Desna

Tian Xia World Guide

Desna is an ancient goddess celebrated as the deity of dreams, travel, luck, and stars. Adventurers and explorers idolize her, while seafaring navigators looking to the constellations invoke her name. Whispering a prayer to Desna while rattling dice is also a common habit among gamblers, and to encourage those testing their luck, the lavish casinos on the Island of Endless Fortunes near Goka incorporate the goddess’s butterfly symbol into their architecture.

Butterfly colonies can be found in many Desna temples, along with caterpillars and silk-producing moths who weave shimmering scarves that are sold to raise money. Desna is so associated with these silks that in Tian Xia, she is often depicted as a giant moth—a striking departure from her usual portrayal as a woman with butterfly wings.

Tian philosophy also frequently references Desna, thanks to the acclaimed Lung Wa scholar Zhong Shuqing. In 6799 ic, Shuqing experienced a dream where Desna transformed her into a caterpillar, guided her through her butterfly metamorphosis, and watched over her until she died and became one with the earth. Upon awakening, Shuqing would expound upon this dream in a treatise, citing it as an omen that everything in this world, from creatures like butterflies and humans to the soil itself, possesses a soul that is valued by the gods.

Divine Mysteries

Desna is one of the oldest goddesses, a divinity who predates mortal life, yet one who has come to adore it for its beauty, capacity for diversity, and pursuit of growth. According to legend, Desna placed the stars in the night sky of the Universe, an act that

found so inspiring that she chose her favorite stars to become the suns of countless worlds. When mortal life rose on those worlds, Desna’s first gift to them was a beacon of hope, for she made the first star and her home, Cynosure, the brightest in the sky, giving those on the countless worlds something to gaze upon, to use in navigation, and to inspire their dreams.

Desna is not often found in this home, though, for she constantly travels; none know better than herself that the wonders of the Universe are nearly infinite. While she travels the Universe, she takes care to remain apart from mortal affairs, in part from painful lessons she learned in the past. Two of her greatest mistakes—the accidental release of the parasite god

(whom she thought when she found his chrysalis adrift in the darkness could be a fellow like-minded traveler) and the vengeance-fueled and impulsive assassination of the demon lord Aolar (whose death nearly united the rulers of the Outer Rifts against all worlds on which Desna’s faith thrived)—are often taught to her worshippers by aged priests as parables for not only learning from your mistakes, but as encouragement to take risks. Even though a stranger may be an enemy, you won’t know if they could have been a friend if you greet them with violence. Those who do become your enemies should be fought against, and in times of great need extreme steps can and often must be taken, but you must stand just as ready to own and correct the collateral damage your actions might cause.

Desna’s original appearance is a mystery. Some claim her first form was that of a star or comet hurtling through the night sky that seeded smaller stars in its passing. Others believe that one can catch glimpses of her first form in the shape of the butterflies she favors. Still others maintain that her first form was one of a shape that would be monstrous to behold and ruinous to describe. Yet all agree that her current shape, that of a beautiful butterfly-winged humanoid, is not how she appeared at the dawn of time. Which of these myths are true is a matter for religious philosophers to puzzle over. In the Inner Sea region, she most often appears as a winged elven woman clad in a gown of stardust, but as befits a goddess who encourages travel and the mixing of cultures, this form varies by region. She may even appear as different women to different viewers simultaneously.

Desna believes in good luck, yet understands that to trust only in fortune is to set aside your own agency. Fate can always be rewritten, but only if one takes destiny by the hand and leads it down a chosen path rather than being passively tugged through life. She relies on instinct to guide her, and her destination is rarely her most important goal. She encourages her followers to take chances and to live life to its fullest, yet also to respect and honor those they encounter in their travels. When someone takes offense, you’re not the one to decide the veracity of the insult, nor should you judge the other for what brings them joy and pleasure. Exceptions are always made when another’s actions are selfish, cruel, or abusive, in which case Desna expects her faithful to defend the meek and oppose the bully.

Desna loves music and live performances, but not so much as the source of the entertainment. She finds greater pleasure in the audience than being on the stage, and while many bards and entertainers worship her, they spend as much time encouraging others to explore their creativity as they do so themselves. A Desnan bard is more likely to invite a delighted audience member onto the stage to join them than she is to finish a performance alone. Desna recognizes love in all its forms and remains committed to her lovers Sarenrae and

, even while periodically sharing close relationships with others. She shows her favor in the form of unexpected good luck, inspiring dreams, or messages whispered from the wings of butterflies, while those who earn her ire find themselves constantly becoming lost, plagued by misfortune, or suffering from the weight of the stars above when forced to stand before the vastness of the night. However, it’s worth noting Desna never plagues those that vex her with nightmares.

