From: ">Rip Van Wormer>"
Subject: Re: Incabulos
In a message dated 10/30/99 9:46:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time, aleph@CCWF.CC.UTEXAS.EDU writes:
> So how have you guys brought the worshippers of Incabulos into play in your campaigns? Who worships him, and why? What sort of goals have you given them?
Incabulos is the best god of evil the campaign has. Tharizdun is asleep, Nerull is too death and night oriented, and Iuz and Erythnul are just punks.
Incabulos is all-encompassing, the lord of nightmares, delirium, and the hordes of Hades, the patron of the witches who hex your crops and the ninety plagues of the gods. He's the only god who has "evil" as a major part of his portfolio. He commands maggots and corruption. He is tied to no specific
pantheon.
Incabulos is said to be the child of Beory; he ripped his way out of his mother's womb and proceded to inflict havoc on her surface. As the patron of UnBalance, he was responsible for overpopulation, plagues which endangered whole species, sickly forests that burnt to ash at their first encounter of a
spark, still ponds breeding monstrosities, endless famines and all manner of other maladies and travesties of the circle of Life. His younger sibling Obad-hai, patron of Nature's Balance, was created to set things aright, and the two have been bitter enemies ever since.
According to traditional Oeridian theology, Incabulos is the Ill Wind, bearer of all accursed plagues and manifestations. Working with the Court of Chaos, he slew the Oerid's oerth goddess Oeridia while she was still pregnant with the brothers Celestian and Fharlanghn.
The Suel churches reckon him as far older, one of the bizarre entities to crawl out of the primordial void before Time. As such, he is as old or older than Lendor himself. Even the power-hungry Suel dared not establish major temples to this foul menace.
Incabulos wears a black, horribly ragged cloak trimmed in green and lined with orange which blows about in the absence of wind, as does his hair. His face is a pallid, sickly blue covered in pockmarks and tumors that end in random horns and tendrils. His eye sockets are completely black with tiny
sparks like maddened stars. His hands are long and skeletal and his body is twisted and deformed, almost doubled over, with peeling scales, plaguemarks and running sores that resemble extra mouths and eyes.
Incabulos is supposed to have created the hordlings; nightmarish creatures with bizarre, surrealistic shapes infesting his plane of Hades.
As patron of night hags (nachtmares), he is the consort of the hag goddess Cegilune. Cegilune has Flannish features covered with cancerous, craterlike tumors and is associated with the darkest phase of the moon Luna. The two lovers look much alike.
His unholy symbol is one of the coolest of them all.
Everyone burns candles to ward him off, but he's worshipped by the depraved survivors and bringers of plagues, by those who haven't slept in years and those who sleep twenty hours a day. He's worshipped by those so consumed with hatred they would sacrifice anything for power. He's both served and
hated by hags and disease-carrying undead, and half-real things spawned from unwholesome dreams.
His devotees work alone, or occasionally and untrustingly with Nerulliacs or other depraved maniacs they feel will cause more harm than good. They seek to undo the work of priests of good with their heal disease and cure light wounds. They seek to throw corpses in the town well and make the women
barren. They destroy healing relics and undermine the good religions and heroic rulers.
Incabulos hates all of creation and constantly works against it. His realm in the outer planes might have looked like the cold void or gray dust he seeks to make of the worlds, but that's too easy. Instead, it's a place of constant corruption, festering
Magical items associated with Incabulos look like horns, drums, banners and other objects meant to signal allies, which in this case can be anything from enormous creatures of the netherworld to winds of invisible plague.
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