In the depths of interplanetary space, a dim planetoid of rock orbits the sun, far from any of its brethren. The light of Sol is etiolated and cold, simply the largest star in a field of others. Its surface is a frozen desert of black stone scoured by cosmic winds, occasional scars to Below limned in ultraviolet fungal growths and radioactive strata. Beneath, a hideous piping suffuses the burrow-cities and cavern temples of the fungus-based lifeforms that have claimed the dwarf-planet, an outpost of an army of beings from beyond the stars. One of their gods, their patrons, inhabits the pitiful ionosphere of Pludo above them, invisible in the light of Sol but a great pressing presence on esoteric instruments. It spirals and coils around the world, flashing with iridescent scales when the sun spits out one of the flares that manage to not die en route to Pludo. It is both here and not here, its coils reaching in and out of subspace, constricting around the disparate species and worlds in its thrall. It is Yigg, the Great Cosmic Serpent, the Father of Snakes, and its fitful, sleeping attentions are on a small, old, waterlogged world five light-hours from where its great head fitfully rests.
Its dreams are vast and ineffable. A simple mortal human could never think in more than two directions at once, and even the greatest of its servitors, the Mi-Go, could only manage 14 separate psychic channels. Yigg is Greater Than. Yigg thinks in thousands and thousands of streams of consciousness, aware of the smallest passing femtosecond and the longest turn of the kalpas. It plots and schemes, varying strategies of the ebbs and flows of power. The Yuggothians (which the Pludan Mi-Go call themselves) are too staid, too beholden to its schemes already. It tires of playing nth-dimensional chess against itself with their cities and worlds as its pieces. It thus interferes with the chaotically-delicious melange of things happening on the Earth.
In ancient times, when the earth was young and primordial and volcanic, Yigg and the oldest of its servitor races waged war against some of its cosmic brethren, Tsathoggua the Toad and Olther the Cat. It’s unclear who won. To this day, it hates the intrusions of the Cats of Olther and the cultists of Tsathoggua (reduced, respectively, to the animal guardians of one small city-state to the western edge of the Inner Sea and furtive, wrong-species worshippers in a frog-haunted swamp), and seeks the destruction of their shrines and worshippers and patron animals to the detriment of its own long-laid plans and machinations.
It has many names among its worshippers on Earth. It is called Father Yig by the snakemen remnants, one of its failed colonization attempts. They scrabble around, DNA cooked to tatters by the effects of cloning and splicing and inbreeding, flailing for their god and attempting their own schemes. Yigg has mostly abandoned them, though it still accepts their worship. A certain tribe of ice-dwellers to the south of the world, barbarians and raiders who wear scaled armor and wear horned helmets and tame and revere the furred thunder-lizards down there, venerate Yigg as part of their bloodthirsty pantheon, alongside the Wise One Wodyn and Thars Tharsen the Thunder-Bringer. Yigg’s presence hasn’t been forgotten by other religions; it is considered one of the Outer Devils of the Gungish Papacy, and at least one clan of the Ghost-Bird Plains plays ritual drums during the Autumn to drive snakes out of their campsites. They tell of the times in the past (not distant, not very) when a many-headed serpent they called Hydra menaced them during the Season of Hunger, eating their flocks and the lithe warrior-youths they sent to slay it.
Other worshippers exist, scattered and secretive, in the hidden places of the world. Single mages perform profane snake-eating rites under the twinkling Fall stars, covens meet in dense forests, ruined ziggurats, deep marshes, in dank village basements, on desert islands, and even in the most-”civilized” cities, right under the noses of the inquisitors and paladins of Gung, Apollonius, and Xorn. In rare cases, the snake-cult isn’t proscribed, and temples sprout as towers from the city skylines like rearing cobras, presided over by tyrant demagogues. Each of these sects worship Yigg under different aspects and names: Apep, Yormund, Set. Not all Great Serpent cults worship Yigg; but they are obscured and confused by their imagery and tenets. Perhaps this is yet another of Yigg’s great convolutions and confusions. Either way, they are unimportant. The disparate cults of Yigg label all others as pretender-priests, heretics and infidels, and wage hidden wars amongst each other. Even in a temple, the main method of advancement is underhandedness and backstabbing. It’s a matter of course that a high-priest will be eventually killed and replaced by an underling, although open bloodletting is seen as crass and unsubtle. Much better to have the priest killed in their guise as a beneficent, doddering old merchant, slain in a freak break-in gone wrong, a trail of patsies and shadow-operators winnowing into nothing like the tail of the Great Serpent.
