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Ylyma

Ylyma is chaotic evil. She is called the White Goddess and often depicted either as a humanoid figure with its face and body concealed by flowing white robes, or as a female mongrelfolk. Ylyma's portfolio is bodily change, disease and deformity. Mongrelfolk say that she was once without gender, but chose to become female in order to bring forth the first mongrelfolk, and thus they call her the Maker. She is venerated by those outcast as a result of illness or birth defects. Ylyma is served by several orders of priesthood that are detailed further below. Her domains are Chaos, Evil, Trickery and Healing. Her favoured weapon is the unarmed strike. Her holy symbol is the two-fingered hand.

Ylyma's name was first found scribed on a statue in a dead city. Different orders of her followers pronounce her name in varied ways.

White Priests

All White Priests are infected with leprosy, and everyone who is affected by their spells (including ranged spells) is exposed to the disease. White Priest spells of 3rd level or higher bear the direct curse of Ylyma, thus the disease that they transmit is magical, affects paladins also and can only be cured if the victim first receives remove curse.

Ylyma does not grant the raise dead, resurrection or true resurrection spells to the White Priest order, but favours reincarnate instead. Anyone reincarnated by a White Priest becomes either a mongrelfolk or an aberration of CR 0-3 of the GM's choice (this change in type is an exception to the usual effect of reincarnate).

Deacons of the Maker

These sturdy and insightful mongrelfolk guide their community and protect them from persecution. They include clerics, adepts, paladins and other mongrelfolk without spellcasting ability. Note: Deacons are not White Priests and do not transmit disease with their spells, though they receive the same altered version of reincarnate.

Sisters of Delight

This order is popular among prostitutes, circus-folk, jesters and burlesque performers. They are known to remove the effects of venereal disease, to bring about surprising alterations of the body and to find customers willing to pay well for such novel company.

Note: The Sisters receive the new spells delay disease and flesh shape. It suits the goddess' purposes to grant raise dead to those worthy Sisters who have need of it. Sisters of Delight are not White Priests and do not transmit disease with their spells.

The members of the order are mostly, but not exclusively women, drawn from the same milieu, often halflings, gnomes or women of mixed ancestry. They dress in motley. Their allegiance to Ylyma is not well known (Knowledge (religion) DC 20) since the goddess gives them dispensation to display her holy symbol draped in a red silk cloth and to speak of her only as the Masked Lady. Their rite of initiation, called the Unmasking, is said to shake the foundations of the soul. The Sisters of Delight include clerics, adepts and bards in their ranks.

The Sisters of Delight in a campaign location: The Golden Guild of Sfyne

Aberration Cults of Ylyma

Athach sometimes pray to Mother when they are hurt or sick. Images of Mother are primitive squat female figurines of white clay with three stubby arms.

The aboleth maintain shrines to Ylyma in out-of-the-way places. Their marble statues depict her as a grotesque tentacled monster.

The Redeemers

This secret order of mongrelfolk rejects the teachings of the Deacons and turns against their own people. Many are blackguards. They favour destruction by fire.

Ylyma's Realm

The White Goddess' Abyssal demesne centres on a sinister cityscape of ruins and hovels. The inhabitants shuffle and moan with the agonies of the White Plague. Here and there, tawdry palaces shudder with raucous, mad music suggesting the revels of the unspeakable throngs within. Where the city thins, the surrounding lands are a tangle of grotesquely deformed weeds over piles of broken rune-carved stone blocks that resemble a desecrated and abandoned graveyard.

Many skurchur, similar to those of Fraz-Urb'luu's realm, and yochlol serve Ylyma, along with evil beings who attend her in hopes of gaining some of her foul knowledge, including numerous yugoloths and some nalfeshnee (though most true tanar'ri shun her).

The afterlife of mongrelfolk also appears to be a decaying city, but a more wholesome place that resides far from other beings in a lost valley of the Outlands. There is a strange correspondence between the two planes, with many similarities in layout and individual buildings between the seemingly distant towns. Hidden records of the planes hint that an inhabitant might shift from one to the other merely by a change in the qualities of his mind.

The powers of the Upper Planes have had secret dealings with Ylyma in the past as a sort of keeper of things too pitiful for the powers of Good to destroy outright. Both in Arborea and the Seven Heavens, secret tunnels from the lower depths of certain grim fortresses lead to gates to Ylyma's realm, closed with mighty seals against the day when the angels may once again need to send some abhorrent thing on a one-way journey to her mercies.