Gorum (GOR-um)

CN god of Battle, Strength, and Weapons

Our Lord in Iron

The clash of sword on shield is my song. I am in your armor, your blade. Strike at your foes and I will guide your hand, for I thirst only for battle

-Gorumskagat IV

The clash of steel, the cry of victory, the gasping denial of death: these are the sound of prayers to Our Lord in Iron, for to follow Gorum is to fight. Gorum does not care the reason for battle—a village’s desperate stand against raiders is no less worthwhile to him than a crusader army marching against demons —nor does he choose sides in such clashes. Good or evil, law or chaos, the reason for the fight is irrelevant. It is the thrill of battle that finds his favor, the crucible of struggle in which victory is there for the taking.

Gorum recognizes the value of strategic warfare and the need for archery, siege weapons, and stealth, but those hold little allure for him compared to hand-to-hand combat, the contest of raw, brute strength against honed, deadly skill. Gorum takes no pleasure in one-sided fights or the slaughter of innocents; an armored knight drawing a sword in his name against a helpless peasant might find his blade rust away. Far more delightful would be the peasant’s seemingly pointless swing of an iron pot, which might be answered as if it were a spoken prayer and transformed into a deadly blow.

The god’s followers hold that one is either brave or a coward, with battle the threshing floor that separates the wheat from the chaff. Death in battle is an honor. While tactical retreats or even breaks in fighting to negotiate are tolerable, no greater shame can befall a person than to flee from combat. Murder and assassination similarly offer no honor, and Gorum feels nothing but contempt for those practices, as well as for Norgorber, who condones them. The god and his followers likewise look on Urgathoa with disdain, as her diseases steal lives in the sickbed while the gluttony she promotes destroys warriors’ fitness for meaningful battle.

Gorum’s followers are innumerable: soldiers, mercenaries, knights, and raiders across Tengarian offer him tribute, especially in places where battle is an everyday way of life, such as Blackmoor , Greyhawk, the Realm of the WINTERFELL, and the Greymire. Believers claim that the god’s spirit lives in iron and gird themselves in metal armor whenever possible. They fight frequently, though not always, to the death—battle can establish dominance, relieve tension, or even just serve as prayer.

His priests are hard to differentiate from his other followers. They commonly wear armor (or heavy robes that incorporate metal) as their vestments and are adorned with all manner of weapons, making them walking arsenals ready to draw steel at the slightest opportunity. Though Gorum has no sacred text, his followers learn the church’s creed from a collection of seven heroic poems called the Gorumskagat. Each verse keeps to a rhythm that remains the same across all translations, which warriors learn to recognize and chant while on the march. These chants harmonize into the haunting sound of a roaring battle, and Gorumite warbands take great pride in chants that suggest great conflicts. Battle is the true language of Gorum, acting as the great unifier, and it differs little whether fought by those speaking Nemzeti or Dwarven.

Gorum’s clerics preach that should all battle ever end, Gorum would abandon Panaria , only to return when mortals inevitably clash again. His most holy sites are battlefields, consecrated by the struggles, blood, and lives of those fighting on them. His temples resemble fortresses, complete with armories and forges—even those in the midst of peaceful cities. They contain images of the god, often pictured as a suit of spiked plate armor with burning red eyes. Shrines to him are simple: a pile of stones capped with a metal helm or a blade jammed into a crevice.


Among adventurers, most Gorumites are humans or half-orcs, though followers can be found among all ancestries. They are valued companions thanks to their skill at defeating foes, even though violence tends to be their first answer to every problem. They typically set out not in search of great treasures but rather to find challenges, test their mettle, and honor their god in glorious combat. The most fortunate prove themselves by emerging from battle victorious time and time again, but even these are more likely to be slain on the battlefield than to retire and fade away into old age.

Relations with Other Religions
Traditionally, Gorum has little interest in the affairs of other gods, considering politics a waste of time. He has battled with most other deities, with demon lords, and with other beings of power when their interests happened to conflict with his or they opposed him directly. As such, other gods lay plans against the day when Gorum might cross their paths again. The craftier deities, knowing he is always willing to enter a battle and cares little for its purpose or the goals of either side, find ways to get him on their side of a fight, promising him the chance to leap into the most heated waves of combat, allies at his back. Many divine conflicts have been decided based on whom Gorum chose to fight beside-and that allegiance may have changed over the course of the conflict.

