#Content Warning: Contains horror concepts and references to abuse in some character summaries.

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Complete warlock lineup challenge, explanation and all concept info under the cut. EXTREMELY LONG. In order the pacts are:

Great Old One (Elder Evil) Fathomless (Aboleth) Hexblade (Primordial Fang) Genie (Djinn) + Patron Yugoloth Fiend (Baernaloth) + Patron Undying (Kyuss) Fey (Sea Hag) Fey (Archfey) + Patron Devil Fiend (Erinys) Demon Fiend (Juiblex) Undead (Lich) Celestial (Planetar) + Patron

I've seen some genuinely interesting analyses of warlock/patron dynamics since Baldur's Gate 3, but noticed that discussion tends to assume that all pacts are with lawful evil devils specifically. Decided to give myself a challenge to come up with a variety of relationships (some positive, some negative) between many different pact types.

GREAT OLD ONE (HADAR): Went this route for Baldur’s Gate 3. A priest of Lathander where such faith is a minority has a child with a tiefling woman. The congregation cries corruption and kills his wife, leaving him to flee with his daughter alone. The two travel together as outcasts—her for her infernal heritage, him both for his faith and for fathering a tiefling. Eventually the girl runs away in the hope that her father, at least, can lead a more normal life in her absence. For a time she travels westward. Eventually the girl gets accused of causing unseasonal, crop-destroying frost and is imprisoned. When the guards make clear they plan to do terrible things to her, she prays first to her father’s god. Then to any god. Then to anyone at all. Hadar, a sentient star being devoured by his fellow elder evil Ihbar, answers. This is less a calculated act, more that the girl's fear, isolation, and hopelessness are intimately familiar to Hadar. The tiefilng wants to repay her new patron but comes to realize that no amount of sacrifice can save him. Hadar is too far gone—even if Ihbar vanished, he would succumb to his wounds. So she searches instead for anything that might alleviate his suffering, talking to him regularly in the hope of giving distraction and letting him know he’s not alone. She isn’t sure if Hadar even recognizes her. Whole thing has lot to do with ideas of self-worth and abandonment. Hadar is used to people exploiting his desperation for power and has punished warlocks who promised sustenance only to betray him—but it gets complicated when a warlock is freely offering without much concern for personal ambition. Basically, good-aligned warlock + elder evil friendship, a lot tied to suns/stars, depths of the sea vs depths of space.

FATHOMLESS (ABOLETH): This warlock is the firstborn son of a fisherman in a family where the eldest inherits the traditions and practices of those who came before. His father taught him all he knew from mending nets to mapping heavens, petitioning the gods and reading weather conditions. They had means of catching any number of creatures from the deep, whether through mundane or enchanted means. During a year of particular scarcity, fishermen are forced to cast themselves farther and farther from familiar waters. Desperate and discouraged, the warlock to-be’s father sets out. He makes prayers and offerings before venturing forth with his crew. When the vessel fails to return, his son takes a small boat and collection of potions to learn what became of them. He catches and questions various creatures, who speak of a terrible lord beneath the waves calling men to join him below. Not dead, they insist, but in service. All life flees before them. The fisherman’s son is extremely wary at this and seeks to learn more of this lord and comes to understand the aboleth in fragments—along with its territory. A creature older than gods, a creature with many slaves, a creature whose touch corrupts, a creature who remembers the lives of its ancestors like its own. The fisherman’s son returns home empty handed but with a plan, and alongside the families of the crew manages to buy and slaughter an ox. A single command spell is woven into its flesh by the local enchanter. Surface. The fisherman’s son takes this and journeys deep into the aboleth’s domain, ties the dead ox to a rope, and shoves it overboard with a strength potion to aid him. Then, he waits. The aboleth surfaces at nightfall, and its body dwarfs the boat many times over. The spell was laughable but the ox offered a meal it had never sampled in its long, long life. So they two will have an audience. The fisherman’s son acknowledges the greatness of the aboleth and that he has reason to believe his father and crewmen are enslaved below. The aboleth, identifying these people by thought, confirms. And the fisherman’s son offers himself in pact to be the aboleth’s eyes inland, bringing experience and tribute well beyond the sea if the aboleth will return those it's taken. The aboleth laughs at the idea of exchanging several servants for one, and asks why it is the son values himself so highly. The fisherman’s son tells the aboleth that within the sea, there are none wiser than it. But the world is larger still, and with all those many millenia of memory there is little novelty left in it. Seeking wonders unknown to any other aboleth, broadening its understanding, must surely be worth something against infinity. The aboleth considers and agrees but only if the fisherman’s son finds replacements for every slave surrendered. Which he does. By the time the warlock joins an adventuring party he has already given others to the aboleth, now ostensibly fulfilling the second part of his pact by finding inland novelties. He actually wants to become powerful enough to slay his patron at this point to free everyone. Added complications tie to the transformations and psychic domination of aboleth victims. For this concept, I realized that I had three ocean-themed warlocks and wanted to be very careful to ensure each had a distinct vibe. Great Old One covers deep sea, mystery, and tentacles. Sea Hag is closer to shore and has haunted vibes. I decided to make Fathomless draw from fairy tales, fishing stories, and the idea of a massive sea monster. I swear that any similarity between this seafaring half-orc warlock and another seafaring half-orc warlock is 100% coincidental lol. I knew this guy would be my physically largest and most traditionally masculine warlock, and when I was thinking about race options it struck me that there's a lot of narrative opportunity if his father was human and his mother was an orc—especially given the tradition of passing knowledge from parent to eldest child. I like the idea of a mainly human and orc fishing village.

