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Description
The younger son of Cyrus the Great, and brother to the king's successor, Cambyses, was Bardiya, called "Smerdis" by the Greeks because… uhm… well look if I had the answers to all the Universe's questions I wouldn't be living alone in a studio apartment playing Dungeons & Dragons with a bunch of nerds on the internet.

Information on Bardiya is scarce at best, with the oldest account coming from the Behistun Inscription, a tale of conspiracy and usurpation commissioned by… well… Darius, the conspirator and usurper. All later Greek historians draw on this obviously biased narrative, so take the following diatribe with a big heap of salt. Initially, Cyrus had assigned Bardiya to be governor of the Achaemenid Empire's eastern provinces, which is usually where you sent someone to be out of the way. This is probably because Cambyses was reportedly a paranoid whackjob who hated his brother, and only kept the peace between them for the sake of stability. When Cambyses began his campaign to conquer Egypt in 525 BCE, he set his brother up as king in Babylon to run things while he was away.

At least… that's what he wanted us to think. Cambyses, after receiving a vision that Bardiya would usurp him, sent an officer named Prexaspes to have his brother assassinated. To keep the peace, Cambyses replaced Bardiya with a body double: Gaumata, convicted brother of a disgraced priest named Patizeithes. No one could tell the difference, it was the perfect plan. Until, that is, Bardiya's wife Phaedymia grew suspicious that her husband was not acting like himself. While he slept, she snuck into his bed chamber and discovered that his ears had been cut off, a consequence of Gaumata's former criminal convictions. Realizing he was an imposter, Phaedymia called an emergency meeting with her father Otanes, who gathered a group of six conspirators in order to assassinate the false Smerdis in 522 BCE. Cambyses is said to have "accidentally" fallen onto his own spear and died around this same time. Nothing to see here, folks.

Design notes, yeah this one's pretty fugly. There's like… three historical images I've been able to find of Bardiya/Gaumata, and they're all extremely unhelpful. The only contemporary image is the Behistun Inscription, which depicts Gaumata crushed under the boot of Darius. There's not exactly much detail, but I did at least use it as reference for his face. A much more modern illustration is "Struggle Between Gobryas and the False Smerdis" drawn by Jacob Abbott in 1900. I couldn't tell which one in the drawing is even meant to be Gobryas or the false Smerdis, so that's a bit of a dud. There's a little medieval sketch of Smerdis from a 1480 manuscript, and another that looks like it's from later centuries (couldn't find the exact source of it) but those outfits are so obviously anachronistic that it kind of pains me to draw reference from them, though it was really the best I had, so I did my best to adapt it where possible. It's not perfect, and I probably should've improvised a bit more on my part, but oh well. The most important part when it came to using this as a D&D token was to make sure the ears were covered up, as that was one of the big clues to unravel the conspiracy web the party was going up against. The discovery that Cambyses had his brother murdered in cold blood was the final straw for them to realize that his mental health had gotten so bad that the main villains were able to manipulate his paranoia into being a danger to his own empire, and thus he had to be stopped… one way or another.

Description
The younger son of Cyrus the Great, and brother to the king's successor, Cambyses, was Bardiya, called "Smerdis" by the Greeks because… uhm… well look if I had the answers to all the Universe's questions I wouldn't be living alone in a studio apartment playing Dungeons & Dragons with a bunch of nerds on the internet.

Information on Bardiya is scarce at best, with the oldest account coming from the Behistun Inscription, a tale of conspiracy and usurpation commissioned by… well… Darius, the conspirator and usurper. All later Greek historians draw on this obviously biased narrative, so take the following diatribe with a big heap of salt. Initially, Cyrus had assigned Bardiya to be governor of the Achaemenid Empire's eastern provinces, which is usually where you sent someone to be out of the way. This is probably because Cambyses was reportedly a paranoid whackjob who hated his brother, and only kept the peace between them for the sake of stability. When Cambyses began his campaign to conquer Egypt in 525 BCE, he set his brother up as king in Babylon to run things while he was away.

At least… that's what he wanted us to think. Cambyses, after receiving a vision that Bardiya would usurp him, sent an officer named Prexaspes to have his brother assassinated. To keep the peace, Cambyses replaced Bardiya with a body double: Gaumata, convicted brother of a disgraced priest named Patizeithes. No one could tell the difference, it was the perfect plan. Until, that is, Bardiya's wife Phaedymia grew suspicious that her husband was not acting like himself. While he slept, she snuck into his bed chamber and discovered that his ears had been cut off, a consequence of Gaumata's former criminal convictions. Realizing he was an imposter, Phaedymia called an emergency meeting with her father Otanes, who gathered a group of six conspirators in order to assassinate the false Smerdis in 522 BCE. Cambyses is said to have "accidentally" fallen onto his own spear and died around this same time. Nothing to see here, folks.

Design notes, yeah this one's pretty fugly. There's like… three historical images I've been able to find of Bardiya/Gaumata, and they're all extremely unhelpful. The only contemporary image is the Behistun Inscription, which depicts Gaumata crushed under the boot of Darius. There's not exactly much detail, but I did at least use it as reference for his face. A much more modern illustration is "Struggle Between Gobryas and the False Smerdis" drawn by Jacob Abbott in 1900. I couldn't tell which one in the drawing is even meant to be Gobryas or the false Smerdis, so that's a bit of a dud. There's a little medieval sketch of Smerdis from a 1480 manuscript, and another that looks like it's from later centuries (couldn't find the exact source of it) but those outfits are so obviously anachronistic that it kind of pains me to draw reference from them, though it was really the best I had, so I did my best to adapt it where possible. It's not perfect, and I probably should've improvised a bit more on my part, but oh well. The most important part when it came to using this as a D&D token was to make sure the ears were covered up, as that was one of the big clues to unravel the conspiracy web the party was going up against. The discovery that Cambyses had his brother murdered in cold blood was the final straw for them to realize that his mental health had gotten so bad that the main villains were able to manipulate his paranoia into being a danger to his own empire, and thus he had to be stopped… one way or another.