Template:Forgotten Realms Deity
Deep Duerra is a fictional god in the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, a god of the dwarves of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
Deep Duerra (dwair-uh), also known as Queen of the Invisible Art or the Axe Princess of Conquest, was the duergar demigod of psionics, conquest and expansion.[1]: 117
Deep Duerra received a detailed description in Demihuman Deities (1998).[2]
Deep Duerra is described in Faiths and Pantheons (2002).[1]
Deep Duerra and her clerics were known below the surface as Norothor ("those who seized enemy lands"). While very few surfacers knew of the goddess and her faith, the Norothor were the talk of underground waystations and trading communities because of their recent efforts in the Underdark. Even the older duergar who served Laduguer considered the Norothor to be a nuisance, because of the strong degree in which they preached expansionism. Regardless, the Norothor served an important role in duergar society, since they trained the natural psionic abilities of young gray dwarves, they attended to and controlled the underclass of slaves, and they scouted and cleared out nearby tunnels so the community could continue to grow. Because of their focus on the mental disciplines they were often used as ambassadors to psionic races such as the illithids and aboleths. The brashness inherent of the faith however, ensured that many of these missions ended disastrously. Duerra's temples were constructed in symmetric patterns meant to be visually appealing, and they featured an empty seat at the center of the centermost room. This seat was called the Daul's Throne and served to remind the Norothor that Deep Duerra was always present and watching. Norothor frequently multiclass as fighter or as Psions.
Norothor prayed for spells at night.
They celebrated a perverse festival known as the Rallying on Midwinter Eve. The clerics commemorated the triumphs of the past year that evening, and they announced their intentions of expansion for the coming year. Accompanied by the sound of hammering and war chants the Norothor passed around the freshly severed head of an enemy. This enemy was one whose territory they would take before the next Rallying.[1]: 117
On the 5th of Mirtul, Norothor gathered in their temples for the Melding. This was a psionic ceremony where they contacted Duerra herself. The result was a communal mind which granted all clerics greater insight in their endless quest for power and territory.[1]: 117
In the stories of old duergar mindwardens, Duerra was the queen of a dark and immense subterranean dwarven empire in ancient times. In their expansionist wars, the queen herself stood in the front of her armies. On one campaign leading to the domination a huge illithid city, Duerra then ordered her men to capture the mind flayers, who were once slavemasters of the entire duergar race. After a century of work, Duerra and her surgeons succeeded in taking the psionic powers from the captive illithids and transferred it into her brood and her clan's bloodline. Mindflayers tell the story differently though, by claiming Duerra was the leader of a slave rebellion. They attribute the psionic powers of the gray dwarves as an invention of their own, used to create a more efficient slave stock. Regardless, many duergar honor Duerra as the progenitor of their psychic abilities. These abilities established them as a distinctive subrace and a symbol of the dominance the duergar attempted to establish through enslavement and expansionism, until they are the preeminent political force of the Underdark.
Immediately on her apotheosis, she was exiled by Moradin. Because of this, Deep Duerra had no friends among the Morndinsamman. Some myths claimed that Laduguer was her father, but the two didn't show any compassion towards each other. While they were nominally allies, they constantly plotted against one another. Over the past centuries with only small successes, Duerra came very close to attempting to depose Laduguer as the duergar prime deity. She was hated by the illithid god-brain Ilsensine for the many thefts of psionic energy and information from it.