The Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide doesn’t get the love it deserves. There’s a lot of good stuff in there if you want to put it to use in your game. To illustrate this, let’s take some tidbits from the Tymora entry in SCAG and apply them to Sister Garaele, Phandalin’s priestess of Tymora.

Garaele Practices What She Preaches

“Our Smiling Lady is said to love none so much as those who gamble with the utmost skill and daring.”

Upon reading this in the SCAG’s entry for Tymora, it dawned on me that it’s easy to fall into the trap of portraying clergy as upright and pious members of their religious community. Only, in the case of Tymora, if you’re not anteing up in some gambling venture or dangerous but profitable opportunity, you’re not actively placing your faith in Lady Luck, are you?

In transforming Garaele from a venerable elvish priestess into a gritty, foolhardy risk-taker, the tenets of Tymora as a deity become much more apparent to the characters as they journey through your world. It’s an opportunity to weave Faerûn’s pantheon into your game without the need to dispense such lore as an aside to your players. They’ll observe this often overlooked lore in action, rather than having it explained to them. That’s how you get the players at your table to engage with your world.

With this new perspective, I wanted a new template for how I would portray Sister Garaele in my adventures. Kara Thrace (Lt. Starbuck from the 2000’s SciFi Battlestar Galactica) immediately came to mind, and that is how I portray Garaele in my games now.

Garaele Looks For Signs From The Gods

“One common method of divining the future is to toss a coin to a stranger (typically a beggar) and ask if it’s heads. If it is, the coin is left with the stranger as payment for Tymora’s favor. If it’s not, the stranger can choose to keep it (and the bad luck) or return it.“

I loved this little bit of lore for several reasons. First, the coin toss can be portrayed as Garaele’s attempt at communing with Tymora regarding future outcomes for which she cannot be certain. For her own fortunes, Garaele doesn’t use the coin. After all, “fortune favors the bold,” and the bold don’t look for signs at every single turn in their day.

But for those seeking Garaele’s counsel when she is uncertain? That requires more care. And so she’ll use the coin toss for some divine guidance regarding the advice she dispenses.

It also provides an opportunity to call for an Intelligence (Religion) check for players proficient in the skill. I’m always looking for ways to reward players for the choices they make at character creation, and so characters proficient in this skill get to roll the check to understand the significance of Garaele tossing a player or NPC a coin (as well as the significance of not returning the coin if it’s a tails). I tend to relay the result and the lore secretly to the players making the check, allowing them to do as they wish with the information in-game.

Garaele Is A Bit Of A Unicorn

Priests of Tymora and temples devoted to Lady Luck are scarce, since her faith tends not to stress a need for intermediaries: “Let the lucky man and the Smiling Lady suss it out,” as the old saying goes. Shrines to Tymora at gambling parlors aren’t unusual, however, and sometimes such establishments attract a priest and effectively become temples.

Chances are the Shrine of Luck is the only freestanding place of worship devoted to Tymora that characters have ever come upon. The same might be said for Tymora’s clergy, unless there are party members that have spent time at a gambling den that had clergy in residence.

And if you follow my template for Sister Garaele, she’s likely to subvert the expectations of players for what a priestess of Tymora should be.

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