#kaorti

The Far Realm: A Place Beyond the Known Multiverse

While information on the Far Realm in 5th edition remains sparse, D&D’s 3rd edition Manual of the Planes delved into the impossible geometry behind this extradimensional space. In short, both gravity and time are absent in the Far Realm, and instead of the normal rules of physics, the Far Realm is composed of an infinite array of translucent layers that seemingly meld into each other. Inhabitants of the Far Realm can pass from one layer to another simply by willing it, and landmarks—encompassing everything from alien seascapes to forests of giant floating tentacles—might stretch across multiple layers.

Forget what you know about the various planes of existence in D&D. The Far Realm is beyond the planes themselves, and according to the Dungeon Master’s Guide, might well be a separate universe existing outside of the D&D Multiverse. Just as we can’t exactly fathom what exists beyond our own universe, the majority of denizens from D&D’s various worlds have no idea what lies in the Far Realm. Learned mages and daring Githyanki sailors of the Astral Sea might have an inkling of this unfathomable cosmic space. But even then, those who strive too hard to understand it risk shattering the limits of their mind.

Monsters of the Far Realm

Chances are, travelers to the Far Realm will be flummoxed by the place’s strange geometry, only comprehending bits and pieces of lifeforms and landmasses depending on which layer they stand on.

The Far Realm first originated in the 1996 module The Gates of Firestorm Peak, for D&D’s 2nd edition. There, adventurers learned of a portal that ancient elves had once opened to the Far Realm, freeing a host of deadly alien creatures. That portal has long since been closed, but the monsters born from the murky goop outside of the multiverse have over time found their way into D&D’s various worlds.

When considering creatures either native to the Far Realm or touched by its energy, think of aberrations—including D&D mainstays like the Beholder, Illithid, and Aboleth, as well as lesser-known entities like the Neogi and the Nothic. 3rd Edition D&D also featured the Kaorti, an alien race who had once been wizards of the Forgotten Realms but were transformed into unnatural, desiccated humanoids by one of the Elder Evils, the greatest of Far Realm creatures.

The Elder Evils of the Far Realm

The Elder Evils are hinted at in Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes as “beings set apart from what mortals consider reality,” as well as the masters behind the sinister heralds of doom known as Star Spawns. Usually incapable of leaving the Far Realm, the Elder Evils’ influence leaks out into the worlds of the Material Plane, often influencing the actions of power-hungry cultists.

Examples of these horrific, primordial forces include

- THARIZDUN — the Chained Destroyer god who created the Abyss

— KYUSS - the Worm That Walks, a giant supposedly composed of a mass of slithering maggots.

Fans of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos will find the Elder Evils familiar, since Lovecraft wrote of unfathomable titans that existed beyond the fringes of reality, dwarfing all human conceptions of good and evil. Any Dungeon Master looking to portray these immense beings might do well to investigate Lovecraft’s writing or read the sections on cosmic horror and fear and stress in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft.

Visiting the Far Realm

The Far Realm is unkind to creatures from the D&D multiverse. Tasha's Cauldron of Everything includes a rollable table of environmental effects for the Far Realm. A character could suddenly find the ground has turned into writhing flesh or that they are compelled to complete a ritual that will conjure a Death Slaad.

"Each round the adventurers are in the Far Realm, they must each make a successful DC 15 Wisdom saving throw at the beginning of each turn or suffer the effects of confusion that round. The chart has been modified from the one in the Player’s Handbook to more accurately reflect the effects of the Far Realm."

"Rrakkma" , an introductory adventure to Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, includes a punishing mechanic that shows how quickly the Far Realm can warp a character's mind:

CONFUSION BEHAVIOR

D10 | BEHAVIOR

1 | The creature uses all its movement to move in a random direction. To determine the direction, roll a d8 and assign a direction to each die face. The creature doesn't take an action this turn.

2–7 | The creature doesn't move or take actions this turn.

