Urgathoa

The Pallid Queen, Goddess of Pestilence

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For more information on all Betrayer Deities, see: Betrayer Deities

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Urgathoa is an utterly amoral, hedonistic goddess of pestilence and indulgence, concerned only with satiating her own desires regardless of the consequences others suffer. She strives for experience and a full appreciation of the world—but her appreciation is utterly selfish. She was once a mortal woman with a tremendous appetite for life, one who rebelled against the notion of being judged by Kalista and losing the joys of living. Somehow in death, she found the strength to tear herself from Pharasma's endless line of souls and return to Iolcus, becoming a divine being and the world's first undead creature. Her existence is a corruption of the natural order; some say her first divine footprints upon the soil of the Material Plane birthed plague and infection, and that the first shadows and wraiths were born of her breath.

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Physical Description

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Urgathoa is usually depicted as a beautiful, raven-haired woman from the waist up—much like her mortal self, though she's as pale as a hungry vampire. Her lower half is rotted and withered, decaying farther down until only blood-covered bones remain at her feet. When she walks, she leaves bloody, skeletal footprints. Although she sometimes manifests nude in the faithful's visions, she usually appears wearing a sheer red or green gown. From neck to toe, the gown is stained with hideous patches of black, brown, and red.

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Divine Realm

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Urgathoa's divine realm is Bloodrot, a necropolis located on the shore of the Sea of Lamentation in Gehenna inhabited by her undead followers. She originally received this realm in a deal with Charon, the Horseman of Death, and the daemons largely leave her alone.

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Tenets of Faith

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• Feast upon the world. It is an endless buffet, abundant with pleasures.


• Reject mindless conformity, temperance, and restraint, for they are shackles.


• Dread not the flaws of mortal flesh; aging, disease, or even death. Embrace them.

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Worshipers

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The churches of Urgathoa are dispersed across Iolcus in cell-based cults, with individual groups rarely working together. Urgathoa's priests are primarily composed of clerics and necromancers. They have few responsibilities to uphold, other than helping those who desire undeath, and protection of their own. Understandably, they often are secretive of their religious inclinations in public. The priests have been known to compel their enemies to eat their own fallen comrades. The church is organized as a matriarchy, with a powerful cleric, usually female, at the head of each temple; if the priestess is a daughter of Urgathoa, the entire temple is considered especially blessed. Priests who can create undead, either through magic or through the passing of their undead taint receive extra privileges.
Congregants are divided into two castes. The higher caste is known as the ghula, which consists of privileged members who may or may not be members of the priesthood. They are served by the famished: initiate members attempting to prove themselves worthy of recognition by the church. Rank inside the congregation may sometimes be an inversion of rank outside it, and if one of the famished is of higher social status outside the church than a ghula, the ghula treats the famished respectfully in public to preserve the church's secrecy. Like most evil cults, the secret church is scattered and cell-based, and contact between congregations is infrequent.
The ceremonial clothes of Urgathoa's worshipers are a loose, floor-length, red tunic, with a dark green cape clasped at the front. The lower half of the tunic is usually shredded, alluding to the goddess' own physical decay. Most ceremonies involve consuming great amounts of food and drink, which means that most raiments are covered by numerous stains.
Certain dedicated worshipers of the Pallid Queen perform daily obediences in order to receive divine blessings known as a boons from their goddess. The obedience takes the form of a ritual in which the worshiper spreads the most sumptuous feast she can find on a flat surface covered with a black velvet cloth. While consuming the food, the penitent must drink wine and say prayers to Urgathoa until she is painfully full. After a full hour of this, the worshiper must consume a piece of rotten or rancid food, trusting in the goddess to protect her from any illness that might follow. Senior priests of Urgathoa sometimes practice a ritual known as the Reaping. The priest will put on a red robe and arm himself with a scythe. The priest then heads out into the world to cause as much death and destruction as he can before he is driven back to his sanctuary. They believe that if Urgathoa is pleased by the outcome of the Reaping, she will grant a boon to the priest.
Urgathoa's temples are modeled after feast-halls, with a large table serving as an altar, surrounded by numerous chairs. Usually temples are near a graveyard or a crypt, frequently inhabited by ghouls. Her greatest temples are often guarded by daemonic servants.

