Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Great and Terrible Cosmic Entities

The multiverse is a dark and unforgiving place. Here are a small smattering of various cosmic entities of intense power and dubious origins to use in your games. Hopefully these entries inspire more questions than answers.


Rusgar

Rusgar is hungry. When this moon, the slightest of rust-colored pinpoints in a nebula-speckled sky, comes into the vision of the Kin, disaster and misfortune follow. Astrological events of terrible and potent significance revolve around the rotations of this distant moon, and auspicious events of a tragic or horrifying nature on a large scale are sometimes followed by Rusgar’s untimely appearance in the sky carrying a massive electric-blue miasma in this lunar atmosphere (hence the phrase “once in a blue moon”). Aeros lies in fear of its neighbor, and with every year astronomers seem to find it moves closer and closer…

What is it? An old and long abandoned (or perhaps not so?) planet coated in malignant technologies, the carapace of a massive living entity that yearns for our destruction, a psychic regulator of negative emotional energy, a great and terrible eye


The Silver Flame

The drow of the city-state of Aaranumbral worship this entity. It sits in the highest chamber of the highest tower of the city, overlooking the placid lake and ethereal forest with a watchful eye. It is waited on hand and feet by the most sacrosanct of its priesthood. It dispenses motes of itself into Crucibles of Possibility, to be spread by the priesthood and used to unlock the ancient cycles of reincarnation in the folk of the Vipernoss woods. Some may well call the work of the Silver Flame heresy. Would their soul know the joy of returning to another body?

What is it? The reincarnated soul of a god (or perhaps a primordial), an ancient and alien AI, a star chained to the earth, a long-dead elvish god


The Raven Queen

The judge of the dead. The Raven Queen, an intelligence of shadow and crystal and silver and mirrors and feathers the color of midnight, is a psychic entity whose sole purpose is to assign the souls of the recently departed to their appropriate afterlives. The Raven Queen cannot be swayed or contacted, her judgement is final, and Charon will ferry any soul where she instructs. It is said her home is on the Shadowfell, but the location of the Castle of the Raven Queen is well-guarded by her elvish servants, the Shadar-Kai.

What is she? The failed resurrection of a goddess of death after the Godswars, the harnessed consciousness of a primordial, a native mind of Meyaphysiacia, a powerful nature spirit revered and elevated by the gods


The Primordials

    They are the elements, in a visceral sense. If we did not have the primordials, the elements around us would fizzle into nothing. If different ones, composed of elements we could not dream of, had survived the war they fought before the gods, the very makeup of our cosmos would be drastically different. We owe the debt of our existence to these unimaginably powerful creatures, who can barely be made aware of our presence even with the most powerful magics the Kin and the gods could ever wield. They are the underlying thought and impulse behind elemental creatures, the body of collective consciousness that encompasses the four inner planes and devolves into chaos at their penumbra.

    What are they? Long dead masses of dispersed power, malevolent minds scheming our destruction on a macrogeologic time scale, the ever-churning elemental planes themselves


The Lady of Pain

    The enigma of Sigil. The Lady of Pain is the only thing between the planar metropolis of Sigil and oblivion. Without the watch and influence of this god-like entity, and her servants the Dabus, Sigil would not exist. It is her mandate that keeps it a godless place. However, her motivations for her upkeeping the urban sprawl are murky. Are we children to her? Fellow inmates? Charges to be watched over? Lambs for the slaughter?

    What is she? A servitor of the Bound One serving their sentence, a manifestation of the Outlands, the sibling of a long-dead god, one of the Five Original Gods, a hungry parasite from the Far Realm


Primus

    The mind of the plane of Order. The goddess Vithitar is not the one who controls the modrons, Primus is. This utterly logical and balance-focused entity is almost exclusively the mover and shaker on Order, issuing commands and manipulating units into planar excursions towards ineffable ends of cosmic equilibrium. One shudders to imagine a mind as great and unpredictable as Primus wielding so much power…

    What is it? The composite computing power of the modron units, an ancient AI set up by the gods, the creator of the universe, the composite device produced by the gears of Order


The Serpent

Some call it Kukulkan, some call it Jormungandr, some call it the World-Eater, some call it the Void Dreadnought. It is massive, its scaled bulk woven from the darkness of demispace spanning miles and its fangs as tall as gods. It is deeply intelligent and malicious, using its psychic might to probe outwards and find rips in demiplanes it can exploit to enter the world. Woe betide our reality if it were to enter the cosmos. It is said that it consumes entire planes at a time, and it is the universe-ender. Some of the most thoroughly broken worship this thing, serving its dark agenda and seeking to create a rip in the multiverse large enough for it to enter and devour us all.

What is it? The progenitor of the Bound One, a failed experiment by the gods, the Bound One itself, a omniversal predator, a myth


Reavers

Widdershins cloaks many dangers in its ur-darkness. Reavers are orbs of antimatter, their corpses fashioned into Spheres of Annihilation. They don’t seem to act with intent or intelligent design, but appear to be highly malicious towards that which exists, devouring matter and energy and growing ever more bloated the more of reality they destroy. Only powerful magics can stop, contain, or lead the Reavers, and it is unknown whether they have any sort of consciousness or coordination, or even how many there are.

What are they? The dividends of a mad wizard trying to create life in Widdershins, extensions of some cosmic and nigh-godlike void beings from before the age of the Primordials, the native species of nothing

Archfey. The Silver Flame

Fiend. Rusgar, Archdevils, Demon Lords, Prime Daemons

Great Old One. Rusgar, the Serpent, the Lady of Pain

Celestial. Primus, the Silver Flame

Hexblade. The Raven Queen, the Locked Travesties, the Dark Powers

Undying. The Raven Queen, many of the Locked Travesties

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