Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanist
Speaking of Tharizdun, what exactly is he that makes the other gods quake in there boots?
A dreadful bore. Seriously, if you ever have dinner with the guy, you'll want to throw him in a Demiplane of Imprisonment too. Doesn't help that he argues about his cut of the bill when the time comes to pay up.
Oh wait, you meant the
other Tharizdun.
The Dark God, The Ender, He of Eternal Darkness, the Ebon God, the Black Sun, the Patient One, He Who Waits, the Wrongly Held, the Anathema, the Father of Elder Evils, the Author of Wickedness, the Eater of Worlds, the Despised, the Undoer, the Chained God.
Don't have dinner with him, either.
Tharizdun is a... well he's a
thing. In his current form, he is an intermediate power of divine rank 11, bound within the Demiplane of Imprisonment by a coalition of powerful deities. The power he extends is limited and must frequently be focused through one of his artifacts to be employed; however, his current power is vastly superior to the small number of worshipers he possesses, something that should not be possible.
Tharizdun is
old. Speculation ties him to the Far Realm, and certainly most of his followers are quite insane, but the nature of him doesn't add up. To the learned of the far-off world of Mystara, he might be described as an Immortal of Entropy... but again, it's not a perfect fit. Perhaps the Dark God is no more than any other divinity, only more ardent in his active pursuit of destructive evil... or perhaps he is something that arose in the cosmology that predated the Great Wheel, an infection from out of time that escaped the dying days of an older order.
Tharizdun is
anathematic. His dogma is written thus: "The very threads of existence must be torn asunder, then burned, then the ashes scattered, until all is nothing and no one exists to remember existence." Tharizdun despises existence in each and every one of its permutations.
Tharizdun is
insidious. He has no true allies, but has been linked to the Princes of Elemental Evil in one guise (that of the Elder Elemental Eye) and works with major fiends as his unwitting pawns, including Iuz and Zuggtmoy. For millennia, when Tharizdun's worship was all but dead, a wraithform known only as "the Dark God" lurked in the shadowy reaches of the Outer Planes, spreading nightmares and corruption. This Dark God seeded the black diamond that corrupted the fey goddess now known as the Queen of Air and Darkness. It is now believed that the wraithlike deity was an aspect of Tharizdun, an expression of his malevolence capable of moving outside the Demiplane of Imprisonment and acting as a deity.
If the Far Realm is likened to chaos despite not being truly of Chaos, then Tharizdun is its counterpart in relation to Evil. Even the most blackhearted gods and sinister fiends would be averse to working with the Chained God if they knew of his involvement in events. That this entity retains so much power within the Demiplane of Imprisonment, and yet can move and operate beyond it in many guises, is what sets him (or it) apart from other elder evils and inspires dread in the gods.