Pharika

God of Affliction

Pharika is a god of affliction and medicine, alchemy and aging. In the earliest days of Theros, Pharika seeded the world with countless secret truths—mysteries of medicine, minerals with strange properties, nexuses of magic, and the like—which she hid among Nylea’s wilds and the shadows of Erebos’s Underworld, leaving clues where mortals might find them. It isn’t altruism that drives her; she studies the innovation and suffering of mortals, deciphering in them ever greater mysteries as she treats Theros as her personal laboratory.

Pharika typically takes the form of a green-skinned human woman with the lower body of a snake. Her hands are thickly scaled and a pair of bronze-scaled vipers seamlessly emerge from her chest. She is never without her kylix, a drinking cup within which she can produce virtually any medicine or toxin. When her aims require subtlety, Pharika often takes the form of a serpent or a medusa, or sometimes an aged human.

Little escapes Pharika’s cool gaze. Even when outwardly friendly, she is cunning and calculating, watching for the slightest sign of weakness or desire that she can exploit later. Those who offend her rarely recognize their misstep until she strikes.

Pharika’s Influence

Pharika represents the duality of life and death distilled into a single draught that can serve as tonic or toxin, depending on the dosage. She is most associated with affliction, whether that phenomenon takes the form of a disease, a venom, a drug, or the passage of years. Her cures are reliable but come at a cost. In some cases, that cost is pain as the medicine courses through the imbiber’s body. In other cases, she demands years of life, either from the patient’s lifetime or the researcher’s labor.

In her oversight of life and death, Pharika acts as a patron of alchemists. Pharmacists offer prayers to her while crafting potions, as do the ill or infirm before imbibing a supposed remedy. Likewise, a body’s slow transformation is sacred to her, whether it be the inevitable effects of aging or the petrification of her medusa children’s victims.

Pharika’s Goals

To Pharika, Theros is an ongoing experiment and mortals are her agents in carrying it out. Rather than limit her knowledge to what her own insights yield, she revels in watching mortals decipher the world’s wisdom and unearth its hidden knowledge, and she delights in seeing each sage interpret their findings in novel ways. She is willing to do anything to perpetuate experimentation and discovery, even at the cost of turning her less devout followers into specimens.

Divine Relationships

Despite her venomous reputation, Pharika has provided nearly every god with a cure or an otherwise essential tonic at a crucial moment. As a result, she’s rarely in outright conflict with her fellow gods, yet she’s always willing to jeopardize peace with her peers if it means indulging some audacious new experiment.

The gods of the Underworld have cordial relations with Pharika. She and Athreos enjoy each other’s silent company, and Erebos appreciates her agenda, which ultimately bolsters his realm. Pharika rankles somewhat at the attention Erebos gets from dying mortals, chafing at their tendency to appeal to him when they could beg her for healing or for a painless death.

Pharika and the gods of civilization cautiously maneuver around one another’s territory, with Ephara and Karametra recognizing Pharika’s medicinal virtues, and she is always seeking subtle ways to use city-states in her experiments without provoking her peers. She disdains Ephara’s and Karametra’s desire to tame the world rather than understand it.

Pharika has her most complex relationships with the gods of knowledge. Pharika loathes that Keranos gifts wisdom to the undeserving, while Kruphix represents mysteries even she has yet to fathom.

No god is more precious to Pharika than Nylea. She adores Nylea as the source of nature’s abundant bounty and delights in Nylea’s warmth. Anyone who threatens or offends Nylea is likely to also earn Pharika’s enmity.

Worshiping Pharika

The diseased and the dying alike often make written entreaties to Pharika for a remedy. Prayers are written on scraps of paper or shards of pottery, sealed in small pots, and buried in bogs, leaving them as secrets for others to exhume years later. Many people pray to her before undergoing a medical procedure, picking herbs, or confronting a venomous animal. Nights of a waxing crescent moon (roughly the first week of each month, when a sliver of moon lingers in the early evening) are sacred to Pharika and are thought to be an auspicious time to harvest medicinal plants.

Pharika’s followers include members of several small mystery cults, which embrace varying aspects of her divine nature. The most infamous of these is the Cult of Frozen Faith, led by a medusa. Initiates receive a lethal dose of poison, become petrified, and then are restored to flesh one year later. Petitioners who have Pharika’s favor emerge alive and healthy; those she doesn’t care for fail to survive the transformation.

MYTHS OF PHARIKA

Tales of Pharika emphasize her secret knowledge, with many legends hinting at apocrypha that a listener might track down to discover the god’s most exalted lore.

Aestraste’s Reward. So impressed was she with the deeds of her champion Aestraste that Pharika offered to fill her kylix with any draught for Aestraste to imbibe. The champion asked to taste the nectar of pure joy, and the god obliged. But when Aestraste took a sip, passion took hold of her, and she quaffed the entire elixir. Overwhelmed with ecstasy, the champion perished, having forgotten that too much of anything—even happiness—can be fatal.

