Tiamat

Tiamat
Titles: The Scaled Tyrant, the Dragon Queen, the Lady of Avarice, the Five-Headed Bitch

Home: The Astral Sea

Alignment: Lawful evil

Portfolio: Greed, wrath, tyranny, pride, chromatic and evil dragons

Domains: Trickery, war

Symbol: Five dragon claws radiating outward in a spiraling circle

Favored Weapon: Flails

Teachings

 * Hoard wealth, acquiring much and spending little.
 * Forgive no slight and leave no wrong unpunished.
 * Take what you desire from others.

Followers and Clergy
The Cult of the Dragon Queen is highly regimented and hierarchical, organized into cells that extend their influence over entire region.

Her clerics are occupied by the twin tasks of acquiring an ever-increasing hoard of wealth for the faith and sabotaging the faiths of other deities, especially Bahamut. As a result, they spend most of their time with an unending series of thefts, assassinations, acts of vandalism, and arson.

With their veneration of wealth and power, the Cult of the Dragon Queen is talented at recruiting powerful nobility and merchants.

Chromatic dragons generally occupy a high position in the Cult of the Dragon Queen, especially if they actively worship Tiamat. Many, however, simply pay lip service and a tithe, using the Cult’s inherent awe and veneration of chromatic dragons to control them for their own schemes.

Traditions and Practices
The two most important daily ceremonies are the Tithing and the Rite of Respect. The former is an offering of a small amount of treasure to the goddess; the tithe is cupped in the priest's hands or talons, and when a prayer is completed, the valuables have sometimes (10% of the time) simply vanished. The Rite of Respect is performed by non-dragons; it is a complicated ceremony of kow-towing in the presence of a dragon or other spawn of Tiamat. Evil dragons celebrate great victories by torturing prisoners and committing other atrocities in Tiamat's name.

Clothing and Symbols
Tiamat’s worshippers wear resplendent robes of the finest materials, dyed in expensive colors to represent the five chromatic heads of the goddess. Their armor is adorned with scales, depictions of dragons, and fangs and claws harvested from the fallen. They often wear ornate, dragon-shaped masks crafted of expensive metals or ivory, and carry ornamental daggers of dragonfang.

Places of Worship
Temples to Tiamat are often built within the lairs of long-dead dragons. They are filled with piles of wealth to be sacrificed to the Chromatic Dragon, as well as traps to keep out heretics and the unfaithful. Few dragons keep shrines to her in their own lairs, because they fear that she might notice their hoards and demand a portion.

Within societies that openly revere Tiamat, her worship is conducted in grand, opulent temple complexes, often with pyramidal structures topped with sacrificial altars.

Sacred Texts

 * The Tome of the Scaled Secrets - Bound and written upon dragon scales, this massive book reveals the history of dragonkind from Tiamat’s perspective. It contains powerful rituals and secrets, and only Darkscales are permitted to read directly from its pages.

Holy Days
The Day of Sundering - On the fall equinox, the day when, according to legend, Io was split into Bahamut and Tiamat, Tiamat’s followers seek to revel in the ascendancy of the Dragon Queen. They sacrifice followers of Bahamut and go on vast, murderous crime sprees, offering up their ill-gotten loot to the Lady of Avarice in exchange for powerful divine boons.