Gorum is generally on friendly terms with Asmodeus, not out of any common philosophy but because the Prince of Darkness often supplies his divine minions with new and more effective weapons of war. Gorum is unimpressed by and a bit contemptuous of Nethys' reliance on magic over physical might, but still feels a kinship with the other god in their mutual love of warlike power and indifference to its ethics. He even feels some admiration for Nethys's strategic prowess. There is no nuance or mitigating factor, however, for the contempt he feels for Norgorber, as assassination and murder are for cowards.

  In recent years, a conflict has gradually built between Gorum and Urgathoa. The Lord in Iron encourages his mortal champions to wage war and become more skilled at martial endeavors, making them more difficult to kill. He believes a valorous death in battle is the proper reward for a life of devotion to such pursuits, and becomes indignant at the idea of seeing his favorite worshipers humiliated by the debilitating effects of disease. Urgathoa takes particularly keen pleasure in bringing ruin to the mightiest physique with lingering illness, or tempting the most disciplined paragon of bodily health into gluttony, and sees no reason that Gorum's faithful should be exempt from her efforts. Her interest has been piqued by the Lord in Iron's implication that his faithful should be reserved for death in battle, and a number of new Urgathoan cults have sprung up in recent years. They pose as warrior sects and challenge other fighters to contests of skill, but infect their weapons with both mundane and magical diseases. Even the lightest scratch may contaminate a fighter with a stealthy pestilence that will lie dormant for months before beginning to slowly, inexorably wither his limbs and sap his strength, until he is left too helpless to feed himself, let alone lift a blade. Gorum's frustration grows, and he may soon choose to escalate the tension between them-whether by striking at her directly or encouraging his followers to focus on seeking out and slaying her followers.

Gorum's worshipers have no particular enmity or friendship with the followers of other religions. If the others accept the superiority of Gorum's teachings, they see no need to fight them, but otherwise, they're happy to engage them at the end of a blade. Because their god has fought almost all other deities at times, and has allied with all of them at others, his faithful see no need to declare themselves for one side or another for any real duration. They admire the physical might of many of Irori's worshipers, but see the effort invested in such discipline as wasted when it is not applied to martial pursuits. They respect the tactical skill of Torag's followers and the passionate charges of Bahamut or Sarenrae crusaders, yet disdain their fundamental restrictions on where and when to fight.

Holy Books & Codes

Gorum has no sacred text, but a collection of seven heroic poems called the Gorumskagat explains the church's creed. Young priests quickly learn to recite these poems perfectly, as elders beat them every time they make a mistake. The poems may be spoken or sung, and each has a distinct rhythm so a familiar listener can easily recognize them when played on a drum. Though individual translations have slightly different meanings, all translations of a poem use the same rhythm (meaning that in some languages, particularly Elven and Aquilian ,the phrasing is awkward).

Tenets of Faith

Edicts: attain victory in fair combat, push your limits, wear armor in combat
Anathema: kill prisoners or surrendering foes, prevent conflict through negotiation, win a battle through underhanded tactics or indirect magic
Follower Alignments: Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Evil

Holidays

Unlike other martial faiths, such as Bahamut's church, which records the dates of great victories and celebrates them as holy days, Gorum's church has little interest in keeping track of old battles beyond creating the occasional shrine at a battle's end. The faithful celebrate battles won today and look forward to victories in the future. Unless a war or battle's anniversary is strongly associated with a particular date, such as the first of the year or a prominent holiday, the church may forget about the specific date within a year or two, only mentioning it when it comes to mind or serves as an example to extol.

Of course, any number of events may provoke such a memory and an impromptu celebration. For example, a change in the weather may cause a twinge in the old battle scars on a priestess's knee, causing her to reminisce about that battle in a speech a few days later; likewise, as a priest repels the ores trying to sack his town, he may exhort the town guard to be brave, drawing from memories of his first battle against ore hordes. Thus, a particular month may have no "holy days" one year and several the next.

Aphorisms

With worship of Gorum widespread across the Tengaria, these common sayings can be heard in many languages and cultures.
Blood, not rust: Gorum believes a warrior should keep her armor clean, but if it must be dirty, better with an enemy’s blood—or even the wearer’s—than rust. This phrase encapsulates the idea that something that may not seem perfect can still be acceptable. Some devotees of the god instead interpret this phrase as a call to action, especially in the face of hopeless odds, believing it is far better to risk death in battle than to simply rot into old age.
Iron-tongued: This descriptor—kin to silver-tongued and acid-tongued—is used to describe people who always manage to say the right thing to start a fight, though few openly connect the phrase to Our Lord in Iron.

Religions

• Gods of Tengaria