8–10 | The creature uses its action to make a melee attack against a randomly determined creature within its reach. If there is no creature within its reach, the creature does nothing this turn.

Adventures in the Far Realm

While the Far Realm might seem difficult to grasp, its nebulous nature also makes it a compelling sandbox for DMs who want to make their players’ heads spin.

1. The Far Realm’s most direct link to the characters is the Great Old One Warlock patron. The reasons behind why this ancient entity might share its power could be the stuff of an entire campaign, particularly one starring warlocks who all serve the Great Old One. Perhaps this elusive patron is a benevolent deity of the Far Realm, and is in fact seeking to get the characters to travel to its domain to defeat the encroaching forces of the kaort!

Consider the following three hooks for adventures involving the Far Realm:

2. Previous editions of D&D hinted that psionic power originated in the Far Realm. This is an excellent kernel to explore in an adventure starring character subclasses like the Psi Warrior Fighter, the Aberrant Mind Sorcerer, and the Soulknife Rogue. Paint the characters as outcasts who are feared for their Psionic Abilities, similar to mutant heroes like the X-Men. Then, dangle the possibility of them learning the origins of their power in the Far Realm. Perhaps a group of Githyanki—who also specialize in psionics—are willing to transport the characters to the Far Realm, but only if they first assist them in an assault on a Mind Flayer outpost in the Astral Sea!

3. If you want to incorporate a smidgeon of the Far Realm into your game without making it the focus of an entire campaign, try crafting a single dungeon based on this Esoteric Dimension. The characters might stumble into the dungeon via a portal, or perhaps while fiddling with a Cubic Gate left behind in an Aboleth’s treasure horde. Their quest to escape can easily take up several sessions at the gaming table. Reskin one of the levels of Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage for a quick start, replacing the monsters with aberrations and setting the dungeon in a multi-layered tentacle forest of the Far Realm instead of the hallways of Undermountain. Your players will be none the wiser, since they’ll be too busy trying to figure out exactly where they ended up!

Cosmic Depths Await You

There’s no time like the present to start planning a dive into D&D’s most bizarre setting.

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.

Background: Though it exists in a sorry state today, the vessel known as the Mandible of Hydax (crude translation) was once a force to be reckoned with, its living stone hull quarried from the body of a fossilized god, bristling with weapons under the direction of a gith warlord who was the terror of the astral sea

Hydax was just as fearsome as her ship, a self styled “tyrant for hire”, she, her mercenary crew, and her warship would contract out for any body of extradimensional oligarchs who didn’t have the strength to put a boot to the neck of their lessers, breaking strikes, defeating rebellions, and ensuring the peasants kept doing their job. This was until Hydax was hired to go after who she and her superiors thought was merely a unusually fucked up spellcaster but was in fact a Kaorti, an emissary of the far realm possessed of terrifying, reality warping powers.   Hydax managed to get her quarry in a cage, and was just in the process of finding a nice void rift to throw the bastard into when the Kaotri ripped them from the astral sea, overriding the ship’s spelljamming helm and throwing them at the nearest material plane ( the party’s home) with enough force to bury the ship beneath the skin of the world like shrapnel. 

Challenges & Complications:

The subterranean path required to reach the Mandible are a hazard unto themselves, with many requiring perilous detours to avoid cave ins and other geological instabilities caused by the ship’s impact. The inhabitants are likewise dangerous, including more than one band of cave-things wielding weapons salvaged from the gith crew or the Mandible itself.

Hydax’s ship contains all manner of wonders and dangers, raging from an arsenal of unearthly weapons and other memorabilia to an archive of (centuries out of date) information regarding the goings on of many alien worlds. Perhaps most valuable of all is the ship’s spelljamming helm, which could be refitted into a new vessel to allow the party to explore the stars. Removing it however may trigger any number of defences, ranging from malfunctioning constructs to a curse from the long dead captain, wraith against any who would loot her prized ship.