HEXBLADE (GIFT OF THE WORLD EATER): The sword is made of arcane shadow that never falters, never fades. Its blade is a fang large enough to split the sun and small enough to pierce the veil of sleep. It slipped from the mouth of Dendar the Night Serpent—fated to someday escape her prison and end the Forgotten Realms as we know them. The devourer of nightmares whose coils shatter worlds, a primordial who threads her way through the roots of Yggdrasil. She lost her tooth while feeding where the Fugue Plane meets the Shadowfell, and it took upon characteristics of the last dreamer it touched. Its voice is the voice of the umbral-self—every feeling, thought, and urge the person wants least to acknowledge. That this tooth was fashioned into a blade is according to the will of its owner. The dreamer herself was an acolyte of Ubtao the Maze-Maker, Chult’s deity who once betrayed the primordials to trap Dendar. This dreamer has spent her entire life studying to become a Mazewalker priest. This involved a huge amount of historical study, prayer, ritual memorization, etcetera—all while Ubtao himself remained silent. This was not due to inability but because the impositions of mortals left him weary. Meanwhile, one of the other acolytes was a yuan-ti pureblood who’d found a home in the dreamer’s community. He’d taken up the faith of Ubtao freely, in spite of his own history. The dreamer received Dendar’s fang some time before this yuan-ti received his title as Mazewalker, and the blade incited all of the dreamer’s repressed jealousy. She challenged the newly appointed cleric to a duel with her blade but was stopped by a more established priest. She was then sent away to learn the shape of her own maze properly. Patron isn't actually Dendar here, but the repressed aspects of the warlock herself. I figured if the Shadowfell is intrinsic to Hexblades now, I didn't want to treat the Raven Queen as the only option. I did some research on Aztec traditional clothes--this isn't an accurate depiction by any stretch but I tried to evoke winged serpent imagery since there's relevance for Dendar and tried to bear in mind materials, colors, and patterns somewhat. Ubtao also has a lore aspect about splitting off his own personal shadow (stolen by Shar) so figure there's a narrative opportunity for mirroring there too.

GENIE (DJINN): A djinn is enslaved by a powerful wizard for many centuries. An earth genasi born from dao is the one to break him free, with no demands of his own. The djinn puts on a front of superiority but claims he will need sufficient display of wealth and power if his reputation on the Plane of Air is to be salvaged. The only solution is for him to amass a trove worthy of his return. He would pact with his liberator and grant a sliver of his power in return for aid in such an endeavor. The genasi is extremely skeptical but agrees. It comes out later that the djinn doesn’t actually think anyone missed him, is convinced he’ll be seen as weak and contemptible for being captured, has no doubt his servants have fled or died while his estate is in tatters, and is convinced he will carry the shame of enslavement with him until he dies. He’s terrified to go home, believes that no one looked for or tried to help him, and is essentially still hiding in the prison of his lamp because it’s all he’s known for so long and he's afraid he doesn't know how to be free anymore. By contrast, the genasi’s father abducted and bedded his noble human mother to display power to other dao. She and the resulting child were subsequently banished to mine gems and precious metals—with the son specifically being seen as valuable for his earth manipulation. A dao would never lift a finger to find wealth, but genasi are not dao. The genasi and his mother were eventually freed and returned home via adventurers paid by her family. While both mother and son were welcomed with open arms, the mother’s way of coping was to try and pretend the experience never happened and ignore the child reminding her otherwise. The genasi was left furious and feeling betrayed, left home when he came of age to pursue his own fortune and define himself beyond the shadow of his parents. He actually succeeds through his mining capabilities, but money can't erase the trauma and he starts to get scared of becoming his father. Adventuring is what he takes up instead to emulate his rescuers and say he's helping people. There's still worry because he isn’t sure if he's only protecting others to make himself feel better though. The genasi shares his wealth with the djinn as part of an attempt to prove himself above greed despite claiming disdain for the djinn’s materialism and arrogance. The djinn continues providing power in return across the adventure from his lamp. The djinn and genasi eventually realize they’re both kind of fucked up, and at some point of getting to know each other become friends. Wanted to do earth vs sky themes between the two (a ton of freedom of movement between the pact and genasi abilities), drew from descriptions for both dao and djinn respectively, and tried to go for distinct visuals that can look nice together.

