best, he is certainly known to place his country even before his own life. Spellcasters who are not patriots get very short shrift from Lord Aholibamah.
He is usually accompanied by his assistant, Nestor Khalkimedes, who is a vain and proud magician who thinks highly of his own intelligence. Nestor being much younger than the venerable Aholibamah is often sent on errands and missions for him.
He is also accompanied by a brownie named Nox who is a sly mischeivous creature that some refer to as "Lord Aholibamah's spy".
In appearance he is a very old but hale and hearty man in his eighties with very little hair remaining on his head but a short aggressively jutting white beard. His hands sometimes tremble slightly but this may be an affectation as he has no difficulty mixing magical materials or casting spells. He wears azure robes with a black fringed sash and boots of black felt.
General Sarai Carmel is both a prominent warrior and one of the keenest strategists in the New Edomite Army. As a soldier she has a fine reputation among her soldiers for fairness, sterness and cleverness. She has gathered a staff to her that are very good at gathering supplies, making and breaking camp, organizing marches and planning.
Carmel has a good reputation among the elves, having fought alongside them in preserving their borders from hobgoblin and giant raids, and thus was a prominent figure in winning an alliance with them. Among the elvish settlers in Fineberg she is very welcome.
The General is married to a rather clever engineer and builder named Stephen, who is admired for a number of inventions including a bread oven that can be transported by wagon, reassembled and baking bread in under an hour; the linkable chains that can be drawn between the two towers that guard the harbour mouth in Fineberg; a form of crankable ram that can be manned by only four soldiers. However Stephen is an often distracted introvert and at times exasperates his more outgoing wife.
Carmel as a commander prefers to trick or evade her enemies, forcing them to use their own strengths against themselves. She despises unecessary casualties and will deeply resent senior members of the Great Council trying to force her into action for either political reasons or out of their own sense of panic. As a warrior she is known to be rather the same, confident, competent and decisive, avoiding flashiness and unecessary daring.
Among Goblinoids Carmel and her officers are loathed and despised, since she recently forced a humiliating treaty upon them following the destruction of several towns and fortifications. Those goblins and hobgoblins and orcs who joined Duke Anderman's army are very aware of being under sentence of death merely for setting foot on New Edomite soil. Anyone they capture in turn will doubtless if they have their way have a slow and agonizing death or at the very least a swift and violent one.
Carmel has a graceful and easy confidence about her that readily wins most over to her. While she is known to have a terrible temper it is usually kept in check and is more expressed with an icey blue eyed glared and frigid courtesy than with shouts and blows. Her personal tastes are usually fairly simple but her armor is of excellent dwawrvish craftmanship and her mounts are always of the highest breeding. She has a magical sword called Frostbite (in the New Edomite soldiers' parlance) and a black hippogriff called Slasher.
More Personalities: The Temple of Ishtar
Nala Livian
The High Priest of Ishtar is one of the handsomest men in Fineberg. He is athletic, devoted to hunting several times a year, and practiced in arms, particularly the arms of Ishtar which are the spear, axe and mace. Dark haired with almost black eyes and a calm but authoritative manner, he is also highly charismatic and shrewd. The Livian family have long provided candidates to the priesthood and those accepted by the goddess are trained in the arts of rule, war, healing, prophecy, administration and erotic love. This last is required so that they may be candidates for the Sacred Marriage to the High Priestess, who among worshippers is still the Queen of Fineberg, the Princess under the Heavens.
In the present case Nala is older by nearly fifteen years than the current High Priestess, being thirty six. The case for his rule of the temple is a curious one. The former High Priest, Talamand, was on a quest for relics lost during the people's legendary trek across the mountains to the land that would become New Edom. He and the party he was travelling with were set upon by Hobgoblins and Bugbears. Though they fought them off, Talamand was wounded by a battle axe wielded by a Bugbear chieftain that bore a curse upon it against those whom it struck. This wounded him deeply in his manhood. There was little time in which to save his life from the rot entering the wound and so his male parts were amputated. Subsequently the goddess rejected him as her High Priest and the sacrifices (which are of animals or of carefully crafted items) were clearly refused, the armor and arms upon the altar rusting immediately and the prize goats and sheep revealed to be rotting and diseased within. Talamand, though still a capable cleric in many ways, was forced to abdicate. He remains an advisor to Nala but often prefers to be away from the city, travelling and offering his services to people on journeys or to the state for various purposes.
The former High Priestess, Shakatis, was a grand and imposing woman of great beauty at the prime of her life, but was found to be involved in a plot to reinstate royalty in New Edom and was also forced to abdicate. She was informed that the Great Council preferred her to join a communit of anchorites in the north, and rather than this she took her own life.
Nala's first act as High Priest was to urge the appointment of a new High Priestess. The appointment of a senior cleric requires the performance of miracles before an assembly of known worshippers of rank, and the most capable was a beautiful young Hierodule called Hereka. It was not unheard of for a Hierodule to be so appointed--their office normally was something between a communicant of dreams and a sacred concubine, whose charms were only enjoyed by heroes and kings as well as the High Priest--but her youth was also considered a great surprise. Nevertheless she was clearly capable of the most important rites and therefore was wedded to Nala in the proper steps of descent and worship on the ziggurat temple, the marriage consummated before a small audience of select worshippers.
