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monstersdownthepath · 5 years

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Spiritual Spotlight: Teshallas, the Primordial Poison

True Neutral Psychopomp Usher of Aging, Poison, and Venomous Creatures

Domains: Healing, Magic, Repose, Scalykind Subdomains*: Restoration, Alchemy, Psychopomp, Venom

Concordance of Rivals, pg. 18

Obedience: Drink a diluted preparation of poison; a single dose of poison is sufficient to prepare five such draughts, and the dilution grants you a +5 circumstance bonus on your saving throw. Alternately, allow a venomous creature to bite you. Benefit: You gain the ability to sense toxins within 20ft of you, as if surrounded by a constant Detect Poison.

(*IMPORTANT NOTE: The Subdomains are my best guess; Subdomains are not listed in Concordance of Rivals.)

Drink up!

This Obedience is similar in many ways to Charon’s own alternate Obedience in which he demands you imbibe drugs to damage your mental ability scores, in that it absolutely sucks to perform day after day. The +5 bonus you get to resist the effects of the poison is often enough to keep you from suffering its effects, but there’s always a chance that you get crunched and are forced to hobble around with broken stats for a day or so. This isn’t even mentioning that poisons are expensive, and even though you can get five uses from a single dose, the cost will still be a deep mark in your pocket every week.

... Unless, of course, you have access to the books Ultimate Equipment and/or Potions & Poisons, which gives us access to the safer and, most importantly, cheaper options with which to poison yourselves in the form of the Gelidburn Oil (2~6 damage a round for up to 4 rounds; 75 gp a dose), Drow Poison (unconsciousness for 2d4 hours; 75gp a dose), Oil of Restfulness (unconsciousness for 1d3 hours; 90gp), and finally, the ULTIMATE thrifty poison: Pupil’s Friend, at a whopping 30gp a dose and causing naught but a bout of sickness for up to 15 minutes. Pupil’s Friend is also harvested from a mold that’s easily cultivated in any dark, moist space, such as a terrarium kept inside a Bag of Holding, potentially eliminating its cost altogether!

Drow Poison and Oil of Restfulness are also both pathetically easy to create, should you not want to go through the rigamarole of waiting for your mold to grow. “Wait a second though,” you may ask, “those poisons knock you out for hours! Isn’t that worse than stat damage?” And you’d be right! It’s a terrible way to start your day! But a perfect way to end one. Remember that your Obediences can just be done whenever you want, not just at the crack of dawn. Take a sip of Drow Poison or Oil of Restfulness just before you lay down to sleep each night and meditate on the sensations it causes you in the brief time you’re allowed before slipping into dreamland, waking up 8 hours later with 16 more hours of your power boost left before you need to do it again. It’s also one of the best ways to hide your Obedience from prying eyes, because who’d get suspicious about someone taking a sleep aid every night? They may be concerned for your health, but not suspicious.

Or you could skip all of that and just have a venomous familiar (or party member) bite your arm. Harder to hide or to justify, but notice that the Obedience doesn’t say that they have to inject their poison! It’s probably scummy to really take this one to the letter so hard, especially because the implication is that they inject you, but you know how I operate; I like loopholes!

As for that benefit, boy it’s been a while since we’ve seen a benefit that wasn’t a +4 to one stat or another, huh? And it’s a decent benefit, to boot! Not good, mind, but decent, especially since Detect Poison is a cantrip with a range of Close, so you can just scan over every 5ft cube you come across from a safe distance away. This ability does little more than save you a few actions to do so, since its 20ft range practically puts you on top of the toxin anyway. That being said, the fact it can sniff through walls (provided they aren’t too thick) will let you detect some hidden traps, stealthy enemies, and even invisible, poisonous attackers, which keeps it from actually being lumped into the Bad Benefit category. Plus you can detect poisoned food and drink without offending your host, which may be important. The niche uses for its ability to narrow down what poisons you’re encountering can also come in handy!

Boons are gained slowly, gained at levels 12, 16, and 20. Servants of the Monitors, though, can enter the Proctor Prestige Class as early as level 8. If entered as early as possible, you can earn your Boons at levels 10, 14, and 16. You MUST take the Monitor Obedience feat, NOT Deific Obedience. Monitors grant only a single set of Boons.

