The Other Council

Purpose:

The Other Council is an informal organization that offers piecemeal advice to the Council of the Lords (of Terrasquestone). They do not meet among themselves, and all are monsters that have come from the Dungeon's Core. They are individuals, have their own goals, own purposes, and have worked against each other as often as they have worked together. Ultimately, the Other Council is the Dungeon's subconscious representation within the city and castle.

Agenda:

Maintain the dynamic status of the city, stagnation is the enemy of the Core

Prevent the manifestation of Dungeon Cults, the Core is not a god and abhors gods.

Prevent the domination of any divine cults, Terrasquestone has no official faith, the Core abhors gods.

Prevent the petrification of order from stifling the City.

Prevent the anarchy of chaos from destroying the City

Prevent the degeneracy of evil from poisoning the City

Prevent the intolerance of good from blinding the City

Leader:

The Other Council has no rank, and no leader, the members work towards their own ends, and are only referred to as the Other Council when being spoke of by the Lords and High Lords.

Founder:

The Dungeon Core is technically the founder of the Other Council, but the eldest and first member was the Mishaad Mendicant

Members:

Listed in no particular order

The Mishaad Mendicant

Appearance: The Mendicant is a massive being, easily ten or more feet tall if it stands erect. Hunched over, it is only a bit over six feet. The thing wears a great bear-fur cloak, and a staff as large as a small tree. The Mendicant has a silent stride, and a quiet presence, and if it holds completely still people can easily overlook it. It seldom speaks, and its appearances are rare, but its voice is raspy and low, like it is not just coming from a long period of silence, but as if speech is not natural to it.

Boon: Endurance, physical, spiritual, and emotional. The Mendicant is the immovable object.

Bane: Poverty, weakness, paralysis, hunger. As a beggar, the Mendicant is non-violent, weak, and expressed the wrack and ruin of famine, and loss

Truth: The Mishaad Mendicant is a Behemoth, a large Pleistocene-like beast covered in long hair, with black talons, flesh-ripping teeth, and a bygone of what might was before the advent of magic, the dungeon, or organized sorcery. In modern parlance, the Mendicant is somewhere between a wendigo, sasquatch, and bigfoot.

The Coiling Covenant

Appearance: The Coiling Covenant is a thirty-foot-long Lamia. It is female from the waist up, and from the waist down, an olive green zolom (a two-tailed species of poisonous great serpent). The Coiling Covenant likes to dress in scandalous fashion, wearing scant clothing that draws the eye to her pointed breasts. She strongly favors rubies and gold in her attire, and those with a keen eye can see the Covenant has left her cloaca exposed completely. Her voice is high pitched and excited, and she moves with frightening speed and agility.

Boon: Fertility, emotional recovery, healing.

Bane: infidelity, poisonings and venom, deception, and cannibalism/human consumption.

Truth: The Coiling Covenant is a Lamia of tremendous power. Most Lamia are related to mundane species, but the Covenant is part zolom, granting her epic stats, and resistances. Her lamia nature means she is as likely to take a lover and lay a clutch of eggs as she is to bite and then consume a lover after a recreational mating. Her children are lamia who live in the Gyre and a number of humanoid children unaware of their supernatural blood.

The Vigilite

The Vigilite is rarely encountered and is considered an ill-omen. It appears as a large figure gliding through the remote parts of the castle and encounters with the Vigilite are the stuff of nightmares. It wears a large cowl and veil that covers its face and reduces it to a fabric-covered pillar that moves with no other sound than the whisper of cloth across the ground. It speaks in a voice that is too loud, unnatural, and grating. Its presence causes headaches, nosebleeds, and nightmares, and it exudes an Aura of Anxiety. It has the air of a clerical or monastic figure.

Boon: magical knowledge, access to secrets, and access to forgotten places and things.

