Wanna be a Bhaaler? (Patreon)

Shot chaaler? 20-inch rims on the imphaala?

Okay, I'm done. Sorry about that.

Feast your eyes on this beauty, both the gorgeous art done by the inimitable Peter Polach, and what might be the murderiest stat block I've ever made. Bhaal occupies a weird space for me; he was probably the simplest of the Dead Three to adapt for combat, but the hardest to integrate into the world in a way that felt believable.

Ultimately the angle I went with is this; Bhaal doesn't really work like other evil gods. He's not particularly trying to recruit serial killers and feed off their worship, because there just aren't enough serial killers for that and serial killers don't get much out of joining a Bhaal cult. He's not threatening to murder those that don't worship him, because worshipping Bhaal doesn't help prevent you getting murdered. There's no recruitment funnel for his murder-cults, because murder is the baseline level of Bhaalist worship.

Instead, Bhaal just wants to be hated by everyone as much as possible, and cultivates cultists to stoke those fires by bestowing addictive, transcendental religious ecstasy on people who were already doing violence for non-Bhaalist reasons, luring them down the path of frenzy until only Bhaalists will willingly associate with them.