The most widespread cult of Chern Durel is the worship of the Hours. Despite being so widespread, it is the least spectacular and so easily overlooked. Further, it is not unified and prone to local variations that disguise underlying similarities to the disinterested observer.
A category of priest routinely seen in villages and cities does not worship any particular god, but a great wheel of gods who each occupy different successive moments in Time. They serve as intermediaries between people and the Lords of the 168 Directions, as the gods of the Hours are sometime called. If they have rune magic of note, I have not seen it, but they are preternaturally aware of the time - both in terms of celestial and all meteorological phenomena, and of human reckonings. Primarily, they make offerings and prayers to win the favor of the Directional Lords. Typically, they provide the many minor charms and blessings people need to survive the oddities of life. A true master knows exactly the moment to act, calling upon the secret powers offered by the nameless gods who reside in the divisions in the Hours, in the divisions between the divisions of the hours.
While all the divisions are called the Hours, the outermost are more precisely days. Parallel to the seasons and arrival of Sacred Time, a calendar tracks which of the outermost gods rule the day. The rule of the day is itself divided into n many Hours, each presided over by its own god, and this is subdivided into the minutes and seconds - in the Chern Dureli idiom, from the days inwards they are called the Greater Hours, the Hours, the Lesser Hours, the Least Hours and beneath that are the Secret Hours.
The gods of the Hours themselves are most typically associated with either one of the elements, one of the powers, a combination of the two, or are considered nameless. Nameless indicates that they do not have clear runic manifestation, not that they are unnamed or without qualities. For example, a class of nameless gods, the Lesha, are strongly associated with the troll goddess Annilla, of the Blue Moon Plateau.
The Hours are most commonly seen as the children of Basko Black Sun, and are famously incorporated in the canonical Restoration of Heaven epic. At the end, Basko Black Sun prepares the chariot of the Sun of the New World, Moving Sun. His union with the Stellar Queen yields the 168 children of Time, who form the spokes of Moving Sun's chariot wheel. At the same time, in my conversations with the priests of the hours, they will often describe these gods as coming from foreign lands, both extant and mythical, which governs the appropriate offerings they are due.
It is a matter of course that one of them, [], is considered lame, after the Sunstop injured him. The Chern Dureli consider the Sunstop to be a Kralorelan mischief, and refuse to hear any argument otherwise. On this day in particular, offerings are made in every village to strengthen the wheel of the sun's chariot, in order to preserve the world that the Dragon Worshippers are so keen to destroy.
- From the notes of Laros Tamultian, one of the few God Learners to reach Chern Durel.
Design goals: First, this is most obviously influenced by the Mesoamerican ritual calendar/Maya tzolk'in, but it also is influenced by Indian astrology. The narrative background is that Chern Durel is a land of outcasts, which accepts all outcasts to it. In the Great Darkness, many gods were cast from their places of origin, and avoided death by becoming part of a great new order in the world in the only place in the world they could be accepted into. I hinted at that a little with the Lesha, until I decided to put this in the mouth of a God Learner traveler, I was going to note that they had announced their affiliation with the Moon rune, helping fuel the Black Moon movement.
As characters in play, they're intended to be a very broad but typically shallow source of magic power. They offer a great deal of common magic, even if by being so broadly defined they are not the best at it. The magic they provide is mostly one-shot, with an initiate being able to make prayers and offerings for one-shot magic more or less whenever with some down time. This is intended to relate to the old Vithelan Ombardaru - low priests who are capable of worshipping any god and getting results, but in this case it's one aggregate time god.
The briefly noted mastery line feels odd to implement in a HeroQuest/RuneQuest context, but really obvious in a Chuubo's sense. They would take on a quest miracle that requires them to build up to a huge magic (i.e.: to find the exact right time and make all the appropriate offerings to the gods along the way). Something about the whole concept feels very rife for God Learnery to happen and possibly help set up a future catastrophe in the Hero Wars.
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