Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 150 - Rovagug

Episode Date: November 13, 2022

Don't forget to send me your contest entries before Friday, November 19th!  Minor milestone as we hit episode #150.  This week we will talk about Rovagug, the monster in Pathfinder lore that will bring about the end of the multiverse.  In this episode we ask:  Where is it now?  What is it doing?  Why do campaigns need creatures of unfathomable evil and chaos and destruction?     #Pathfinder #DungeonsandDragons #DnD #GMTips #Rovagug Resources: https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Rovagug https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Spawn_of_Rovagug https://lovecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Rovagug https://2e.aonprd.com/Deities.aspx?ID=15

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Rovagug's worshippers make sacrifices and destroy valuable objects, hoping to wake the great beast. The worshippers tell each other that each life that they snuff out, each piece of art that they destroy, each work of labor that they bring tumbling down puts a crack in the prison that holds their god. Thank you so much for tuning in to episode 150 of the Taking20 podcast. This week, continuing the lore series all about Rovagug. Before my rambling starts, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Dentists. Did you know that dentists need to use a special tool to take care of red dragon teeth?

They have to use a fire drill. If you're looking for gift ideas for the RPG lover in your life, head over to 3D Crafts and Curios on Etsy to buy a beautiful dice tower, dice jail, DM screen, or other RPG accessory. Brenton Galbraith again has sponsored this beautiful fairy dice tower as a giveaway, but to enter, you have to send me a screenshot of your liking and following 3D Crafts and Curios on Facebook or Insta, but to enter, you have to send me a screenshot of your liking and following 3D Crafts and Curios on Facebook or Insta, and that's all you have to do to be entered to win. You can message those to me on the social media site or send it to contest at taking20podcast.com. Deadline is Friday the 19th, so send those screenshots in. Thank you again, Brenton,

for supplying the Dice Tower for the giveaway. You've been a great sponsor this year and a good friend, and I greatly appreciate your support of the podcast. 150 episodes. I never in a hundred years thought I'd still be making content this far in. Six months before the pandemic started, so going all the way back then,

a Let's Play that we were trying to set up fell through, and I got the podcasting itch. So finally I decided I'd start making a few episodes, throw some advice out there, maybe I'd make 20 episodes and see how it went. The feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive, and I want to thank every single one of you that are listening now, and especially the very few of you that were listening then. I think my first month I had somewhere like 80 or 90 downloads of my five episodes I released. Now, most of my months have more than 1,200 downloads, and I have regular listeners in

26 countries with smaller listener counts and another maybe 15 to 20. So thank you, all of you, for listening to this podcast. I sincerely hope it continues to be funny, informative, and chock full of groan-worthy puns for the foreseeable future. I did a lot of brainstorming about what I wanted to do for episode 150. I mean, it's a minor milestone. I tossed around some ideas like viewer mailbag, but eventually decided, you know what? I wanted to do a topic that I can relate to.

One that I think describes me to a T. An unholy beast capable of destroying the multiverse. I mean, I wanted to cover a topic that I could really sink my teeth into, like a whirling maw of anger and hate, locked at the center of a planet until one day, it won't be. Of course, I'm talking about the Pathfinder legend of Rovagug, the Destroyer, the Unmaker, the Enemy of the Gods, and one of my favorite parts of Pathfinder mythology. To tell the story of this monster, we need to go all the way back to the beginning of reality as we know it. The goddess Phrasma, who we discussed at length in the Afterlife episode 146, was the

first being in creation. She stood atop the seal that caused a new reality to be created. When she stepped off the seal, she created gods and universes and planes of existence with every step. However, during those early steps, she was frightened that there was something beyond her vision and beyond the reality she was creating. That fear manifested as Rovagug, or according to some legends, Rovagug was drawn by that fear and came to the reality that way. No one really knows for sure. Rovagug is a deity unto itself and the first of a species called the Qlipoth. They're Lovecraftian creatures of tentacles and fangs, that's basically all they are. Examples from Pathfinder include the Shogti, the Nyagoth, and the smaller Bebliths.

