Lore

Rallos Zek, the Warlord

God of war, strength, and conquest — patron of warriors, ogres, trolls, and the giant-kin of the Rallosian Empire.

Rallos Zek is the god of war — the Warlord, the Father of Tactics, the divine architect of the lost Rallosian Empire whose ruins still mark Velious and beyond.

Where the other evil-aligned deities take their portfolios from emotion or process — hate, fear, plague — Rallos's portfolio is purely structural.

War, in his theology, is the natural arrangement of any sufficiently ambitious people. Peace is what happens when the conquering is finished, and it never is.

Origins

Rallos is one of the older deities of the canon, present from the early arrangements of the world. The giant-kin theological texts hold that he made the giants himself, in his own martial image, and that the great Rallosian Empire of the Age of Conquest was the closest the world ever came to his preferred order — a single people, organized for war, in possession of every land worth holding.

The empire eventually broke, on causes that the texts argue about endlessly, and the Rallosian remnants in Velious now hold themselves to be its rightful inheritors.

The break is treated by the cult as a temporary setback rather than a final defeat; the war did not end, the army merely had to reorganize.

The wider canon treats the Rallosian Empire's collapse as the central setback of Rallos's career. The Warlord himself, according to his cult, is patient — empires end, the war does not — and his work continues through warrior orders and giant-kin enclaves wherever organized force is welcome.

Conflicts and alliances

Rallos's central opposition is with Quellious, goddess of tranquility, whose entire portfolio is the disturbance he requires the world to maintain. The standing antagonism with the Tranquil is the longest-running peace-versus-war axis in the modern canon.

He stands in secondary opposition to Tunare, whose green domain his armies have repeatedly trampled, and to Erollisi Marr, whose protective sphere directly contradicts his. The two oppositions are treated by the Rallosian camp as professional rather than personal; the Warlord respects what he opposes, where the opposition is competent.

Within the evil-aligned camp he maintains a wary alliance with Innoruuk and Cazic-Thule. The three spheres — war, hate, fear — are compatible without overlapping, and the texts hold that the three deities maintain a long-standing nonaggression pact among themselves. His relationship with Bertoxxulous is more strained; plague tends to interfere with the discipline of an army, and the Warlord finds it discourteous.

Domain

War, strength, conquest, the discipline of organized violence, the long patient work of empire-building.

His sphere also covers the secondary martial virtues — the chain of command, the tactical mind, the willingness to die in formation — and the cult-architecture of giant-kin and warrior orders that organize themselves around all of these.

The Warlord's theology distinguishes carefully between violence and war. Violence is small and disorganized; war is the structured deployment of violence in pursuit of an objective. The cult treats the distinction as the entire difference between barbarism and civilization.

Followers

Ogres are nearly universal in their worship of Rallos and constitute the central tribal expression of his cult. Trolls hold him as a primary patron, alongside Cazic-Thule, in the older Innothule tradition.

Warriors of every race — particularly those whose alignment runs neutral or evil — name him as patron of first resort.

The frost giants of Kael Drakkel are the most organized Rallosian remnant on Norrath, and they hold themselves as the legitimate continuation of the Empire. For class restrictions see /wiki/deities/rallos-zek.

Planar realm

Drunder, the Fortress of Zek, is the Warlord's planar seat — a vast martial complex organized around three principal halls: the Plane of Tactics (his strategic court), the Plane of War (the proving ground), and the inner stronghold itself.

The architecture is uncompromising; every approach is a battle, every chamber a potential ambush, and the Warlord's personal guard does not stand down for visitors of any rank.

Mortal raids into Drunder are treated by the inhabitants as a routine military problem, which is itself the highest possible compliment from the Rallosian tradition. The plane has no spaces of rest; the Warlord considers leisure a softness and his realm reflects the conviction without exception.

Notable myths

The making of the giants, the Warlord's central artwork — the shaping of the giant-kin as a martial people in his own image
The founding of the Rallosian Empire, in which Rallos directs the giants to organize the first cross-continental conquest
The breaking of the Empire, the central theological tragedy of the cult, with causes argued endlessly
The Plane Wars, an apocryphal cycle of conflicts said to have been fought among the gods themselves with the Warlord at the center of every campaign
The standing army of Drunder, the perpetual condition of his plane — never disbanded, never at peace, always ready