The Dark Urge

Hey Dapper! As an avid follower of- and equally avid inspiration-taker from your work, first of all, thank you for the work you've put into all this. It is a treasure-trove of knowledge and inspiration that has certainly made me very happy. Can I ask for your thoughts on Tharizdun? I've been trying to form a concept of it for in my own world, but I've had little success.

Monsters Reimagined: Tharizdun, the Whisperer in Darkness

Being the default "god of madness" Tharizdun brings together two of my enduring gripes with d&d: gods that no one would actually worship and the enduring legacy of depicting people with mental illness as dangerous lunatics devoid of empathy and reason.

As he currently exists in the DM's toolbox, the whole point of including Tharizdun in your campaign is to act as the powersource behind whichever final fantasy style endboss wants to start the apocalypse before unleashing a mass of offband lovecraftian tentacles. Derivative, trite, his singular desire to inspire others to end the world is MCU levels of failing to give villains proper motivations.

We can do better

TLDR: Far In the wildest depths of the astral sea the ur-god Tharizdun is formless and thoughtless, yet dreaming. Resembling nothing so much as a cosmic nebula of oily clouds, a vast and shapeless expanse of churning primordial chaos that pulses with synapses of psychic lighting containing a consciousness older than time itself. Like a sleeper beset with sleep paralysis the chained oblivion thrashes against a reality it can only barely perceive, sending shockwaves of destruction across the cosmos.

While scholars of all worlds debate the true origins and nature of Tharizdun they can agree on two things:

It is more powerful than all the pantheons of creation, and it is terrified.

Inspiration: I wasn't originally going to do a whole monsters reimagined on Tharizdun, instead simply gesturing on what Matt Mercer has done with the deity (using the roiling chaos as a throughline for much of his Exandrian worldbuilding) and leaving it at that.

Around the same time I got this ask though I was considering doing my own take on Azathoth, the so called "blind idiot god" of the lovecraft mythos, inspiration struck and I decided to alloy the two concepts into what I think is a stronger whole. There's a lot of overlap in the two formless horrors, partly due to Tharizdun being a d&d's attempt to dip its toe into eldritch horror, without quite understanding the thematic framework involved.

Like many other things ( Minorities, the sea, decay, air conditioning) Lovecraft was terrified of objective reality. This might sound like a joke, but fundamental to his mythos is the fear that earth and the white men that lived upon it were not the centre of the universe created by a loving god. Lovecraft lived in increasingly scientific times and the science supported the idea of a universe in which humanity's existence was the meaningless product of random chance. Azathoth was this anxiety embodied in its most extreme scale: the capital G god of the universe which sat in the middle of all creation that was not only uncaring towards humanity (as many of Lovecraft's creations were) but the embodiment of ultimate unthinking chaos.

Trying to port Azathoth (and most of the other lovecrafitan pantheon) doesn't work because the conceits of the genre fundamentally clash. D&D DOES propose a moral universe, and goes out of its way to simplify morality down to such a cartoonish level that it has objective answers. In Lovecraft the horror comes from the fact that the cultists and their fucked up alien gods exist, where as the moral christian god doesn't... in d&d there's no reason for the cultists to worship the fucked up alien gods because the regular gods are both existent and quite nice.

The default d&d cosmology has multiple infinite voids of chaos including limbo, the abyss, and the far realm. I've already given my take on one of these, but I wanted an alternative for the origins of the weird that wasn't specifically focused on entropic decay.

There's a fascinating (and very depressing) history over the term hysteria and the connotations of mental crisis with feminine fragility. The word itself comes from the greek word for womb and there's something about the idea of "primal birthing chaos" that's worth playing with insofar as it makes weird rightoids Jordan Peterson deeply afraid.

Taking these thoughts as well as my earlier gripes in mind, its going to take a bit of an overhaul to make Tharizdun/Azathoth as a credible antagonistic force for a campaign. Also, this might be my own bias as an author showing through here but I don't go in for the lovecrafitan "truths too terrible to be understood". I think the universe is a fundamentally knowable place and if things exist outside our means of perceiving them then we'll just bullrush through and work out a temporary explanation on our way.

Here's my Fix/Pitch: Both Tharizdun and Azathoth are supposed to represent primordial chaos and formless madness. D&D's less than stellar history with mental health issues aside, we know that "madness" isn't evil and it isn't the antithetical opposite of order: It's flawed reason, it's an inability to comprehend, and it's deeply scary for those going through it.

THAT ended up reminding me of a famous quote from lovecraft himself; "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown".

What if we make THAT FEAR into the god? Imagine the panicked sensation of being woken from the deepest slumber by a sudden noise, the door opening or a loud bang going off somewhere on your street..... the phantom horror of something touching you, crawling over you in the middle of the night before you have any of your senses or reason or memory to tell you that it's just your partner or your pet or your own bed sheets. That's the stuff sleep paralysis is made of and it's been haunting us humans since the dawn of time. It's also the same horror of being born, of being a non-thing and then coming into existence in fits and starts without any understanding of the world that you're now

Now imagine there's something out there in the astral sea, the plane of dreams and thoughts... powerful beyond all imagining but created without the ability to ever fully wake up. It is stuck in that first moment of existence because it may well have been the first thing to ever exist and it's been trapped in the shapeless nightmare of an infant since the dawn of time

THAT is how you make a god about the horror of the unknown. A god that is antagonistic to us because it is sacred of us, and it is scared because it has no way of knowing us, knowing the reality it inhabits beyond its own fear.

