Ollarasht

Sovereign of Feast and Fortune.

Lore pending

This page carries Ollarasht’s strictures and little else. The wider lore of her faith — her feast-days, her houses, her clergy, her place among the Sovereigns — has not been written yet. What is here is complete and canon; it is simply not the whole page.

Ollarasht is named more often than any Sovereign in Sair, and served by almost none.

Every gambler breathes her name over the dice. Every farmer thanks her for a good year, every sailor who comes home says she was with him, and not one in a thousand of them could tell you a single thing she asks. She does not appear to mind.

Her sworn are a different matter, and they are gamblers to the last. They rise on a meal and a drink and stand up from it mended, as though they had slept a week in a good bed. They read the day before it arrives — the omen taken, the question put, Fate itself weighed in the hand — and at their tables nobody sickens and nobody goes hungry: the water is clean, the ill turned aside, and at the great feasts the meal itself makes heroes.

Ollarasht does not give good fortune. She gives the chance at it, and what she cannot forgive is a follower who will not take one.

Traditions that teach her: the Gnomish Iconologist, and — asking more still — the Antiquarian.

Her worship day is Far, when the week’s work is behind and its winnings are still in hand. She shares Far with Dolorah, and the two are not so far apart as their followers pretend: the sun that ripens a field is one thing, and whether it rains on the day you cut it is another. Sair needs both, and knows it.

Strictures

Both of Ollarasht’s traditions ask a great deal, and the deeper asks more. Find your own tradition below; it tells you what it adds to the one above it.

Gnomish Iconologist

• A follower of Ollarasht must always display a holy symbol of Ollarasht somewhere on her person when in public.
• A follower of Ollarasht must open each day with a meal, a drink, and a wager laid on the day to come. The breakfast takes one hour (6 turns). On Far, Ollarasht’s holy day, she must feast in company and set upon the table a precious stake. The Far feast takes two hours (12 turns).
• A follower of Ollarasht must never refuse a fair wager, however little she likes the man offering it.
• A follower of Ollarasht must abide the fall of the dice. The only fair way to recover a precious loss is to wager for its return.

Antiquarian

An antiquarian of Ollarasht keeps everything asked of a Gnomish Iconologist above, and further:

• A follower of Ollarasht must refuse no sporting wager.

The wager

Precious Stakes: A precious stake must be something of substantial importance to the character. A stake worth at least one month’s expenses to a character is always considered precious; in other cases the Judge may use his discretion.

A wager needs two willing parties, a stake, and an outcome neither can command. A demand is not a wager. A threat is not a wager. Nothing is owed to a man who says your purse or your life and calls it a game of chance.

A fair wager’s odds answer its stakes. A follower may be asked to lay a gold piece against a silver and take no insult from it, so long as the odds run ten to one to match. What makes a wager unfair is not that the stakes stand uneven but that the odds do not answer them: a gold against a silver on the turn of a single card is honestly offered, plainly lopsided, and an iconologist may leave it lying on the table.

A sporting wager is one where at least one of the odds or the stakes runs nearly even. A coin against a coin that a die comes up six is a sporting wager: the stakes stand level, though the odds do not. Her whole purse against a single coin on the flip of a true coin is a sporting wager: the odds stand level, though the stakes do not. What she may still leave on the table is the wager that runs against her on both counts at once — long odds and her purse against his copper — for that is not a game, it is a gift.

Three things are no wager at any depth.

• A lie. Concealment is not lopsidedness; it is cheating, and a cheat is no wager at all.
• A stake she cannot cover. She is bound to meet what is offered, not to invent what she has not got: a follower with three copper on her may be played for three copper and no further.
• Flesh against property. Life, limb, and liberty may be staked only against their like. No follower of Ollarasht, however deeply sworn, is obliged to lay a hand on the table against a purse of coin. Nor may she stake what was never hers to stake — another’s goods, another’s freedom, another’s life.

Abiding the fall is not forgiving the cheat. Fortune is owed obedience; a man with weighted dice is owed nothing, and what he took by cheating he never won. She may take it back, and him with it.

Ollarasht’s sworn are rarely rich for long, and she has never forbidden them to be. No stricture of hers says a word against a full strongbox. It is simply that word gets round what a follower is carrying, and she has never in her life been able to tell the man who came to play her for it to go away.