Icons of the [REDACTED]th Age 1: the Last Pharaoh & the Theurgist
[So. You like 13th Age, but don't care for its Icons? Try some from this series; I got... several.]
The Last Pharaoh is nemesis of the Lich King and the Theurgist both. The Pharaoh is high priest of a cult that seeks to annex the living world to their particular underworld, or to immamentize the underworld — they dream and burn for a world of the undead, a world of monuments, shrines, temples, and idols carven of every mountain and cliff. The appeal of such an apocalypse is limited.
The cult — the Temple of Bone — rules a land far to the south where the transformation is nearly complete, and where living things are as uncommon as undead across the rest of the world. Bone Temple propagandists whisper to wizards and to priests of other dark forces. They offer the secret of mummification in exchange for loyalty, and this prize compares favorably with lichdom to some spellcasters; every lich must win the secret of the phylactery from a patron daemon, or violate the wholeness of the cosmos to steal the knowledge directly.
Every full shrine and Bone Temple is contiguous to the Land of Night, and mummy cultists move from city to city through this realm. The power of a mummy priest and even the Last Pharaoh himself is contained within the stones and stele boundaries of their temples: the mummy is potent within their ritual zone of unlife, but cannot leave the field of necromantic influence without crumbling to dust. Living servitors, and lesser undead such as death knights and wights, act as the cult's talons beyond their unholy fanes.
All this priestly nonsense bound to stone prisons is beneath the Lich King's contempt. The Court's goals require the world as it is; their mode of unlife feeds on the energy of a living world, and many a lich's phylactery is, in fact, a living blood relation, or pure-bred lineage of pet pseudodragons, or distributed among a chittering horde of homunculi whose flesh and blood retain the lich's living substance.
THE THEURGIST
The Court and the Temple of Bone are equally stymied by the Theurgist and the unique magic his adepts draw from the higher reality of natural life, death, knowledge, wisdom, and compassion. The Theurgist as an Icon does not share or channel magical energy to followers, and the deaths of past Theurgists in confrontation with evil has not disempowered true theurgic clerics: the publicly known Theurgist is in fact one of a number of stations of an esoteric hierarchy of the most accomplished adepts of theurgy, and all adepts draw their power from surrender of the self to the Ocean Without Wave or Shore.
Theurgy accesses the magical energies of the world through a purified consciousness whose selfhood is free of the contingent factors of memory, upbringing, preference, personality quirks. A theurgists remembers his or her childhood and past as well as anyone does, but through discipline and compassion has ground the density of selfhood down to a gossamer fabric transparent to the Names and Qualities ascendant from moment to moment. The compassionate heart encompasses all entities: a true cleric has compassion even for the most wicked of undead — their bones and sinews, though animated by selfish, stolen magics, are still bones cut from the pure robe of the Manifest, the Eternal. In their regard for all life and spirit, theurgists have a particular duty to cleanse and anoint the remains of the undead, gathering and eventually burying in the clean earth every mace-smashed fragment. Though an undead being is a blasphemous construct of necromantic energies, its substance is bone formerly living, formerly sustained by the cycle of natural life and natural death, and connected to the bones of ancestors and kin by ties of love and duty.
The path of the Theurgist and his true adepts is most arduous, and for every adept, a hundred or a thousand clerics of the Path continue to struggle with selfhood. In game terms, adventuring clergy of the Theurgist may be any class, favoring fighter
The cult — the Temple of Bone — rules a land far to the south where the transformation is nearly complete, and where living things are as uncommon as undead across the rest of the world. Bone Temple propagandists whisper to wizards and to priests of other dark forces. They offer the secret of mummification in exchange for loyalty, and this prize compares favorably with lichdom to some spellcasters; every lich must win the secret of the phylactery from a patron daemon, or violate the wholeness of the cosmos to steal the knowledge directly.
Every full shrine and Bone Temple is contiguous to the Land of Night, and mummy cultists move from city to city through this realm. The power of a mummy priest and even the Last Pharaoh himself is contained within the stones and stele boundaries of their temples: the mummy is potent within their ritual zone of unlife, but cannot leave the field of necromantic influence without crumbling to dust. Living servitors, and lesser undead such as death knights and wights, act as the cult's talons beyond their unholy fanes.
All this priestly nonsense bound to stone prisons is beneath the Lich King's contempt. The Court's goals require the world as it is; their mode of unlife feeds on the energy of a living world, and many a lich's phylactery is, in fact, a living blood relation, or pure-bred lineage of pet pseudodragons, or distributed among a chittering horde of homunculi whose flesh and blood retain the lich's living substance.
THE THEURGIST
The Court and the Temple of Bone are equally stymied by the Theurgist and the unique magic his adepts draw from the higher reality of natural life, death, knowledge, wisdom, and compassion. The Theurgist as an Icon does not share or channel magical energy to followers, and the deaths of past Theurgists in confrontation with evil has not disempowered true theurgic clerics: the publicly known Theurgist is in fact one of a number of stations of an esoteric hierarchy of the most accomplished adepts of theurgy, and all adepts draw their power from surrender of the self to the Ocean Without Wave or Shore.
Theurgy accesses the magical energies of the world through a purified consciousness whose selfhood is free of the contingent factors of memory, upbringing, preference, personality quirks. A theurgists remembers his or her childhood and past as well as anyone does, but through discipline and compassion has ground the density of selfhood down to a gossamer fabric transparent to the Names and Qualities ascendant from moment to moment. The compassionate heart encompasses all entities: a true cleric has compassion even for the most wicked of undead — their bones and sinews, though animated by selfish, stolen magics, are still bones cut from the pure robe of the Manifest, the Eternal. In their regard for all life and spirit, theurgists have a particular duty to cleanse and anoint the remains of the undead, gathering and eventually burying in the clean earth every mace-smashed fragment. Though an undead being is a blasphemous construct of necromantic energies, its substance is bone formerly living, formerly sustained by the cycle of natural life and natural death, and connected to the bones of ancestors and kin by ties of love and duty.
The path of the Theurgist and his true adepts is most arduous, and for every adept, a hundred or a thousand clerics of the Path continue to struggle with selfhood. In game terms, adventuring clergy of the Theurgist may be any class, favoring fighter
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