Bane: Death, madness, PTSD, self-destruction

Truth: The Vigilite is a Beholder that has its nature concealed with layers of cloth. No one is aware that it is a floating sphere covered in eyes, as it is covered almost constantly when stalking a Lord or High Lord who has done something worthy of its attention, or has a deed in their heart it deems interesting. Much like the Vorlons from Babylon 5, the Vigilite shows up at contentious times to force those in power to face their own terrors, weaknesses, and flaws, to make them know who they are, and those who fail are driven mad. 

The Dyndaed Devoted

The Dyndaed Devoted is one of the most normal and human-seeming members of the other council, though his demeanor is very untrustworthy, even unsettling. His smile is wrong, his eyes are wrong, and his emotions are completely inverted. Joyous things make him scowl, while tragedy gives him a mirthful smirk. He always wears black formal attire, decked in silver and amethyst jewelry. He is a broker, a dealer, a giver of loans, and a remover of difficulties, and the price at first always seems to inconsequential.

Boon: What do you want? I can help you with anything you need.

Bane: It will cost you everything.

Truth: The Dyndaed Devoted is a Deep Dragon, a wingless species of dragon long adapted to living in the lightless depths of the world, finding paths and realms that will never see the light of the Sun or feel the tread of human feet. At its core, it is a deceiver and a liar, but it delivers on its promises, monkey's paw style. It does have a penchant for over-delivering because this amuses it. Why remove a single troublesome noble blocking an ambitious man looking to raise his station when facilitating a tragedy that leaves not just the noble dead, but the entire family extirpated, their lands burnt, and dozens it not hundreds dead in the process?

The Other Lord

The Other Lord is a wight dressed in the full formal regalia of a Lord, and it is very disconcerting to be near, as it is both predatory in posture and almost nothing can be divined from it. The Other Lord is too tall, too lean, has too many teeth, and is hunched over. It smells vaguely of blood and sweat, fear and rot. No one is sure what gender it is, as it wears a formal cowl that hides its hair, and the upper portion of its face. It has an unpleasant voice and is quick to biting sardonic laughter, and its favorite tools are mockery, hatred, and vitriol.

Boon: wisdom, the Other Lord never lies. Truth, the removal of disguises and misdirection.

Bane: Ruin, hubris, wasting death.

Truth: The Other Lord is a mockery of the Lords and the High Lord created by the Dungeon Core to remind the Lords of what they are, and what they really serve when they forget those things and think they are no different than other lords and nobles across the land. It is also the Herald of the Dungeon when it has a need to let the Lords know something in the most disturbing manner possible. A wise and balanced Council of Lords will never see the Other Lord, while periods of upheaval, discontent, and problematic leadership will see it bring its own seat to fill at the great table.

The Niskogg Glamity

The Glamity rarely appears to the Lords, instead issuing summons to them to come to a specific location deep in the castle. Those who have offended the sensibilities of the Glamity are summoned down into the Gyre itself. Its herald is a comely youth wearing nothing more than a sheer wisp of cloth around itself, leaving nothing to the imagination. They speak but a few words and beckon the summoned Lord to follow them, taking them down secret paths into the hidden places in the castle or shortcuts into the Gyre. Below a chorus line of similar-clad youths await them and speak the voice of the Glamity in unity, something very disconcerting. They stand in front of a slowly pulsing organic sphere, tendrils waving around it like a menacing corona. Should the Glamity itself speak, it has a very sweet and motherly voice and is disarming in its maternal charm.

Boon: reproduction, pets, animal affinity, sex

Bane: vermin, swarms of pests, surges in dungeon monster hostility, danger

Truth: The Niskogg Glamity is a Deep Spawn, a large rugose creature with maws at the end of long tendrils, eye-stalks, and other pseudo-appendages. It exists to breed and produce monsters from its genetic library. The Heralds are humans it has been crafted to be incomplete without its guidance to give the appearance of will, otherwise, they are meat puppets. It enjoys romance, eroticism, and almost every fetish imaginable. It also runs the dungeon's monster breeding and eugenics program, creating new versions of monsters through its ability to create almost anything inside an egg. The Glamity has steady influence over the city's prostitution guild.

