Besmara
(a.k.a. The Pirate Queen)
Once a minor nautical deity revered on Golarion, Besmara is now venerated as a powerful goddess of pirates, conflict, and the alien leviathans that swim through the void. Some of her priests claim that Besmara took her current power and position as her prize when she deposed another deity in a daring raid, but as these events ostensibly took place during the Gap, they remain impossible to confirm.
Many vesk mercenaries worship Besmara in her role as the goddess of strife, but pirates, smugglers, war profiteers, and other criminals who profit from conflict make up the bulk of Besmara’s followers. Even those pirates who normally eschew religion might still pray to Besmara to ward away her wrath, or they might toss a share of plunder out the airlock as tribute to the Pirate Queen to curry her favor. Such folk tend to be more superstitious than religious, however, so Besmara has few temples and little in the way of an organized church. Nevertheless, ports and space stations visited regularly by pirates often host small shrines to the goddess; similar altars can also be found on remote asteroids, on space hulks, and in starship graveyards.
Most of the Free Captains pay at least lip service to Besmara, and many of them carry a small, valuable trinket (such as a chunk of rare mineral or an antique laser pistol stolen from an important starship captain) with them at all times, considering it bad luck to ever misplace the item. Some of these baubles have been passed down form Free Captain to Free Captain over the decades.
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