In its earliest days, Rovagug was charged with burrowing through the newly created abyss. When it reached the deepest layers, though, the demons had begun breeding in enormous numbers. While the demons are individually weak, they were numerous enough to put the great beast on the run. Eventually, it crossed the planar boundaries and began eating worlds on the material plane. These early worlds were said not to even have names yet. Rovagug wasn't satisfied, so the other gods rallied to drive it back to the abyss. They did so, but it escaped again back to the material plane, and a lot of worlds had started forming history and names and identities,

and the creatures were intelligent enough to feel the suffering of being consumed. Rovagug loved the taste of all of that and wanted more. He destroyed, quote, untold numbers of worlds where history will likely never be known or told. Eventually, he became aware of the plane of Axis and the Eternal City where Phrasma sits in judgment. He showed up there and the destruction was catastrophic. Parts of the city are still recovering thousands of years later. As Rovagug left Axis and turned his attention towards three worlds, Earth, Andropha, and Galarian,

the goddess Sarenrae gathered an unlikely collection of gods. The lawful neutral Abadar, Apsu, the god of metallic dragons, Asmodeus, lord of the archdevils, Calistria, goddess of lust, revenge, and trickery, Dahak, the god of chromatic dragons, Desna, goddess of dreams and luck, Dubral, who had eventually become twisted into the god of pain called

Zon-Kuthon, Arastel the hunter, Ghazra of nature in the sea, Phrasma, and Torag, the most powerful of dwarven gods, along with a number of other gods from more remote parts of the world. The battle was fierce, and some gods died in the battle.

The gods were not powerful enough to destroy Rovagug, so they resorted to the best that they could do, trap it. Calistria, goddess of lust, remember, lured Rovagug to Galarian and distracted him. Given what she looks like and what Rovagug looks like, the implications are unpleasant to consider. While the beast was distracted, however they did it, other gods prepared the dead vault, and Sarenrae cast him aside and sealed the door with a key that only Asmodeus can turn. Sarenrae warned her followers to avoid the area on Galarian above where Rovagug was cast down. But mortals are going to mortal, and they really didn't fully understand what the goddess was saying to them, and they built the city of Gormuz over the spot where Rovagug was cast down.

Unfortunately, the people living in Gormuz began to get corrupted by Rovagug's relative proximity, and eventually Sarenrae gave into her wrath. relative proximity, and eventually Sarenrae gave into her wrath. The citizens had been corrupted and started cursing Sarenrae, and Sarenrae smote the entire town of Gormuz. But as a perfect example of unintended consequences, when she did that, she pierced the dead vault, creating the pit of Gormuz, and the pit filled with all kinds of monsters trying to get closer to Rovagug. The opening in Rovagug's vault was too small for it to escape, but it could start creating monsters that could leave the vault, and soon after, Ulunot, the first spawn of Rovagug, emerged. He wouldn't be the last, though. Over the next 5,000 years, others would emerge, including the fearsome and nearly impossible-to-kill Tarasque.

Now is when I'm going to pause and say some of you pronounce it Tarasque. Don't hate me. Remember, I got introduced to this shit before there was an internet, and there wasn't a definitive pronunciation guide from the DM player Hivemind. It's still Tarasque in my mind because the first DM to introduce it to me pronounced it that way. Now, you may be asking, why lock Rovagug away? Well, aside from the whole eating countless worlds and reveling in destruction for destruction's sake, there's a prophecy that says Rovagug will be released during the End Times. Supposedly, there'll be a threat, another apocalypse of some sort, a potential fate that's so awful that Asmodeus himself will become desperate enough to release Rovagug, who will consume all of creation and

then itself, leaving behind Grotus, see episode 146 for a little more on Grotus, to end this multiverse and a survivor who will rebuild it anew. Who is that survivor? Conventional wisdom said it'll be Phrasma again to create the multiverse anew, but wouldn't it be really neat if it wasn't? Anyway, so where is Rovagug, the Tide of Fangs, now? It's in the Dead Vault in the center of the planet Galarian. It has enough power to grant spells and powers to clerics that worship it, and yes, there are those who worship the Great Destroyer. Needless to say, it's chaotic evil, and most of its worshippers are as well. While there's no official holy book of Rovagug, an insane prophet named Chalmus Cold is writing