Adventure Hooks:

The greatest threat Tharizdun presents to most beings in the universe is having a nightmare about them. Through the inexplicable paths of sleep an individual's mind may find themselves connected to the entity's own... receiving terrible visions as the thinking clouds of Tharizdun's body churn in a variable brainstorm. Some aspect of this communion will be twisted into something terrible, birthed into the cosmos with the same shrieking fear and confusion that inspired its creation. Some desperate few seek out this communion, thinking in their hubris that they can give shape to Tharizdun's creation, that the terror beyond time suffers collaborators or requests. (Yes, I'm yoinking the dream-spawning ability of beholders. They were already weird enough before they started getting involved with dream stuff)

Despite being a living entity, Tharizdun is also a place, a plane unto itself streaking through the multiverse like a collossal ameoba through the primordial soup. There are landscapes within the god, whole continents that form and erode through seasons of surreality as the paroxyc titan dreams them into being. One can create portals into these landscapes, even fly a jammership across them, but the act of doing so invites an even more chaotic backlash than visiting the chained oblivion in dreams, letting its terror leak out into the waking worlds.

The name "chained oblivion" dates back to an eon when forces of celestial order attempted to keep Tharizdun contained in the hopes of preventing the escape of its creations or its contact with other minds. This period of the multiverse oft refereed to as the "Time of Quiet" sadly came to an end when the entity's bindings were shattered by a collective of villains and horrors today refereed to as the "Court of Fools" or "Troupe of the Final Void". The Troupe are a motley bunch, unable to agree on a theology but all wanting to pick at the slumbering titan like it was a scab on the skin of heaven. Some serenade Tharzidun with cacophonous music, others hurl saints and sacrifices into its body, some worship or hunt the god's offspring while others stab it with cosmic pokers, just to get a reaction. They want to wake the chained oblivion and don't care how much of the multiverse they have to burn to do it.

Like a mollusc producing pearls as a means of containing an irritating bit of grit, Tharizdun's roiling cosmic body will occasionally spit out an entire world or strange demiplanes as a means of dislodging something it could not pallet. While this has been the genesis of many realms both beautiful and terrible throughout the astral timeline, of late all these worlds worth taking have been colonized by the Troupe. Woe and pity to any mortal who calls such a world home, ruled over by tyrants who care only for destruction, unaware of a cosmos not coloured by Tharizdun's wake.

Titles: The chained oblivion, the spiraling titan, sire of stars, the Paroxsmal god, Lord of all Hysterics.

Signs: Stormclouds that look oily and churn with otherworldly light, formless nightmares and pervasive sleep paralysis, mass delusion, darkness that echoes with the god's muttering and the sound of distant flutes.

Worshippers: Ad hoc worship of Tharizdun tends to congregate around those who have received unwanted visions of the chained oblivion, as the harrowing experiance often bestows those that suffer it with an otherworldy weight to their words, to say nothing of occasional psychic powers. Many abberations likewise pay heed to the chained oblivion, either for directly giving them life or for its great and insuppressable power. Among these include Grell who refer to Tharizdun as "storm mother", The nightmarish Quori follow in the wake of the god's psychic emanations and make up a large faction of the court of fools, and the Kaorti, terrifying mage-things remade by exposure to the spiralling titan's heart who claim to be heralds for the entity.

Art

Kaorti Medium aberration, neutral evil Armor Class 16 (resin armor) Hit Points 27 (6d8) Speed 30 ft. Str 7, Dex 14, Con 11, Int 14, Wis 11, Cha 16 Damage Immunities poison Damage Resistances psychic Condition Immunities poisoned Senses darkvision 60 ft. passive Perception 10 Languages Common, Sylvan Challenge 1 (200 XP) Material Incongruity. Every hour the kaorti is on the Material Plane and not encased in its resin armor, it must succeed on a DC 15 Constitution saving throw or gain one level of exhaustion. Vile Transformation. A kaorti can spend 8 hours with its jaws locked onto the body of an unconscious creature that isn't a construct or undead. If it does, at the end of that time, the creature is transformed into a kaorti (if it was a humanoid) or into a thrall of the kaorti who created it (if it wasn't a humanoid). A thrall of a kaorti retains its normal statistics, except that its Intelligence becomes 1, it becomes an aberration, and it obeys the kaorti's verbal commands. Innate Spellcasting. The kaorti's spellcasting ability is Charisma (spell save DC 13). The kaorti can innately cast the following spells, requiring no material components: At will: ray of enfeeblement 1/day each: color spray, disguise self, feather fall, spider climb Actions Multiattack. The kaorti makes two melee attacks or two ranged attacks. Bite. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d4+2) piercing damage plus 3 (1d6) psychic damage. Dart. Ranged Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, range 20/60 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d4+2) piercing damage plus 3 (1d6) psychic damage. Ribbon Dagger. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 4 (1d4+2) slashing damage plus 3 (1d6) psychic damage.

The remnants of wizards who long ago sought to push beyond the boundaries of the multiverse, kaorti are the twisted result of those ancient pioneers. Able only to tolerate the fundamental differences between Far Realm and Material Plane by encasing themselves in cysts, these creatures cannot survive for long outside the protective resin casings they create for themselves. Now they live in remote fortresses and monasteries, entirely driven by the unending need to corrupt as much of the Material Plane as they can, so as to consume it for the Far Realm. They can be found in “cysts” of up to five dozen. The average kaorti stands 7 feet tall yet weighs a mere 100 lbs. 

