Believers of the Source

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Believers of the Source
Aliases	Godsmen, Tested, Self-Made
Plane of Influence	Ethereal Plane
Headquarters	The Great Foundry, Lower Ward, Sigil
Allies	Athar
Enemies	Bleak Cabal, Dustmen
Factol	Ambar Vergrove

The Believers of the Source are one of the main Factions competing for the hearts and minds of the denizens of Sigil in the Planescape setting for Dungeons & Dragons.

With a belief they style as "sequel observances", where observation of the consequences of one's actions can lead one to understanding what to do to accomplish only good results in the future, the Godsmen (as they're known) are essentially a weird mixture of evolutionists, reincarnationists, and transcendists.

Basically? The Godsmen believe that existence is a forge which shapes all people. A person is born, dies, and reincarnates over and over again, each life being higher or lower than the one before as a result of the actions that past life undertook. Ergo, by understanding one's past lives, one can direct the course of one's future incarnations, until eventually one's spirit evolves to the point of achieving godhood. Hence their common nickname.

This doesn't, however, make the Godsmen particularly nice. As all life is both a consequence of previous actions and a lesson to be learned, by the Godsmen creedo, suffering is self-earned and must be overcome. Even goodly Godsmen take a "tough love" approach, and weigh the outcome of support vs standing back before intervening. If a basher refuses to learn from their mistakes, things will only get worse for them in the future; messing with life lessons is against everything the Godsmen believe.

As you'd expect, the Godsmen make enemies. Their most steadfast and traditional foes are the Dustmen, who consider the philosophy of the Believers of the Source to be obscene - both Factions believe in reincarnation, but the Dustmen portray it as a negative thing and the Godsmen as a positive one. The Bleak Cabal are also surprisingly hostile to the Godsmen, mainly because the Godsmen's creedo of "you earned your suffering; overcome it and get better" is offensive to their belief that suffering is just a sign of the multiverse's inherent lack of meaning and so should be opposed. They also have had enmities and outright war with the Doomguard (who believe that ascending to godhood defeats their belief in entropy's inevitability, or at least restrains it) and the Harmonium (who, of course, find the individuality of the Godsmen opposing their goal of peace-through-conformity).

Because of philosophical resonance, the Godsmen operate the Great Foundry, the section of the Lower Ward of Sigil that houses the city's supply of metalworking industries. This enormous collection of forges and furnaces, sheet-works, bar-works, mold-works, pullies, crucibles, and portals to mines across the multiverse works ceaselessly to produce all of the metalwork in Sigil.

Needless to say, joining the Godsmen isn't easy - oh, it's easy enough to ask, you just walk up to the Gate Foundry and say you want in, but the first step involves being a dog's body at the Foundry, which is tough work. If you can hack running around in scorching heat and doing arduous labor for long hours, eventually, you can find a senior Godsman to informally sponsor you, and they'll start teaching you what you need to know.

Prior to the Faction War, the most significant conflict of the Godsmen is an internal one. The Godsmen traditionally place unthinking animals low on the "ladder towards the sublime" and thinking races higher up, but a female human druid factotum named Basdank takes offense to that. See, she's a high leveled member of one of the druidic kits called the Shapeshifter, which means she's spent a lot of time in animal form, and she thinks their focus on instinct (closely related to the Faction's philosophically vaunted intuition) is at least equal to humanoids' focus on rational intelligence - in fact, she claims it to be superior. Though many Godsmen feel that this is alarmingly close to the philosophy of the Ciphers, she has attracted a large following.

During the Faction War, their Factol, Ambar Vergrove, is Mazed by the Lady of Pain on the 11th day of the war. The Believers of the Source don't realize this, and instead believe he has managed to ascend to some new level. In the wake of the Factions getting exiled, the Godsmen happily leave, having started to grow tired of their stationary role in Sigil beforehand. Before leaving, though, they are approached by the Sign of One, and the two groups find sufficient common cause that they choose to unite and form a new philosophy: the Mind's Eye pseudo-Faction.

Gallery

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  Factol Ambar

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  The Great Foundry

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