YUGOLOTH FIEND (BAERNALOTH): If you ask them, baernaloths are the hand that moves the cosmos. Eldest of all fiends—they sparked the war between law and chaos. They brought low the angels that would be devils. They gave life to fiends of all alignments. But baernaloths, like all yugoloths, have no qualms with lying either. The baernaloth is a gaunt, infected, disproportionate, humanoid creature. Its head resembles an emaciated horse crowned in horns. Baernaloths feel no emotion and no social connection. If there is meaning to their lives, it comes through the myriad ways they spread destruction across the universe. What was made is unmade by their hands. What lives will die by their decree. There is no hope, mercy, or possibility to be found in a baernaloth. They are practiced in torture, deception, and murder because the associated pain is fundamentally beyond their capacity. Existence is a meaningless, obsolete thing and they are the instruments to dismantle it. They can mask their lack of feeling through performance, but it is just that—a performance. Baernaloths make no preference between consuming fine cuisine and rotten meat, but may feign enjoyment of either to provoke a reaction in someone else. They fundamentally are not equipped for caring or morals, and while their abilities rival that of evil demigods every choice they make (including combat itself) is designed to manipulate others. They come from the Gray Wastes, and are neither lawful nor chaotic in nature. The specific baernaloth pacted with here articulates his sadism as something resembling curiosity. There is something in other creatures that mourns, that clings, that treasures, that fears and struggles. This instinct strives to preserve itself against harm even when giving up would end that harm. There is, however, a point in prolonged torture when the soul surrenders hope entirely as a final attempt to shield itself. It isn’t the same as what the baernaloth knows, but the numbness and indifference bear some resemblance and it’s the closest he can get to connection. The warlock in this case is a woman whose town worshipped Xammux, god of knowledge independent of morality. Any act of cruelty or torment was permissible so long as it offered previously unknown information. Not all experiments conducted there were motivated by sadism. Not all would have been considered immoral by the broader population. Some were. This town is destroyed by paladins of Tyr seduced by Bane. They glory in the death of their targets, believing they extinguish evil for a greater good. They are convinced that profane knowledge is something that can be buried and unlearned. The warlock only survives by hiding, and she is driven to rage by both by the loss of knowledge and the loss of everyone she knew and cared for. She seeks and pacts with the baernaloth in revenge, to punish those responsible. The baernaloth, knowing her to be faithful to Xammux, sees himself as a teacher and has enabled her toward slaying paladins in ways that serve Xammux. Their deaths must always provide an opportunity to learn. The baernaloth sees harming the self, harming others, repeating acts versus new acts, predicted outcomes and unpredicted outcomes, as being largely the same in the end—but he’s inviting the warlock to explore what they offer to her, and what distinctions do or don’t exist in destruction. If there is any such thing as moral high ground at all. The warlock here is determining her own identity in the shadow of god and fiend together, and she can either forge herself in their images or she can set herself apart by rejecting them. She is very evil-inclined, but in a do-evil-unto-evil way. With the right party she could be sparked toward embracing or rejecting her worst impulses, but this probably ends at best in bittersweetness and at worst in horror and tragedy. I wanted this warlock to have Blair Witch vibes, and given baernaloth designs I decided a similarly muted palette made sense for her. Superficially prim but with hints of violence under the surface, very dead feeling.

UNDYING (KYUSS): Kyuss was once a mortal necromancer of great renown, whose deeds came wreathed in prophecy. He gathered for himself a cult to defy death itself. Kyuss innovated spells casting their subjects beyond the limits of mortality—consciousness divided amid countless worms animating flesh. So great did his power grow that he took a path toward godhood (or something greater, something worse) and sacrificed his entire following at that altar. Transformed by the ritual, Kyuss's role now is the Worm That Walks. Those innumerable tiny lives composing his own are enough to blot out the stars. He is beyond anything that can be destroyed. The warlock who pacts with him is a goblin who found herself the sole survivor of her clan against a troop of adventurers. Without the others at her back she is left cripplingly aware of the fragility of her own life, and the limits of her own abilities. She’s always been a runt but even the booyaghs and warriors towering over her were nothing in the end themselves. So the goblin pretends gratitude toward the adventurers, and they let her tag along (not like an equal but a pet to be condescended to) until the day she learns of and makes contact with Kyuss. Like Kyuss himself, the goblin slays those around her for the promise of immortality. But in the aftermath she finds herself alone with her patron, with more blood needed to build her strength. She doesn’t kill the next adventurers she meets but offers her allegiance genuinely as a warlock, demanding to be treated as an equal. When they try to get to know her, the goblin has to reflect on her own fear and mistrust toward others along with whether she’s willing to risk guaranteed safety to connect with anyone. Probably there’s some examination of loneliness and fear between her and Kyuss. I think the warlock realizes over time that Kyuss’s existence is pretty miserable, and it might be better not to follow in his footsteps. First, worth mentioning that everything I found about undying warlock pact versus undead warlock pact 1) said undying is mechanically terrible 2) struggled to differentiate the two tonally. What I gathered after WAY too much investigating was that undying = 'I will become unkillable' while undead is about occupying the space between life and death specifically. And guys, holy shit was it hard to pick a patron for undying that wasn't a lich/vampire/mummy that had specific ties to regeneration or being indestructible. Also still spooky. I wanted a smallfolk warlock, and decided going with a goblin who struggles with feeling like vulnerable canon fodder would give a lot of opportunities for growth. I think the idea of her exploring the worth of life as a whole (in all its fragility) while also gaining power has a lot of cool possibilities. I forbade myself from going green again here because it would be excessive. Kept the scheme more natural and utilitarian otherwise. You know this goblin is a protagonist because she got that white anime hair. How many goblins with white anime hair have you seen? Not enough.