Originally from the Fiend Folio.

Did some creature concept art for my players in DnD, should be a fun time for them!!! Cosmic skeletal demons babyy

Spelljammer game keeps going well. I'm running my very first dungeon ever and people are exploring this odd uncanny place without an idea that the place is basically what happens when a hedron from MTG meets the ship from Event Horizon. Floor 1 is strange. They're there atm. Then floor 2 will turn out to take a shift to xenomorph lair meets dungeon. Floor 3 is essentially a Chalice of Izs from Bloodborne merged with an Eldrazi ruin. At the very end, after the boss, they'll find a room screaming into their psyche names such as Hadar, Bolothammog, and Emrakul. The villains of arc 1 are the elves of Xarixis (from the adventure included in the Spelljammer set), but I've reworked the scenario extensively and long story short they drain life from other planets to keep their star alive still...but that star keeps the Far Realm away. So after that arc is done, we'll shift to true eldritch scopes. Laying the fondation for it all is being so good.

Looking like something straight out of Dr Strange or some LoveCraft horror story, here's the Nenzad by Skippy128 on Reddit.

Tati (playing Seraph): Time for Lab 2?

Andy (playing Una): Yeah! Although now I'm really glad you suggested doing Storage first so I got to meet Carbonne sooner. Uh, in case Lab 2 is dangerous I nip out and ask Thaddeus to look after Carbonne for me.

Hamish (playing Thaddeus): Sure.

Andy: I tell it, "I'm going into an area that might not be safe, so I'm going to leave you with my friend Thaddeus for a few minutes. Is that okay? I'll be back soon."

DM: Carbonne says, "Okay. Come back."

Andy: My heart, guys! Okay, Lab 2.

DM: Lab 2 also has ten tanks along the far wall, but this time only one of them is occupied.

Andy: I look for this room's chalkboard.

DM: The chalkboard talks about how this experiment aimed to try to increase the subject's power level by incorporating material from the Far Realm with the previous experiment.

Tati: Don't like that.

Rach (playing Ashiok): Far Realm?

Tati: Mind flayers, aboleths, beholders. A totally different universe; genuinely alien and with the unrelenting goal of subjugating and/or destroying our universe.

DM: The blackboard declares that this experiment is a failure and should not be replicated. Because of the Far Realm influence, the subject is far too intelligent to control and possesses an implacable hatred for anything from the natural world. It was too dangerous to try and kill it, so it's been enclosed and left here.

Tati: I look at the jar. Is this one asleep too?

DM: The creature in the jar is staring at you while it mashes itself against the inside of the jar, desperately trying to get to you. It looks furious.

Tati: *recoils* Oh god. I look away immediately. "Billie, do not telepath with it. It could mind-control you."

Adam (playing Billie): I'm rolling a Wisdom save to see whether I heed Seraph's warning or not... Aw, I don't telepath with it.

Tati: That's not 'aw'!!

We are all from the far realms and we should embrace that

2022-#2: The Adventure Continues 8

The Adventure Continues details the activities and plot lines in my Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with me as Dungeon Master. Last year, The Adventure Continues 7 followed the adventures of high-level characters, Zanzinabe, a dark elf fighter/fire elementalist magic-user, Qa’hr, a part human/part illithid fighter/wild magic-user, and Douterango, a gray elf fighter/magic-user/thief. They are a high-level adventuring party who travel to many planes of existence, rarely having serious problems or consequences. In their last adventure, “SOS from the Ixlan Galaxy,” they followed up on a strange signal Qa’hr received via wild magic. The signal was from an unknown galaxy far away, the Ixlan Galaxy, and they were able to pilot their magical vehicle, Cloud 9, there. They eventually located an unfamiliar intergalactic spacecraft on the outer edge of the Ixlan Galaxy. On this vessel they met a Vitrum, an intergalactic robotic species that was so advanced that it was created with interdimensional technology by a long dead alien race. The Vitrum informed the space travelers that the Ixlan Galaxy had intergalactic visitors frequently, all looking for the infamous Library of Knowledge which contained the secrets and all of the knowledge of the universe. The Vitrum directed them to a spacecraft it encountered looking for the Library, and soon the adventurers found and boarded that spacecraft, the Nostromaz.

They investigated the derelict ship which was in poor condition and owned by the Planascapian alien race, a flat-headed humanoid species which they met. The Nostromaz had been attacked, and the crew were under control of aliens on an upper deck. Zanzinabe, Qa’hr and Douterango made it up through the decks, battling robots and controlled Planascapians until they found their dominators, a couple of Lovecraftian Yith aliens. The Yith were apparently themselves being directed by a very powerful undead alien with a pentagram-like head, a Pentebri. After the Pentebri escaped the Nostromaz via psionic probability travel, the adventures found a technological gate which took them to the planet Hali where the Library of Knowledge was located. They soon found themselves in the Library and they began learning the secrets of the universe…for just a few seconds, then things became very slow for them, barely moving a millimeter a minute. They were virtually timestopped permanently; the SOS was all a lure to trap them here. They heard in their heads that they were now safe in the library of Hastur, the Yellow King, the King of the Far Realm, and there was no escape, and here ends the tale of Zanzinabe, Qa’hr, and Douterango, not dead, but forever trapped. At this point the campaign shifted to a single character who had not been focused on before…

Years ago in my campaign, the player character gray elf ninja, Lorien, had a clone accidentally magically made. This clone was sent back in time in a limited time vessel. His name was Faerlight. The vessel was powered by wild magic, and had five uncontrollable destinations in time, apparently random. The time vessel appeared externally as an old wooden door, but internally it contained a few Tardis-like extradimensional rooms. There were no controls, the time machine was completely automated. All that was known was that the five destinations would involve critical missions in time where much good could be achieved. After Zanzinabe, Qa’hr, and Douterango were left frozen in the Library on Hali, the playing sessions all focused on Faerlight’s five missions.