The Church

There’s little sense of authority in Desna’s church. While her worshippers respect and admire the skills of their elders and value their knowledge and advice, there’s no strict hierarchy among the faithful. Her priests are valued by the tales of the journeys they’ve undertaken, the experiences they’ve had, and the mistakes they’ve endured and corrected rather than by traditional notions of seniority.

A typical Desnan service is performed almost entirely in song or music, with interludes of dance, storytelling, and dream recollection interspersed throughout. Those capable of using magic to share dreams with others often favor this method of preaching or storytelling over more mundane practices.

While temples and even cathedrals devoted to Desna do exist, these edifices also include shrines devoted to other divinities as well, particularly to

and , for Desna’s faith does not attribute the size of a building to any degree of religious success in a region. Indeed, many Desnans view the keeping of large temples or cathedrals as unwelcome anchors that prevent the faithful from traveling and encourage sedentary lives. As such, most of Desna’s places of worship are smaller, unattended shrines. These are found at crossroads, in remote areas of beauty, in the vicinity of unmistakable landmarks, or atop hills or mountains where the stars can be viewed unimpeded. Often these shrines lack walls or roofs and are little more than circles of standing stones or groves of ancient trees. Traveling priests of Desna take it upon themselves to clean and maintain these sites as they encounter them, leaving signatures or improvements behind as a way of marking their own journey. These wandering priests do their best to avoid repetitive travels, and make sure never to visit the same shrine twice in the same year, and when they do make a return trip, take pains to approach from a route previously untraveled by themselves.

The faithful have little desire to carry heavy tomes filled with overly oppressive or florid doctrine. Often, graffiti-like markings on shrines are all the religious texts a worshipper of Desna needs, but many have taken to carrying small documents, scrolls, or slim folios to serve as religious inspiration as needed. They prefer these documents to be written in an entertaining manner, and to the untrained eye a Desnan holy scripture might look like a book of fantastical fiction, creatively enhanced historical texts, unexpectedly raunchy poetry and limericks, or even outright erotica. Regardless of the form, these texts always seek to honor the tenets of The Eight Scrolls. These short scrolls contain all the church’s official doctrine, summarizing Desna’s early days as a goddess while making sure to leave plenty of room open for interpretation and the addition of new parables.

Followers

Those who are devoted to Desna follow their dreams and are encouraged to constantly challenge themselves with new ideas, to visit unseen locations, to forge new friendships in unexpected places, and to aid those in need—particularly those who are being bullied or oppressed. Song and art are encouraged methods of self-expression, and while the faithful are expected to avoid spreading fear and despair or engage in bigoted behavior, they also encourage forgiveness to those who do and to the self as well; if one cannot be allowed the risk of a mistake and then be given the chance to learn from their errors, spiritual stagnation may accrue. Still, willful cruelty shouldn’t be tolerated, and those who engage in such pursuits must be stopped.

While Desnans generally don’t pick fights, they have been known to cause them accidentally. In a conflict where violence is inevitable, a Desnan is expected to hit hard and fast to end the battle quickly. Worshippers of Desna are particularly drawn to join heroic adventuring parties, for they are groups whose very nature encourages the combination of travel, cooperation among diversity, and the defeat of evil and cruelty when it’s encountered.

The church of Desna doesn’t maintain many organized groups, although its small regional gatherings and congregations are countless. Still, two particular orders among the faithful deserve special mention.

The Spherewalkers are a loosely organized collection of traveling missionaries; worshippers must roam hundreds of miles, practice skills that aid in travel, and study a wide range of geographic and religious topics before they can even be considered for inclusion in the group. Almost all Spherewalkers are divine spellcasters, and they maintain mystical links to favored landmarks in their travels and use dreams to travel and explore as much as they do their feet.

The Order of the Starless Night is perhaps the oldest Desnan congregation. While they were at their height during the era of Thassilon, where their members helped to protect Varisians and Shoanti alike from the cruelties of the Runelords, the order’s true calling is the opposition of forces from the Dark Tapestry. Knowing full well that information about these mysterious forces is tempting and alluring to those who would use it for evil, the Order of the Starless Night works to limit the scope of their actions and prefers to work from behind the scenes, so that their enemies never quite realize they face an organized opposition whose resources could well become sought-after trophies.