The Basilisk’s Greed. In Pharika’s earliest days, her mind overflowed with knowledge, and she retreated to a secret, verdant glen. There, she set to scribing her secrets into the garden’s fruits, hiding within each a dozen deaths and their cures. When she retired wearily to bathe, a lizard crept into her grove and gobbled up much of the fruit. It’s said that this original basilisk and its progeny are still heavy with undigested secrets, and that if basilisk blood is distilled into ink, it can be used to write out forgotten lore.

Day of Affliction. During the first week of the eleventh month, Meletis observes Pharika’s winter festival, the Cheimazion. The sick and infirm sleep in the god’s temples during this festival in hopes of receiving a miraculous cure, and the truly devout imbibe near-lethal doses of poison, trusting Pharika to oversee their recovery. In some tales, a cobra with rainbow scales appears in Pharika’s temple and bites some incurable soul. The envenomed victim pitches and babbles for three days, but their disjointed words prove to be a font of alchemical truths, sometimes bearing the secrets to healing others around them. In most of these myths, the victim expires at the end of these three days—Pharika’s price for sharing her secrets—but in some, the patient recovers, thereafter exhibiting remarkable resistance to illness and poisons.

Dragon Balm. Some texts of Pharika claim that within the chemical makeup of each individual dragon lies the cure to one specific disease or venom. Those desperate for a cure to a rare affliction often pray to the goddess to reveal the monster that embodies the malady tormenting them. Such insight, though, rarely decreases the danger of dragon hunting.

The Medusa’s Curse. To seed the world with knowledge, Pharika gathered her medusa children and granted a hundred secrets to each, bidding them to hide their revelations throughout the mortal realm. Selfishly, the medusas each kept secrets for themselves, using these as currency to bargain with mortals. Angered that her children would hoard any of her secrets, Pharika cursed them, so that they could never after behold their own reflections without risking death.

Pharika’s Champions

Alignment: Usually neutral, often evil

Suggested Classes: Cleric, druid, ranger, rogue, warlock, wizard

Suggested Cleric Domains: Death, Knowledge, Life

Suggested Backgrounds: Criminal, guild artisan, hermit, outlander, sage

Most champions of Pharika seek to uncover the world’s greatest secrets through science, alchemy, and magic. They are often enamored with the mysteries of life and death, along with snakes or other venomous creatures.

Pharika’s Favor

Pharika craves champions who support her ongoing experiments, torment her enemies, and deliver cutting-edge aid to the suffering. Yet, just because someone serves Pharika doesn’t mean they are immune to her whims. Why did Pharika turn her gaze upon you, and how did you survive long enough to earn her approval? The Pharika’s Favor table provides several suggestions.

Pharika’s Favor

Devotion to Pharika

In accepting Pharika as your patron, you entrust your health and your knowledge to her. As her follower, consider the ideals on the Pharika’s Ideals table as alternatives to those suggested for your background.

Pharika’s Ideals

Earning and Losing Piety

You increase your piety score to Pharika when you expand the god’s influence in the world in a concrete way through acts such as these:

• Creating a cure for a dangerous affliction
• Defeating a powerful foe by using poison
• Discovering or documenting an unknown people or a poorly understood creature
• Building or restoring a temple to Pharika, or a site that glorifies serpentine creatures

Your piety score to Pharika decreases if you diminish Pharika’s influence in the world, contradict her ideals, or make her look ridiculous or ineffectual through acts such as these:

• Destroying alchemical, medical, pathological, or similar research
• Performing a notable act of healing without exacting a significant price
• Slaying a medusa or serpent

Pharika’s Devotee

Piety 3+ Pharika trait

As a devotee of Pharika, you have power over affliction. You can cast ray of sickness with this trait a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum of once). You regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest. Wisdom is your spellcasting ability for this spell.

Pharika’s Votary

Piety 10+ Pharika trait

Pharika’s blessing shields you from most maladies. You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, and you are immune to disease.

Pharika’s Disciple

Piety 25+ Pharika trait

Pharika blesses you with Pharika’s Balm, an effect that can cure or enfeeble. As an action, you can touch a creature and choose one of the following:

• The target regains hit points equal to 1d8 + your Wisdom modifier, and you can cure the target of one disease or neutralize one poison affecting it.
• The target must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw, or for 1 minute, the target deals only half damage with weapon attacks. The target can repeat the saving throw at the end of each of its turns, ending the effect on a success.

You can use this action a number of times equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum of once). You regain all expended uses when you finish a long rest.

Champion of Affliction

Piety 50+ Pharika trait

You can increase your Dexterity or Wisdom score by 2 and also increase your maximum for that score by 2.