Faerlight wore a face covering and full ninja suit. He threw shruikens and gas pellets, and he used arcane ninja abilities. His weapon was a magical anything weapon that changed into any weapon type upon his command. He moved through the shadows and attacked quickly and relentlessly. He was a threat to just about anyone or anything. The best image of him is Nightwing-like as seen below. A time traveling ninja!

Faerlight’s first adventure was, “55 Million Years Ago: The Citadel of Anacreon.” Faerlight found himself in the First Age of his planet of Terra, in prehistoric times with dangerous dinosaurs and extinct exotic life. But he saw smoke from a fire from a nearby cave, and went to it. He found within the cave what appeared to be a primitive man who strangely directed him down a river. The man looked like a young Vincent Price, and vanished soon. Faerlight traveled down the river by magical flight for about fifty miles, encountering extinct birds and hungry hostile dinosaurs. The river led him to a flat topped mountain with a large building on top of it, the Citadel. The mountain was surrounded by jungle that was inhabited by a superior tyrannosaurus rex species, Indominus Rex. Faerlight made it to the Citadel, and found it inhabited by primitive humans who were following tasks, all under deep mental control. He explored the Citadel until he reached its deeper levels.

Faerlight found in the lower levels a temple that the humans frequently visited where their “Boss” was, a huge statue that they worshipped. It’s eyes were gems that controlled their minds and gave them their instructions, utilizing famous D&D artwork as seen above. Faerlight shut down the mind control temple, and continued exploring. He surprisingly found another time machine, which explained where the people came from. He was so far back in time that the most advanced mammals were squirrel like, so the people were not from this time. The time vessel was out of power and slowly recharging over hundreds of years…as the controlled humans performed the necessary upkeep of the building. This second time machine was recharging for hundreds of years, and had a few years left to be fully recharged. And when it was fully recharged, it would send a signal and wake someone up. Faerlight found that the person behind this scheme was asleep in a temporal stasis bed. He found the person, and it was Anacreon, a major villain of the early days of the campaign that disappeared long ago, having stolen a time machine. Anacreon was the leader of the Phantoms, a chaotic evil alignment sect that attempted to destroy the world by summoning Cthulhu. Before Faerlight could reach him, he saw Anacreon surprised by a third figure. The third figure was shining golden yellow hues and appeared godlike yet frightening. Faerlight watched as this figure, Hastur, the Yellow King, put Anacreon under his control against his will, and they both vanished together. Faerlight then managed to send the controlled human captives in Anacreon’s half powered time machine back to the future from whence they came. Faerlight left this prehistoric dinosaur-land knowing that the Citadel was the first building on the planet, and could probably be excavated in the future.

Faerlight’s second adventure was, “20,000 BD: Mistoplix Conquers the World.” The time vessel took him to 22,000 years before he left to the continent of Dorse long before it was named as such. At this time it was still barbaric for humans, but civilization was soon to flourish. He emerged in a war camp, and found a commander, Dors. He learned that the world had been conquered by one man, Mistoplix. Mistoplix, similar to the Superman villain, was a wild magic-user who made a copy of Anacreon’s time machine before he first used it. Mistoplix was an insane chaotic neutral wild mage who was thoroughly corrupted by wild magic. Chief Dors was the organizer of the resistance. The resistance had to fight Mistoplix’s forces: large, exceedingly strong and tough lion-like monsters he created, capable of killing dragons, the Grazzat. His forces also included a mysterious aquatic species, the Aboleth. Mistoplix was known to be located in the Asian islands of Aleutia, and Faerlight set off via flying carpet over the ocean, to defeat the only magic-user on the planet for before there was any magic-use.

Upon arriving near Mistoplix’s neon purple glowing palace, Faerlight was approached by a lawful good, super-intelligent creature appearing vaguely horselike with a horn: a ki-rin named Uogata. Uogata was the last survivor of the Aleutian resistance. Faerlight soon made an attack at night on the purple palace as Uogata kept guard. He found within a lavish large bar with intoxicated Nezumi rat men. He found Mistoplix’s designs, and they were dangerously crazy. He intended on using his time machine for extremely nefarious purposes, this taking over the world was just a diversion to his larger schemes. Mistoplix intended to go back in time, create the universe, and make himself god. Faerlight found Mistoplix, but he jumped into his own time machine and escaped. Faerlight then determined a second destination for himself in this time zone: the continent of Aborgin. In his time it was named Amorgin and was an accursed continent, more dangerous than anywhere, and in this time it was where the aboleth kept their headquarters. At their headquarters they possessed magic items Mistoplix gave them that had to be destroyed. They had a magic item that created Doomeye water, water that semi-permanently subjugated peoples’ minds. They also had a device to open a gate to the Plane of Water, and it very much appeared that the aquatic non-humanoid aboleth species intended to flood the planet for themselves.

