#outer spheres

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.

Dungeon: The Sanctum of Thwarted Fates

Adventure Hooks: 

While swapping tall tales at the local inn, the party hears tell of a place high in the mountains, a ruin where broken towers float in the sky overlooking a lake of blood. Travel close enough, the mountaineers say, and the heavens themselves will change into something frightening and foreign, a starless expanse of perpetual dusk, lit by the harsh glare of unfading, static moons. A wild story to be sure and completely diverging from their current quest, but still the temptation to make the hike might prove great enough to draw them off the trail. 

Sometime later in their journey and perhaps in need of an oracle, the party hears tell of a missing court astronomer, one who was known to speak to nobles and prosperous merchants about the hidden influences of heavenly bodies. One such merchant, paralyzed by superstition is willing to pay the party a small fortune to track this star gazer down, having gathered from some of their contacts that the astronomer was last seen heading out of town ( in the direction of the mountains, but they haven’t put that together just yet). 

A series of disasters and rumors of a raving madman that fortold them eventually leads the party to the Astronomer, haggard from his journey up the mountain and in possession of terrible powers. Eyes glowing with a baleful red light, he predicts bridge collapses, neighborhood destroying fires, even the falling of stars, and it soon becomes clear to the party that the astronomer isn’t just telling the future, but speaking it into existence. A desperate following has collected around the astronomer seeking to avoid these terrible fates, and will defend their prophet from any harm the party might intend towards him. 

Setup: Once dedicated to a goddess of high and lofty places, the sanctum was originally home to an order of mystics who sought enlightenment by casting their minds beyond the bounds of reality, journeying out into the astral plane and beyond. One of their order, reckless and hungry for a taste of the ineffable ventured into realms strange and forbidden, drawing the attention of !rhu-nyji: an outer god who plays with reality the way a child toys with clay. The outer god made contact with the wayward acolyte and flowed backwards into the monastery grounds, damaging the very essence of the material plane in the process.  

The sanctum’s grounds now lay desecrated, not by the unholy but by the corrosive influence of something hostile to the idea of stability itself. Cold winds of the outer planes gust across this scorched threshold, and !rhu-nyji lingers just beyond, baleful influence ready to be invoked should someone go poking around where they’re not supposed to be.... like a certain astronomer who heard tales of strange horizons and decided to investigate for himself. 

Deity: Mnyull, the Revelation Tyrant

Fasinating stuff my friend, my latest translation of old imperial accounts reveal a previously unknown confession from the rogue general Paldermot. As you well know, current historical narratives have the general sacking the capital city in a failed attempt to seize power from the Tribunes, but if this text is to be believed the Tribunes captured Paldermot and dispersed his rebel legion before he ever entered the city. It goes on to say, in a transcription of Paldermot's own words that he had "Followed a star" to the "seat of a new imperium", and claimed that the star had promised great allies to aid him in his conquest. The text is unquestionably authentic , but it throws our entire understanding of events into question; If Paldermot was captured in the midst of his rebellion, who or what destroyed the capital and turned the surrounding countryside into a crater?

Setup: Hurdling across the void of the astral sea, the meteoric god Mnyull brings ruin wherever he goes, the embodiment of unrelenting invasion at the hands of an inexorable foe. Unlike other gods which present themselves in abstract forms felt across the multiverse Mnyull prefers to exist as an incarnated singular being, a towering construct built around the mummified yet undying body of his current mortal avatar.

This living reliquary leads an army of crusading zealots scattered throughout the multiverse known as the starry horde, followers and adherents of its former vessels who believe that by serving the Revelation Tyrant, they continue the legacy of their particular heaven-chosen liege. It is important to note then that Mnyull and his followers do not adhere to any one ideology as they hold the act of conquest itself sacred, whatever form that conquest takes. Like a shooting star the tyrant god is constantly on the move, dragging his followers into one conflict after another before retiring to a palatial demiplane of rock and ice for decades or centuries at a time to rule those realms where his cult has taken hold.

It is for this reason that some theologians have considered classifying Mnyull as an outergod, those divine beings considered actively hostile to the stability of realities they interact with. Debate rages in those lofty circles however as the hostility the Revelation Tyrant represents usually takes the form of “ Invade them with an alien army before or after hitting their world with a big rock or series of big rocks”.  While the scholar dither, Mnyull bides his time, growing ever closer to some innocent world that has no idea of the disaster that is about to strike it.