Each worshipper of Yigg almost invariably keeps a second, public-facing facade of respectability. They could truly be anyone. This is a core tenet of the religion and ritual undertaken during meetings, the Shedding of the Earthly Skin to reveal the divine new scales beneath, accomplished in the Inner Sea city-cults by the lifting of a diaphanous cowl of shed snakeskin off all the acolytes upon entrance to the inner sanctum. The most zealous priests keep layers of these cowls on at all times, so that even their flock may not know their identity.
There is a folklore tale among the Yiggites: Once, a boy in a small shepherd village warned his people of an asp by a river. They made great pains to find and eliminate it before it could bite their flocks. They could not; the boy had made it up. He laughed as they drove their sheep back over the mountains. A week later, he claimed to have seen another in a mountain spring. The villagers gathered their sheep and drove them to the riverside, but again could find no snake. He laughed at their foolishness, to be tricked a second time. A week passed, and on his way home, he espied a huge python throttling one of his mother’s sheep. He rushed home and warned them that there was another snake. They struck him for his lies, and he left in anger to sleep upon the hillside over the village. The next morning, the python, fat with all the people it strangled and ate in their sleep, slithered up the hill. “Thank you, child, for were it not for your lies they would never have let me eat all of them in the darkness.” There the boy and the snake struck a compact, and he went out into the world to ready it for the devouring.
All Yigg-cultists lie. A layperson might lie at the most opportune time, keeping a facade of utter truthfulness until the time is ripe for the most crushing betrayal of all. This is good; even the truth, told in the preparation for a lie, is blessed in Yigg’s great slitted eyes. Those inducted into the cult speak in a strange double-speak, where everything they say is meant as the opposite. The truly zealous, the snake-saints and high-priests, speak in bewildering koans, draped in layers of irony and facetiousness. And the missionaries of Yigg, seeming mad on street-corners and abandoned caves, speak in carefully constructed, easily disproved falsehoods, to better put to disbelief the one gleaming truth hidden in their speech.
All snakes are sacred to Yigg. Its typical sacrifices include tongues, hearts of those with authority, cats and toads, and prey larger than one would think a person could kill (such as bulls, boars, and bears), burned on a plinth to the open sky. Autumn is the time of year when its presence on Earth is strongest. It is associated with the planetoid Pludo in alchemy and mysticism. Devotion to Yigg enhances spells dealing with deception or charming, physical transformation, poison, and crushing force.
Devotion
Devotion is a new stat, representing the ability of your god to intercede on your behalf. It is not your devotion to your deity, but your deity’s devotion to you. Even if you are a beloved champion of the cult, your god may refuse to help or abandon you at the GM’s discretion; the gods are fickle and work in mysterious ways.
The way I run gods, many of them aren’t. A lot are genius loci, or demons, or spirits of a concept, or extraplanar beings of great power, or ascended magi or something else. These are the ones that utilize devotion: Yigg is real, an alien being that for some reason associates itself with snakes, lives on Pludo, and takes a very real interest in the goings-on of mortals on Earth. It is able to alter reality and knows much, but it isn’t omnipresent or omniscient (except in its followers' lives, perhaps). There is no devotion from the Inchoate, the Overcreator of the Entirety, Who Dreams Beyond All Times and Spaces, and Demiurge Ialdabaoth has more important things to do than address his adherents. Demiurge Iog tends to meddle much more than his brother.
Your Devotion starts out equal to your Wisdom/100. Roll 1d100 under to avoid the effects of another god’s curses (your own god may still choose to curse you at any time without allowing you to roll under to resist); roll under half your Devotion to call upon your god to affect the world around you in some way (like bestowing curses of your own, turning creatures antithetical to your deity, or drawing water out of a rock).