Faerlight travelled to Aborgin and found that the aboleth had built a huge platform. They had also constructed magic devices across Aborgin to transform the continent. Faerlight discovered terrible secrets about the aboleth. As a DM, I had previously barely ever used the aboleth because I knew that their backstory would be very rich, detailed, and had to be correct. So Faerlight learned that the aboleth were not from his planet, they originated from the Far Realm, the Twilight Zone of the planes. They did not die from old age, ever. They were very powerful and super intelligent. They arrived a few hundred years previously via a gate from the Far Realm. The aboleth were here to terraform the planet, and they had already transformed Aborgin from being an Africa-like continent into an an accursed house of horrors. Faerlight found and destroyed his two magic item targets, but then something unexpected happened. The sky cracked open, and an enormous chaotic flying tower appeared from the Far Realm and proceeded to land on the huge platform. The aboleth flying city of Xxiphu had arrived, filled with hundreds of aboleth. This was the end of the world! Faerlight dashed inside, tracked down a creature called a Living Gate, and slew it. This then closed the gate to the Far Realm, sucking Xxiphu back to the Far Realm. Faerlight caught up with Uogata, and they travelled back to his time vessel. Faerlight met again with Chief Dors, who the continent would be named for, and he noticed he also looked like Vincent Price, the man he met millions of years previously. Faerlight and Uogata then left in the time vessel for his third mission.

In Faerlight’s third time travel mission he continued to move forward in time, this time to, “925: The Pyramid of Evil.” He was now about 1,200 years before his own time. The two travelers found themselves in a bar in a small unknown town. It was under heavy attack when they arrived. A wounded warrior was collapsed in the bar, and came to consciousness and spoke to them. The man looked like Vincent Price again, this time older. Faerlight was sure that he was speaking to the same person on each mission, but this individual continued a conversation millions of years later as if no time had passed. This enigma was directing him on each mission. His direction this time was towards an incredible flying black pyramid above the desert town, shooting laser beams down and attacking the town. Faerlight flew up to the pyramid on Uogata the ki-rin’s back and found the main doors propped open. Inside were adventurers from the region battling organized militant undead forces. Faerlight joined a party of adventurers and they were not good individuals, but soon they were all killed or dispersed by aggressive undead attacks. Faerlight and Uogata stumbled across a black Tabaxi cat man thief creeping about the pyramid, named Midnite, and he joined them. He was all that was left of the defending forces. Together the three of them defeated, locked up, or ran away from the undead in the pyramid as they progressed through it.

The pyramid was one of the pyramids of the Devilish Design, each pyramid having a purpose from the lawful evil devils from Hell. These pyramid had been located and the subjects of adventures in this campaign over many years. This pyramid was Mephistopheles’, and in it his deathmaster son, Arawn, was in full control. Arawn was the first villain in my campaign, a creator of undead appearing as Angus Scrimm’s Tall Man from the Phantasm films. Arawn had been defeated a long time ago, but a splinter of himself still existed in the Year 925, also due to time traveling. The party encountered powerful skeletal liches and new undead Arawn created like battle wraiths and red glowing pyramid liches. Arawn started literally crashing the pyramid into the town, flattening it and destroying it. Faerlight and his party found Arawn, and he was quickly defeated before they set the pyramid on a course into the sun, destroying it. They returned to the destroyed town with Midnite, and in the remains of the bar there was a surprise. Faerlight entered the bar to be screamed at by an enraged Asmodeus, ruler of Hell, accompanied by two deadly pit fiends. He demanded to know why a time traveler was destroying his Devilish Design pyramid, and the huge hulking pit fiends approached them to tear them apart. Suddenly a time stop was put over just Asmodeus and the devils, and Medwyn the mage stepped out of the shadows. Medwyn is the campaign’s mage who created the Timelord class from Dragon Magazine #65. Lorien knows Medwyn in the future, he is a well known character, one of the most powerful mages on the planet. Medwyn quickly explained that he detected the disturbance their time vessel made, which brought him there. He sent them away and the three escaped via the time vessel from Asmodeus and the Year 925.

The fourth time travel adventure took Faerlight decades after the time he left, to the future, in “2150: Azrath’s Final Secret Base.” However, before the trio could investigate that, they were attacked within the time vessel! Asmodeus had sent a greater pit fiend into their time vessel to investigate it. It was defeated without too much destruction, and they arrived in the year 2150. Faerlight stepped out of the time machine into the Dorse city of Obsidian. The time vessel had arrived in the back of a wagon in motion transporting old doors. He landed on the street and a carriage suddenly stopped for him. Medwyn stepped out of out, 1,200 years older since he was last seen, and he was with Lorien’s adopted father, Olorin. Faerlight became bewildered and stumbled into the carriage and found himself in a ride with another Vincent Price incarnation, asking about how the third mission went. This fourth mission was about a master vampire, Azrath, another major villain in the campaign. Faerlight learned that Azrath had been defeated by this year, but he had kept a secret base with his original body ready to reclaim his soul upon death. There he slept until he would be forgotten, when it would be safe to emerge. Faerlight, Uogata, and Midnite were directed into a funeral home. This led them to a small dungeon. Since the vampire was sleeping and trying to remain hidden, there were very few living creatures in the dungeon. There were various golems and undead, but there was one controlled caretaker, a strange psionic goblin, Zeekly, who they freed. It was hard to find the lair of the master vampire since sections of the dungeon had been collapsed, sealing them completely off and hiding further sections; see the map below. This mission was quick, and they soon left with Zeekly the goblin. They travelled a couple of miles outside of Obsidian to the wagon with the doors and the time vessel. Faerlight surprised the three that they were parting company: they were staying in the year 2150 and he would proceed on his final mission. They were all surprised to then see Lorien, the person Faerlight was cloned from, along with a spacecraft he parked nearby. He took Uogata, Midnite, and Zeekly away speechless into his spacecraft as they waved at Faerlight as he left in his time vessel.