Relationships

Desna maintains a wide and somewhat tangled network of relationships, and she’s always eager to expand this circle further in her travels as she meets new mortals and divinities. Yet there are some relationships that she values more than others—none more so than her romantic involvement with

and . Myth states that Desna first caught Sarenrae’s eye with her creativity in the act of creating the night sky, something that inspired Sarenrae to choose certain stars as suns for countless worlds. For ages, the two played in the heavens, day and night chasing each other eternally though the firmament, only to rest in each other’s arms at dawn and dusk. This relationship mirrors into their faiths, with worshippers of Sarenrae and Desna often working together to guide societies with this duality of respect for night and day, the times for work and rest or travel and dreaming. Shelyn came to this union sometime later. Whether because of Desna’s concern over Shelyn’s fraught relationship with her brother or Shelyn’s talent at representing dreams and the night sky in works of art, the Eternal Rose was welcomed into the union by both goddesses, and today their love for each other has inspired entire worlds.

Desna values this romantic bond, yet she does not constrain herself—and Sarenrae and Shelyn understand this as a manifestation of Desna’s free-wheeling spirit and relentless wanderlust, for the Song of the Spheres sees relationships and friendships as terrains to travel and explore as surely as the paths on any world. She has recently approached

several times in attempts to secure the aid of the Goddess of Midnight in finding a way to aid Shelyn in her own toxic relationship with her brother, and she’s always eager to tease and encourage—and now and then reward— for his flirtatious antics. Her relationship with is more complex and likely tied to her fondness of the elven form as much as it is an appreciation of the Savored Sting’s creativity in finding solutions for complex problems. She values Calistria’s wit and capacity to handle matters without worrying about ramifications, yet also takes care to moderate her own reactions and does her best not to get too carried away by the mercurial deity’s sometimes cruel whimsies.

Yet not all of Desna’s divine relationships are based on friendship, respect, or love. She has long fought against the infectious machinations of

as penance for accidentally releasing him from his torpor, and while she has come to learn from her impetuous choice to kill Aolar in response for the demon lord’s murder of many of Desna’s favored worshippers, she doesn’t regret the risky move. She remains staunch enemies with (ever since her murder of the god Curchanus, whom Desna had come to view almost as a father figure despite his younger age), (whom she aided in the imprisonment of and whom she loathes for his ravenous appetite for the destruction of all she loves), and Zon-Kuthon (for the way he manipulates his sister Shelyn and the world as a whole to make them fear the night), but among the greatest enemies of her faith are the inscrutable alien divinities of the Outer Gods. Even as these cosmic aberrations roil unheeded through the darkest corners of the Universe, caring not for the lives of mortal kind, the apocalypses they engender and represent as well as the cruelties they inspire mortals to pursue make them her greatest foes.

Divine Allies

Desna’s allies are mainly comprised of azatas and agathions, who share her joy for discovery and wonder. On occasion, aeons with an affinity toward the stars will aid Desna and her followers, but they arrive and depart on their own inscrutable timetables.

Night Monarch: Appearing as a massive moth or butterfly with colorful patterns on its wings, the Night Monarch manifests under starlit skies to aid Desna’s faithful in times of great need. Despite its incredible size, it flies in silence and with great stealth, and spotting it is seen as a sign of great fortune and thought to bring favorable dreams. Although the Night Monarch has been slain multiple times over the eons, it always reappears again, no worse for wear, whenever it’s needed once more.

Divine Intercession

Desna favors those who follow their hearts and whims without bringing harm to others.

Minor Boon: For those at the end of a journey, Desna gifts a deep sleep. Once, after you rest, you completely recover all Hit Points, remove all negative conditions, and become free of any curses or diseases.

Moderate Boon: Desna twists fortune in your favor. Once per day, after determining the result of a check, you can reroll the check and take the new result.

Major Boon: Desna bestows you with a swirling cloud of lights that forms a pair of wondrous butterfly wings. These wings grant you a fly Speed of 40 feet and shine dim light to a range of 20 feet.

Minor Curse: You always seem to lose your way or have strange mishaps on the road that delay your travel. You (and thus any group that travels with you) travel at only 3/4 normal exploration Speed, before taking into account the terrain and other features that might slow you down further.

Moderate Curse: Misfortune follows you in your travels and requires acts of contrition or benevolence to keep at bay. You must always roll twice and take the worst result when attempting a check. This is a

effect. You can express your remorse and ignore this effect for 1d4 rounds by spending an action, which has the trait. If you perform a truly selfless act of compassion, you ignore this effect for 1 day.

Major Curse: The stars themselves rebuke you for your ways. You are

4 and 1 whenever you are exposed to starlight.