FEY (SEA HAG): The sea hag looks like a drowned and bloated corpse. Seaweed-like hair and patches of peeling scales. Rows of teeth like a hagfish because the jokes write themselves. Her proportions are wrong—there are too many bones in some places and not enough in others. Her eyes are dark and flat like a shark’s. It's worth knowing that sea hags in particular not only loathe beautiful things—they seek to deface them at any opportunity. The warlock in this story is a half-elf who was once very handsome, wed to a woman falling to disease. He made a deal with the hag to save his bride, but in exchange the hag had liberty to disfigure him to her satisfaction. And she did. The wife he did this for could no longer bear to look at him, but wouldn't admit this lest she be a horrible person. When another man approached she became enamored and began an affair. The wife simultaneously grew colder and crueler to her own husband. Other people in town clearly knew, but didn't tell him to spare their own discomfort. So the hag finds her victim isolated and desperately miserable, pretends at pity, then gives him an ornate shell. If he crushes this, she’ll initiate a pact with him and he will have the most wondrous power at his disposal until the end of his natural life. Compensation for the mess. The man is repulsed and tells her off, but keeps the shell. He later finds his wife in their shared bed with her new lover, and in the ensuing confrontation she turns all of her guilt, frustration, and sense of being held back into rage—lashing out at her husband. He breaks the shell. His fury and anguish combine with an influx of magic from the pact, and he levels the town. The warlock discovers shortly after that he can’t actually kill himself either, since the pact lasts until the end of his natural life. Unnatural causes can no longer kill him. He has to live with himself. But… he does still have that pact after all. For arc bits, the guy might be able to say that he didn’t have control over his magic—but he did want everyone dead in that instant. Not just his wife or her lover but every person who shunned him, everybody who knew and bit their tongue, every person who went on to treat him like something dirty. I originally didn't plan to make three ocean warlocks here, but I kept seeing people comment on how sea hags are supposed to be the ugliest hags only for the descriptions to be standard. I felt a moral responsibility to conceptualize the ugliest and most horrific looking hag I could. Drowned corpses are upsetting and seemed like a no-brainer for some of that. I kept hag-green in the warlock's color palette but tried to tie to driftwood and seaweed to differentiate from Great Old One and Fathomless. There is a face design under the bandages but I think keeping him covered gives more room to imagine the extent of disfigurement. I wanted this guy to feel like he's been physically and mentally destroyed just by looking at him. He has stopped trying to take care of himself in any capacity.

FEY (VERENESTRA): The warlock is a farm woman whose husband died due to the machinations of a hag. She's heartbroken and enraged, but doesn’t believe herself strong or clever enough alone to take revenge properly. She knows enough of hags and fey to decide it would be better to find herself an ally that understands the target. She seeks archfey Verenestra the vain and beautiful. Verenestra has abandoned countless lovers over her life without a thought to be spared. Being met with the rage of a supplicant seeking aid is new. Verenestra asks the woman if her husband had been very beautiful. This is met with a snort and the claim that her husband was plain as plain could be. Knobby elbows, bony face, crooked teeth. But he was beautiful to her. Verenestra mentions how she’s been serenaded and worshiped by her own lovers—sometimes very sweetly. She asks if it was the same. The farm woman replies that her husband had no knack for such things, but he’d rub her feet after a hard day and made her laugh herself sick more than once. There was no one kinder or gentler than him. Verenestra asks why go through such trouble for a man already dead when she could simply find another? Hags are a terrible bother, and her husband is lost already. The woman says that it shouldn’t have happened to him, or to her. She won’t see it happen to anyone else. Verenestra doesn’t quite get it but is intrigued and agrees because she thinks there’s an interesting tale in the mundanity of it all. She and the woman pact, becoming companions on the journey ahead. No romance for either of them. The farm woman processes her grief, but also there’s room for both her and Verenestra to wonder at each other’s lives and develop empathy/connection for each other. Friendship development between the two, some examination of beauty and relationships to other people, the concept of irreplaceable things. For fun, knowing that Verenestra is 4’6’’ and barely wears clothes—warlock should be fairly tall and broad while dressing with remarkable practicality. Both the farm woman and Verenestra should undergo character development for the better, and both have their share of faults and virtues. Both are wise when it comes to different things. Possibly touch on the Prince of Frost (Verenestra’s brother who fell into rage and cruelty that persists because a woman he wanted loves someone else), with how they both understand that behavior. I tried to keep largely in-line with Verenestra's descriptions while giving her a distinct look, and tried to keep both characters tied to different aspects of nature. The warlock is more practical and has harvest colors/light hair versus Verenestra having otherworldly 'immune to staining' fey garments and dark hair. Autumn versus spring vibes.