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Holy Books & Codes

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"Serving Your Hunger" is one of the unholy and profane texts of the goddess Urgathoa. It was written by her first knight-commander and antipaladin, Dason who was rewarded for its completion with a powerful artifact. It contains the goddess' basic tenets of faith, several recipes for extravagant meals (a few copies are rumored to include instructions on how to cook humanoids), and the most well-known ways of becoming undead (dealing primarily with ghouls, wights, and vampires). The text contains riddles intended to jar the mind, shaking it loose from conventional thought such as morality and moderation. It also serves as a primer to prepare one's mind for a more conciliatory approach to the undead.

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Contacts & Relations

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Prime Deities

The Mistress of Maladies despises Sarenrae with all her being, she who would preach temperance and deny mortals the guilty pleasures for which they should not feel guilt. During the Dawnspear War, Urgathoa's plagues infected many, but it was the Dawnflower's blessed light and clerics that cured their ailments.

Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Charon and Urgathoa share a realm, a circumstance settled upon by a mutual agreement. Interactions between the two are sparse, as they give each others' forces a wide birth.

Divine Traits

General Information

Alternative Name(s)
The First Undead
Goddess of Pestilence
Lady Despair
Mistress of Maladies
The Pallid Queen

Alignment
Neutral Evil

Pantheon
Betrayer Deity

Areas of Concern
Disease, gluttony, undeath

Favored Weapon
Scythe

Sacred Animal(s)
Fly

Sacred Color(s)
Green, red

Symbol
Skull-decorated fly

Worshipers
Gluttons, hedonists, necromancers

Worshipers' Adjective(s)
Urgathoan

Plane
Gehenna - Bloodrot

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D&D 5e

Domains
Death, Trickery

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Pathfinder 1e

Domains
Death, Evil, Magic, Strength, War

Subdomains
Blood, Cannibalism, Corruption, Daemon, Ferocity, Murder, Plague, Self-Realization, Shadow, Undead

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Pathfinder 2e

Domains
Decay, Indulgence, Plague, Undeath

Alternative Domain(s)
Magic, Might, Swarm

Divine Ability
Constitution or Wisdom

Divine Font
Harm

Divine Skill
Intimidation

Cleric Spells
1st: Goblin Pox
2nd: False Life
7th: Mask of Terror

Divine Boons

• Minor Boon
  You feast on the spoils of life and death. You gain the benefits of the irongut goblin heritage, regardless of your ancestry. If you already have this heritage, the circumstance bonus increases to +4.
• Moderate Boon
  Urgathoa blesses you as one of her children. You gain negative healing.
• Major Boon
  When you contract contagions, you experience fever dreams filled with insight. Once afflicted with a disease, you gain the effects of Foresight with yourself as the target until no longer afflicted with any disease.

Divine Curses

• Minor Curse
  You must overindulge or partake in forbidden feasts before you find yourself even remotely sated. You need to eat 20 times as much food as normal to avoid starvation, though you always feel hungry regardless of how much you eat. If you dine on the flesh and blood of sapient creatures, you need to eat only the normal amount of such meals and your hunger abates.
• Moderate Curse
  Urgathoa cuts you off from positive energy without granting you the blessing of undeath. You are harmed by positive effects and don’t recover Hit Points from them, as if you were an undead or had negative healing, but you are still harmed by negative effects as normal.
• Major Curse
  Urgathoa teaches you that pointless lives in slavery to death and morality are bound to end in tragedy. You develop an incurable wasting disease that leaves you clumsy 2, enfeebled 2, and unable to move except by Crawling. This disease never progresses further to kill you, but it passes to your friends and loved ones merely by sight, wasting them away unto death before your eyes and causing them to rise as undead to haunt you.