Faerlight proceeded on his final time travel adventure, in “The Year Zero: When Gods Walked on Terra.” This time he went back in time 2,150 years to the campaign’s equivalent of the Christian year Zero. There were no gods birthed in this campaign, but they did appear. In the year Zero it was known throughout history that the good gods walked Terra in the ancient city of Urbs and delivered the laws and ways to live in the form of tomes such as the Bonus Leges and the Book of the Old Time. But Faerlight’s time vessel had an enormous collision before arriving at its fifth and final destination. There was an explosion, and the the time vessel actually collided with Mistoplix’s time ship. Both ships passed through each other and Faerlight saw Mistoplix cursing him. Both time ships were badly damaged by the collision and were virtually destroyed, falling apart and melting into nothing. Faerlight’s vessel landed in the year Zero, and he jumped out just as the vessel disintegrated. He was in a sage’s quarters in the city of Urbs, an old sage who looked like an elderly Vincent Price. He quickly briefed Faerlight in this mission. Mistoplix’s vessel had crashed down the street, and he intended to subvert history by appearing to the people of Urbs as Deus, the gods of the gods.

Faerlight quickly dashed outside. Coming down the street was a procession of a couple of golden glowing good gods followed by the people of Urbs. They were heading towards Mistoplix’s crashed time vessel. Faerlight ran inside it, and found that its destruction had been slowed but not prevented. Mistoplix’s time vessel’s interior was weird, altered by Mistoplix’s uncontrollable wild magic surges. Faerlight soon found Mistoplix, a battle ensued, and one of Mistoplix’s own wild surges, randomly triggered by his own attack spell, extinguished his own existence. Before leaving, Faerlight rescued Ranavenificus, an unconscious Grippli frogman who was a wild magic-user Mistoplix apprentice. Faerlight popped back outside, the vessel disintegrated, and Faerlight fell into the procession. He ended up in the Urbs town square where the lawful good and chaotic good primary gods themselves cast a god spell as part of a ceremony. The spell was to get the favor of Deus, the unseen god, the unknown god of the gods, the creator of the cosmos, the god not even known to exist, the god of no known alignment. What the two good gods did not expect was that instead of receiving a vague sign of favor from this formality of a spell, Deus himself was manifested in physical form, shocking the gods. He appeared with a beard, old, wise, and most certainly appearing exactly as Vincent Price. A recession parade took place, and Deus briefly spoke to Faerlight, and asked him how his missions went, correcting via time travel five problems best resolved by time travel. He told him that during the short ceremony that he had concocted the plan of Faerlight’s missions and had simultaneously met him in each mission in those few seconds in other time zones. Deus existed outside of time. He then congratulated him and told him to spend a year and live and rest. After then, Faerlight would return to Lorien, reincorporating their souls, and Lorien would then remember everything Faerlight did on these missions. Deus said farewell, the gods vanished, and Faerlight was then approached by a young Medwyn. They debriefed, and Medwyn took Ranavenificus to send in forward in time to join the other three Faerlight picked up on his travels. Faerlight then took a well deserved vacation, for one year.

At the end of that year Faerlight expected to die, but instead Deus showed up on his doorstep one last time. He explained that Faerlight became known in his missions as the Agent of Deus, and someone is trying to summon him, so there is one last mission. Faerlight was handed a glowing silver scroll to give to those who were summoning him. He was then sent to them, into the farthest future, appearing in a foggy dark realm filled with assorted spacecraft and various vessels. The outer edges of this small realm was some sort of translucent bubble, like the strongest of forcefields. Faerlight was then approached by an ancient alien who explained they are in the last few minutes of the universe’s existence in the very far future. Everything is rapidly collapsing, and they called for the Agent of Deus for help. Faerlight handed them the silver scroll, and they read it. It contained the coordinates for a secret location, the one place that anyone could survive the collapse of the entire universe, a special realm. The spacecraft all rapidly departed, and Faerlight stayed behind looking out of the bubble at the swirling disintegrating universe. He watched the outer planes swirl into nothing as everything collapsed into a swirl of fireworks and colors…and then he woke up in the present day, the year 2135, and he was Lorien…

But Zanizinabe, Qa’hr, and Douterango are still trapped, frozen in time by Hastur in the Ixlan Galaxy! The campaign then proceeded to follow the semi-retired high level player character, Olorin, for his last adventuring season. He intended to start out by trying to find Zanzinabe and company, but he also intended to visit the Shrine of Deus, that has fallen out of the caretaking hands of the druids and into the ownership of a somewhat shady young professor, who happens to look like Vincent Price…

In two days, there will be hourly posts for the artwork for the monsters encountered in these Dungeons & Dragons adventures!