Gwenth, the Keeper of Purity

The Keeper of Purity has two forms, appearing as a waif-like woman with long almost white hair that hangs down to her knees. She wears simple robes, that seem almost too thin, titillating with the potential sighting of too much leg, or a bit of exposed breast. Nothing is ever seen, just the burning temptation of the potential. She carries a staff, sometimes the Staff of the Holy Treasures, and has a voice like warm honey. Her other form is an alicorn (winged unicorn/Pegasus with a horn) mare, with a silvery white coat, a golden horn that sheds light, and wings the color of the dawn. In this form, the Keeper cannot speak but can deliver punishment or blessings as the case merits.

Boon: Cure, Raising the dead, dispelling evil magics, protection from evil, protection from lies

Bane: the righteous fury of that which is holy, including turning the unworthy into pillars of salt and ash

Truth: Gwenth is an Alicorn, created by the Dungeon Core from samples taken from the Slatehaven Monolith fragment taken to Terrasquestone. As such, she is a relic creature and has the powers of an Imperial Age forged beast and the mind and soul of an Arch-Priestess of the Lunar Cult. Her power is vast and uncompromising. As the Vigilite is the opposite of the Dyndaed Devoted, so is the Keeper of Purity the rival of the Niskogg Glamity.

Emnas Uddergold, the Sacred One

The Sacred One is a minotauress, or female minotaur, and appears as such. She is large, nearly ten feet tall, and easily over 800 lbs. She has short horns compared to male minotaurs, but large for a heifer. Minotaurs have breasts, not udders, and her breasts are expansive. She is very soft-spoken, and almost submissive in her demeanor, and is so rarely seen most forget she is part of the Other Council.

Boon: restoring health to sick infants, mother's milk

Bane: obsession, weakness, lactose intolerance, poor milk production from anything that lactates

Truth: Emnas is functionally a half-giant/minotaur and exists as a patroness for infants, children, pregnancy, and unfortunately, those who have breast, pregnancy, and lactation fetishes. On the positive side, she is a sort of social service for infants and children in the city, being attached to their overall health and wellbeing. On the negative side, she can either smother transgressors under her mass or withdraw her blessings, leading to sickness and poor overall livestock and household care. A callous noble dismissive of tending his livestock, wife, children, etc, might find himself blowing up anytime he eats a dairy product and his children afflicted the same way, devastating for a nursing infant.

There is also a trade for minotaur milk and other dairy products in the City, so that is also a thing.

Lavhaqa, the Inviolable Scribe

Lavhaqa is a horror to behold, appearing as a massive golden orb weaver spider. She is constantly spinning a scroll that is a record of everything that has happened of note in the city or the dungeon. When pressed to appear to the Lords, she can manage a partial transformation, producing a female human upper torso to appear from the top of her thorax, but retains her full arachnid appearance otherwise. The human growth can speak and gesture with its arms but it is disconcerting since its eyes cannot see, as Lavhaqa still uses her regular eight eyes to watch everything. Thus, the body doesn't face whoever it is speaking to, and it has no sense of tone or inflection when speaking.

Boon: all the recorded knowledge in Terrasquestone, binding of contracts, and laws ordained by the Core

Bane: legalistic traps, all secrets exposed, spiders, Jesus, the fucking spiders...

Truth: Lavhaqa is a giant celestial spider that is the secretary of the Dungeon Core, and the Court Recorder for the Council of Lords. The Lavhaqan Record is an ever growing set of books that record the abridged history of Terrasquestone, dossiers of its residents, and other useful and completely useless information. The Inviolable Scribe is a regular companion to The Vigilite, the Other Lord, and the Dyndaed Devoted, acting as their notary as the case requires.