DEVIL FIEND (ERINYS): This is another one of my Baldur’s Gate 3 characters, and likewise a tiefling. From childhood the warlock had it enforced by those around her that being of fiendish blood, she was an inherently wicked person. Her parents tried their best to teach her otherwise but people were just as awful to them. They couldn’t run a shop, join a faith, participate in local events. And if an unrelated terrible thing happened, there was a non-zero chance they’d be scapegoats. When her father was beaten and the family business vandalized beyond repair, the warlock decided to embrace what everyone accused her of being and pacted with a devil. She slew the people targeting her parents, but they were absolutely horrified by her pact and by her actions. The culprits hadn’t committed murder after all. And hearing from her that she’d done it for them—the warlock’s parents were horrified and distraught. So she left. She uses her pact in service to herself now and argues that it’s ridiculous, thankless business to stick your neck out for others. Her patron prefers to enable her selfishness, her anger, her sense of injustice, and her belief that no one else is on her side. The devil doesn’t seek to inspire fear because it would be counterproductive in the warlock’s fall and corruption. “No one is with you except for me.” This warlock I think will examine her relationship with selfishness versus selflessness, helplessness versus power, who she is or isn’t willing to make herself through choices, and the worth of mortal lives. I want her to have fire motifs and to lean into more traditionally infernal aesthetics without them being the only thing to her. She's the most traditional pact on the surface but things get psychologically complicated when you look closer. I also wanted this character to be visually very distinct from Great Old One as a tiefling lady warlock.

DEMON FIEND (JUIBLEX): This warlock is a common-born male drow from the slums of Menzoberranzan. He was intended simply to be eldest but became the disappointing only child when his mother experienced complications during childbirth. The family traded in mushrooms through a combination of foraging and cultivation—covering food, medicines, and poisons. It was practical that, while worship was exclusive to Lolth, there was respect for Zuggtmoy and Juiblex given their influence in the Underdark. When disease swept the Braeryn, Menzoberranzan watched on indifferent at the culling of undesirables. Attempts to heal were in vain and the body count became so obscene that the warlock was forced to flee home for survival. During a nervous breakdown trying to survive alone outside the city, he pacts with Juiblex for his ties to pestilence—the strongest force he knows. Sacrilegious for a Lolth worshipper, but he feels himself so far beneath her notice it makes no difference. And Juiblex, infection from the wound of the Elemental Chaos, accepts. This warlock is a walking agent of plague and oozes. He's already convinced that he will die, and die horribly. He hasn’t had hope for a better life before and can’t quite wrap his head around what that would even look like. He could be encouraged to break his pact and try to build a future with the right party. In terms of design I wanted this guy to feel striking but not luxury since he's a bit of a mess. Walking biohazard vibes, glasses partly because sunlight sensitivity and partly to evoke plague doctors. Juiblex is basically a shifting pile of hot sentient tar with red eyes, and red eyes are common in Lolth-sworn drow so I played into both.

UNDEAD (LICH): The lich patron was a powerful Imaskari wizard in life, but that was long ago. As a young man he learned terror of death in witnessing the fall of his empire. This meant the loss of not only his family but his community, its buildings, its technology, its culture. Faced with such overwhelming impermanence he spent the rest of his life building power in secret with the goal of escaping mortality. Achieving undeath, the lich then focused on making himself as obscure as he could—consuming only what souls were necessary to sustain himself and blotting his very name from history to avoid enemies. He catalogued and maintained as much as he could of Imaskar in his lair only to be forced to flee by a group of adventurers. (Theft doesn’t count if the owner is undead, apparently.) Left without material properties to ground him, the lich is terrified to find he’s not only forgetting details—he doesn’t remember what it felt like to be alive much at all. He no longer knows who he is. He’s been in seclusion for ages trying to hold onto something lost. There’s nowhere he belongs and no one he belongs with. The warlock in this case is a quiet scholar who craves power, knowledge, and renown after a lifetime of going without. The scholar comes from a large family where he was expected to keep his head down and his mouth shut—only being known in relation to those around him. He’s approached by the lich with an offer of magic, information, and wealth in exchange for aid. The lich wants his stolen artifacts recovered and his identity restored. The warlock is building a reputation for himself that’s divorced from his own life and history—he wants to leave a mark on the world that will never be forgotten. For good or ill. The lich sinks deeper into grief over the course of his story and needs to finally come to terms with the ephemeral nature of all things along with his own death. The warlock changes for worse over his own story and becomes either a token evil party member or someone who actively needs to be stopped in contrast with the lich patron becoming more human and sympathetic. Cool possibilities if the party encounters Deep Imaskar and none of it feels like home to the lich anymore either. I designed the warlock with a lot of red-violets partly because one of the descriptions I found of Imaskar referenced purple stone being common to the architecture and it seemed like a fun reference, partly because I wanted him to feel a little ostentatious, partly because I had to do a segue between the color scheme from demon pact into celestial pact.