Because of all this Nala's rise to High Priest is considered to be somewhat suspect by cynics outside of the temple and even whispered on occasion within the temple. Since assistance by elvish and gnomish magic and dwarvish ingenuity more than worship of the old gods has brought about a richness of agriculture and mineral wealth in New Edom it is hard for sceptics to say whether the worship of Ishtar, Osprem and other old gods is worth it. However tradition dies hard, and while some clerics seem to be more ceremonial than others there is no denying that healing, dream interpretation, blessing of crafts, goods and crops and livestock take place successfully in the Fineberg temple at the very least. And certainly the goddess herself was known to be cunning and ruthless when she had to be.
Nala controls a lot of wealth as well as the authority over the temple directly. All taverns in Fineberg owe the temple a tithe, and along with tithes of worshippers and the temple's own rented lands roughly fifty wagonloads of food can be expected every harvest for the temple alone into Fineberg.
Nala posesses as high priest certain regalia: the periapt of Ostara, which detects good and evil and protects against outside evils; the Lapis armor, which worn in battle is capable of absorbing a death blow once per day; the Table of Destiny, which is actually a series of ivory tablets that are used to reveal the future.
As a man he is known to be warm in manner, winning over most people with an outstretched hand and a keen eye. He is a good orator with an authoritative voice. It is also said that he can be coldly vengeful if every crossed. It is said of Nala that he is the one man in Fineberg who can do a miracle no one else can: go down the street two ways at the same time. This is not said to his face or to those known to be his adherents, since while he is not the law he certainly can influence it and is one of the most powerful business interests in the city. What it refers to is the fact that he has clerics everywhere, including as advisors to the city council, serving on the watch and the town militia, volunteering service as Wine Criers and assistants to Market Wardens, as truth tellers to magistrates. All this is helpful. It cannot be denied that clerics are useful in all these capacities. It also gives him eyes and ears everywhere. He has a personal network to rival the Council Police. This has also been noted by higher ranking officers in that organization.
Nala's closest henchman is the chief administrator of the temple, Olor, a quiet, neat man who is dry in manner and slavishly devoted to the High Priest--and genuinely is as well. Olor has no inherent charisma, bright manner or art of seduction in him. Nala is genuinely admired by him. For Olor, to serve the High Priest is to serve all that he cannot be in life.
The only other man Nala trusts implicitly is Aramon, the Captain of the Temple Guard. This is a difficult office to have. There is constant talk about disbanding it forcibly by city councillors. The Council Police find infuriating the idea that what they refer to as a private organization can require them to state their purpose at the gates. It has been severely reduced regardless to a mere fifty. However Aramon in spite of this manages to keep temple property secure, to be loyally devoted to the High Priest no matter what. He was a former officer in the Army of the Republic but when badly wounded in the first Goblin War his life was saved by a young priest called Nala. Since then he has been his devoted friend. Aramon is often the pragmatist with Nala and is one of the few people who speaks to him bluntly in private.
Hereka the High Priestess, the Princess under the Heavens, is a dark haired woman recently twenty one, with an excitingly curved but trim figure hinted at but never vulgarly reveled by the flowing layers of cloth she wears, embroidered beautifully but in certain light briefly transluscent. Her voice was described by a bard as being a caress of velvet.
Hereka was seen to be gifted in ways that led her to be trained as a Hierodule. She had no desire for adventure in the wilds but rather preferred to devote herself to learning temple secrets. In older times Hierodule priestesses would dance on flowers in diaphanous gowns greeting the arrival of kings and heroes. For the most part in the last generation or so they have often been merely symbolic, and have often been the bored concubines of the High Priest, meddling in petty temple intrigues. Hereka was different: she sought to know the power of the goddess. This was not without risk: it involved her undertaking vision quests and stealing into parts of the temple which required her to overcome dangerous puzzles and spells. A precocious girl, she began her intent quest for power at the age of fifteen and by the time she was twenty she had learned a great deal in secret, including a promise from Ishtar that should she agree to restore the temple to former greatness she would become the next High Priestess.
Hereka is also a profoundly sensual person. She enjoys life but much the way a cat does, not demonstratively but with a quiet absoluteness, from lingering in a bath to lovemaking. She and Nala see eye to eye in many ways. He found that far from gaining a puppet High Priestess he gained a true partner, who in some ways had a startling amount of insight into the ways of the other worlds. Unlike himself however Hereka is rather unworldly and thus they balance one another as well as a coin.
Hereka has few female friends, the only solid one being her long time personal attendant, Minyanda, a handsome woman in her late forties who practically raised her. Minyanda is not a priestess, but is from a minor landed family and is thus a good observer of political matters and an able household administrator, which is largely her current function.
Hereka posesses two particular artifacts as High Priestess: the Sacred Diadem, her crown of office, which enables her when wearing it to perform clerical magics at higher levels of ability than she would normally be able to; the Stone Lion, which is a winged lion that will at a command word animate once per day for a limited time but long enough to transport her or defend her.
To the public, Hereka is gracious, regal, beautiful and magical, mostly seen during processions and public rituals only. Hereka in fact makes sure that she never if possible has to do any dirty work in public to maintain this reputation, using other clerics to gather information about supplicants or complaints in order to make sure that she always appears just, kind, generous and merciful.