Each cult has its own tenets and strictures that might increase Devotion, but the examples aren’t rigid. If you do something devout, talk to the GM. Converting to a new religion starts you back off at 0, and confers a 3-in-6 chance of getting cursed by your spurned god. After 50 Devotion, converting confers a 5-in-6 chance of curses, and after 75 you always get cursed.
When you advance Devotion, check the chart to see what other abilities your god has decided to bestow upon you.
Devotion
0: None. Calling upon Yigg in a state of gracelessness has a 1-in-6 chance of delivering a curse.
20: Cast sticks to snakes once per day.
40: Pupils become slits, able to sense heat. Snakes nearby are drawn to you.
50: Clerical point of no return. Dropping below 50 devotion to Yigg inflicts a curse upon you.
60: Cast speak with reptiles once per day. Scales grow in patches on the body like mange, granting +1 to AC.
75: You may build a ziggurat or tower temple dedicated to Yigg (costing at least 20,000 silver). Within 2d6 weeks, 1d20+3 minor Yigg-cultists arrive to do your bidding. Beware of backstabbing.
80: Cast charm (affecting 8HD of enemies) once per day. Your bones are pliable, allowing you to slip into spaces no larger than your head.
100: Become a monstrous, poisonous snake. Hand over your character sheet; you are an NPC. This is considered a good thing by clerics of Yigg.
Gaining Devotion
Every day without doing something to increase your Devotion, it falls by 1.
+1: Lying about something big (discuss with the table/GM if it counts), or lying to your own companions (similar, has to have consequences. White lies are a matter of course).
+1: Proselytizing in public. Usually illegal.
+2: Proselytizing in secret. +3 if someone actually converts.
+2: Eating the heart of a lawful person.
+3: Mutilating (whether physical or social) a priest of a lawful deity, or an adherent of Olther or Tsathoggua.
+4: Destroying a shrine to another god. +5 if it is to Olther or Tsathoggua.
+6: Destroying a temple to another god. +7 if it is to Olther or Tsathoggua.
+10 or more: Wiping out a bloodline of rulers or the clergy of another religion.
-1: Revealing the mysteries of Yigg to nonbelievers.
-3: Playing an instrument (besides the flute) during Fall.
-10: Harming a serpent, or allowing a serpent to come to harm.
Curses
The brandmark of godhood is throwing around curses to those who irritate you. Mostly curses are shouted by cult patriarchs or high-priestesses as they are dragged into a town square and hanged, before their bodies are cut apart and burnt then thrown into different rivers. Some curses lay dormant inside doors, statues, or whole buildings until someone blunders into them, briefly drawing the attention of the being into whose domain they intrude.
Let us see an example:
Markus of Sharqis breaks into a vine-shrouded, mist-haunted ziggurat in a deep, tractless jungle. Ignoring the helpfully snake-y intaglios of death and bloodshed on the doors, he enters the inner sanctum, seeing an ancient, ichor-stained altar stone of timeworn basalt as well as a marble statue of a half-man half-snake being. The statue wears a splendid turquoise amulet (a sun surrounded by two snakes facing each other) that he knows he can get at least a few hundred eagles for in Albinport, 200 miles down the Sallow River. Markus grabs it, feeling a shiver pass along his spine, and just now noticing the thousands of little snake skeletons like autumn leaves scattered across the floor of the chamber as they rattle in an unfelt wind.
Markus, hours later, approaching the chipped-paint hull of the barge he has chartered to take him a-plundering upriver along the winding courses of the Sallow: anxiety leaving, the creeping feeling of being watched finally ceasing to burden his hunched shoulders under sweat-stained brigandine and sodden linen. He waves to the crew lounging on the deck beneath the mosquito netting, smoking pipes and shooting dice. “Fuck you, gentlefolk. I hate laying my weary eyes upon your sorry hides, and am sore beleaguered by your continued presence along the shore here.” The crewmembers look up, startled, one cabin boy cracking a sickly smile at Markus’s ill-timed joke. Markus’s eyes are wide, startled by what just exited his mouth. He tries again, to soothe his bout of coprolalia. “I jest not, erstwhile bloodsuckers! I wish you’d all just fuck off down the river without me, for I would rather the jungle cats and mist-moths and all manner of malarial miasmas for companionship than your poxy, slack-mouthed, saprophytic idiocy,” he cries, weeping at his traitorous tongue. The crew bristles, drawing their short swords and hatchets and making to go ashore before the captain of the vessel, the family matriarch, stops them.