Hooks:

The Party’s homeland is struck by the invasion force of a kingdom that fell to Mnyull’s influence generations ago. While more traditional warfare occupies the early adventures of the campaign, they begin to uncover hints of lore about their enemy’s newly arisen (and apparently immortal) theocratic leader along with the strange monument she’s building. Just as it seems they might have an upper hand against the invaders, their enemies deploy new and terrifying weapons and otherworldy allies, sourced from the portal they’ve just finished building.

Sometimes Mnyull decides to feed his urge for conquest by invading a random plane, riding a chunk of astral rock through its firmament and establishing a kingdom wherever he lands. The Revelation Tyrant is not a creature of foresight however, and on his most recent outing ended up impacting into one of that plane’s moons. Refusing to give up he’s carved out a realm among the strange creatures that live among the palid rocks of that blasted planetoid, and now sets his sites upon the verdant world below.

While enjoying a trip to the local archives and observatory, the party are interrupted by agents of the starry horde, looking to plunder the vaults looking for information regarding great weapons created to break worlds known only as “The Anvils”. Predating even the Revelation Tyrant’s earliest memory, Mnyull once used his divine will to steer these ancient tools towards ever more destructive ends, until a coalition of forgotten heroes toppled him from his throne for fear he would turn the weapons upon them. 

Deity: NokolOb-Zich , Outer god of the Unmaking Inquiry

As you approach the cultists altar, you can’t help but shake the feeling of being watched. Something has witnessed your deeds here, and it is hungry to see more.

Setup: Many occultists will speak of the terrifying obscurity of their patrons, of powers beyond mortal ken that look upon the waking world with little more than disgust or disregard. Few then speak of those powers that are fascinated mortal kind not in the jealous, imitate way of gods, or in the detached curiosity of alien arbiters, but in the rapture of a child staring at insects beneath an overturned rock, or an anatomist over a vivisected frog. The scrutiny of such a being would be terrible, as it can bring unseen powers to bear to poke and prod the object of its focus into the desired stimulus, moving through impossible angles to allow the target of its obsession no possible escape from its probing scalpel.

  NokolOb-Zich is one such entity, a thing that peers through cracks in reality looking for new things to catch its interest. Seldom invoked by dabblers in the forbidden arts, ‘Ob-Zich is less likely to grant its petitioners power or knowledge as it is to crack part their minds and start picking over all the pieces. Still, the Voyeur has itself a following, mainly in other inquisitive sorts who hollow out a part of their own mind to act as the outergod’s peephole into their own lives, absorbing scraps of eldritch insight like some kind of cognitive remora.

Those who have encountered the entity report that it has very little of a physical form, existing as only a sense of being observed and an endless stream of nonsensical questions: “ When will you cry? How does joy taste? What shape is your favorite sound? that lead in the general direction of a conversation”. Others have reported visions of eyes peering through empty spaces and endless grasping hands, though these are likely to be an effort by NokolOb-Zich to communicate its intent rather than a hint at its physical form.

Adventure hooks:

The Voyeur seeks not only to observe, but to provoke, spurring the subjects of its fascination into action so as to better be able to understand them. To this end it may set a horrid monster on a settlement divided by civil strife to see how the community reacts to an outside threat, or haunt a lone individual to test how their mind deals with the pressure. Stranger however is when the entity randomly chooses to be “nice”, creating facsimiles of long departed loved ones to see who a bereaved individual might change, or delivering an oddly appropriate gift to a stranger just to see their reaction. The outer god should never be considered benign, as those gifts are never given out of a sense of selflessness and are most often intended to make the target squirm.

Those seeking to know the dark secrets of history or the possible future will sometimes invoke NokolOb-Zich if their need is great and their self preservation is small. Eschewing traditional sacrifices of blood or treasure, the outergod prefers twisted tales involving the lives of mortals, traditionally involving those who compromised their values or ended up in bizarre or paradoxical situations due to their convictions. Those petitioners who do not have their own stories of mishap are often forced to create one if they wish to trade, creating innumerable networks of tragedy, blackmail, and sorrow that all lead back to the wandering eye.