Mind Flayer in D&D 5e: The Dreaded Illithid Unveiled

🛸🧠 Dive into the Mysterious World of Mind Flayers! 🧠🛸 Our latest article delves deep into their role in group dynamics and their connection to the enigmatic Elder Brain. A must-read for all fantasy enthusiasts and D&D players! #dnd5e

Mind flayer in D&D 5e, or (aka) illithids, are nightmarish entities that have haunted the annals of Dungeons & Dragons lore. Recognized by their octopus-like appearance and unsettling hunger for brains, they are iconic adversaries in any campaign. Delve into the shadowy world of these psionic tyrants as we explore their origins, powers, and the roles they play in the D&D universe. Does a mind…

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guys I really like the camila adopts hunter trope guys I really really really-

actively disappointed in y'all. i saw the "cohost mod is into cub porn" post reblogged uncritically on my dash a few times and was like hmm seems kinda flimsy so will not be reblogging. but to find out that the main target of the accusations in that post is a trans woman and that the accusations were really as unsubstantiated as they seemed... now of all times, in a conversation about leaving the site that was precipitated by spurious claims of sexual deviancy against trans women... i'm sorry but you simply can't be holding onto the whole "reblog warning posts about so-and-so being a sexual deviant" mindset even if you claim "oh but i won't reblog the unsubstantiated ones against trans women" cause clearly thinking that is not protection against actually doing it!

Footnotes on foes: Eldrazi

Hey DMs, do you need an unfeeling aberrant force to threaten your campaign world at various scales but don’t want to use mindflayers? Bored of lovecraftian knockoffs threatening to drown reality in abstract but unspecified “madness”? Well have I got the monster for you friends, It’s the Eldrazi: an unknowable and all consuming horde that’s here to reduce your setting to nothingness.

I’ve always had a fondness for the Eldrazi after they originally debued in magic the gathering, alien beings that sap all life from their surroundings and seem to have no other aims beyond the total and complete obliteration of whatever world they happen to dwell on. (plus they have a super cool look, and in the end isn’t that what matters?)

Eldrazi have a lot of mystery surrounding them, but in trying to puzzle them out I came up with my own headcanon that was too good not to use.  Below the cut I’ll go into detail on how I think the eldrazi function, and how you can best use them in your campaigns.

TLDR: The eldrazi are the great decomposers of the multiverse, reducing dead worlds down into their base components, and then into dust to be reabsorbed by the cosmic cycles of the astral sea. A perfectly natural process, but one that can go catastrophically wrong should the eldrazi be drawn to a world that has not yet died as they often are by witless dabblers or disruptions to those same astral currents. When they end up on a world they’re not supposed to be they end up creating wastelands, fighting against nature like an infection.  

While they’re scattered about many regions of the astral sea where stagnation looms, the eldrazi mainly occupy a region of the multiverse known as the dead realms, a cosmic landfill where realities decay into one another and the faceless horrors can do their work.

It is important to note that the eldrazi are not a species, or in many ways actual organisms: Each eldrazi brood (differentiated by trends in their alien anatomy and what they transmute material into) is the intrusion of a singular will into the cosmos with its own aims, which constructs its bodies from the errant energies of whatever world it happens to interface with. This makes communication with the eldrazi highly difficult, especially for those who encounter them without prior knowledge, as the will that pilots an eldrazi brood experiences the whole of the brood at once, many bodies at once, many dimensions at once. Even the most intelligent and independent members of a brood are merely hands in comparison with the greater body, able to exert a greater tactile degree of control but not actively conscious.

This alien existence extends to their anatomy: resembling summoned or illusory creatures, the body of an individual Eldrazi lacks blood or organs, and is instead a notional matter primarily used to store the magical potential they sap out of the worlds they digest. When an eldrazi dies they do not rot, instead they erode, the magic that composes their being leaking back into the laylines they siphoned dry.  Such transference can cause surges of wild magic proportional to the size and number of the brood slain.

This lack of a physiognomy extends to how Eldrazi seem to “breed”, budding like fungus or grotesquely merging to form larger bodies, which amounts to the prime entity behind the brood splitting up its focus for multiple tasks.  Sometimes the entity needs to actively participate in its act of decomposition, in which case the brood begins draining all it can, growing all it can, and then merging together into an eldrazi titan. These entities can lay waste to landscapes but also think in ways the disparate brood could do nothing about.

Eldrazi have a strange relationship with magic, in that their singular goal seems to be to extract the magical/living/quintessential essence out of dead worlds, meaning they become very adept at reading and manipulating systems that are built upon these primal currents. Eldrazi broods spread along a plane’s laylines like mushrooms along a rotten branch, sapping at its nutrients till the line goes dead and the landscape with it. This infection can even spread to enchantments, curses, and magical constructs, bringing them into a titan’s influence and even providing a seedbed for the growth of more eldrazi.

Very little of this information is well known by planear scholars, and even less of it is understood by those who might encounter stray eldrazi that’ve ended up scattered on their worlds. What most understand is that the Eldrazi show up following great magical disasters, create a wasteland wherever they go, and seem to have an innate ability to overcome and subvert magical defences. Most are content simply to hunt them on sight, and the prime eldrazi seem more than content to let their stray buds be culled while they focus on the real task of eating worlds.

