The Sleeping King

The sleeping king is a very frail old man who sits on a throne in an enchanted slumber. This is by design as if he even moves a tiny bit in his sleep: nightmare portals appear, and abominable aberrations come through and attack.

On very rare occassions, powerful psychics have reported dreaming of a frail old man on a throne in a desperate mental struggle to hold shut the Nightmare Gate. If he loses concentration in the dreamworld, even for an instant, calamity follows, as the nightmares unleashed are those of the gods themselves. In other dreams, or perhaps other timelines, the frail old man has taken the entire nightmare into himself and lost himself to it. He tries to throw himself into the waking world, but is held back by some unknown force.

Worshippers

There are two schools of cultists that worship the Sleeping King.

• The first regularly perform appeasement ceremonies - horrifying rituals that involve pain, self-mutilation and sometimes human sacrifice, all aimed at keeping the King asleep and unmoving. While they rarely perform their rituals openly, they do operate with the knowledge (if not blessing) of the established churches of the pantheon as their work does help hold the King's madness at bay.
• The second are doomsday cultists. They do not practice openly and are executed on sight by all right-minded folk. They will do anything in their power to wake the King and end the world.

The first is often confused for the second. Townsfolk have lynched elderly clerics trying to genuinely avert catastrophe. And it's not just superstitious farmers who make this mistake - in 1065 (72 bgf), the clergy of Braeland had to almost empty their temples of wealth hiring mercenaries from Law-Down to protect an appeasement ritual that the then King of New Braeland had declared heretical and an imminent threat to the people.

Update 0.4.26 agf - the Appeasers have marked the minotaur Mylmar for death and will kill him on sight.

Symbol

An iron dagger piercing a glass eye