Tiamat
The Chromatic Dragon; Creator of Evil Dragonkind; Queen of Dragons
Symbol: A five-headed dragon
Home Plane: Gehenna with holdings in the Abyss and Hell
Alignment: Neutral Evil
Cleric Alignments: Any Evil
Portfolio: Evil dragonkind, conquest, cunning, unfettered passions
Worshipers: Evil dragonkind, evil scalykind, goblinoids, conquerors, plotters, the cunning, the passionate
Domains: Destruction (Torture), Evil, Nobility (Leadership), Scalykind (Dragon), War, Water
Favored Weapon: Five-headed flail (same statistics as flail)
Physical Description:
In her natural form, Tiamat is a long and thick-bodied dragon with five heads, a pair of massive, batlike wings, and a wyvern’s stinger-tipped tail. Each head is a different color: white, black, green, blue, and red. Her massive body is striped in these colors in a scintillating, fascinating, and ever-shifting array. Tiamat has great, webbed feet, and is astonishingly fast and agile in the water, though she is not terribly agile in the air. As a true paragon of dragonkind, as well as a deceiver par excellance, Tiamat has a number of other forms that she uses regularly, though she favors a few over the others. One of her favorite forms is that of a dusky-skinned and scantily-clad woman, or whatever humanoid race she is in contact with at the time, with long black hair, a commanding presence, and a beauty that is at once otherworldy and also astonishingly earthy in nature. Tiamat is known to regularly assume a hermaphroditic form, though she prefers to be female in basic shape.
Description of Nature, Personality, and Dogma:
As one of the two ruling dragon gods of Therafim, Tiamat knows well the full weight of power that her position entails. Feeling that power, she feels it a crime that it should not be exploited to the fullest. Tiamat is one of the most powerful and beautiful beings in creation, according to her view of the world, and she should be allowed to enjoy these natural talents, and certainly to rule over the other, lesser beings that populate the multiverse. She is also a creature of intense and varied passions, taking and discarding lovers at whim, forming attachments and breaking them off whenever the mood strikes her.
The spread of evil and the conquest of Therafim are Tiamat's primary concerns, and the long-term goals of all of her worshipers. Many evil dragonkind lose sight of this eventual goal in their lust for wealth and comfort, though a great many more keep it ever in their hearts. Acquiring power and dominion for Tiamat's sake is the guiding concern of all her followers, and they are all tasked, each in his or her own small way, with looking constantly for new ways for Tiamat to gain additional clawholds on the Prime Material Plane. Tiamat's worship is also highly addictive, since, after one has exerted one's cunning to extend her will, it entails allowing oneself to indulge in your deepest, darkest passions without restraint. She does not believe in holding herself back from what she desires, and neither do Tiamat's followers. Wealth and power are the goals of all Tiamat's worshipers, along with passion and the occasional spats of comfort where they can be gained, so long as they do not leave her worshipers soft and unable to effectively pursue her goals.
Clergy, Places of Worship, Important Rituals, and Servitor Races:
Tiamat tends to be at once highly selective and rather haphazard with choosing her clergy. Clerics of Tiamat must, without exception, be devoted to evil. However, Tiamat tends to be choosy and fickle when granting her favor, at least initially, the ease at which one of her acolytes is first allowed to gain spellcasting ability varying with her mood. However, once Tiamat selects a cleric, so long as that cleric does not come out in rebellion against her, she is remarkably constant and generous in granting requests for spells and other assistance. She demonstrates her favor by marking the bodies of her clerics, usually by causing a divinely-placed, five-color tattoo to wrap around one of the cleric's body parts, looking like the coil of Tiamat's tail.
Temples devoted to Tiamat tend to have the number five as a central theme, with numerous coiling draconic figures and depictions of great, savage talons making up the architecture. They tend to be dark and forbidding places in most of their rooms, with the cries of innocent victims taken for the pleasure of the clergy of Tiamat echoing loudly through the halls. The central chambers of Tiamat's temples tend to be opulent and very comfortably arranged, and frequently have large hoards of treasure, serving as both a treasury for the temple, and as a convenient bed for any evil dragon that might visit.
The most important day for Tiamat is the Day of Dispatch. Taking place in the middle of autumn, when plant life is starting to die out and leaves are changing colors, Tiamat's worshipers gather to celebrate their accomplishments over the course of the year, and engage in a general revel that usually turns into an all-out orgy. At the height of the celebration, which can take several days, the revelers will ritually burn at the stake a virgin sacrifice, who will be pulled into Tiamat's realm while still alive (unlike most of her sacrifices, who die, while their souls are taken temporarily to Tiamat's realm). This virgin soul, who may be male or female, will them be made to serve Tiamat's lusts for as long as she wishes, before she devours the sacrifice alive.
