Shona's in enough of these games already!
Also, write-up!
Name:The Shapers
The dreams of a dead god can burn the world When the Pankrator set about ordering the world, he was hardly the only puissant being living within it, dozens of behemoths and titans wandered the world. No-one knows whether they were some sort of fragments of creatures form before Creation, or simply creatures who were born as it was created. Of course, the Pankrator bound or destroyed all of these great beasts, but now he's gone...
The being now known as Iurt was one such creature. It was a shaper, it could alter the world around it however it pleased but not create anything new. When the Pankrator came to Its domain, there was a great battle, as there usually was when such creatures were fighting for their life. When the Pankrator triumphed, he split the creature in three. It's form he threw to the farthest North, where everything freezes, from stone to vacuum, there it shattered into a thousand shards of ice. He smote the Creatures soul, the fire of divinity that made it sacrosanct from binding, into oblivion. Finally, he bound his mind to the inside of a perfect sphere of stasis in the Infernal realm, as fragile as glass, but eternal and unchanging. Without a form or soul, the beast could do nothing but rage impotently as its prison refused to obey its will.
Without the Pankrators will protecting it however, random happenstance freed Iurt from his prison, as two battling demons accidentally broke it while fighting in a newly discovered cavern. Although much reduced in power Iurt was free again, and it vented centuries of pent-up rage on those two unfortunate demons, who ended up as two puddles of water, after several days cycling through other possibilities.
Soon after It managed to find Its way to the materiel plane (Where it took to being called he for the sake of omniscient narrators recording the history of the world).
Summoned by a tribal shaman who's tribe was on the run from an Imperial expedition sent to destroy them after they started worshiping a mountains which obliterated a patrol chasing a group of them via avalanche. In exchange for freedom, he gave the tribe fur the color of snow, so they might hide from their enemies. In exchange for the tribes service, he gave the shaman a spell to turn ice as hard as steel. In exchange for their worship, he struck their old idol, turning the great mountain into a rain of ice shards that destroyed the Imperial city the expedition hunting them was based in.
With a tribe of camouflaged nomads under his control, Iurt struck at the mining towns and logging camps that populate the north-east, with cave-ins and forest fires aiding the assaults. So, in the first year of the Ascension war,s Iurt rules a large chunk of the North-east, with a caste of savant-priests composed of the tribe that summoned him and those that joined them, a caste of warriors composed of whoever doesn't go insane when his improvements are done, and so on.
Pretender: Iurt is rather reduced in power form the point where he could change his surroundings on a whim. For one, he has to form a physical form out of his surroundings, which means he's rather easy to get rid of temporarily compared to other Pretenders. He's also unable to affect the will or intelligence of a sapient being, being firmly rooted in the physical realm, which also means he cannot grant animals sapience, make plants sentient, and so on.
As he's been rather severely reduced in power since his heyday, Iurt focuses much of his efforts trying to regain his divinity and form. Currently he makes due with the spark of immortality granted by his cult a form forged form steel-ice and adamant in a generally humanoid form. Needless to say, this isn't good enough.
Strengths:
The Weave of Weft of Reality: Iurt is a true master of magic, and the entire nation rests on this fact. The savant-priests are also generally skilled tranmuters.
The Armies of Infinity: You know what makes a good soldier? being ten feet tall and made of steel, or having wings and explosive spit, and so on.
Productive are: the North-east was one of the Empires major sources of raw materials, and so makes a good profit through the black market (obviously the Imperial Cult and Umberot don't allow any official trade)
Weakness'
Anathema: Iurt seems likes he's straight out one of the stories about the Pankrators ordering the world, and he fits pretty much perfectly into the "primordial demon" stereotype, so outside of where he can make his power felt, there is almost no cult to Iurt.
Power of the Material: Iurt, and by extension, those taught by him, can only affect the shapes and substances' of things, not their minds or souls, and he can't create anything form nothing. Enchantment, Necromancy and Conjuration are all beyond him.
Pathetic spy corp: the Sheper's culture is drastically different to almost every other one in the world, which combined with a lack of enchantment makes spy work difficult.
Stats
Morale:+++
Economy:+++
Military:++++
Espionage:++
Magic:+++++
Mass Appeal:++