Cosmology & Religion

What follows is the shape of the heavens and hells as the learned describe them, and the faiths that ordinary people actually keep. Hold it loosely. Much of it is taught with great confidence by those who cannot prove a word, and your character may believe some, all, or none.

Heaven, Hell, and the endless war

No one in Sanctuary can name a creator god. Good and Evil are instead said to be actual places and powers: the High Heavens, home of the angels, and the Burning Hells, home of the demons. They have warred since before the world began, a conflict without beginning or end that scholars call the Eternal Conflict, and Sanctuary, the mortal world, lies between them like a field between two armies. Whether any of this is literally true or a story the faithful tell is the sort of question priests answer with certainty and everyone else debates quietly.

The angels and the Council

The angels are not the kindly winged guardians of children’s tales. Those who claim to have studied them describe beings of pure light and law, remote and terrible, whose concern for any single mortal is far from certain. The archangels are said to rule the Heavens as a council, and a hero of a devout people might venerate one or more of them: Tyrael, called Justice; Auriel, Hope; Itherael, Fate; Imperius, Valor; and Malthael, Wisdom. Together they are named the Angiris Council, or simply the Council. Few claim to have seen one, and fewer still would call the meeting a comfort.

The Prime Evils and the powers of darkness

Unbeknownst to most mortals, the demon lords of the Burning Hells form a hierarchy. Greatest among them are the three Prime Evils, spoken of in fearful whispers as the source of the worst that has ever befallen Sanctuary. Beneath and around them crowd lesser demons without number. Many mortals believe that dark powers exist, that they hunger, and that they can reach into the world through a weak soul, a cursed place, or an open door. The Horadrim, an old order of mages, were founded to hunt and imprison the Prime Evils, and by most accounts they succeeded. Their story is told in History & Recent Events.

Why most people know none of this

If the war of Heaven and Hell is so momentous, why does the average farmer know so little of it? The traditions hold that after an ancient conflict called the Sin War, a great forgetting fell across Sanctuary and wiped the memory of the higher powers from the minds of mortals. Some mages, priests, and hidden orders resisted that forgetting, or have since made contact with these forces again, though such claims are widely dismissed as madness or invention. Your character may know a great deal or almost nothing, depending on their people and their training.

The faiths of Sanctuary

Zakarum, the Church of the Light

The dominant faith of the western world is Zakarum, the religion of the Light, built on the teachings of the prophet Akarat. It holds that a righteous, disciplined life is a shield against the darkness, and that the Light will prevail in the end. Its hand lies heavy on daily life in places like Westmarch: its priests speak with authority, its paladins carry the Light into battle, and its seat of power stands far to the east at Kurast. The Church has its own entry under Factions.

Ancestral, nature, and local traditions

Beyond the reach of the Light, older faiths endure. The Barbarians of the north revere their ancestors and the sacred mountain they guard. The Druids of Scosglen keep faith with the land itself. The people of the southern jungles speak with the spirits of the dead, and the distant monks of Ivgorod serve a host they call the Thousand and One Gods. To a devout Zakarumite these are error and superstition. To those who hold them, they are simply true. None of these traditions imagines a friendly god who intervenes on request.