Terrible is the favor of a god of heedless knowledge, as ‘Ob-Zich’s blessings are likely to manifest in the form of ceaseless visions from across the known universe, just as likely to contain the wisdom of dead civilizations to your neighbors’ dirty gossip. What’s more, the voyeur has no problem distributing dangerous knowledge to those people/cultures totally unready for it, leading to calamitous advances in technology, magic, or warefare for those unready for its burden. More than one disaster has been caused by NokolOb-Zich depositing dangerous information into the mind of an unstable arcanist or inventor, or simply some emotionally immature weirdo given step-by-step instructions to unleashing havoc.

Titles: The Voyeur, The Wandering eye, The all devouring unknown,

Signs: Feelings of being watched, endless questions, constant whispering, alien eyes staring through holes in places where there should not be holes.

Villain:  Avhidrem, the Sculptor in Ivory

“ Hey, did anyone get hurt in that last skirmish? ...There’s a lot of blood.... 

oh.... 

...oh its the walls....

Oh that’s infinitely worse”

-Nelegaine Nighteye, dungeon delver

Adventure Hooks: 

Folks traveling through the highlands have reported strange phenomenon, ranging from the feeling of being watched to disturbing abstract pictograms inked onto rocks with sanguine pigments. A rare few have even reported discovering patches of cliff or caves twisted into alien monuments, their base materials transmuted into the greasy-glossy texture of gristle covered bone. 

Ghost stories surrounding the old abbey tell of monks who refused to give up treasures to a marauding local lord, and so were sealed inside their hall and burned alive for their defiance. Occasionally, great lights are seen far out in the wilderness, which folk speculate are the still burning spirits of the holyfolk come to hold vigil over their own graves. 

Bloodied and frantic, a trapperwoman comes staggering into town, having run two nights and a day after encountering something horrifying while out checking her lines. She reports being chased at great speed by a spinning disk of stone, which as only slowed when it had to cut through rock or trees to hurl itself at her. She managed to lose it by getting it to bury itself half way into a solid granite cliff-face, wereafter she limped back to the settlement. She says that she encountered a faceless being while getting water from a brook near the edge of the foothills, but she had no time to process what she saw before it’d hurled a volley of stone needles her way, some of which are still buried in her flesh. No telling what happened to her hunting partner she left behind in her mad flight, but if the party investigates the strange construct, they’ll discover that it’s driven to seek the needles at the fastest speed available to it. 

Setup:  Enslaved for xer ability to open portals through the multiverse , the aberrant mage Avhidrem escaped xer captors only by wrecking their dimension hopping vessel and hightailing it into the wilderness. Now stranded in an ostensibly alien world, the mage works to find a way home without attracting the attention of the slavers who’d still see xem as valuable savage. 

A noble enough goal, but that desperate desire to avoid discovery means that Avhidrem sees any sapient creature that crosses into xer territory as a potential threat, and doggedly peruses them with an anxious terror, leading to crypid-style tales of being stalked through the highlands by a faceless entity, or outright disappearances when Avhidrem thinks they’ve learned too much. 

Random encounter: Flotsam of a Far off Shore

All rivers flow together, and what is lost on one bank may yet be discovered on another. 

Adventure Hooks: 

Tales of strange flora and mutant fish in the river bring the party to an isolated valley in the highlands, where they find an alien landscape has taken root and a derelict ship run aground in technicolor mud. Searching the ship’s cargo hold they find long spoiled crates and vessels full of unidentifyable goods, as well as a wealth of raw rubies and a a few esoteric magical devices. Figuring out how these treasures work and where they came from will be a puzzle in and of itself, and may require someone with esoteric skills, or a lot of trial and error. 

Cages in the ships hull reveal that it was also carrying live cargo, though whether these were livestock or prisoners is impossible to tell given the small scattering of aberrant bones or hollow carapaces that remain in the few unruptured enclosures. These alien beasts now populate the valley, stalking the party as intruders into their territory. 

