Description:

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 gorgon, 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 labour.

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 gorgon 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 manoeuvre 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 gorgon. Initiates receive a lethal dose of poison, become petrified, and then are restored to flesh one year later. Petitioners who have Pharika’s favour emerge alive and healthy; those she doesn’t care for fail to survive the transformation.

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 enamoured with the mysteries of life and death, along with snakes or other venomous creatures.

Pharika’s Favour:

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 Favour table provides several suggestions.

Pharika’s Favor:

1 You were born in a plague-struck village’s final days, ultimately being the only survivor.
2 Exposure to a rare toxin granted you visions of Pharika, and you have sought her wisdom ever since.
3 Your medical attention proved crucial to a stranger’s survival, and now your acquaintances periodically fall ill, as though Pharika is testing you again and again.
4 A sagacious serpent once offered you guidance and has influenced your studies ever since.
5 You are dying. As death grows nearer, you are increasingly adept at deciphering nature’s mysteries.
6 You have no idea why Pharika showed interest in you, and you might sometimes wish she hadn’t.

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:

1 Devotion. My devotion to my god is more important to me than what she stands for. (Any)
2 Scholarship. Unlocking the natural world’s secrets is a challenge I welcome. (Neutral)
3 Balance. My work shall save as many lives as it takes, balancing the deserving and the insufferable. (Neutral)
4 Immortality. Those who discover nature’s darkest and direst secrets earn the right to live forever. (Evil)
5 Fatalism. Everyone dies. As a result, I may employ their brief lives to further my agendas. (Evil)
6 Tutelage. The world is a deadly classroom, and students need an expert guide to survive. (Neutral)