Adventure Hooks:

High in the mountains there’s said to be the wreck of some kind of flying ship, that locals say they saw hurtling through the sky decades ago only to crash somewhere amid the peaks. The ship is in fact a spelljammer, and salvaging its helm might just be the first step in the party setting off on their first cosmic adventure. All is not well though, as when they begin exploring the high cliffs and isolated valley, they find ship and much of the surrounding landscape has been turned into a spiralling labyrinth of giant bismuth crystals, the haunt of a few eldrazi the jammer crew picked up while fleeing a dying world that ended up scuttling them in the end. 

Powerful spikes of magic draw the eldrazi across the planes, so after the mid-campaign villain attempts their apotheosis and fails miserably, not only to the party have to deal with whatever threat that unleashed, but increasing numbers of sightings of horrifying entities skulking about the countryside near the villain’s old lair. This gives the party a chance to re-explore an old dungeon, finding its corridors warped and its chambers filled with dust. 

Desperate to impress their supervisor by summoning a rare creature from the outer planes, a group of arcane grad students at the local magical college have unwittingly ended up snagging an eldrazi away from its brood, and are intent on studying it. For its part, the eldrazi seems oddly complacent, but is infact exerting its flesh warping influence on the students and the animals surrounding their lab. The party first gets involved tracking drown grotesque chimeras of ratswarms and stray beats, which invariably lead them through the increasingly organic sewers and up into the lab, where the eldrazi has broken containment.   Not all the students are accounted for, and while some got away with benign abnormalities, others have been incorporated into the brood, and will seek new places to take root.

Also, while there’s no official stats for eldrazi, a lot of great creators have already taken the challenge upon themselves, so I encourage you to go out and find some of their work.

HTTYD is so special, how often do you get to spend this much time with your main cast??? Watch them GROW UP???? Consume literal HOURS of material in the forms of movies, shows, comics, games, shorts, etc????? We're so SPOILED

Prompt 263

Once More, we return to Tiamat prompts. 

It was a wonderful idea, really! If one of them couldn’t break the barrier, then surely their combined might would do it! And it had! It had worked, even if their remaining humanity was sacrificed. They’d done it, they’d made it where everyone could escape, could leave!

… Except for them. Someone had to close the portal. And it all would have been fine, if not for the remnants of the GIW. One last hail mary from the imbeciles, they all supposed. Trapping them here within the Zone. 

Separated from their families, from the pair of children they had agreed to raise. At least their siblings would watch over Ellie and Jordan. Kyle could hide them, make sure they were safe. Jazz… Jazz was gone, the final straw in this plan. 

They screamed, they raged, they destroyed in grief for those that didn’t make it, and for those who had but had nowhere to go. No portals opened, even as they tore at the green around them. They fought, any that thought they were weak, that they were merely a beast, an abomination trapped in chains of science and gold. 

There was nothing that could be done, Frostbite had said, sympathy in his voice. No way to turn back the clock with how entwined they had become, Clockwork had explained. The only thing they could do was wait, Pandora had tried to sooth, despite it doing nothing. 

They wrenched open the coffin in a hazy fury, tearing apart armies like it was blades of grass. Their maws devoured dead who had lost themselves and become mere husks and thralls, lashing tails ripping through armour like it was nothing. 

And then as titans, they clashed with the one who had once stolen the city here. There was no desperation from them this time, no armor besides scales unbreakable as flames and storms and ice and thorns ripped islands apart. There was no desperation besides that of their opponent’s. 

There was a pleasure in their victory, before it was wrenched away. What use was a crown when their family wasn’t there? When their daughter, their son, their children were not there by their side? 

Paulina laughed, hysterical as ectoplasm dripped from her maw as Kwan howled. Their body was covered in it, their rampage that had no use, no reason leaving a trail of destruction behind them. Is this what they wanted? 

No. 

Danny raised his head from the dissolving corpses to look towards the obliterated roof of the Keep, once so terrifying now turning to dust like the crown. The crown reforming above their heads, heavy and almost choking. 

They would carry this weight together. Would restructure things, would do what they had wanted to do for Amity before the Barriers. They’d work together to rebuild the Realms, make it safer, make it safe for those newly dead. 

No matter how long it took, no matter how hard it would be to fix the destruction they had wrought in this meaningless battle. (“Danny, you’re the spokesperson,” Sam spoke up, thorn-like scales ruffling. “You’re most familiar with the realms thanks to the Infinimap.” Fair. “We’ll need allies, we’re only nine people.”)

(“Let me talk to the egyptian afterlife,” Tucker sounded exhausted, hood folding back. “I’m most familiar with them… Star, Paulina, you’re both Princess Dora’s favorites-”)

(“We can do it. Just give us time.” “Maybe a to-do list.” “Clockwork. We need to talk to Clockwork, he’d be most familiar with this.” “Rest first, nerds. We’re all… exhausted.”)

(Valerie laughed tiredly, blades melting to heal a broken horn. “Time isn’t linear here Dash. You know that. I know that. For once we’re the ones with time to spare.” It would take years to get things up to snuff. Make things Safe for when they could bring their families here.)

Their eyes opened as the now flimsy chains shattered, a smile stretching across the shared face of their humanoid form. Soon. They could return to the mortal realm soon. Just a little more, and they could see their little ones.  They'd waited a thousand years, they could wait a few days more.

(also have sketch)

@fairy-lights-and-blobs @radiance1 You both seem to enjoy my Tiamat prompts/Aus lol

when ur trying to be a silly little flirty guy but your friend is too busy going through the most harrowing experiences known to man