The Canticle of the Formless Many

This is for my mainstay campaign setting, which still doesn't really have a proper name.  It's the same setting as my Eastwylde campaign, and the world in which I plonked down The Maze of the Blue Medusa.   It's background stuff for the Stonehold dungeon I'm writing.

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Don't call them a cult; much less a faith.  The ladies and gentlemen of the Canticle would be insulted at the term.  What they do is no act of faith, but the ultimate act of reason.

To wit: the ultimate act of reason is accept its own impossibility. 

The universe is chaos: growth and decay and the random movement of particles.  Throughout the many worlds truth is change, and the idea of Eternity--with its golden rays and choirs of insipid angels--is the lie.  Creation and destruction, transmutation: paint on the canvas, form growing from clay under the sculptor's fingertips.  This is truth and beauty, invention and imagination.  That is what the Canticle holds to.  It is perhaps best thought of as a collective of artists. 

The Canticle is a coterie of wizards from the western lands.  Specifically a group of wizards born to land and wealth, specializing in the Transmutation school.  There are perhaps only a dozen.  Most of them are more than a century old, perhaps few would be easily recognized as human any longer.  But though they have altered themselves, the members of the Canticle save their boldest and most striking work for others. 

That work may not be devotional in the sense usually imparted to cultic activity, but there is a metaphysical resonance in it as surely as in the transcendent work of all serious artists.  A somebody, at least, an other, grants inspiration and power to fuel his devoted as surely as the architect of the finest Temple can claim his inspiration to be heavensent.  That other is The Formless Many, the Great Warper, an immense Toad of Limbo squatting above the fraying nerves of the cosmos.  Perhaps not a god but certainly no fiend as the grossly limited manichean cosmos holds.  And more than powerful enough to influence the Prime Material through his blessing of manifold mutation.

In his name the masters of the Canticle sculpt flesh and transform matter, juxtaposing and lampooning the dull taxonomy of creation.   When they gather---only a few such salons occurring each century--it's a chance for each to show off in craft and imagination.  Competition such as true artists live for.  At their last gathering for example, exhibits included a woman meticulously half-transformed into a giant centipede; a living man with flesh of crystal glass; a mosaic in precious stones and dragonscale that eats, shits and sings; a girl who grew old in a day, gave birth to herself, and died.  Such gatherings are inevitably ostentatious affairs.  The privilege of birth combined with arcane power and flagrant defiance of the Arcane Order's strictures means each member of the Canticle lives like a prince, if only in their sealed and hidden Seclusiums.  

They are aesthetic hedonists.  Corruption of the body is no problem---any decent wizard should be able to restart his liver or banish a venereal blemish, let alone sustain himself over decades of sumptuous living.  To live below a certain level of luxury would be a disgrace to any of them, and certainly mean exclusion from the Canticle.  [In my setting, most wizards are from upper middle class families at least, and almost all of the very powerful ones, heroes or villains, were born into wealth and power].  Most of these wizards were born in a time period roughly corresponding to the Late Middle Ages, and their outlook is that of any baron standing defiant of a distant throne: my demesne, my land, my people, my house, my money, and I'll do what I like with it all.

The mightiest of the Canticle is the arch-rogue, Cyrelle the Chaotic.  Her infamous Seclusium--towers of pink marble on a grand manor--still lies unconquered at the heart of the trackless forest of Broceliande, in defiance for centuries of the justice of the Arcane Order and the Kingdoms of the West.  Prior to her recent disappearance Cyrelle was perhaps the most hated rogue wizard alive.  Not a few Archmagi and other would-be champions were felled or twisted into mockeries of themselves by her over the centuries.  It is said she is over 400 years old and has the appearance of a great lizard in kaleidoscoping colors; it is said she created her own tiny world to tend as goddess; it is said she gave birth to a demon so powerful it ate her; it is said a host of angels abducted her for judgement in the night; some say she has simply tired of the West and is living large in the Yellow City of Yoon-Suin, tasting the debaucheries of the Slug-Men.


More Prosaically,

So the Canticle of the Formless Many is sort of my version of a secret evil chaos cult.  Except it's more like The Legion of Doom than a traditional army of nameless hooded acolytes.  You have to be 1. at least a level 13 Wizard (that is, Archmage candidate material---a serious badass) and 2. enormously wealthy/landed aristocracy to even join (and ofc., Transmutation as a specialty school is a must.  Most of them bar Abjuration and Evocation or Illusion).   There are at most maybe a little over a dozen active living members, and each one would (or should) be a suitable Boss Badguy for a long term campaign in their own right.

They aren't trying to do anything esoteric like change the world, end the world, summon a god or enact some prophecy or whatever.  I always struggle on an engagement level with "high concept" villains.   These guys are basically a club of libertine aristocrats with Arcane PhDs who like to fuck with and torture people for fun; they're generally not as deep as they think they are.  You know that old horror story about English aristocrats who pay to have homeless people kidnapped, brought to the woods on their estate, and then hunt them with hounds?  Yeah like a wizard version of that. 

However, the Great Warper/Formless Many/Great Grotesque Toad is a very real thing, and the Canticle's activities really do extend its randomizing and liquefying influence on the Prime Material.  You could call it a Demigod I guess; Divine Rank 0.  Not as powerful as the Archangels or the Demon Princes but much more fun.  If the Formless and by extension the Canticle have an agenda, it's "make everybody roll on that d1000 mutations table from Realms of Chaos over and over because LOL." 

Cyrelle is the first (and so far only) Wizard/Seclusium Dungeon I created using Vince Baker's Seclusium of Orphone dungeon generator thing.   She's a 17th level wizardess which makes her probably one of the 10 most powerful humans on the European subcontinent and somewhere in the top 24 for Eurasia.  I did a massive amount of writing for her Seclusium/the Forest of Broceliande; it was way too ambitious for a first go however so I'm starting with the Stonehold as a more modest dungeon of ~50 rooms or so.