Boon 1: Serpent's Kiss. Gain Polypurpose Panacea 3/day, Touch Injection 2/day, or Sands of Time 1/day.

Polypurpose Panacea is an adorable little spell with a variety of small, flavorful effects and very little use in the average storyline, especially in combat. I would take it during downtime or a lighter session but wouldn’t use it for much anything else.

Touch Injection lets you store an extract, an elixir, a potion, or a poison within a harmless pocket space in your hand, letting you instantaneously jam it into someone you make a successful touch attack against. With a duration of 1 hour per level it’s fully possible to keep a valuable potion hidden from prying eyes only to unveil it when it’s needed, or to keep a lethal poison tucked away for a specific target... But, ironically, it’s actually more useful in combat than for covert operations, because any poison contained inside has its onset changed to immediate, so whoever you slap with it gets to feel the effects instantaneously.

Also it changes the poison’s delivery method to ‘touch someone,’ eliminating the need to shank your victim, trick them into eating it, or making them breath it in, which has its value. Though I’m not a fan of getting close to my enemies (being primarily a squishy caster player), I’m always for making poisons more viable, even if they do get expensive and impractical later on (unless you’re an Eldritch Poisoner Alchemist). I also still enjoy the idea of holding a particularly powerful extract or potion in there to be unleashed at the right moment.

I’ve discussed the uses of Sands of Time before in Charon’s article, so go refresh your mind with that. Long story short: it’s a bad spell to have most of the time since some creatures have hard-to-guess or completely nonexistent age categories. The flexibility of Touch Injection and the general cute usefulness of Polypurpose Panacea make them more useful than Sands.

Boon 2: Breath of Life. You may cast Restoration 1/day as a spell-like ability.

Perhaps even more boring than stat increases, we have the technically-healing spell Restoration.

That being said, having a FREE Restoration, even at 1/day, is incredibly valuable despite how dull it is. Restoration cures ALL ability score damage, all drain to a single score, all fatigue and exhaustion, AND all temporary negative levels. It’s best used at the end of the day just before you all go to bed to clear off everything someone has suffered in one go, but whatever you do don’t try and use it in combat unless it’s needed to desperately save someone’s life, because it takes 3 rounds to cast.

I say it’s so valuable, by the way, because of how much money this ability will save in the long-term. Restoration normally costs 100gp to cast, but if you pour 1000gp into it instead you can also scrape one permanent negative level off the target. Note that this is described on the actual spell card as “(diamond dust worth 100 gp OR 1,000 gp, see text).” The ‘or’ is the operative conjunction here, because with some spell-likes (such as Gate and Planar Ally) you still have to provide the monetary cost because it’s not listed as a material component. The 1000gp Restoration requires is explicitly a material component, and thus as a spell-like you don’t have to pay it.

Given how often higher-level monsters use ability score damage/drain and negative levels, this ability will save you thousands of gp and other resources over the course of your career. I just wish it were Greater Restoration instead, because..

Boon 3: Wonders of Age: You no longer take ability score penalties from aging and cannot be magically aged. Any penalties you may have already incurred remain in place, however. Mental ability score bonuses still accrue, and you still die of old age when you reach the end of your natural lifespan.

... Teshallas’ final Boon is unbelievably bad.

For reference, a great many other deities grant you eternal youth as a side-effect of their Boon’s true benefit, and still others who grant you eternal youth do so while also giving you eternal life. Teshallas does neither of these things, and doesn’t even have the decency to reward your service by undoing any age penalties you may already have (which would be against their whole domain, but y’know).

This is just a huge slap in the face for anyone wishing to work with the Primordial Poison and hoping for a potent blessing once you’ve reached level 16. Hell, in most sessions? This won’t even matter since you’re not likely to be roleplaying long enough for your characters to age to the point they take penalties. This is basically a blank Boon. This is a third Boon that’s worse than the second Boon, which should NEVER happen.

If I were DM, I’d just scrap this whole thing and replace it with something more befitting a god that claims to be responsible for the mortal aging process in the first place. Or, at the very least, I’d slap on a secondary benefit to make it more attractive. I dunno--maybe a boost to mental ability scores, or forcibly (and permanently) aging someone, or something. Bleh.

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