“If ye be wanting to avail yourself of our services, ye’ll be wanting to stow such shittalkery. But our contract is for both up and down yon River Sallow, and we’ll not have our name slandered for breaking it. Get aboard and shut up.”
“I will do no such thing, foul barnacle on Ett’s backside,” Markus whispers, nodding his head gratefully. The captain huffs and has the crew make ready to cast off.
“Fine, Master Markus, ye shall have your long jungle walk alone, as ye wish.” The two strappingest of the polers begin levering his luggage and cargo overboard, into the thick black mud of the riverbank.
“Continue! Continue, please!” Markus says, running to the side of the barge and waving his arms. The crew, the ones not busy upending his belongings, hold him back with their blades. “At least keep the beautiful treasures I’ve stolen from their ancient resting places!” The greed at his heart burns and flickers, black despair filling him as they bash the hinges off the locked coffers and chests he’s kept under the utmost secrecy so far on his journey.
The captain laughs scornfully. “A most kind severance package, yer lordship,” she says, putting venom into the last word. Markus feels his shock and avarice curdle into black hate, a burning embarrassing vermilion suffusing his sweat-slick features. “Thank you, kindest of sirs, for leaving me here. I wish much joy upon you and yours, and may your river journey be safe and swift.”
Markus, two months later, stumbling into the town of Albinport, flushed with fevers, moth-bitten, cat-menaced, armor torn off and sword rusted to its scabbard, making his way to the nearest inn with a crazed grin: “How was the treasure hunting?” The innkeep, disinterested, toweling the inside of a glass.
“It was great!” Markus says, cackling.
Most curses can be cured or prevented by clerics. Each religious sect’s inner mysteries include vast stores of knowledge either protected from the outside world or stolen from other cults. In fact, all “clerical” magic consists of hidden methodologies and obfuscating names that would apply to otherwise “secular” spells. Sticks to snakes is a widespread spell with many different formulae and rituals to achieve the same ends, though both the Yigg cult and the Gungish Papacy would have you believe otherwise. Folk-knowledge holds that the only way to get rid of a curse is to appease the thing what cursed you, whether by doing its bidding or by setting right what pissed it off in the first place. In Markus’s example, he could have simply returned the amulet to its resting place to be free of the Curse of Forked Tongue.
It has been suggested by certain religious institutions that diseases and curses are one in the same, negative effects on the mortal body caused by unseen forces, and though most modern secular physicians don’t accept this theory, the symptoms of physical ailments and curses are fairly similar. It remains to be seen if the methods of “treating” or lifting curses (I.E., through appeasement of the inflicting entity) can be applied to more mundane sicknesses.
Cleris or bishops of Gung, Apollonius, or Xorn can cure most curses and diseases. It’s unclear if they are calling upon their own Devotions or simply delving into their respective libraries for research or a smoke break before coming back with poultices and prayers and censers of myrrh. They charge an amount of silver equal to 100 times the dice roll of the curse, or 1d20x100 in a pinch. A cleric or priest of Yigg can easily dispel a curse placed by Yigg, but require esoteric payments, like “Deliver this box to a bakery near the Royal Palace of Memnis. Don’t open it.” Most Yigg cults are also desperately poor, so they may also accept silver eagles at half the rate of a normal priest. Experimental or crackpot physicians can try to lift curses, but usually have better luck treating the symptoms for similarly exorbitant sums, usually discounted if you’ll become the focus of a study or experiment. Philosophers, occultists, and monster-hunters have far less reliable success rates, but do exist and offer their services.
1d20 Curses of Yigg
1-5. Minor Curse of Yigg: Cumulative -1 to HP and Dexterity.