Perhaps the oddest salvage from the ship is it’s log, not a leger but a midnight blue crystal about the size of a satsuma, that the party finds in possession of a sharp toothed skeleton near crumbled to dust. When attuned, the crystal floats about the head of the activating creature and silently observes, occasionally pestering them with alien words projected into their mind.  After a long enough time together, the crystal will begin probing them every couple of days with a random word it has overheard and a concept that might be related to it. Should the party indulge this game, eventually the log will synthesize their language, being able to communicate everything it has eidetically recorded. 

Setup: Though trading barges are known to take roundabout routes through the highlands in hopes of reaching resource rich frontier settlements, it’ll become obvious to a party with a lay of the land that this particular valley is bracketed by rapids and waterfalls, making the strange ship’s appearance even more implausible. As it turns out the vessel the party discovers hailed from the miasmic plane of Leng, a place of terrors and traders most of the multiverse would prefer forgotten. and was brought to the valley by a teleportation accident brought about by a cutrate ship’s mage. 

Intending to teleport the vessel to a prosperous trading port somewhere across the astral sea,  this Leng mage used poorly made maps that ended up conjuring the ship a few hundred feet in the air. The crash killed most of the crew, shattered the hull, and released those creatures it was intending to sell. Coincidentally, it also released all the parasites and spires infesting that hull, which over the subsequent years took root in the surrounding muck. 

Ally: Lexxia Mare, Scholar of the Ashen Wastes

The sage put down her scepter, and spoke with a sympathy unfelt in her expression.  “I’m sorry, it appears you and your companions have appeared at an inauspicious time, the dust-storms last for weeks this time of year, and afterwords the saltskitters will be out claiming new territory along the dunes..”  

“ What is this place? “ Asked Rhorgar

“ Who are you?” queried Verna

“ Where in the nine hells are we?!” Demanded Ogierd, which drew the stranger’s reproachful glare.  

“Not so far as that, I assure you.. but much farther than any of you have likely been before. Come, we will shelter in the lower catacombs away from the howling wind, and I will answer any question you may have. Questions are why I found myself in this ruin in the first place, and I have uncovered a few answers to share in my hermitage.”  

-A journey beyond the horizon: a tale of the Patrisford five

Setup: Though it features prominently in the mysticism of nearly all cultures, few pay much attention to the moon, far as it is beyond the reach of mortals and too constant in its cycles to never warrant scrutiny. Scraps of lore speak of divine palaces on the outskirts of the firmament and while some scholars see the truth of these tales, most other consider them little better than the fairy-stories hinting at the existence of foggy gardens and pearlesant seas. 

Lexxia Mare was one of these scholars, a deacon of a dogmatic faith who’s patron had long since ceased his visitations to the mortal world. Dissatisfied with endless postulation on the abstract nature of their absent benefactor and the vagaries of his last commandments, the deacon decided to seek a means to meet with the god on her own terms. Seeking out a relic from the founding of the faith said to have come from the god’s own halls, Lexxia used her substantial power to teleport herself back to the relic’s origin, finding herself in a deserted ruin where the world of her birth hung in the sky like a glistening jewel. 

While it might have once been the realm of palaces and pearl gardens hinted at by the stories, Lexxia found the moon to be a far cry from that splendor: an endless, ruin dotted wasteland filled with nothing but glistening silver-white sand and the windcarved canyons. Here she spent several years in isolation, combing through the wastes for clues to a forgotten past and meditating on the foundations of her faith.  Though her hermitage has led her no closer to her god, it has greatly increased her wisdom and occacular powers, and should the party seek a guide to the cosmos, they could ask for none better. 

Adventure Hooks: 

A teleportation mishap under an open sky leads to the party being deposited into the wastes or a lunar ruin. Disoriented and preyed upon by strange beasts of the wasteland, they are saved from their predicament by Mare, who offers them her own hermitage as a place to retreat and recover their strength.   

Lunar ravagers are towering fey raiders who live in floating fortresses among the clouds and descend to hunt dangerous prey by the light of full moon. Though they are rare and secretive on the planet below, they maintain a constant presence above the lunar surface, able to utilize their full abilities whenever they wish and finding no end of game among the dangerous scavengers of the palace-moon.  Those abducted by the fey as slaves may end up escaping to the silvery wastes below, or may be freed by Lexxia when she comes to parlay with yet another ravager fortress infringing on her territory.