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Yondalla is an ancient goddess who’s waxed and waned with the ages. She was among the many neutral fertility themed deities who rose to prominence shortly after the rise of humanoids in Material Plane, the first one among them to reach greater deity status due to sheer number of worshippers and was also the only one who managed to survive the massive consolidation of the fertilty/family/agriculture domains in Earthmother Chauntea’s hand intact. While mortals have long forgotten this matter, Yondalla’s official stance is that Chauntea straight up stole her image of the matronly patron of family and farming and exaggerated it to the level of caricature, removing all of Yondalla’s own intricacies and complexities, thus becoming a simpler and more appealing goddess to the unwashed masses. She even stole her moniker. Which is kinda obvious to all beings who know about Chauntea’s little secret and is also the thing that soured Yondalla on the humanoid races.
Legends of halflings all over the multiverse say Yondalla created them after seeing that all other humanoid races were flawed. They say Yondalla took skill from elves, stability from dwarves, courage from orcs and resourcefulness from humans and, after a lot of work, mixed them all together to create the halfling race. While the mentioned mortal races (and their creator Pelor) tend to scoff at this, there’s no doubt that halfling was created by Yondalla’s hand. Which is strange, as a deity would need to have a lot more power than (then recently deposed) Yondalla had to be able to create a whole new mortal race. Yondalla had suddenly gained a large amount of worshippers somehow. It was nowhere near what was stolen from her but it kept her at intermediate rank instead of atrophying into an errand boy of Chauntea like the others.
The origin of halflings and Yondalla’s gradual conversion to law and good is one of the most well kept secrets in the planes (on par with Gruumsh’s plans). After faking her death and dumping most of her divinity into Astral as a corpse, Giant Mother Othea fled to Material Plane and started over with what she knew best: fertility cults. Thanks to her experience at mother goddessing that was longer than the entire existence of humanoids, she easily spread her influence and rose in power, swiftly becoming a greater goddess with multiple facets like protection and wisdom. And when she got outmothered by Chauntea, she decided to fall back to another thing she knew: birthing a mortal race. So she went around in disguise, spent centuries on many worlds, had countless of affairs with all the humanoid races and used her old titanic power to mold her accumulated offspring into what she thought would be an ideal worshipper race. She told halflings a story of combining the best parts of humanoid races into them because it sounded a lot better as a creation myth than then I banged two billion guys. But now things were different. Unlike with giants, halflings were the result of affairs that had contained eagerness and sometimes even love. For the first time, Yondalla had children whom she actually loved and desired to be a good mother to. This was what pushed her towards good and law, she slowly became the loving and responsible parent she pretended to be, even giving up on all of her plans of revenge on Chauntea.
Yondalla’s long and stable reign as a lawful good goddess of halflings lasted peacefully until she got the multiverse’s least romantic proposal from Moradin, a long list of extremely logical arguments detailing how a union between them would be in both of their interests and why they were the best potential mates for each other out of all the other cosmic beings. It was really reasonable and well thought out and Yondalla was impressed. Being probably the richest and most powerful being in the multiverse, Moradin really was a good catch (which was on the list) but Yondalla just wasn’t interested in being bound in marriage and said so. But then greater goddess of beauty and lust came for a visit. Sune had heard of Moradin’s interest in a marriage and was really hoping he’d pick her but Moradin passed over her due to the silly and unfounded “Nerull’s wife” thing, which was a bummer because she was hoping to put the screws on the uppity primordial greaters by marrying one and using it against others. But Yondalla was also good, for she was also a deity of Material Plane and would surely be glad to take one for the team. Yondalla had learned what happened when you ignored divine politics firsthand, so she reluctantly gave Moradin a chance.
In a few short decades, Yondalla was crowned as Berronar, the Queen of Mount Celestia. She became Moradin’s staunch ally and pioneer on Material Plane, taking special pleasure for spreading his influence all over Material through halflings (whom she was still keeping solely for herself). She even plays the role of negotiatior and peacekeeper between the primordial siblings, making certain they don't conflict too much (especially Corellon and Gruumsh) while there's those unruly younger upstarts of Material to bring in line. All this immensely pissed off Sune and the animosity between them is still strong.
Berronar actually is happy about being married, she does like Moradin and perks of being his wife are so great she’d be stupid to give it up. Besides, she can still indulge her wilder and inappropriate urges using a certain secret identity* that absolutely nobody knows (and since she’s become a greater goddess thanks to Moradin sharing his own worshippers, she can be in two places now, guaranteeing her secret stays a secret). She may not be in the songs make sense type of crazy love but far as marriages go, it can’t possibly get better than this.
As Yondalla, her church is mostly limited to halflings but they’re a widespread race on Material and, while not very zealous, they’re all very reverent of her and she covers most aspects of halfling life (including the less scrupulous ones too, which they all try to keep quiet). Some halflings know Yondalla is married to some distant sky god who’s uncaring about affairs of mortals and they don’t much care about him in turn. Other halflings know Moradin as a great ally to Yondalla and revere him and do the occasional missionary work to spread his faith around. As Berronar, her church is mostly spread to Upper Planes and puts more emphasis on her protection, tradition and healing aspects and is quite militarized with plenty of martial and medical traditions, with only small influence on Material Plane. Berronar is revered first as Moradin’s wife and second as a protective deity, but wherever Moradin’s influence goes, so does Berronar’s. Name of Berronar is usually unwelcome on mortal worlds where Material Plane deities are dominant but all those deities’ attempts to discredit Yondalla usually backfire, the normally lukewarm halflings consolidate and rally around their religion when feeling pressured.
Nowadays, Yondalla is even nominally allied with Chauntea against Sune, Nerull and their buddies. Which just goes to show impossible is a lie.
*Yup, there we go.
Originally Posted by Fable Wright
Re: Teaching new tricks to old gods
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