Saints, Gods and Pretty Pictures

Thought I'd share a long-standing illustration I've been using to introduce players to the canon of saints and holy days in my original campaign world (well, original in the sense that it's yet another way to present Is-Europe-Is-Not-Europe) ...

Click, enlarge

This approach leads me to think how else illustrations could be repurposed by a world creator in need of a quick and dirty pantheon. For example, Sidney Sime's illustrations could illustrate an exotic, Tekumel-like religion ...

Not the god of square dealing

But a surprisingly good resource is the Marvel universe, in particular marvel.wikia.com searched under "gods." Thor over the years had dealt with many other pantheons, and the more obscure of these make great god-fodder for an original campaign ....

And if you can stand this level of comic-bookery then maybe you could just cut out the middleman and have your world worship one of the more obscure groups of superheroes. Like for example, I dunno, the Young Gods:

In fact, names like "Highnote" and "Splice" are just begging to be filed off, and I'm not sure how even as actual superheroes, these people can face the modern world they never made each morning. She's the sun goddess Zos, he's the moon god Elu, together they fight crime. Much better.

St. Amaro's Western Adventure

While researching my folk saints I came across a most intriguing real-world figure, the legendary, uncanonized Santo Amaro.

This blessed wanderer set sail from the land of Alia, "whose cities now lie in ruins," searching for the terrestrial Paradise, convinced it lay across the oceans - he is assumed to have sailed west, although the direction of travel is not always clear from the manuscripts. He gathered a crew (could YOUR PARTY be that crew?) and set forth into uncharted waters, guided only by faith.

The Spanish texts of his adventures (available here, at the end of the monograph) bear a certain resemblance to themes in pagan Celtic literature of the journey across the western ocean to the Otherworld (imramm) and to the similar legend of St. Brendan the Navigator from Irish Christendom. C.S. Lewis (who was Northern Irish) may indeed have drawn on these tales of curious islands, moral lessons and marine perils for his Narnia book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

Amaro's encounters, to the gaming mind, look like the kernel of a saltcrawl map.

1. Tierra Desierta, island of five cities and many castles, where the men are ugly and the women beautiful. Abundant animal encounters. Provisioning and trade available. Handsome male party members are at risk of entanglements, jealousy.

2. The Ruddy, or Vermilion Sea.

3.  Fuente Clara, island of many sins and vices, but where everyone is beautiful and courteous, disease is unknown and the lifespan is 300 years. Henchmen and hirelings must make a loyalty check or remain in this false paradise.

4.  The Coagulated Sea traps the ship among seven other abandoned ships, where fierce sea monsters the size of horses and larger fight over the corpses of the ships' crew. (Inspired by prayer, Amaro escaped this deathtrap by inflating waterskins with air and tying them to the ship, whereupon the beasts attacked the waterskins, believing them to be corpses, and pulled the ship out of the clotted waters.)

5. Ysla Desierta, bare of growth, overrun by fierce lions and populated by hermits, a fortified abbey with basic supplies. Each Saint John's Day the lions and other fierce beasts fight and the stench of the resulting corpses is such that anyone staying on the island for up to a month afterward is sickened.

6. Further on the monastery Val de Flores, in an abundant land with rich supplies. The leader of Val de Flores is a friar, Leonatis, whom the local savage lions respect.

7. The Port of Three Houses, a rich and beautiful land but without inhabitants and the port with no more than three houses.

8. The two hermits in the valley beyond do not know where the Earthly Paradise is, nor do the high-born women of the convent Flor de Dueñas.  but the wandering holy woman Baralides does, who only appears to the virtuous. She can give directions to the gem-encrusted castle gates of Paradise.

9. Paradise: whose porter allows a timeless glimpse of that land (Amaro spent 277 years gazing without realizing it) and gives as a gift the fruit (complete healing) or the earth (a tree planted in it will give fruit as healing potions) from the trees of paradise. You want to pry some of the gems loose? I double dare you to try...

Amaro's voyage is short, however, compared to the wilder adventures of St. Brendan, which curiously manage to cover some of the same ground. Maybe a Greater Neo-Imramm Western Sea map is in the offing?

Folk Saints: St. Gumption

Continuing an extremely irregular series of the folk saints in the world of Mittellus. This one emerged with player input during a session last weekend as I floundered for a name for the main church in Renneton.

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A Short Oar Sect image of the saint.

The long-deceased holy woman, Gunderdon of Frusk, often has her name shortened to Gumption when she is honored as an unofficial saint along the wild borders of the True Religion.

Escaping a raid on her convent, this devout sister of middle years set forth on a choppy sea in a coracle with woefully insufficient provisions. Her faith, grit, and determination pulled her through this ordeal and the subsequent trial of shipwreck on a deserted, cold island, where she remained for seven years, defending herself against wolves and sea-devils with a broken oar.

After her rescue, she traveled the wild shore on a donkey, enduring fantastic extremes of cold, dry and wet, surviving horrific tortures of the heathen. Eventually, broken in body but not in spirit, she met her martyrdom on a hot griddle, demanding to be turned over so she would roast evenly, and taking a miraculous three days to cook through and through.

Gumption's faithful scorn the complexities of civilization. If the Church will not canonize her because she never performed any miracles on anyone else's behalf, well, what do those incense-swingers know about anything anyway? Her followers place a premium on self-reliance and stick-to-itiveness, and waste no opportunity to teach these lessons to their children. Temples and shrines to the Saint are scrubbed clean, often several times a day.


If Eracle is the folk saint of strength, Gumption is the folk saint of constitution, and other elusive qualities besides. In social relations she is called upon to lend chutzpah. Where initiative is needed, she doles out moxie, spunk, pluck, pep, and good old-fashioned get-up-and-go. In uncertain situations, she recalls horse-sense to mind. And when danger looms, her blessing reinforces guts, strengthens the kidney, stiffens the spine, and thrusts the chin upward. Her spiritual enemies are lazybones, stay-a-beds, those who dilly-dally and shilly-shally, dingbats, duffers, poindexters, and the legions of the lily-livered.

Prophets of the Saint dress in plain, frayed and much-mended clothes, and carry as their sacred weapon a broken oar. There is a rift between the Long Oar (as staff) and Short Oar (as club) sects, often coming to blows; the Long Oars are seen as decadent by the Short Oars, and foolish in their hope that Gumption will eventually be canonized.

All her prophets lack the ability to abjure evil creatures, but emanate a 10' radius aura of morale (+2 for allied NPCs and animals). Additionally, they can exhort others to buck up and pull themselves together, having the ability to dispel fear, confusion, and paralysis at will by touch (at 1st level), at 30' distance (at 3rd level) or for all creatures in a 30' radius (at 5th level). Finally, they save at +4 versus all mind-affecting magic and distractions.

Folk Saints: St. Hermas

St. Hermas, clad in dragonscale, gifts a loyal adventurer with cash and loot.

Yes, the pious wanderer prays to the canonical St. Seraphina of the Wandering Stars. But the quest for adventure and treasure in Mittellus has led to the popularity of the folk-saint Hermas, wherever chancers gather to wrest long-lost treasures from the oblivion of the earth.

Hermas, so the legend goes, was a fearless soldier in the North in the times of Invictus and Amalthea. He was anointed into the Revelation by Amalthea herself, and performed many useful services of a special nature for them and their followers. In the wars against the monsters of the Far North that followed the death of Amalthea, Hermas preferred to stay off the battlefield, conducting perilous infiltrations at long odds with only a hand-picked band of misfit comrades.

The tales told of him are as many as the notched and worn copper pennies that fill a fifty-pound sack. How he killed an ogre with a nail; reversed the flow of a river and drowned a whole kobold lair; made a false prophet tear his own head off in a game of dares and forfeits; convinced a dragon to yield its cache, one coin at a time.

True to form, his final adventure was as audacious as it was doomed. Finding a doorway to Hell, he slew devils left and right before finally meeting his martyrdom at the hands of the Evil One. In some versions of the legend, he tricked the Devil by offering his own soul in exchange for a companion's, knowing himself to be incorruptible; then fought to get it back, achieving that goal just before he died. Therefore he is also known as Rescuer and Ransomer of Souls.

As a folk-saint, Hermas appeals to adventurers, highwaymen, smugglers and other enacters of desperate deeds. His symbol is the X of crossed swords, and he is often depicted wearing dragonscale armor, raising two swords with mounds of treasure at his feet. His cult is controversial in the Church; some tolerate it, seeing it as a way to keep otherwise unreachable individuals thinking of the World Beyond, while others damn Hermas as a fiction and pagan relic who encourages theft and murder in a holy name. Those of the tolerant persuasion often pair Hermas with the canonical saint Seraphina in their oaths and prayers.