CELESTIAL (PLANETAR): An aasimar is captured by demons and falls upon being forced to kill not only other aasimar, but devils to survive. This act answers the corruption of Zariel by infernal forces. The aasimar had previously been guided by his celestial mother, but she ceased contact at his corruption. At the direction of Ilmater, a planetar is sent instead to help this aasimar escape with the suggestion of forming a pact. The planetar pacts as directed (reluctantly) and gets the aasimar to safety, but the aasimar was in no state to continue fighting for the cause of good for a while. After being spurned from most places due to fallen status, he finds shelter at a temple of Ilmater while trying to come to terms with trauma, survivor’s guilt, and abandonment issues. Repressed anger on his own behalf is too deeply buried to touch yet. The planetar observes all of this. One day an influx of refugees pours in as the result of nearby demonic incursion, and the aasimar decides to attempt to aid the mortals there through his pact despite being terrified. He at least knows what that kind of conflict entails, but isn’t sure whether joining is for himself or others. The planetar decides it’s a good act either way and lends aid freely. The aasimar becomes an adventurer following the battle but it’s unclear whether this is maladaptive coping (if he’s in the middle of combat he’s not thinking about ‘what if’s) or actual healing. The planetar needs to learn more about empathy, moral complication, and the value of life itself outside being an instrument of judgment. The aasimar needs to come to terms with self-worth, finding a sense of belonging in the world outside being an instrument of war, and rediscovering any kind of safety. The aasimar also needs to come to terms with the idea that his mother’s love was contingent upon his purity, and she may not be able to love him the way he wishes she would. I've been fucking around with aasimar and celestial variants similar to tiefling variants because I think there's untapped opportunity for them to look a bit alien in their own ways, particularly with distinct facial structures. I actually had this aasimar design mostly ready before doing the project and wanted to give him a color scheme tied to dusk. Ilmater seems like the most consistently good deity of good aligned deities and with his mercy motifs also has ties to twilight clerics. I struggled SO MUCH picking the celestial patron because during my research there was a lot of 'this group won't associate with mortals', 'this one won't associate with anyone who isn't morally pure', 'this one is a straight up animal'--and I wanted to go with at least some classical angel vibes. I also wanted to do something with the premise 'this warlock did some terrible things but is trying to get better, the patron is good aligned but fixates on purity' as conflict to avoid celestials being the 'easy' pact if that makes sense. My understanding is that most planetars are bald and green but I rejected that since planetars tied to particular gods vary sometimes and I wanted a silvery-brown bird angel. Brown in both warlock and patron was because I wanted to ground in nature at least a little. Dusk visuals I wanted to feel like the last moments of sunset while the planetar feels a little like a rising moon.

Not included:

- A warlock using mainly the color yellow. - A warlock that is even more red. - Great Old One pact with Karsus, which is a stupidly cool option imo but one I have ideas about for other stories. - The lich patron design. Guy seems like a buddy but I got tired. - Making up pacts for the horrendously neutral planes, as in Mechanus and Limbo. For real it bothers the hell out of me that these aren't just as hardcore as positive and negative planes.

As a whole, I just really wanted to explore a range of positive and negative relationships across many different pact types. I'm not of the mind that the relationships between clerics and gods are inherently healthy while warlocks and patrons are inherently unhealthy. Versatility in terms of what relationships look like across pacts was something I wanted to cover too. I didn't want it to be a situation where you could look at any given pact and just assume what the relationship is. Ex. Fey you might have an adventure between friends but you also might get a hag shaped disaster. If you got here lmao thank you for checking this out, hope this was fun to read for you like it was fun to make for me. Do you have any ideas for pacts you would like to see?

[terramythos]

Review: The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin (The Broken Earth #3)

Length: 398 pages.

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Apocalyptic, Post-post-post Apocalyptic, Dystopia, Female Protagonist, Antagonist POV, First-Person, Second-Person, Third-Person, Gray Morality, Dark, Great Worldbuilding, Great Character Development, LGBT Characters, Diverse Cast, Trilogy, Perfect Score 

Warning(s): This is probably the most optimistic of the trilogy, but it’s still not a happy series. Abuse/torture, slavery, graphic violence and gore, and major body horror. References to child death. 

My Rating: 5 / 5 

**WARNING: THIS REVIEW (INCLUDING THE SUMMARY) CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST TWO BOOKS. IF YOU WANT A SPOILER FREE REVIEW, PLEASE READ MY FIFTH SEASON REVIEW (X), OR, BETTER YET, JUST READ THE SERIES.**

My Summary:

The reckoning of the world has come. Essun, who has lived a life of suffering and loss, finally has a home to call her own. But she is one of the last living humans who can harness The Obelisk Gate and return the Moon to the world, finally quelling Father Earth’s rage and ending the apocalyptic Seasons forever. She knows such an act will  cost her life. 

