ER:Stalwarts
From The Heretic Knowledge Vault
A body (so to speak) of not-alive, but maybe not-quite-dead adherents of the Veracian Church in the Errant Road role-playing game. Even though they are never seen in the flesh, they're important to the eerie tales surrounding the Artifact of Absonial. Needless to say, they don't exist in the Poe-verse.
There is no short and simple description of just who the Stalwarts are/were, so let Sister Rose's memories of what she'd learned about them try to explain:
- It would be a mistake to call the Stalwarts a "denomination" within the Veracian Church; "sect" came closer, although it still might not be totally correct. Orthodoxy certainly wasn't an issue with them -- quite the contrary, the Stalwarts were probably the single most zealous movement in the entire Church when it came to religious orthodoxy in the traditional sense. Their practice of that zeal, though ...
- The heyday of the Stalwarts movement had been about a hundred years in the past, if Rose remembered her history correctly. Some priest whose name she couldn't recall had discovered a combination of magic, plus certain herbs that grew in the swamps of the far south, that could induce a death-like state in their recipients, a state so convincing that it took the revival of one "volunteer" who'd been placed into the state (not so voluntarily, Rose suspected) to convince the Patriarch that the state was not death. And that paved the way for Father Yogesh.
- Yogesh had started out as a simple country priest, barely literate, and knowing little more of Luminositan doctrine than that He was powerful and scary, yet to be loved, worshiped, and -- incongruous as it might seem -- protected. Simple Yogesh may have been, but he did have charisma, and he also had a concept. His followers, mainly drawn from small towns such as the ones that Rose and her friends had been passing through, had sworn to defend Luminosita even unto death and beyond ... and so, when the drug/magic-induced death-like state known as the Peaceful Death became public knowledge, he knew exactly what to do with it.
- It was only a matter of time, and not very much of it, before Father Yogesh had a cadre of ultra-zealous Luminosita worshipers who were willing to enter into the Peaceful Death state (with, of course, appropriate pomp and ceremony), and be interred in the most sacred grounds of the Veracian Church -- the temple at Emerylon itself, the swamps where Luminosita had arisen hundreds of years earlier, a few other sites -- there to watch over the holiest artifacts of Luminosita, and rise to defend them from the infidels, or at least rise when Judgment Day finally happened. Of course, things didn't exactly work that way. When the Tsuirakuans arrived to prosecute the last of the Mage/Priest Wars, the Stalwarts remained buried, and as far as anyone could tell, also quite dead -- if peacefully so. ...
This odd, maybe-undead army plays no direct role in Errant Road. However, when Rose and her colleagues Argus, Lillith, etc.) go to retrieve the Artifact of Absonial from an archaeological dig near the small town of Provatiel, they have a scary encounter with buried, not-quite-dead guardians on the Stalwarts model. At first Rose suspects that they are Stalwarts, but some "research" reveals that these guardians had been buried decades after the last of the Stalwarts was interred, and had nothing to do with them. Lillith, the first to make contact with this scary bunch (and to be, for lack of a better word, possessed temporarily by one of them), coined the name "Peaceful Dead" for them, and the name sticks.
According to Rose, there are still Stalwarts out there, still waiting in their sacred burial grounds for a chance to rise and fight for Luminosita against the infidels. Their categorization "Living Impaired character in Errant Road" therefore has some oddities to it, but one has to call them something. In any event, they have not yet appeared in the game proper, and probably never will.
