Who is in the Demiplane of Imprisonment?

[victorysaber]

From issue 353. Who is the dude trapped inside?

 

[Delta]

Historically I assumed that it was Tharizdun. When the plane was first mentioned (1E Manual of the Planes, as I recall), the description seemed very similar to flavor in module WG4, and the novels that Gygax was then doing about him after leaving TSR.

 

[Shawn_Kehoe]

From issue 353. Who is the dude trapped inside?

I'm guessing something nasty from the Far Plane. But then, I do like Lovecraftian horror.

Next time I want to really shake up my campaign setting, I think I might let the PCs get imprisoned in the crystal, only to be freed centuries later when the entity has escaped and laid waste to the land.

Shawn

 

[Shemeska]

From issue 353. Who is the dude trapped inside?

It doesn't say it openly, but it's supposed to be Tharizdun. At least that was my intention, and some additional text that said as much outright was trimmed before publication.

The demiplane’s origin is ancient, and the mythology of its founding appears in a hundred variations across a thousand prime material worlds, with the names changing to fit the local theology. But the stories all possess one common truth: the demiplane is the prison of a malevolent deity of oblivion called the Dark God, the Elder Elemental Eye, Tharizdun, the Elder Elemental God, who seeks nothing less than the destruction of everything.

So feared was this entity, that unable or unwilling to kill him, a pantheon of rival gods or other planar powers sealed him away. These legends are ancient, with fiendish historians placing the Dark God's imprisonment near the birth of the first deities spawned of mortal worship, and potentially before that point, suggesting the entity might not be a god in the same sense, but something else, maybe even originally native to another multiverse.

Removing the direct naming of big T does make the demiplane more plug'n'play for homebrew campaigns, or anything else that lacks the core planar history, etc. But that was my original intention with the article, though I was under a pretty hard word count, so I wasn't able to go with some other ideas about Tharizdun that would have portrayed him as something other than a god, yet very much a product of the conventional multiverse rather than something from the Far Realm or elsewhere (though the original, but trimmed text above does hint that he's something wierd).

Really, how many imprisoned beings of madness and entropy are linked to a veined purple whirlpools and creepy eyes?

I was drawing on the demiplane and big T's history from the 1e MotP, 2e Guide to the Ethereal, and 3e RttToEE. Again, the word count didn't leave me with an absolute ton of room to elaborate from the baseline in earlier editions, though since they never described the exterior I had some fun with the bubbling dreamscapes frothing around the demiplane's boundary, etc. I really enjoyed getting to talk about it.

 

[Nightfall]

Shem,

Mind reposting that part of Moil that got cut also?

 

[Shemeska]

Shem,

Mind reposting that part of Moil that got cut also?

I did in the earlier thread about issue 353, but there's not much that got chopped. I was much more frugal in writing that section, because it was the largest of the three demiplanes I got to cover in terms of word allowance. Given another page of so, I would have gone into some depth about some of Acererak's "leftovers", Orcus's newfound use of some of the more intact towers, and some of his minions retaking control of the place.

The edited text is a little scattered about the draft, so I'll have to break out my copy of the magazine to compare. Won't get to post it till later because I'm going to go out for dinner with the post-NC gameday crowd.

 

[Crothian]

It doesn't say it openly, but it's supposed to be Tharizdun. At least that was my intention, and some additional text that said as much outright was trimmed before publication.

Well, that was a simple mystery to solve

 

[Nightfall]

Shem,

No worries. Just email it to me instead when you get the chance.