The Crawling King

Torog, the Crawling King
Symbols of the Crawling King.
Deity information
Type	Betrayer God
Province	Enslavement, Torture
Common symbol	Three pale arms clawing from a dark void
Gender	Masculine
Pronouns	He/him/his
Alignment	Neutral Evil
Worship
Worshipers	Torturers, Slavers, Jailers
Associated domains	Blood Death Trickery
Arm of the Betrayers	Grovelthrash
Appearances
Other work	Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep

Torog, the Crawling King is an evil god of torturers, slavers, and jailers. It is said that pathways under the world are the result of his tears of pain and anger, and his realm is a network of deadly caves and manacles. He was defeated during the Calamity by the Dawnfather and the Everlight.

Appearance

Fan art of a statue of the Crawling King encountered within his prison, by Callum Lyall.

The Crawling King is typically depicted as a swollen, malformed worm slithering through the darkness below with a hairless human head at the helm, three arms carving through a lightless rock.

Personality

As the patron god of slavers and jailers, the Crawling King offers guidance to those who rob others of freedom.

The Crawling King is a jealous god, and he will seek to destroy any rivals that try to challenge his rule over the domains of torture and imprisonment.

Since being sealed away by the Prime Deities, the Crawling King has never truly healed from the wounds he suffered. Every attempt to leave his prison is a torturous attempt on his permanently broken body. As the god of torturers, he takes inspiration from each failed attempt as new ways to inflict pain on mortals.^{[citation needed]}

Biography

Background

The Crawling King is both the god and creator of the tunnels and caverns of the Underdark beneath Exandria.

Screenshot of a vision of the Dawnfather, the Arch Heart and the Crawling King in the Calamity from "Those Who Walk Away (LoVM)" (LVM2x04).

During the Age of Arcanum, the archmage Vespin Chloras released the Betrayer Gods from their planar prisons. The Crawling King tortured the Betrayer Gods' enemies at the Bastille of Torment under the Dunrock Mountains and his followers used the caves beneath Ghor Dranas as torture dungeons. A warrior named Ganix attempted to strike down the Crawling King with his army, but his army was defeated, and the Crawling King captured and tortured Ganix, twisting him into the Laughing Hand.

During the Calamity, the Crawling King and his followers tunneled beneath a woodland in the Cyrios Mountains that was home to reclusive elves who worshiped the Moonweaver, sinking the plateau into a valley. The Crawling King's servants sapped the life and color from the trees at their roots, creating the Pallid Grove. The elves there retreated beneath the Pallid Grove and became pallid elves.

In the first century of the conflict, when the main pantheon reached a truce to deal with Aeor's anti-divine technology, they agreed to send several mortal avatars to infiltrate the flying city to sabotage the Factorum Malleus. The Crawling King was one of the Betrayer Gods who agreed to participate, and incarnated as a sickly and physically tortured tortle, Zaharzht, who spent most of its time coughing and focusing on his own pain rather than helping. As Aeor was about to be destroyed and the other avatars of the Betrayers were focused on trying to hurt the Prime Deities, the Crawling King's's avatar was left alone until he was found by Asha (the Wildmother's avatar), who accepted that she was to blame for the pain the other god experienced in Exandria (since she had been the one who found the planet in the first place), and allowed him to hurt her mortal body before both of them lost their physical form, returning to divinity.

At some point, the All-Hammer and the Moonweaver secretly built the King's Cage near Bazzoxan as a trap for the Crawling King. It appeared to be a temple to the Crawling King to lure him into using it, but it was a fane that would allow them to banish him.

Depiction of the Threshold of the Excoriated, which still transmits the Crawling King's curse, deep within the Betrayers' Rise, by Kent Davis from Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep, p. 71.

In one of the war's climactic battles, Alyxian and his allies fought the Crawling King's forces at the gate of the Betrayers' Rise, a dark fortress-temple, and won a hard-fought victory.

The Dawnfather and the Everlight defeated the Crawling King by luring him aboveground; the Dawnfather pierced his body with 10,000 lances of sunlight. The Crawling King's violent tears carved the pathways under the world, and his followers fled into those tunnels to escape the light. The Everlight then imprisoned the Crawling King far from Exandria; he remains banished in a sliver of the Far Realm that now borders on the deepest pits (or very base) of the Underdark, "where the boundaries between the worlds grow thin."