Tiamat is served by a great many evil dragons, all of them her most prized lovers who she allows to remain with her in her extraplanar realms as her consorts. She is also served by many goblinoids, especially hobgoblins, who admire her dogma of conquest, though they generally fail to understand her passion.
History and Relations:
Bahamut and Tiamat are the first dragons, born of the clash of primordial energies between the Light and Chaos, a clash which also formed the rest of the multiverse. At first Bahamut and Tiamat were lovers, but their vastly different natures soon turned love to conflict, and they began to fight, a fight that incidentally created the Morrigan. This battle caused them to be cast out of the endless paradise where they had first lived, a place where they had been charged by the Light to create new life and guide it to enlightenment, down into the world of Therafim. While they have both withdrawn themselves from direct intervention in mortal affairs, knowing that doing so would endanger their lives directly, and the very existence of Therafim itself would cease should either of them ever be slain, they both continue to act in extraplanar realms, where they cannot die permanently, and through many proxies in the mortal realm of the Prime Material Plane, each seeking to promote their personal view on what "enlightenment" should entail.
Since Tiamat, along with Bahamut, caused Therafim's history to take place, and they are the parents of all the draconic deities, she has an inherent connection to each of the dragon gods, and makes it a point to get to know personally, or at least to remain informed upon, each and every one of the others deities. Her passionate, charismatic nature, her keen mind and memory for details, her sensual nature, and her skill with words has won her many allies among the evil gods, and also among many of the more neutrally-aligned. She is known to have a great many lovers, divine, extraplanar, and mortal, and while Tiamat does use sex as a means to sway the judgements of others through seduction, she is also a highly physical and sensual creature, and takes great pleasure in the efforts of good lovers.
Tiamat and Bahamut have a long and complicated history, and this history continues to this day. They both have wildy differing philosophies, and even more wildly differing methods, and always act to counter the actions of the other, actions that sometimes lead them to direct physical confrontation, leaving both gods spent and in need of recuperation for extended periods. At the same time, however, they are also deeply, even madly, in love, and feel a passion for each other that defies all that either of them believe in. It is not at all uncommon for their physical confrontations to turn amorous, though the passion of their lovemaking is almost as destructive as the savagery of their battles.
Favored Offerings and Justifications for Direct Intervention:
For Tiamat, a proper offering is something of incredible value. The weight of something's value is subjective, and Tiamat understands this, but she most prizes offerings that are precious to someone, especially when they will feel that item's lack most keenly long after it has been offered to her. These offerings include precious objects as well as living sacrifices, especially the virgin sacrifices of sentient, good-aligned beings. In a pinch, of course, Tiamat is not too terribly picky, and will eagerly accept gold and gems. She generally prefers that her offerings be burned (alive, should they be living creatures), or sunk into deep water, so that they cannot be seen any more by those making the offering. During this process, Tiamat seizes the offering personally, pulling it into her personal hoard. She has trouble keeping ahold of the souls of living sacrifices, but treasures them highly for the brief period she is able to keep them before they slip free of her talons for judgement and their eternal rewards, often using them to sate her many passions while they are in her keeping.
Tiamat would dearly love to directly intervene in a great many matters on the mortal plane. If she dared, she would rule directly on the Prime Material Plane as she does in her extraplanar realms. But she does not dare, because she knows that placing herself within the mortal realm would make it possible for her to die like a mortal. Lacking any safe method to rule directly, Tiamat therefore regularly communicates with her worshipers, and calls many seemingly insignificant but evil creatures to paths of greatness, empowering them beyond their meagre normal abilities so that they can better serve her will. Tiamat also has a tendency to call mortals and dragons that she finds attractive to her own realm (these mortals must be willing for this to work without drawing Umnos' ire), there to use these mortals not only to sate her almost limitless passions, but also to produce offspring. Capable of producing vast numbers of eggs, Tiamat places her spawn in the care of her draconic servitors across the world, allowing them to slowly build up significant armies. Any of her lovers that Tiamat leaves alive after such an encounter regularly return to the mortal realm with divine empowerment, allowing them to act as champions of evil. After she has provided one of her followers with power, Tiamat leaves that follower to his or her own devices, to rule or fall as skill and fortune allows, thus demonstrating that follower's worthiness before Tiamat.