Anubis

Anubis was the god of the dead in the Pharaonic pantheon,  who judged the souls of worshipers in the afterlife. Unlike other members of the pantheon, who traveled to Toril on the ship Matet as manifestations to liberate kidnapped worshipers and went on to become the Mulhorandi pantheon, Anubis was among those who chose to remain behind.

Description
The avatar of Anubis typically took the form of a man with the head of a jackal or dog, with a mane of straight black hair falling over his shoulders, and the tail of that respective animal. This avatar would be garbed in a kalasiris, a decorative gold breastplate of scale mail, as well as a number of armlets and bracers.

Personality
Anubis held a great enmity towards thieves, especially tomb robbers, as well as those who tried to raise the worshipers of Pharaonic deities from the dead.

Powers
The avatar of Anubis had a number of innate abilities. These included being able to shapechange into a jackal, teleporting without error at short distances like a blink dog, casting charm monster twice simultaneously, preventing a soul from returning to its body when a cleric is trying to raise its body from the dead, and animating any statue of himself. He could also animate any object that was located within a tomb he could sense, no matter the size, as if casting animate objects.

As he presided over death in his portfolio, Anubis instantly sensed any sealing or violation of a tomb and any casting of raise dead or similar spells upon the bodies of those who worshiped a Pharaonic deity. His avatar could will itself to perceive anything within of Anubian worshipers, Anubian holy sites, objects sacred to Anubis, or any location where his name or one of his titles had been spoken in the last hour. He could perceive up to five such instances. The avatar could also block the sensing powers of deities for up to two locations at once for a period of up to 6 hours.

Anubis was capable of creating a variety of magic items, but they would never exceed a market value of 30,000 gold pieces.

Spells
The avatar of Anubis was capable of casting a variety of spells, though he particularly liked biting at foes with his canine head. The spells his avatar was capable of casting included the following:


 * antimagic field, calm emotions, charm monster, deathwatch, death ward, destruction, dictum, dispel chaos, dispel magic, gentle repose, hold monster, identify, imbue with spell ability, magic circle against chaos, Mordenkainen's disjunction, Nystul's undetectable aura, order's wrath, protection from chaos, protection from spells, shield of law, slay living, speak with dead, spell resistance, spell turning, summon monster IX (law domain), surelife, undeath to death, and wail of the banshee.

Possessions
The avatar of Anubis typically carried an a scepter, a +5 disruption heavy mace, and an ankh. This ankh was in length, weighed, and made of bright blue stone. It could enact a true resurrection upon the corpse of any creature by making physical contact with it. And any non-divine being that tried to touch it would be afflicted by horrid wilting.

Realm
Anubis made his home on the Astral Plane and was the sole deity in the multiverse to do so.

Activities
On very rare occasions, if a tomb held an image Anubis within it and was being robbed, he would send his avatar to kill the tomb robbers.

A slightly more common activity of Anubis, though still quite rare, was forcing people to go on some quest with the purpose of increasing the power of his local Church if they had dared to raise a worshiper of Pharaonic deities from the dead.

Relationships
Anubis was the son of the Pharaonic deities Nephthys and Osiris. He was served by hound archons that had the heads of jackals.

Worshipers
Compared to the other Pharaonic deities, Anubis had few clerics and they were often unpopular due to their close associations with cemeteries and funerals, the latter of which they often officiated. In preparation for the afterlife, his worshipers practiced rigorous disciplines in order to hone both their minds and spirits.

The temple layouts and priestly vestments of the Anubis faith were typical of Pharaonic deities. His temples were always located next to cemeteries and acted as embalming centers, funeral chapels, and guarded repositories of both magical and sacred knowledge.

History
When the Pharaonic deities that would become the Mulhorandi pantheon traveled to Toril, Anubis sent with the goddess Nephthys a cadre of his hound archons to serve her, among them one who was known as Thah Rahalar.

Some time after this, it was believed by many planar travelers that Anubis had distanced himself from the Pharaonic pantheon and became a guard of the dead powers that floated in the Astral Plane, becoming known as the "Guardian of the Dead Gods". However, there never ceased to be an Anubis in the Pharaonic pantheon. Some believers of the former tried to rationalize this by claiming Anubis was replaced by a deity of the same name or that he had split his divinity into an aspect.