A Priest’s Role

Clerics of Selket are cold-blooded and stealthy, equally adept at eliminating rivals and shepherding secret cults. Most are multi-classed as rogues. Though she is a demanding mistress, she allows her priests to do mercenary work as assassins as it brings coin into her coffers, and some go so far as to create a separate identity so they cannot be traced back to their religious affiliation. The faithful give offerings in the form of items taken from murdered enemies and laid at the feet of an idol of Selket, and in rare cases, they might sacrifice valuable prisoners in her name.

Whereas in civilized lands Selket’s worship is relatively rare and generally shunned, in the trackless wastes and among the desert barbarians she is revered in a far more open manner. Tribes invoke her name upon the deathbed of elders to heal wounds and illness and to protect them from the monstrous scorpions and shambling dead that plague their lands. Some tribes even spawn holy warriors called Scorpion Dancers, acrobatic combatants who eschew all weapons and armor save for poison-tipped daggers crafted from human bones and who wear no clothing save for the yellowed funerary shrouds taken from entombed corpses.

Venomous Hand (New Spell)

School necromancy [evil]; Level cleric 2
Casting Time 1 standard action
Components V, S, M (dust of a dried, ground scorpion)
Range personal
Target you
Duration 1 min./level (D)
Saving Throw Will negates; Spell Resistance yes

One of your hands becomes a colony for a dozen or more stinging, biting scorpions. For the duration of the spell, you may no longer use two-handed weapons or equipment. You also suffer a -4 penalty to all Strength- and Dexterity-based skills checks. However, a touch from your vermin-covered hand deals 1d6 + your Intelligence modifier points of damage and the victim must make a Fort save (DC 12) or be poisoned by the scorpions’ poisonous sting (1 Con damage, initial and secondary). In addition, you are always considered armed. You can use this melee touch attack 1 time/level: once these attacks are used up, the spell ends.

Allies

The following creatures are well known supernatural servitors of Selket:

The Scorpion Pharaoh Deep within the parched desert lays the tomb of the Scorpion Pharaoh, one of the few female rulers of this ancient desert land and a disciple of Selket. Some go so far as to claim she is the daughter of Selket by a mortal man. In what scattered images and stories that remain from her poisonous reign, the Scorpion Pharaoh was most often depicted as a coldly beautiful woman whose timeless youth was a product of divine heritage.

If only the people knew the truth. The Scorpion Pharaoh was indeed the child of Selket, but no mortal man can claim to have sired her. How could any earthly being produce a creature as foul? She’s a 20 ft. long scorpion with foul poison constantly oozing from her twitching tail and a husk-like body from being mummified within Selket’s womb, yet she is blessed with a wickedly keen mind. Selket’s daughter seized the reins of power in the desert lands and held on for centuries, her grip on the land as crushing as the massive pincers she used to destroy her enemies. She was finally overthrown and entombed within a buried crypt, but she has not been destroyed and dreams of a time when she can emerge to awash her former domain in poison once more.

Temphu Easily mistaken for a succubus, this beautiful seductress (CE female tiefling rogue 5/assassin 2/sorcerer 3) looks like a tan elven woman with a shaven head, erotically clinging and translucent robes, and a silk veil drawn mysteriously across her face. Her most noticeable features are a pair of feathered wings that spread from her back and the twin trails of thin smoke, like those from dying embers, which rise up from her eyes when enraged. (Non-chaotically aligned creatures who witness this smoke must make a DC 25 Will save or be affected as per the spell confusion for 1d6 rounds). Temphu is a skilled assassin, a master at crafting poisons and stepping forth from shadows to slit throats. But more, she is an artist of pain, who delights in designing new and torturous ways to force compliance from her enemies.

In the Real World…

In the real world, Selket is not nearly as fiendish as presented here. Indeed, her worship was widely accepted across ancient Egypt. Also known as Selqet, Selquet, Serket, or in Greek, Selkis, she was a fertility and mortuary goddess. In her role as scorpion-goddess, she guards the pharaoh’s throne and is also said to guard the serpent, Apep, preventing this entity of chaos from emerging unto the world and swallowing all in its path.

(Open Game License)

Selket

Portfolio Death, healing, mummification, poison, protection, vermin
Domains Animal, death, healing, protection
Sacred Animal Scorpion
Favored Weapon Dart

Selket is a deity of immense contradiction. On the one hand, she can be called upon to bless an individual with protection from poison, while on the other she concocts death-dealing elixirs and is the proud progenitor of verminous scorpions. Is she a goddess of good intention, or one whose intentions are malediction? Originally she was both, and yet neither. Now, however, poisoned by her own venom and a burning jealousy for the stature of other gods, she is a cruel and sadistic mistress who rarely projects benignity and, then, only as part of an elaborate deception to attract followers.

In her primary domain, she is the birth mother of the scorpion and their patron goddess and, in this guise, is both feared and venerated. Indeed, many desert tribes will refuse to kill any scorpion for fear it may be Selket herself. The venom dripping from Selket’s tail is said to be so potent that it can kill even other gods, so it’s little wonder that assassins pray to her as the mistress of poisons and other herbal concoctions. (Ironically, she is also an influential deity among those who wish to remain safe from poison.)

Additionally, she is a deity of death and mummification, charged by the pantheon of the desert tribes with the sacred task of guarding the entrails of the deceased. As a result, her temples, generally lost amidst the shifting sands of the desert wastes, are inhabited by the soulless husks of past worshippers who serve their deity as eternal guardians.

Appearance

Selket often takes on the form of an astonishingly beautiful and shapely woman wearing nothing save for a headdress with a scorpion on its top. She finds this pleasing shape highly effective in seducing men to her fold, but once they are in her claw-like grip, she reveals her true appearance: that of a woman with a scorpion’s head, an ichor-dripping scorpion tail, and a hollowed abdominal cavity stuffed with bags and incense.

Temples and Shrines

The scorpion goddess’s church operates on the fringes of civilization, and therefore most places of worship are in out-of-the-way locales or well hidden. Because services to Selket—typically including the sacrifice of screaming victims and ritual ingestion of poisons and hallucinogenic plants—often devolve into an orgiastic excess of violence, food, and delusion, urban-shrines must be well isolated to ensure no attention is drawn to them. In the desert wastes, Selket is worshipped outside or in plundered tombs.

In either case, a church will always have a few common features. There will be a flat, bloodstained sacrificial stone upon which victims are poisoned before their throats are slit. Bodies are disposed of in pits filled with hungry scorpions although the heads are laid at the feet of Selket’s idol, horror-filled eyes staring up at the deity that was the cause of their demise. When at last the flesh rots away from the skull, it is smashed and the bone fragments littered across the floor like pebbles. Each churches of Selket also contains a fountain filled with bubbling black ichor, said to be the goddesses own blood, which is a potent poison and hallucinogen that worshippers use in their rituals.

Relations with other Religions

Selket is largely dismissive of other deities, even those within her own pantheon. She believes she is superior to them and will eventually rise from the desert sands to claim her place as leader of them all. That said, she knows better than to be openly antagonistic since this might encourage her enemies to band together to destroy her. The one deity with whom she is close, in both portfolio and relations, is Nephthys, goddess of birth and death, life and undeath. This is perhaps understandable and natural, as Nephthys is in fact Selket’s mother.

On the other hand, Selket abhors Maoch the Tortured Husk, the Abyssal lord who lays claim over all mummified restless dead from his dust-filled tomb and throne room. She sees him as a petty thug trying to gain status among mortals through terror but who is ultimately not worth her attention.

(Open Game License)