Rowa

Sovereign of Life and Love.

Life and Love are the same to Rowa. To love a thing is to make more of it.

Her followers are farmers, herders, foresters, and midwives to the whole green world. They know every plant in the wood and pasture — which to plant, which to glean, and which to avoid. They read the storm before it arrives, hear the whispers of trees, and bend beasts to their will.

Rowa keeps no ledgers and weighs no debts. She has one instruction, and it is more.

Traditions that teach her: the Gnomish Iconologist, and the Antiquarian.

Her worship day is Zor, high in the week, when life is most active. She shares the day with Szorowai, when her rage is at its peak.

Strictures

Rowa’s traditions have many strictures. Find yours below.

Gnomish Iconologist

• A follower of Rowa must always display a holy symbol of Rowa (a sheaf of grain) somewhere on her person when in public.
• A follower of Rowa must tend something living for at least one hour (6 turns) each day — be it a field, a beast in foal, a garden, a sick man, a pot of herbs on a windowsill. On Zor, Rowa’s holy day, she must put something living into ground that is not her own, and tend it in prayer for at least two hours (12 turns). She may thereafter never tend it, harvest it, or claim it.
• A follower of Rowa must never destroy a growing thing wantonly.
• A follower of Rowa must put something back for whatever she takes out of the green world.
• A follower of Rowa must take no natural life but at need. Not for sport, not for trade, not for convenience, and not in anger.

Antiquarian

An antiquarian of Rowa abides every stricture listed for the Gnomish Iconologist above, and further:

• A follower of Rowa must take no natural life at all by her own hand.

The green world

The unnatural is to be shunned. The undead, the demon, or the thing conjured from thin air are not life in Rowa’s reckoning, her strictures do not protect them.

Need is food, defence, medicine, and passage. A follower may eat, may fight for her life or another’s, may take what heals, and may clear what genuinely bars her road.

Rowa does not count. Her iconologists may fell a tree and plant a forest. What she wants is the world larger at the end of a life than it was at the start.

Another’s hand is another’s hand. The antiquarian’s stricture binds her own hand; it does not bind her friends, her henchmen, her hirelings, or the world. She may travel with killers, and even be glad of them, though she may not ask them to kill on her behalf. Should she come to blows herself, she may strike, break, bind, disarm, drive off, or put a man on the ground. What she may not do is finish him.