Dugmaren Brightmantle

Dugmaren Brightmantle was a lesser dwarven deity of learning and innovation, and patron of dwarven scholars and free thinkers. His domain was the gathering of knowledge regardless of its utility and the creation of novel inventions using the various findings. The Errant Explorer embodied the progressive side of the conservative Stout Folk, and the exploratory spirit that led to acts of creativity.

Description
Dugmaren appeared as an elderly, slightly hunched dwarf with twinkling, blue-grey eyes. The height of his avatar was variable, ranging in height from tall, to  tall, to  tall.

Personality
Of all the dwarvish gods, Dugmaren was certainly the most given to chaos, a divine manifestation of the most chaotic principles of dwarven character. He was instinctually creative and adventurous in spirit, with a natural desire to explore. He was also the most open-minded member of his pantheon, and the inquisitive deity was primarily concerned with the discovery of the unknown. Whether or not the knowledge he was searching for had any practical application was irrelevant; he compulsively accumulated trivia and "useless" information, favoring knowledge for knowledge's sake.

Dugmaren was benign, cheerful, and optimistic, but his behavior could cause problems. He had a tendency to drift away from what he was doing to investigate something else that caught his notoriously capricious attention, often abandoning projects before he was done and usually before he found a use for his gathered knowledge. He was an experimenter and meddler whose fiddling had ruined things he was not supposed to touch an inestimable number of times. Despite this attitude, Dugmaren was not in any way to be placed alongside inventors like the tinker gnomes of Krynn, being jolly rather than chirpy to the point of being frightening.

Powers
Avatars of the Errant Explorer casted spells like bards, and often did so in an experimental (and even haphazard) way. They could cast blink, dimension door, and teleport without error once every ten minutes. They could only be harmed by enchanted weaponry, and ranged from resistant to immune against mind-affecting abilities.

The Wandering Tinker could avoid several attacks directed at him alone simply by intuiting how they would play out and moving out of the way, although he could not predict if the attack would hit him in the first place and could only do so around three times per minute. He could also determine how any object (magical or mechanical) worked just by handling it for around a minute.

Manifestations
Rarely did Dugmaren manifest in an obvious or straightforward manner, preferring to guide his followers to new discoveries by the most subtle means possible. This might involve the revelation of something hidden to a determined seeker, such as a book turning to a page of particular interest or a secret door slightly shifting. He showed his favor by having his worshipers discover various objects, including king's tears and pearls or random scraps of of unlooked for lore, and by having faint, long-lost melodies play with no apparent point of origin. Conversely, he communicated that he was displeased by temporarily keeping a book shut, causing a device to malfunction or cease working, or by blocking the one or more senses (usually hearing) for a while.

Sometimes Dugmaren found the need to manifest more directly. In these cases, he typically enveloped a worshiper or object in a nimbus of bright, blue-tinted light. What this actually did was dependent on the situation, but normally he gave sentient creatures the ability to use a single divination spell (such as detect magic, ESP, identify, legend lore, or true seeing) or a single defensive spell (such as shield, protection from evil, ironguard, magical vestment, anti-magic shell, or lesser globe of invulnerability). Sometimes he manifested by transforming a mental image in the heads of his followers into a physical object similarly to how a major creation spell work.

Possessions
Dugmaren always carried a collection of books with him. Brightmantle's avatar wore a bright blue cloak of displacement and wielded a +1 broadsword dubbed Sharptack that could cast feeblemind twice per day.

Relationships
His ceaseless quest for knowledge and constant tinkering and exploring had a tendency to get Dugmaren into trouble and although Moradin admired his adventuresome spirit, the Dwarffather despaired at his tendency to wander away from a pursuit to follow something else that caught his notoriously fickle attention. Dugmaren's circle of friendly deities included Haela Brightaxe, Marthammor Duin, Brandobaris, Erevan Ilesere, Gond, and Shaundakul. Gargauth, who represented knowledge-hunting for illicit and perverse purposes, was among his most hated foes.

Worshipers
Dugmaren's clerics drew from the most creative tinkers and free thinkers of dwarven communities, on rare occasions even allowing gnomes to join their orders. They followed a doctrine of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, seeing equal value in learning a once-lost recipe for toasted zygom stalk and discovering the crucial flaw in an enemy's defensive fortifications. In fact, since the clergy strongly favored creation over destruction, there's a good chance many of them would have preferred the recipe. Temples of the Errant Explorer, usually sprawling edifices filled with the scattered detritus of a half-hundred abandoned experiments and twice as many open books, could be found both above and below the surface.

Dugmaren's clergy prayed for spells in the morning. They observed few official holidays, instead whispering a prayer of thanks to the Errant Explorer upon the discovery of some new bit of lore. On Greengrass and Highharvestide, they began the day with several hours of private meditation, usually staring at the flame of a candle. Thereafter, neighboring worshipers would gather to discuss their discoveries and creations since the prior convocation.

Dugmaren Brightmantle's specialty priests were called xothor (dwarven for "those who seek knowledge", roughly), with the singular form of xothar.

History
Dugmaren's ambitions ensure that he was always at the center of some exploit, frequently in the company of his loose circle of deific associates.

Appearances

 * Card Games
 * Blood Wars