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 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, or cryptic omens in the form of puzzles, riddles, or "impossible" objects. 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.

Realm
Dugmaren's realm was on the Outlands, existing as part of the triple realm known as the Dwarven Mountain. He shared this realm with Vergadain, dwarf god of luck and fortune, and Dumathoin, dwarf god of mines and exploration. The gigantic, rocky, barren mountain was covered in random settlements, since the actual realm itself was underground. Anything outside of that was strictly not part of the realm, cared about by none of the three gods, and the slopes were so high, rocky, and cold that anyone wandering them was likely to end up dead.

The realm lacked towns as imagined by humans, instead consisting of nothing but an endless series of interweaving and intersecting tunnels that rose, sunk, coiled, plunged straight down, crossed chasms, and cut through the honeycombed caverns. It was always under construction, and every inch of stone and brace was magnificently carved. Despite all residents being dwarves and considering anything non-dwarf or non-dwarven a waste of time unless strongly proven otherwise, the tunnels were still made so that anything short of a hill giant could wander it easily.

Under the Dwarven Mountain, one would find the various dwarven halls, which to dwarves was the equivalent of one's identity, family, community, and city. The most important halls were the specific domains of the three deities, each specialized in something that made a rough dwarf's life complete. Dugmaren's Soot Hall was between Vergadain's Strongale Hall closest to the peak, which was notorious for gaming halls and rumored treasure vaults, and Dumathoin's Deepshaft Hall far underground, which was filled with mines and ore-rich caverns.

Soot Hall
Soot Hall's name was literal, since the caves were coated in chalky black ash from millennia of work, and the light was the ruddy haze of smoky glass. In contrast to the Strongale Hall, Soot Hall was sober and earnest, absent of drinks, decoration, and indulgence. The bright paintings of women were replaced by endless bas-reliefs of industrious activity reflective of the realm's focus, for sobriety was not to be mistaken for inaction. A wild disarray of furnaces, forges, smelters, and workshops (as well as villages) filled out the caverns of Soot Hall.

The noise in the hall was ceaseless, the air filled with constant clattering, on top of the screeching whistles and clanging bells that indicated the time (a useful feature given that there was no day or night underground). Not that the petitioners needed to sleep, since Dugmaren bestowed upon them unlimited endurance, allowing them to complete their tasks with only minimal need for sustenance. Some paused between jobs while most leapt to enacting new ideas just as they had them. The dwarves were always in motion, hurrying to work and hurrying home while doing whatever they were doing, whether singing or working, with unrestrained intensity.

Although the dwarves of Soot Hall created much, their best products being the finely crafted and frequently magical hammers and breastplates that often ended up in Strongale Hall's gaming tables, their home was also a place of learning. Libraries allowed for quiet reflection, and were filled with esoteric tomes on metallurgy and other iron crafts. A fair number of miserable gamblers had come to the towns outside the mountain hoping for a chance to play in Vergadain's fabled halls, but there were also the rare few who sought admission to Brightmantle's libraries.

World Tree
In the World Tree cosmology, the Soot Hall was carved into Dwarfhome's great mountain, but was nonetheless a place of constant invention.

Activities
Dugmaren was on an unending quest for knowledge, and often ventured beyond his home to the Outer Planes of Arborea, Bytopia, and Elysium. He was also constantly tinkering, but this and his exploring had a tendency to get him in trouble. Dugmaren sometimes dispatched avatars to guide dwarven scholars and travelers unseen, often by protecting them and giving them hints on where to go.

Relationships
Dugmaren was normally believed to be one of the younger children of Moradin and Berronar, a chaotic divergence from his sternly lawful father and nurtured by his mother's favor. Berronar was somewhat cool towards him, patiently humoring his "antics" while waiting for the day she foresaw when he and his followers would set into traditional dwarven life. This wasn't to say that Moradin disliked his son, for in truth he admired his adventurousness and could relate well to his creativity. However, Moradin despaired at his fickle attention and found no end of irritation in his habit of walking away from incomplete projects. It was rumored that Dugmaren did indeed promise his father he would someday settle down and find a use for the knowledge he had accumulated over the eons, but such a day was likely far off.

Dugmaren was unique among his pantheon for his focus on the mystical and arcane. Most of the Morndinsamman were very practical deities, focused on matters of martial prowess, craftsmanship, tradition, and earth, whereas he desired knowledge regardless of its practical purpose. Still, Dugmaren was tolerated by the lawful members of his pantheon (even the duergar deities Laduguer and Duerra) because his inventions and innovations were undoubtedly creative and had provably beneficial uses. None among his pantheon were his enemies, though Vergadain had forged a particularly close, personal friendship with him, for both shared an interest in mischief.

Dugmaren's various pursuits ensured that he was always getting himself in the middle of some exploit, and he had a group of loose, regular associates in these plans. These included the similarly young dwarven deities Haela Brightaxe, demigoddess of luck and battle and Marthammor Duin, god of travelers and guides. Both Marthammor and Dugmaren shared the theme of traveling to gain knowledge and the two were on good terms, with Marthammor always welcome in Dugmaren's Soot Hall. Shaundakul and Gond, human god of travel and innovative craft respectively, and two demihuman deities of rogue]s, the halfling god of adventure Brandobaris and the elven god mischief Erevan, were also among his accomplices.

Other friends of Dugmaren were various human gods of knowledge, including Deneir, Oghma, and Thoth, the halfling gods Cyrrollalee, Tymora, and Urogalan, the nearly forgotten elven goddess of runic magic Alathrien Druanna, and the leader of the gnome pantheon Garl Glittergold.

Dugmaren's proxies were typically scholarly and frighteningly canny dwarves who were coincidentally good at multiple tasks.

Enemies
In terms of opposition, Dugmaren had few true foes, even if he found the company of some deities (including Abbathor, evil giant gods, and the goblinoid pantheon and duergar pantheon members) trying at best. Urdlen, the tunneling, greedy, and outcast mole deity of the gnomes, was an enemy of his, but Urdlen hated everyone and everything.

Among his most hated foes was Gargauth, a former archdevil and Faerunian god of corruption, albeit one that had eventually gotten himself trapped in a shield. Gargauth was the embodiment of everything malevolent about the search for the unknown, representing the illicit and twisted motives that could lurk behind a quest for knowledge.

Dugmaren also opposed the mind flayer gods, Ilsensine and Maanzecorian (before the latter died at any rate) as they sought to hoard knowledge for themselves. His relation with Ilsensine was a curious one; those in Soot Hall without a skill, trade or other way to prove themselves useful were quickly booted to another realm, and Ilsensine's was not exempt from that list. Ilsensine once possessed one of his petitioners and used him as a spy, and it was unclear if Dugmaren didn't know, didn't care, or if something else was the issue.

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