Talona

Overview

Talona is a goddess of disease and poison, and is blamed for everything from common illnesses to crop failure to brackish wells to plague. Where she walks, death and misfortune follow. She has the personality of a petulant, greedy child, and fluctuates between demanding attention at any cost, and becoming aloof like a wounded lover who has been discarded by her paramour.

Description

Talona appears as a tall, gaunt woman with long, unkempt hair and elongated, reaching fingers. She resembles a formerly voluptuous woman whose body has been wracked by hard years, horrific disease and starvation.

Holy symbol

Talona's symbol is three amber tear drops on a purple triangle.

Favored weapon

Talona usually appears at festivals or when her followers need her most, but she has no taste for violence. If someone attacks her clergy, she usually empowers a few of her priests with her Touch, and them disappears, leaving them to fend for themselves. Talona's Touch can heal a creature of all hurts, including restoring lost limbs, removing lycanthropy and breaking geas spells and curses. However, the goddess prefers to kiss and embrace her clergy, ravaging their bodies with fatal diseases. When they are on the brink of death, she introduces an antidote, synthesised from her saliva, into their veins with another kiss. This causes burning pain, followed by rapturous ecstasy, and is an experience most priests of Talona dream about. This purging cleanses their bodies of all weaknesses and imperfections, and grants them improved combat and magical abilities.

Talona usually ignores attackers, letting those who dare touch her suffer the full effects of her powers. Anything that touches Talona rots away, from a creature's claws to a warrior's longsword, collapsing and crumbling away within three rounds of initial contact. Unless a weapon or armour was used to attack Talona, any living creature loses the limb they touched her with. In addition they may contract a wasting disease that will eventually kill them unless removed with some suitably powerful magic. Her priesthood have selected the unarmed strike as their favored weapon.

Realm

World Tree cosmology

In the World Tree cosmology of Realmspace, Talona resides within her realm, known as the Palace of Poison Tears, which is located on the outer plane known as the Barrens of Doom and Despair which she shares with her superior, Bane, and her fellow Dark Gods, including Beshaba, Loviatar, and Hoar. The Barrens of Doom and Despair are simply inhospitable, and are so bleak that life could never thrive there. The plane consists of vast expanses of black sand, great plains of featureless granite, and bleak canyons ringed by sheer cliffs of knife sharp obsidian. No water trickles through the wastes, no plants grow, and nothing wholesome thrives here. Despite the oppressive heat, there is no sunshine, instead black clouds cloak a glowering red sky, shrouding the lands in darkness. The Palace of Poison Tears is a squat pyramidal-shaped structure surrounded by hot and humid fens infested with parasites and other infectious agents of various varieties. The air swarms with mosquitoes and biting midges, and every substance, from the water to the air, is toxic.

Great Wheel cosmology

In the Great Wheel cosmology, Talona resides within her realm, known as the Palace of poison Tears, which is located within the fetid jungles of Cathrys, the second layer of the Tarterian Depths of Carceri.

Worship

Talona is a fearsome goddess, and there are numerous prayers that beg her for protection from illness and poison. Various rituals to placate her involve the use of three drops of blood or three tears - to be dropped into a well that has gone bad, dripped into the handkerchief of someone beset by coughing, dropped into a fire made by burning withered crops, dripped into the mouth of a plague sufferer, and so on. It's common practice to mark a container of poison with her holy symbol, three droplets in a triangle, and during epidemics folk paint the same image on the homes of the infected.

What seems to motivate priests of Talona the most is their quest for respect: respect for their goddess due to her potentially devastating power, and due to them as her representatives. Throughout their careers, they work to build up their immunity to various poisons and diseases, and once they're protected; they take employment as physicians treating the diseased; inter those who have died of plague; and as food tasters for paranoid rulers, wealthy merchants, and nobles.

In Spelljammer

Talona is a member of the Faerûnian pantheon and as such is considered native to Realmspace. Priests of Talona can travel throughout Realmspace without limitation. However, once they enter the phlogiston, they are stripped of all spells, but are still able to man a helm as normal. When they enter a new crystal sphere, they regain access to their low level spells, but are unable to recover all spells until they return to Realmspace.

Appendix

External Links

• Talona article at the Forgotten Realms Wiki, a wiki for the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
• Talona article at the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Wiki, a wiki for official Dungeons & Dragons content from 2nd edition AD&D.

References

Connections