down myths and legends while an inmate of Havenguard Asylum, and he calls his writings the Cycle of the Beast. Rovagug's practitioners mostly worship in secret, since most of polite society frowns upon those who want to destroy everything. Every time an earthquake happens or a volcano spews forth heat and destruction, Rovagug's worshippers make sacrifices and destroy valuable objects, hoping to wake the great beast. The worshippers tell each other that each life that they snuff out, each piece of art that they destroy, each work of labor that they bring tumbling down puts a crack

in the prison that holds their god. Each of their little efforts of destruction adds up and one day will free him, setting him loose to bring about the end of things. Rovagug lies sleeping and suffering in its prison, its flesh being eaten by enormous creatures known as rackworms. These creatures are 80 feet long and weigh about 15 tons. They consume Rovagug's flesh and are occasionally shaken off by the beast, causing earthquakes and even sometimes expelling these rackworms to other planes of existence. When they arrive, it is a major destructive event as these worms will continuously eat, not because they need nourishment, but because they have an

inherent cruelty and desire to destroy, regardless of what they're destroying. Occasionally, Rovigo expounds a horrible creature like the Tarrasque to rampage the planet of Galarian. These monsters could be an episode unto themselves as they are feared children of the planet of Galarian. These monsters could be an episode unto themselves, as they are feared children of the god of destruction and nearly indestructible themselves. These great spawn when they arrive cause untold destruction across continents, and now they are various places in the universe. They could be located in the Darklands, like Chimnuset, sealed away somewhere on Galarian like the Tarasque, and some have escaped and we don't know where they are, like Ulunot, Volnagor, and Zoltani.

But mostly, Rovagug waits for the Vault to weaken enough for it to escape, or for Asmodeus to become desperate enough to open the Vault so it can bring about the end of all creation. So why did I take a few minutes to cover Rovagug today? Because the fact that I'm interested in legends and implications of a locked away beast that eats everything in the multiverse, including the gods, highlights the importance of having legends of unbelievably powerful, evil, and destructive creatures that exist somewhere in your world. Creatures with inscrutable motives that can be a threat, not just to this village or this nation or this continent, maybe the entire world or the entire

universe even. High-level campaigns need threats of that magnitude, and if you want to run a high and epic-level campaign, you really need appropriate big bads. Plus, sometimes you just need a group to serve as antagonists to the PCs. Many of the gaming systems we love are starting to do away with the concept of humanoids being irredeemably evil just because of the accident of their ancestry. But you still need evil for the party to vanquish and be the big damn heroes. One of the easiest ways to build antagonists would be a sect of worshippers of a destructive god. The sect is murdering, destroying, and creating chaos solely for their existence, and not with any redeemable reason

behind it. Organizations with evil motivations make convenient sources of baddies behind the campaign. So think about your world where the apocalypse is nigh and these powerful offspring are being released from their eternal prison in advance of a god-like being who's going to bring about the destruction of everything. Only your epic level party stands between the multiverse and utter oblivion. Write a campaign where the party has to collect assets for the great war from good and evil beings alike to lead the fight against the monsters. I bet you and your players would have fun doing it. Shorter episode this week, because my option was either a 15-minute episode or a 40-minute one. I'm sure I'll cover the Great Beast in more detail again later on in the future,

because there's certain aspects I haven't gotten to and really don't have time. More importantly, don't forget about the contest. Beautiful fairy dice tower supplied by Brenton Galbraith of 3D Crafts and Curios. The deadline is Friday. Send me those screenshots of your liking and following 3D Crafts and Curios on Facebook or Insta. Tune in next week when we'll talk about one of the most feared side effects of tabletop role-playing game, burnout. But before I go, I once again want to thank this week's sponsor, Dentists. Did you know that I have a dentist who loves to dance? She's great at the salsa, is light on her feet in the

ballroom, but man, you should see her floss. This has been episode 150, continuing the lore series all about Rovagug and the Pathfinder universe. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking podcast is a publishing cube media production copyright 2022 references to game system content are copyright their respective publishers