The Great Mother, the Grain Goddess, Earthmother
Alignment1) Neutral Good
Pantheon Faerunian
Realm House of Nature
Portfolio Agriculture, plants cultivated by humans, farmers, gardeners, summer
Worshippers Peasants and indentured servants, druids, farmers, gardeners
Domains Animal, Good, Plant, Protection, Renewal
Favored Weapon A shock of grain (scythe)


Chauntea is worshipped as the Great Mother of agriculture, the kind benefactor who ensures a strong harvest, healthy meals, and robust country living.

Growing and reaping are part of the eternal cycle and the most natural part of life. Destruction for its own sake and leveling without rebuilding are anathema. Let no day pass in which you have not helped a living thing flourish. Nurture, tend, and plant wherever possible. Protect trees and plants, and save their seeds so that what is destroyed can be replaced. See to the fertility of the earth but let the human womb see to its own. Eschew fire. Plant a seed or a small plant at least once a tenday.

Chauntea is a deity as old as Toril herself. Hers is the divine spark that gave life to the natural world, the vibrant, caring spirit infused with the planet at the moment of its creation. Originally a deity of wild places and animal life, Chauntea has grown with her world, changing and adapting to its many developments until becoming the patron of agriculture that she is today.

Members of the Great Mother's clergy divide themselves into two factions of roughly equal size. Those clerics who minister to farmers and agricultural workers in cities, towns, and villages refer to themselves as Pastorals, while those of the wilder, older sect that caters to the wilderness call themselves, with a touch of arrogance, the True Shapers. Members of both sects recognize no central authority - theirs is a highly individualistic faith. Chauntea sets out a doctrine outlining a general set of values and taboos, but how each cleric adapts this code for herself and her flock is largely a matter of personal interpretation. The church members members of all races, though women vastly outnumber men, perhaps because the religion's liturgy is infused with references to fertility, motherhood and femininity.


While by no means defenseless, the church of Chauntea has no affiliated military or knightly orders. Those who guard its temples and shrines are usually members of the clergy.


Priests of Chauntea are charged to learn—and pass on to others, both fellow clergy and laity—all they can of horticulture, herblore, plant types, and plant diseases, and to encourage all civilized folk to enrich the land by replanting, composting, and irrigation, not merely to graze or dig it bare for what it can yield and then pass on. They replant trees wherever they go, root out weeds that strangle and choke crop plants, and till plants back into the soil. They strive to let no day pass in which they have no helped a living thing to flourish.

Clergy of Chauntea are encouraged to work against plant disease wherever they go. They often hire nonbelievers to helf them burn diseased plants or the corpses of plague-ridden livestock to prevent the spread of sickness. They keep careful watch over such blazes. Chauntean clerics do not like handling fire but are not forbidden to use nonmagical fire.

Chauntea encourages her faithful to make offerings of food to strangers and those in need, freely sharing the bounty of the land. It is also said that money given to one of her temples returns to the giver tenfold. Worshipers should plant at least one seed or small plant-cutting a tenday, tend to it faithfully for as long as possible, and see that their own wastes are always tilled back into the soil to feed later life. Any extra seeds yielded by plantlings should be taken to a temple of the goddess for distribution to the less fortunate.

Priestly Vestments

Priests of high rank of all types in the service of Chauntea tend to favor white or sun-colored ceremonial robes trimmed in deep forest green and to use staves smoothed by much handling but otherwise natural in appearance. Some such staves are enchanted to purify or promote the growth of what they touch.

Clerics must be within '1 step' of their deity's alignment
  • deities/chauntea.txt
  • Last modified: 2019/12/07 11:14
  • by eredruie