Auril

  • Name: Auril
  • Allegiance: Gods of The Wild; The Four Seasons
  • Portfolio: Cold, Winter, Glaciers, Polar Environments, Arctic Dwellers
  • Titles: The Icemaiden, Lady Frostkiss, Icedawn, Maiden of Midwinter, The Lady in the Ice, The Drowned Lady
  • Symbols: A six-pointed snowflake; A gray heraldic diamond; An icicle; A necklace of ice crystals; A hand-axe
  • Worshipper Alignments: LN, LE, TN, NE, CN, CE
  • Core Doctrine: The cold does not care.
  • Edicts:
    • Encourage others to pray for the goddess’s protection.
    • Aid others in surviving the winter.
    • Keep yourself apart.
    • All that you care for belongs to the lady.
  • Anathema:
    • Showing strong emotions.
    • Making fire by any means.
    • Setting foot in lands that do not receive annual snowfall.
  • Allied Faiths: Beshaba, Chauntea, Mielikki, Silvanus, Talos, Umberlee
  • Enemy Faiths: Sune, Tempus, Cyric
  • Pseudonyms: Saukuruk (in Sossal), Thrym (among the Firbolgs), Ulutiu (in The Great Glacier), The Queen of Air and Darkness (among the Fae)

Base Requirements

Proficiencies

  • Weapon Slots: By class
  • Allowed Weapons: Crushing and Cleaving Group, Short Blades Group
  • Allowed Armor: none
  • Bonus Weapon Proficiencies: none
  • Required Weapon Proficiencies: Dagger
  • Non-weapon Slots: By class
  • Available Groups: Spiritual, Survival, and Detection
  • Bonus Proficiencies: Religion, Survival (arctic), Weather Sense
  • Required Proficiencies: none
  • Recommended Proficiencies: Elemental Resistance, Endurance, Heat Protection, Mountaineering, Slow Respiration, Swimming, Time Sense, Waterproofing
  • Forbidden Proficiencies: Fire-Building, Smelting

Priest Spheres:

  • Major: All, Air, Astral, Combat, Necromantic, Travelers, Water, Weather
  • Minor: Animal, Protection

Overview: Auril, the Frostmaiden, is the goddess of winter and cold. Her devoted clerics engage in activities ranging from guiding parties through frozen arctic wastes to summoning winter storms for the glory of Auril. Whatever their task, most “right-thinking” folk consider
clerics of Auril to be rather frightening individuals. Because they are unharmed by the winter cold, many clerics of Auril make a handsome living delivering medicine, messages, and needed supplies throughout the northlands in winter, and many have taken up careers as explorers and merchants.

In northern and temperate lands, Auril is worshipped alongside Lathander, Chauntea, and Mielikki as one of the Four Seasons, and viewed as a necessary, if dangerous, part of nature. Even then, her worship is largely one of appeasement, as mortals attempt to hold off the worst depredations of winter through praise and sacrifice.

Description: Clerics of Auril wear long white robes with blue trim. They wear a belt and wrist bracers made of real ice, which miraculously do not melt until the dawn of Greengrass. During the Feast of the Moon, which marks the arrival of winter, new manacles and belts are created. The belt and bracers are made from ice harvested from the Great Glacier, and carved by the highest-ranked clergy of Auril.

Clerics of Auril do not wear armor. During winter, they use enchanted daggers made of ice as their primary weapons. Otherwise, the priests use a hand axe, another one of the symbols of their faith.

Role-Playing: Clerics of Auril are like snow itself. Snow can either be a hindrance to growing crops and traveling, or it can be a pleasant thing for romping in. These clerics can either call down snow and ice on the unwilling, or serve as expert guides through the cold, giving invaluable advice on how to survive.

Most clerics of Auril are reclusive. When they do associate with others, it is usually with fellow worshipers of Auril, especially crusaders and other priests. Like ice itself, clerics are required to be cold and emotionless, an aloof priesthood that only gets involved when there are storms to be called up, or money to be made by lending their services as guides.

Clerics of Auril are required to make sacrifices to their goddess often, of anything which they care about or assign value to, and always by cold. This may be a small thing, such as coins tossed into an icy fissure, or large, such as a lover or child staked out in the cold to die of exposure. The fewer attachments the cleric has to worldly things, the fewer sacrifices he must make, but the easier it is to make them.

Special Abilities:

  • Clerics of Auril are immune to natural cold effects and receive a +1 bonus on saving throws against cold-based spells and attacks.
  • In the hands of a cleric of Auril, a frost brand +3 sword also grants the wielder a 50% magic resistance.
  • Once per week per level, a cleric of Auril can summon a snowstorm, provided the temperature is already below 30 degrees. This storm will last for 1d12 hours, dumping 1d4 inches of snow per experience level. Winds will be at gale force, and the temperature will drop below 20 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. No animal can fly, no missile weapon can be used, movement rates are reduced by half, and all combat is penalized at -4 to attack rolls within the 5-mile radius of the storm. Only priests of Auril are immune to the combat penalties from the snowstorm.
  • During the Feast of the Moon, all Clerics of Auril are bestowed with a set of magical bracers and a pair of daggers, all made of ice. These items last until the Spring Equinox (19 Ches), at which point they melt and cannot be replaced until the next Feast of the Moon.
    • The ice bracers worn grant the cleric a +3 bonus to AC, as well as the abilities of a Ring of Warmth.
    • The ice daggers function as daggers +1. Furthermore, if a natural 20 is rolled, the ice dagger does an additional 5 points of cold damage.

Special Disadvantages:

  • Clerics of Auril cannot turn or command undead.
  • Clerics of Auril are forbidden from using any spells or magical items that create fire or heat.
  • Since their faith is one situated in the North, no one born south of the Moonsea can be a cleric of Auril. Even worse, these clerics lose all of their spells and powers if they ever venture into those forbidden areas to the south of the Moonsea. Their magical ice items will melt and vanish before the appointed date, if taken into those lands.

Drowning Your Sorrows in Spring

One major rite of Auril is celebrated by all people of the north, even those who pay little heed to the Frostmaiden. This rite, known as “Drowning Your Sorrows in Spring”, involves drowning an effigy of a woman (or in some places, a living woman) to celebrate the end of winter.

Performed when at the first ice-melt of spring, the rite involves preparing a life-sized effigy in female clothing (or else a crone, usually selected by lottery or from local prisons), and drowning it in a river. In most communities, children and youth are invited to build the effigy, under the guidance of Auril’s clergy. Regardless of whether a living or symbolic sacrifice is made, the ones to throw it in the river must always be young and unmarried, to symbolize the year’s renewal.

A strange custom of the north concerns the “drowning of the crone,” a large figure of a woman made from various rags and bits of clothing which is thrown into a river on the first day of the spring calendar. Along the way, she is dipped into every puddle and pond … Very often she is burned along with herbs before being drowned and a twin custom is to decorate a pine tree with flowers and colored baubles to be carried through the village by the girls. There are of course many superstitions associated with the ceremony: you can’t touch the crone once she’s in the water, you can’t look back at her, and if you fall on your way home you’re in big trouble. One, or a combination of any of these can bring the usual dose of sickness and plague.
— Volothamp Geddarm

Return to Religions.

Auril

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