Her daughter Nassun, meanwhile, has seen that the cruelty of the world cannot be reconciled. More powerful than her mother, she seeks the power of The Obelisk Gate for another purpose— to end the suffering of others, forever. 

And finally, Hoa reveals the origins of himself and the other stone eaters— the immortal, humanoid statues who have their own stakes and motives in this conflict. His is a chilling tale of a utopia built on the suffering of others… a cycle humanity seems unable to break, even 40,000 years after the Seasons began. 

Does humanity deserve another chance? Only one will decide the fate of the Earth.

Time grows short, my love. Let’s end with the beginning of the world, shall we? Yes. We shall.

Minor spoilers and my thoughts follow.

Here’s my dilemma— this is the final book in a series, and I find it impossible to talk about any final entry without reflecting on what came before it. For better or worse, everything ties together somehow in the last book. In this case I’d say “for better”, because this book was great, and an excellent way to conclude a thought-provoking and wonderful trilogy. But nevertheless, I’ll probably be discussing the series as a whole in this review.

So, yes, this was a really good conclusion. Definitely not where I expected things to end up, based on the opening premise, but that’s not a bad thing, and it’s been interesting to see how the story and characters have molded and changed. Honestly, I don’t have some master plan on how to style this review, except by discussing all the different parts of the story that really clicked for me.

I’m a sucker for “fate of the world” type stories, and I’m glad that The Stone Sky finally takes this direction. It’s really something to see how far Essun has come. She starts as a scared little girl hiding in a barn and is now a forty-something woman with the destiny of humanity in her hands. You can see all the steps that lead her to this point, but there’s something truly epic about any story that includes such a level of growth. It’s been an often-painful ride, but one I’ve really enjoyed nevertheless.

Obviously, I have to talk about the characters. Everyone was SO interesting. Even characters you were supposed to dislike initially had fascinating development over time. Schaffa is the obvious example, as we saw in The Obelisk Gate, but that continues in The Stone Sky as well. In this one there’s a minor antagonist from the previous book who gets called out on her bullshit and… changes her behavior accordingly. Hell, the leading antagonist of the entire series, Father Earth, the force that has caused the death and destruction of billions of people, has justifiable motives.

And you look at Essun, who is generally a good person at heart, and some of the terrible things she’s done (which is ESPECIALLY relevant since the narrator likes to see the best in her). Her daughter Nassun fills the “destroy the world” role, but even her motivations for doing so come from a place of compassion. It’s… interesting, to say the least. And that’s not to say that there aren’t minor characters who are pretty awful the whole time, but those are noticeably the irredeemable bigots, which makes sense for the type of story being told here.

You know what I mentioned in my Obelisk Gate review (x) about gray morality? Yeah. Everyone major is a complex character. Who knew?

As for specifics, I already named most of my favorite characters in my Obelisk Gate review, and that pretty much continues here. There are some new faces introduced (or re-introduced) in this one, but for the most part the focus is on an established cast, emphasizing how they’ve grown and changed over time. There’s plenty of examples. Essun, despite everything, has started to move past a lot of her trauma and open up to other people. Nassun has her own found family in Schaffa, but nevertheless continues to spiral down a destructive path. Probably the most significant development in this one is Hoa, our intrepid narrator, who finally reveals his origins and backstory. I found him fascinating because he directly states his motives several times, yet we don’t really know his intentions until this book. It’s been a ride back and forth, but I think he’s probably one of the most interesting characters in the series. He’s a far cry from the minor helper character he seems to be at first.  

While the first two books had snippets from Hoa’s perspective, he becomes a full-fledged perspective character in The Stone Sky, and reveals a lot about the world and general themes of the story. This entry also humanizes him a great deal. We already knew he identifies as a human, that he’s one of the oldest stone eaters alive, but not necessarily what that means to him until now. Most of his story explores how the world got to its current, cyclical apocalypse-state, tied to the origins of the stone eaters. Despite the time leaps, Jemisin keeps it all relevant and interesting; it never feels jarring to switch between disparate perspectives. That’s true for the other books as well, and I think it speaks quite well of her writing. One really satisfying part about Hoa’s perspective in this entry is we get an actual, canon explanation for why he’s narrating Essun’s life in second-person. Over the course of the series he lapses into first-person sometimes, or narrates in a very stylistic way, and all of that starts to make sense too. There’s even solid reasoning to the whole unreliable narrator thing! It was a nice touch to tie off the series.