The Crawling King's followers hunt the followers of the Cloaked Serpent for sport.

"Where The River Goes" (2x15)

While investigating a long abandoned arcane laboratory for the Gentleman, the Mighty Nein discovered a journal written by Siff Duthar, which gave the group their first mention of the Crawling King.

"Agreements" (2x61)

Jester scried on a person connected to the opening of rifts to the Abyss, and saw a human writing in a book titled, "The King That Crawls." Fjord and Caleb saw the similarity to "the Crawling King," a secondary title of one of the Betrayer Gods, Torog. They knew him as the patron of torturers, jailers, and those who want to rob others of freedom. They also understood that there weren't many sketched representations of him, as it's sometimes considered a taboo to make full representations of him, but they recalled descriptions of his appearance.

Caduceus communed with the Wildmother and asked whether the King That Crawls was a threat to the people of Rosohna, to which she replied, "The King That Crawls is far beyond any of us. He is of no threat to the people of this city."

"The King's Cage" (2x69)

Obann explained to the Mighty Nein that the King's Cage was a temple to the Crawling King, built around a primal fane of corrupting power. But the temple was actually a trap: unbeknownst to the Crawling King, the temple had been secretly constructed by the All-Hammer and the Moonweaver. When the Crawling King was defeated by the holy light of the Dawnfather and the Everlight, the "King's Cage" (as the temple came to be known) was instrumental in imprisoning the Betrayer God. With the Crawling King bound to the fane, he was banished and sealed away at the fane's source of power: the Far Realm.

After the Divergence, the still-corrupted King's Cage fell under the control of the Crawling King's zealots, including the undying Champion of the Crawling King, the Laughing Hand. The followers of the Moonweaver fought the forces of the Crawling King on the very steps of the King's Cage. Upon realizing that the Laughing Hand could never truly be slain, the Moonweaver's celestials martyred themselves to seal away the temple. It was their hope that the King's Cage and the zealots within would remain forgotten, and thus could never be unsealed and unleashed on the world.

That hope was squandered when the Mighty Nein unwittingly helped to unseal the Laughing Hand for Obann, who broke the final seal and freed the imprisoned Champion. When a member of their party unexpectedly turned on them and sided with Obann and the Laughing Hand, the Mighty Nein was forced to retreat. They managed to escape with their lives, but the Chosen of the Crawling King was released back onto the surface world.

Worship

Commandments of the Crawling King

“

Commandments of the Crawling King

• Seek and exalt places where no light touches.

• Revel in the pain you inflict upon others, and relish the pain you suffer yourself as an offering to the Crawling King.

• Imprison those who cannot resist you, and drag all life into the darkness.

”

– 

from the Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn

[!h]

Known worshippers

The Crawling King's worshippers are those who take others' freedom and creatures living in the darkness below. Creatures of Carceri build prisons in the Crawling King's image. Notable worshipers include:

• The Laughing Hand (after going insane)
• Thangrul II, the king ruling the Emberhold in the name of the Crawling King.

Appearances and mentions

• Campaign Two
  • "Where The River Goes" (2x15), mentioned only
  • "A Favor in Kind" (2x16), mentioned only
  • "Agreements" (2x61), mentioned only
  • "The King's Cage" (2x69), mentioned only
• Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep, first appearance

Trivia

• In "Downfall: Part One" (3x99) Zaharzht, explained that the Crawling King had been suffering since they entered reality and he longed for the place where the main pantheon hailed from.
• Laura Bailey revealed in an interview that if she could choose a Betrayer God connected to her character in Downfall, she might have chosen the Crawling King because of the drawings of her son Ronin, who loves to draw the different monsters connected to Critical Role. Early in character creation, Nick Marini also expressed interest in playing as the Crawling King.
• Vox Machina unwittingly stumbled upon a location matching the description of where the Crawling King is imprisoned: in a tunnel just outside Yug'Voril, in the depths of the Underdark, there is only a thin veil separating the Material Plane from the Far Realm, from which terrible abominations bent on subjugation emerge. The Miskath Pit seems to match the description better.
• In 5th Edition lore outside of the Exandrian main pantheon, there is a divine brother of Surtr called Karontor, considered the wicked god of the fomorians. One of his nicknames is "the king that crawls", very similar to the title of Torog the Crawling King, who is also associated with torture, the Underdark, and the Far Realm.

References

Art: