A god of necromancy?

[Gwic]

I'm not up on the 4e deities/lore. What is an appropriate evil deity to be 1) having their clerics spreading a zombie illness, and 2) opposing Bahumut?

Thanks for any help!

[Vknight]

Vecna
And if they are crazy enough they will worship the Demon Lord Orcus

[Daftendirekt]

And, FYI, the Raven Queen is the perfect god to oppose this god of necromancy. She's the god of death... but, like, permanent death. Her dogma is that everybody has their time, and stuff like necromancy is mortal-kind's way of trying to avoid it and thus break her rules.

[LaZodiac]

I'll also note, Bahamut is the biggest good of all the big goods, so he'd probably work againest all the evil gods.

Though if you do go for Vecna, put in some Ioun as well. She's a god of free knowledge, while Vecna is secrets.

[Vknight]

Ioun is also a good choice she and Vecna are constantly at one another throats and trying to take knowledge from each other.

...LaZodiac I have somehow for the last 2years missed that Ioun is a chick and I've been thinking of her as a he. So thanks

[Mando Knight]

I'll also note, Bahamut is the biggest good of all the big goods, so he'd probably work againest all the evil gods.
Pretty much. His dearly despised sister holds a special place in his rogues gallery, but if there's evil afoot, Bahamut wants it squished.

[Gwic]

You all are so helpful you don't even know!

- Vecna works great for my mysterious necromancer BBEG that they'll be spending heroic tier chasing. He's got an castle on an alternate plane where he was experimenting, abducting peasants to experiment on. But before they could storm it, he teleported out, taking down every Vecna symbol in the palace. Vecna is the perfect god for the BBEG to worship.
- The evil member of my party is follower of the Raven Queen (because she though the name was just so awesome) so now I can use Daftendirekt's tip to hook the evil ranger into wanting to oppose the BBEG.
- The party includes a wizard without a diety, who is just leaving his parent's basement. Per LaZodiac's tip, I could send recruiters for Iou to convince him help the party in exchange to their libraries.

So, really, big thanks to all of you!

[BlckDv]

If you are going the Vecna angle and have access to Open Grave; be sure to consider what role to give Kas in your campaign. As Vecna's former ally and now hardcore foe, but evil to the core, Kas is an interesting device for plot.

I'm running a campaign of Ioun followers fighting Vecna who have found Kas a needed but untrusted ally at times, a frightening competitor at others.

Also decide early on if you want to bring the Vecna artifacts into your story (The Hand and Eye) or not. If you want to use them, making sure to drop early hints and have key NPCs missing a hand or eye can add good flavor and possibly reveal (or misidentify) certain NPCs as evil.

[Vknight]

I have a NPC in a game who has no right hand or right eye.
The man had the clever idea to put the eye and hand into the wrong parts of his body. He then covered the loss of the hand with a gauntlet powered by magic and a sealed devil into his eye socket