Many shrines and temples to the Saint have been erected by wealthy adventurers, and it is there that his powers manifest directly, for he has no holy order. Such a shrine will always have an object by which a band of adventurers can swear the Oath to St. Hermas. The Oath's form of words varies but usually enforces cooperation and fair sharing among the band, with oathbreakers subject to supernatural comeuppance of a dire and unspecified nature.

The Saint brings ruin to breakers of his oath.

Some shrines also feature small practice dungeons, cemeteries for adventurers killed in the line of duty, shops or training halls where affiliated professionals sell goods and services of interest to adventurers, or libraries where the collected wisdom of explorers and warriors can be read for a fee. Many are the stories of small and capricious miracles the Saint has performed in his shrines to reward the faithful and generous. His word and gospel is that of earned prosperity, and that alone is enough to earn him his steady following.

(Info on the historical St. Hermas here. Often confused with St. Hermes.)

Folk Saints: Introduction

My interest in folk saints, and folk-beliefs about Catholic religious figures more generally, began with the Miracle of the Paella. On a visit to Morella, an inland hill-castle town in northern Valencia, I saw the following plaque on a house wall:

It illustrates the miracle said to have occurred when St. Vincent Ferrer, a Catalan Dominican preacher who lived around the turn of the 15th century, visited Morella. His hostess turned out to be insane. Ashamed that she could not offer good meat to the Saint, she slaughtered her young son and served him up, Valencian style, in a paella. The Saint fortunately recognized the meat for what it was, and resurrected the lad in the middle of the dish.

Anyone who spent as much time as my young self poring over the D'aulaires' Greek mythology book would quickly know this tale as a variant of Tantalus' sacrifice of his son Pelops to the Gods. Like the Saint, the gods identified the meat on offer and resurrected the boy. Many other pagan stories live on in European folklore about the saints and other religious figures. In Portugal, Bartholomew is revered by sailors, carries a trident, and is attended by a strange sea monster, like Poseidon. The existence across Europe of Black Madonnas has been seen as a continuation of various cthonic and nature cults, while the dark Saint Sarah of the Gypsies bears an explicit connection to the Hindu goddess Kali. And let's not forget this fellow, who's come a long way from being a Lycian bishop.

Other folk-saints are mainly legendary figures, including the beloved St. Christopher, who was expelled from the calendar by the Vatican in 1969, and has been analyzed as a sort of combination of Hercules and Hermes. Stranger still, some traditions paint Christopher as coming from a dog-headed race - the one pious gnoll on the planet? - not to mention the folk-saint who was actually a dog, Guinefort (see here for both). The legendary Wilgefortis or St. Uncumber was a woman who prayed to grow a beard so she would be liberated from having to marry - clearly this lady was no Dwarf! Another mythical female saint, Ursula, who supposedly led an army of 11,000 virgins to martyrdom, has been identified with legends of the Norse goddess Freya. Speaking of virgins (or not), the less said about the unspeakable Saint Foutin the better.

The hard life in Latin America has led to a flourishing of folk saints who, now more than ever, look after the poor and desperate. Such dubious characters as Mexico's Pancho Villa and Argentina's Evita Peron attract popular prayers. In the midst of the ruthless drug cartel wars of northern Mexico, some sentimental thugs - and many common folk - give offerings to the righteous bandit Jesus Malverde. Apart from historical figures being popularly canonized, other revered figures make their way in from obscure parts of the iconography. Leonard Cohen fans may be familiar with the Anima Sola, a lonely soul being released from purgatory. More eerie still is the modern-day cult of Santissima Muerte, a holy female figure of Death often represented by an actual skeleton, echoing the Aztec goddess Mictlancihuatl, who "grants blessings no real saint would approve."

Does your role-playing game feature characters who flit rootlessly from place to place, constantly exposed to death and danger, living hand-to-mouth in search of the next big score? Maybe they'd be tempted to make a small offering for the blessings of a righteous bandit, or to keep Death off their backs and on their enemies'. The folk-patron of adventurers in my world of Mittellus, St. Hermas, is up next in this series.