Baradun, the God of Automation

Baradun, the God of Automation, was a major power of The Pantheon War. His capital was situated on Aeldrum.

Summary

Baradun has no creed to offer his mortal servants -- there is work, food and sleep. Mortals serve only for the tasks that automata cannot easily complete themselves, and while machine-limbs and the like are what another god might call gifts, Baradun makes no such pretense: they make the servant more useful.  To be born under Baradun's rule is to know nothing else, to have one's soul belong to Him only because no alternative was even thinkable. The overwhelming machine-hordes of Baradun are self-replicating, and it is only in the almost evolutionary accumulation of variations in this replication that they differ from each other; Baradun's angels are perhaps the exception -- the longer they have served, the more lesser entities they must command, the more they acquire a personality, and it is often an exceedingly strange one.  Angels who fight on the front and are "rebuilt" dozens of times become particularly unique in shape and outlook. These angels of Baradun are not "ensouled" however in the sense of an angel of Kirva or other gods: they are sentient machines, replicating the processes of a sentient soul mechanically -- perhaps because they lack souls (which modern occultists would think of as a moderating element against the stresses of experience), they adapt to the centuries of warfare not with trauma or perseverance but with complete assimilation to their conditions: the character of a war-angel is born, not shaped, by its experiences on the battlefield.  The machine-men (what a modern Aeldman might call a cyborg) of Baradun are of course ensouled, but the distinction is almost meaningless to their monotonic personalities.

History

Baradun's lengthy campaign against Kirva and Idolmar was one of the last major phases of the Pantheon War, featuring the deployment of planetary-scale weapons such as The Black Pyramid installations and ending in The First Scouring of Aeldrum. Some doubts exist as to whether Baradun survived the Pantheon War, and a handful of modern scholars have suggested that he and his servants may have become corrupted by the Unnamed.