Torog (/ˈtoː.rɒɡ/)
Torog, the Crawling King is an evil god of torturers, slavers, and jailers. His worshippers are those who take others' freedom and creatures living in the darkness below. It is said that pathways under the world are the result of his tears of pain and anger, and his realm is a network of deadly caves and manacles.
Torog - the King that Crawls
Codex of the Gods
Torog
Torog was once a god of virility and health, renowned for his invulnerability… until he battled the Primordial Titan Gargash. Torog slew Gargash, but in its dying breath the Titan cursed Torog to exist in a space between life and death. Torog still could not die, but his wounds would never heal, leaving him in perpetual agony. His legs broken broken and maimed, Torog could only crawl through the bowels of the earth where he carved out the vast subterranean network of caverns now known as the Underdark.
Epithets
The Lame God
The King that Crawls
The Jailor
Domain
Torog is a god of death, though he stands in stark contrast with his rival, the Raven Queen. Due to a treaty between the two, the Raven Queen accepts all souls who die on the surface, but Torog claims all who perish beneath the surface of the earth.
While all who enter the Raven Queen’s care eventually fade away into complete dissolution (this is why resurrection spells have a time limit), those who enter Torog’s domain of Tarterus will often wish they had faded completely, for Torog is also the god of suffering and pain. His servants, the demodands, relentlessly torture all who enter his care. This constant punishment allows the souls in his domain to exist in constant agony for perpetuity, like Torog himself. He is both the warden of the dead, and a prisoner in the Underdark himself, so he is often viewed as the patron of both jailors and the imprisoned.
Dogma
To the followers of Torog, pain is existence, and the absence of pain is nothingness - the True Death. They view life as a time of innocence, a time when mortals are spared the true nature of reality before they must accept unending torment for their own good. Torog’s clergy view themselves as somewhat precocious children. They are the kid in first grade who knows Santa isn’t real.
The faithful of Torog divide themselves into two separate sects, the Caretakers of the Blind, and the Revealers. Caretakers believe their duty is to prolong life as much as possible and ease the suffering of the living as much as possible, and are some of the most skilled healers and surgeons in the world. The Revealers believe that it is their duty to enlighten the masses of the world, and gift them with a glimpse of the true reality. They are by far the most skilled torturers in all the multiverse, more gifted than even the fallen angels of the Nine Hells.
Tenets
Followers of the King that Crawls are often surprisingly liberal in their views. They are some of the least judgmental people you can find, because to their god, morality does not matter. Rich or poor, powerful or weak, saintly or wicked, it makes no difference to them. Torog will inflict the same amount of suffering regardless. There are those who find this lack of strictures extremely liberating.
Allies
Torog has an accord with two of the other major powers whose rule the Underdark - Lolth and Asmodeus. Because the domains are also prisons of unending torment, Torog allows the souls of the Drow and Duergar to pass into the Demonweb Pits and the Nine Hells respectively. As a result of this treaty and their generally neutral and non-judgmental nature, followers of Torog can be found in nearly all corners of the Underdark. The Caretakers of the Blind are welcomed due to their healing skills, and even the most proud Drow matron knows that her skills in inflicting pain pale in comparison to those of the Revealers. To have a Revealer torturer on staff is a sign of prestige among the nobility of the Underdark.
Enemies
Torog and the Raven Queen are rivals. As gods of death with competing philosophies, they each view the other as abhorrent. The Raven Queen believes Torog to be needlessly cruel in his resistance to the natural order. Torog believes the Raven Queen is grossly negligent by not inflicting enough pain and misery to prevent her charges from succumbing to the void. Followers of both gods try to avoid stepping into the others’ domain. Servants of the Raven Queen know if they die underground their soul will be imprisoned for eternity, denied the natural cycle of life and death. Servants of Torog fear death on the surface, for if they do their souls are condemned to eventual True Death, a fate they consider worse than perpetual torment.
Torog is also mortal enemies with Orcus, the Demon Prince of Undeath, who he views as a thief and usurper. Cultists of Orcus and Priests of Torog will slay each other on sight. The only common ground Torog has with the Raven Queen is their hatred for undead, and priests of both faiths will ally with each other to destroy necromancers where they can be found.
Clergy and Temples
Followers of the King that Crawls always wear his holy symbol prominently due to the laws of safe passage that many civilizations of the Underdark have written for the faith - not that Torog cares if his followers are killed. He tortures them the same as anyone else. The Lame God counts members of nearly every race that exists underground among his followers. Kuo-Toa, svirfnebblin, derro, humans, and goblins are some of the most common, though there are even some heretical drow and duergar in the King’s clergy. Eye iconography is prominent in both the garb and the temples of the followers of the King that Crawls. Beholders like to claim abandoned temples of Torog for themselves, because the decor makes them feel like they are being worshipped as they properly should.
Festivals
There are two main holidays within the Church of the Jailor.
The Night of Blinding is a night of missionary work. Caretakers open their temples and will heal all who enter free of charge. Prison gates are opened and the Caretakers are allowed through to see to the care of the inmates - though of course none are allowed to leave and the Caretakers will work to keep any from escaping while under their care.
The Festival of Revelation is a week long holiday where members of the faithful take turns inflicting their arts on each other. Those who find the most heinous and creative ways to inflict suffering on their fellow Revealers are celebrated. Deaths rarely occur during this festival, but if they do, the killer is considered blameless. After all, Torog was going to torture the deceased regardless, and the killer will be too. Most Revealers have excessive scars from this festival. Caretakers are always on hand to help the revelers recover from the wounds they inflict on each other, and the last day of the festival is traditionally an orgy of pleasure and excess, a celebration of the reprieve of life that is granted before the eternity of unending pain. Many laypeople are willing to subject themselves to the Revealers’ talents just to get to the party at the end.
Champions and Avatars
Torog is unusual in that he still regularly manifests on the Material Plane. He crawls through the tunnels of the Underdark, carving new caverns with his massive bulk. He is a massive hairless giant, his legs shattered and his body covered in weeping open wounds and burns. He wears a crown of bone embedded in his scalp. Torog’s most secret inner desire is that he longs for the dissolution that he has denied those within his care for eternity, and should someone achieve the miraculous and find a way to slay the immortal death god, he likely will not resist.
The King that Crawls makes his lair in the Soul Abbatoir of Gargash, the hollowed out corpse of the slain Earth Primordial that cursed Torog to his current fate. This domain exists in both the Material Plane and in the Shadowfell of the Underdark. His domain is known as Tarterus, and the greater Shadowfell of the Underdark is known as Carceri. His lair is maintained by the Wrackspawn, souls who have been tortured for such an eternity that they have lost all sense of self. They are granted a brief reprieve from their torment to serve the Jailor until they begin to remember who they are. Then it’s back to the torture pits with them. The torture pits are staffed by fiend-like creations of Torog known as Demodands. Despite what some hopeful creatures who serve the god think, Demodands are not ascended followers of the Lame God. They are soulless constructs created to mete out suffering to all who once lived beneath the surface of the earth.
Torog, the Crawling King is an evil god of torturers, slavers, and jailers.
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