Should you find any clerics of Lamashtu in a state to converse with any eloquence, they may correct you on the colloquial pronouns given to their Mother, who speaks in many bellowing, yelping, screeching voices and therefore couldn’t properly be said to maintain any one gender. The association with maternity really stems more from a unique philosophy of care and adoption for those discarded by typical society.
If you’re going to find such an articulate follower of the Mad Chorus, it’s as likely to be in Ustalav as anywhere. The country doesn’t overtly patronize the deity, but then there is a certain appreciation here for the broken, the twisted, the lame and the lost – the protected of Lamashtu. The ugly and the overlooked. It would be almost a noble ambition if it weren’t so bitter and erratic – most usually taking the form of jealousy and revenge against that society which threw them out in the first place.
Lamashtu’s favorite way to gain followers is to break and to mar the naturally beautiful – they love to twist the chosen of Shelyn from her grasp, blessing them with unhealable scars or deformed children, showing them how easily the favor of that proper polite society is lost. How quickly it can be replaced with hesitance and revulsion. “The ravings of the mad,” they say, “are the secrets of gods.”
Scavengers, jackals and hyenas and coyotes, wolves exiled from their packs are favored of Lamashtu and the reason they contrived to rip the domain of Beasts from Curchanus. They believed that he was not properly venerating the stragglers, the hungry ones, those…less majestic, less beautiful, less appreciated. This was seen as a great win by many of the societies of gnolls, goblins, minotaurs and harpies, bugbears and hobgoblins – the thousand forgotten sentients of Golarion, reduced to the name of “monster.” To many, it was the first time they felt that a god stepped up and protected them, sheltered them, made them welcome. The blessings of their Mother are uncomfortable; the positions and politics of their Mother are unpredictable; but that their Mother cares for them in a world which emphatically does not is undeniable. Sometimes that is enough.
Holy places of Lamashtu are old ruins, wrecks, condemned and abandoned buildings no longer fit to live in, corrupted clearings of wood where little grows…places nobody else wants. Favored weapons of Lamashtu are natural attacks – teeth or claws or horns, whatever you’ve got that’s a part of you, a part of the bone of you. We’re mostly all blood and bone, in the end, and not so different.
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