6. Curse of the Limp Snake: A general flaccidity, disadvantage to all Dexterity rolls. Impotence.
7. Curse of the Coiling Grasp: Fingers become motile and articulated like serpent spines. 2-in-6 to drop held items each round of combat.
8. Curse of the Waning Poison: Take 3d6 damage, then 2d6, then 1d6, then 1d3, then 1 each day thereafter.
9. Curse of the Ineffable Lengths: A brief glimpse of the temporal coils of Yigg’s astral body around the planetoid Pludo causes all spatial distances to be skewed and changeable. Disadvantage to ranged attacks and quick movement causes nausea and vertigo.
10. Curse of Scales Upon the Eyes: Blindness. Scaled flesh grows over the eyes.
11. Curse of the Viprous Inamorata: -2 to all reaction rolls, -5 to those for prospective romantic companions.
12. Curse of the Forked Tongue: Truth and lie become confused before exiting your mouth. The curse affects intent; deliberately speaking a lie to cause truth to come out causes you to lie anyway.
13. Curse of Crawling Upon the Belly: Your limbs slowly wither away over the course of 1d6 weeks to vestigial stumps.
14. Curse of the Yawning Maw: The soil tends to open up beneath your feet, causing tripping and stumbling. After 3 days, a huge chasm tears the ground under you, swallowing you whole.
15. Curse of the Squirming Brood: Every day at dawn, you lay an egg, out of which pours 2d100 venomous little snakelings.
16. Curse of the Plunging Hawk: Hawks, eagles, owls, and secretary birds hate you and go out of their way to harry you.
17. Curse of Cold Blood: You become coldblooded, unable to move without at least 3 hours of uninterrupted sunning everyday.
18. Curse of the Ceaseless Dreaming: Fall into a deep sleep for a month. Your body must be tended carefully or else you starve. Only physical attack can wake you, on a successful Luck check. When you awake, everyone seems to have snakelike features, slitted pupils, forked tongues, fangs, hidden scales.
19. Curse of the Fearful Prey: Gain ophidiophobia.
20. Curse of the Insidious Usurper: Yigg takes over your body at random times every 24 hours. 2-in-6 during the day, 4-in-6 at night. If Pludo is in the sky (during Autumn), it happens every night. Duration is 1d6 hours, and the GM tells you what to do.
Monsters
Yiggite
1-3HD. 2AC. Poisoned Dagger. 10S. 3d6 Appearing (in the coven).
They could be anyone. The old lady selling eel pies on the street, the actuary pouring over records with thinning hair, the young children pushing Ouroboros-like hoops in alleys. In their most hidden of chests could be secreted a cloak of any number of colors, venous red, space black, silt green, bundled around a delicate veil of minutely-stitched snakeskin.
If a Yigg-follower has 12 or less HP, they are a simple cultist. More than 13 and they are a cleric, with access to the spell sticks to snakes, the ability to sense heat, and +1 AC. All cultists have an alter ego as a normal citizen, and a hidden, twin-bladed flamberge dagger coated in poisons secreted on their person.
If there are more than 15 Yiggites appearing, at least one has a Devotion greater than 60, with all the benefits that includes. They can deliver a random curse once per day. If there are 18, they tend to one of the transfigured Acolytes of Yigg.
Acolyte of Yigg (Giant Poisonous Snake)
6HD. 4AC. Strike/Strike or Constriction or Spat Venom. 13S. 1 Appearing.
A glimmer of evil intelligence remains in the unblinking eyes of those priests and zealots of Yigg who reached their beloved apotheosis, taking the image of their god onto their own flesh. They are revered as living saints among the Yiggites. It is claimed by some (heretical) scholars that all giant snakes are Acolytes of some stripe or another, most of whom in their immortality lost their dedicated flock. It is well known that all snakes are inherently immortal and grow throughout their lives; if they get big enough they are appellated “giant”, and if they keep growing they devour their own tails to stay satiated, until they disappear with a pop as they finish their meals forever. The man-faced snakes revered by the ophidians are a gray-area. Best not to think of them.
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