Alignment: Any
Symbol: A set of scales; one side is made of gold, the other of bleached bone
Disciplines: Unquiet Grave.
Oath: The ceremony administered to a potential Judge depends on if they have chosen to seek out the eternal youth offered by the Scales of Mourning. Those who do not are sworn to the oath in a simple ceremony involving three other Judges. Recruits who desire immortality, however, are taken to a quiet place where a circle of both healers and necromancers administer the Transcendent Rite to them and then asked to swear the following oath with their skin still smoldering from the conflicting energies.
“I swear on my honor and in the name of my ancestors before me that I will uphold the balance between life and death. I will hunt threats to this balance when it is right to do so, trade life for death and death for life when it is needful, and use restraint when exercising my powers over life and death. May my mortal husk crumble to ash if I fail in my oath.”
Allegiance Benefit: In addition to access to Unquiet Grave (trading a discipline of their choice), Judges of the Scales of Mourning benefit from a +2 sacred bonus to saving throws and armor class against undead creatures and their abilities, as well as a +2 competence bonus to Heal, Knowledge (planes), and Knowledge (religion) checks.
Upon joining the Scales of Mourning, a non-undead Judge has the option of pursuing immortality (this option may also be pursued at a later date). If they take this option, the ceremony takes approximately four hours and requires a special ritual powered by both positive and negative energy. Once complete, the Judge participating in the ceremony ceases to age, and gains no benefits or penalties from aging other than those they’ve already accrued. A Judge may cease to be immortal as a full-round action (they may not be magically compelled into forgoing their immortality), though if they do they may never again benefit from this avenue of eternal youth.
A Judge who violates her oath (such as by wantonly upsetting the balance between life and death) loses access to her sacred bonus to saves, as well as her bonus to skill checks, until she atones by spending seven days in contemplation of life and death or else by completing a heroic act to restore the balance (such as by closing a rogue portal to the positive energy plane). If she has sought immortality through this order, her aging resumes until she atones, though she once again gains eternal youth upon successful atonement. Leaving this Tradition strips a Judge of any immortality gained through its rituals.
Description: The quiet Judges of the Scales of Mourning are a group of semi-mortal warriors who pursue a long-term balance between life and death. This order began its existence as a very different sort of group, one which crusaded against the undead and the influence of negative energy. Eventually retreating to a small island in an effort to experiment with the effects of driving out all negative energy influence, the Scales completed their grand experiment, sealing their home away from the negative energy plane entirely.
They no longer live on that island, which they refer to only as the Great Failure.
The survivors, scarred and ravaged by cancerous growths, staggered onto the mainland and began training students in order to ensure that no one who followed them would make the same mistake. This first generation of students rebranded themselves the Judges of the Scales of Mourning and spread into the world to recruit like-minded souls, the better to preserve the delicate balance of positive and negative energy in the world.
Today, the Scales of Mourning quietly monitor the relative amounts of positive and negative energy within a given region. Most areas, they find, essentially take care of themselves. However, certain events - a keris dragon taking a lair, a necromancer raising armies of undead, great atrocity - can upset the balance of life and death, leading to a slow but dangerous degradation in one direction or another. The Judges usually prefer non-invasive solutions if they can be applied; an upwelling of positive energy from a keris dragon might be matched by the Judges moving a lich into the area, for example. More often than not, however, the Scales of Mourning must correct the problem by force, and usually follows up by assigning several junior members to the area to ensure that there is no long-term fallout.
Aside from their ongoing task, the Scales of Mourning collect what lore they can find on the interactions between planes of existence, but especially the interactions between the Prime Material and other planes, in an effort to better understand the complex relationships involved. Their history has taught them the painful lesson that even the seemingly destructive negative energy plane is vital to existence as they know it, and they gather, and sometimes spread, their knowledge in the hopes of preventing anyone else from having to learn the same lesson.
Common Tasks: Judges without long-term assignments can sometimes feel like they’re bouncing between contradictory orders. A Judge may be asked to save an undead being (and its library of knowledge) only to turn around and put down a nest of wraiths the next week. They close portals, open them, seek natural confluences with other planes and sometimes, regrettably, just plain kill people. The work is almost always messy.
Available Services: Quite aside from their extensive libraries on planar lore - and planar denizens the Scales of Mourning collect items and artifacts relating to positive energy, negative energy, or both. As a result they maintain vast but well-balanced armories that contain a staggering mix of weapons, healing, curses, and even, sometimes, more exotic things. Members get a steep discount (based on the idea that they can be trusted), but they’ll sell to outsiders, especially if they can arrange for the item in question to be used to further the balance (such as by selling discounted wands of cure disease to a plague-ravaged city).