Lamashtu

Per Saban during his research after the Hobgoblin attack on the Old Caravan Road where a shrine to the demon goddess Lamashtu (pronounced lah-MAHSH-too) was found.

---

Morbid Sayings

Lamashtu “Great is the daughter of Heaven who tortures infants. Her hand is a net, her embrace is death. She roars like a lion. She constantly howlslike a demon-dog.” —Lamashtan prayer from her clerics

Background

• She is the mother and patroness of many misshapen and malformed creatures that crawl, slither, or flap on, above, or below the surface of Golarion. Her unholy symbol is a three-eyed jackal head, which may be represented in many ways, and her sacred animal is the jackal..
• Lamashtu’s goal is to corrupt mortals and twist the entire world into her misshapen brood, an enormous monstrous family devoted to her. make the appropriate grisly sacrifices..
• Lamashtu’s worshipers believe that purity and perfection are temporary or illusory, while corruption and flaws are the natural and final state of things. .
• Lamashtu may also send messages through nightmares: a hunter might receive a vivid nightmare of Lamashtu biting the head off a dwarven infant, thus directing him to kill the dwarven captain (the head, or leader of the group) to force pesky dwarven soldiers to return to their base. In rare cases, injured worshipers deep in her favor might wake to find wounds half-healed or a lost limb regrown, though she is not a healing deity, and in these cases the result is meant to stand as testament to her unnatural intervention: a man with a belly wound might have pink scarring and strange hairy growths, a human amputee might have a gnoll’s leg, and so on.

The Church

• Services to Lamashtu include howling, screaming, branding, bloodletting, childbirth, and sacrificing humanoids or animals.

• Lamashtu’s worshipers often perform ritualistic selfmutilation to prove their devotion to her, wearing their scars as trophies until the lucky day when she graces them with some kind of deformity (which is then displayed with reverence).

• Pregnant cultists can pray for Lamashtu’s blessing, transforming their unborn into monsters that claw their way free of the womb, leaving behind horrific scarring that the faithful view as signs of devotion and piety.