This entry into the series also gives us a chance to look at long term worldbuilding. Specifically, there’s a LOT of slow burn/long con details about the world that we finally figure out here. One really interesting detail is the concept of “icewhite eyes”. Basically, it’s a rare eye color that’s commonly seen as a bad omen. The Fifth Season seems to play this straight; two named characters have icewhite eyes. One is the then-monstrous Schaffa. So, bad omen, check. The other is Hoa, who we figure out pretty early isn’t quite human (at least how we see it), and has mysterious— possibly sinister— intentions. So, check off the bad omen there, right? Except BOTH of these characters develop in unexpected ways. Schaffa becomes— of all things— a strong father figure for Nassun. Hoa is, well, Hoa, and full of spoilers, but it should be obvious by now he’s a pretty complex guy. Finally, in The Stone Sky, we learn where the negative beliefs about icewhite eyes come from, and it is… well, pretty fucked. It’s obviously allegorical, but the reader doesn’t really get the extent of it until this book, which makes it all the more insidious. It ties wonderfully to the anti-bigotry, anti-oppression themes of the novel, and does so by completely playing the reader.

This is just one example of many, and I’m willing to bet this series is a fun one to re-read due to all the future context. But now to focus on things that generally apply to the series, rather than something this book in particular focuses on.

Generally speaking, there are things about the world that I really like, now that I’ve had three books to consider them. One big thing that played with my expectations was orogeny as a concept; for all intents and purposes it feels like this world’s version of magic. But as the series goes on you learn orogeny isn’t magic at all; just an evolutionary trait future humans picked up (I mean, the term “oroGENE” implies this, but…). Not only that, but traditional magic does exist, and is very relevant to the story. The stone eaters were also super interesting. They were way different than most generic “fantasy races,” and getting their backstory in this entry made them even more compelling to me. They’re uncanny and sort of creepy at first, but the more you learn about them the more explainable their behavior becomes.

I’ve talked so much about the things I like about the series that I’ve neglected to mention the writing itself… it’s very good. Exquisite, even. I’m not sure how else to describe it— Hoa has a very strong voice— humorous (often bitterly) and cognizant of the little details. I loved the fun poetic bits that experiment with typeface and line breaks. There’s even a part where The Important Words Were Capitalized, which felt so natural with how people type now that I’m surprised I haven’t seen it much in literary works. The trilogy was very fun to read based purely on the writing. Even if it had been lacking in content, which it wasn’t, I think I still would have enjoyed it purely for the craft.

Certain themes are omnipresent in this series, and there were several that really struck a chord with me. Obviously, the cycles of oppression the characters face are allegorical to the real world. One thing I REALLY like about this series is how much it defends the downtrodden, something I feel mainstream fantasy often fails to do. So many series seem to WANT an oppressed class in their fantasy world, then are completely apathetic to what that means, or don’t bother to challenge the issues such an inclusion brings. It’s like “oh, well, this happens in the real world, so I should have some sort of allegory for racism/sexism/homo/transphobia”. Not so here— The Broken Earth is about the full implications of oppression and why it’s so wrong, why it’s so unjust. The Fifth Season’s dedication reads “For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question” and honestly that was the point I knew this series and I were going to click. Just because we are looking through a fantasy lens does not make these things any less horrible or ugly, and I’m glad the series takes such a strong stance against dehumanization and oppression.

Another overarching theme I was surprised impacted me so much was that of parenthood. A character early in the series says “Children will be the ruin of us.” It’s a haunting line in context, and thematically it sticks through the rest of the series. Essun’s motherhood is a central part of her character— striking because initially she has no desire to be a mother. She is, arguably, not even a very good mother in the traditional sense— but her protectiveness of her children ultimately defines a lot of the story. It’s hard to go into detail without broaching major spoiler territory, but it’s a consistent and heart-wrenching theme that persists all the way to the end. That particular line is literal for many, many events in the story.

I discussed representation in my previous reviews, so I won’t retread that much, but stories like this prove just how easy it is (and should be) to be inclusive. It makes sense that the cast is so diverse in this series, because it is very much about the oppressed and the issues they face. Wouldn’t make any sense to have that central concept, then focus on a bunch of straight white guys. But that being said, I think this series is a great example of how  writing can be better in terms of representation. This is the only fantasy series I’ve ever read where the main protagonist is a 40-something black mother. And there should be much, much more out there. Since getting into this series I’ve found myself looking critically at a lot of mainstream entertainment, and its failure to represent minority groups beyond a few token characters. It was a problem I was aware of, but this series makes it look so easy that I find myself even more annoyed that most people don’t bother.

I’m not going to lie— The Broken Earth is a pretty bleak series. A lot of really horrible shit happens to the main cast. Hell, the opening premise is that (a) a toddler was murdered by his father, and (b) the world is about to end forever, killing millions of people. Most of the early content focuses on a brutalized slave class, hated by society for the crime of having a certain evolutionary trait. But the series is also about the small moments of hope that shine through despite these things. Happiness and compassion are worth celebrating, because they remind us that there is something worth fighting for in the world, no matter how hopeless and awful things seem. We see characters who are victimized and beaten down ultimately come into their own truths and find their own families and reasons to live. So yeah, it’s a dark series, but I wouldn’t have had it other way. I hope someday I can meet N. K. Jemisin to thank her for writing these. They’ve given me a lot to think about.