#quori

[dailyadventureprompts]

Hey Dapper! As an avid follower of- and equally avid inspiration-taker from your work, first of all, thank you for the work you've put into all this. It is a treasure-trove of knowledge and inspiration that has certainly made me very happy. Can I ask for your thoughts on Tharizdun? I've been trying to form a concept of it for in my own world, but I've had little success.

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.

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.

Art

#monsters reimagined #outergod #tharizdun #lovecraftian #outer spheres #astral #kaorti #quori #far realm #planescape #spelljammer

[boociforme]

a little break from artfight posting to show off a scene from our game

a few weeks ago @/absent_lambeth 's Laestis died, but being a kalashtar comes with some perks and she was brought back with the help of @leidensygdom 's Vest, her quori of sorts!

he kind of panicked and brought her back....not quite right, sharing some of his curse with her and now she is slowly getting corrupted by magic crystals 🥲 but it's fine! it's fine. yup.

#original character #dnd #illustration #dnd art #dnd character #tiefling #human #dungeons and dragons #dndoc #kalashtar #quori #fantasy art #fantasy character #dnd oc #dnd5e #ttrpg art

[gaynaturalistghost]

Some of Cairn’s last moments from our campaign and a Bess Atwell song that’s been running in my mind for months. She ate the forbidden fruit and got turned evil. By her logic, she’d only be “1/2” evil since her quori had got separated. She’s a dumbass.

#dnd #kalashtar #mystic #quori #dnd character art #dnd art #comic #lyric art #dungeons and drawings #Cairn #my dnd character #they’re ace/aro #or roommates kind of #art #Spotify

[ccsven]

My Kalashtar and Quori are different from the standard, I’ve noticed. Vesper and Sefsermak come together to make Vesefsermak. Sefsermak is a Hashalaq Quori, a dreamstealer, and he eats dreams like krill. Some of the more vivid dreams play in his mind like a movie and sometimes he finds it hard to differentiate dreams from reality. He drifts through space and never actually communicates with humanoids and so he doesn’t know their cultures. When these vivid dreams play, he thinks these are pieces of history, things that actually happened to people. This has carried over to Ves, when he sleeps, he has these memories of Sefsermak’s memories of these dreams. Being among the people, he often confuses dreams with memories as well and can’t understand when people dream either. Since his “dreams” are memories. He thinks other peoples dreams are also memories.

Vesefsermak is from the astral plane and often travels to other planes to explore. He’s never quite felt at home anywhere, though maybe that’s his Quori slipping though. He’s a drifter and never spends too long in one place.

#dnd #kalashtar #quori #dnd pc #oc

[glory-hasnoplacehere]

Added a muse again. Welcome back. Quori Len.

#gif #quori #join the ranks//new muse #when you see my face hope it gives you hell//Quori #text #words #witchcraft

[honor-among-thieves]

Connor Szarvas // Hexblade 14 - Aberrant Mind 6

In my Connor D&D AU (which is so far from FHR I can't even call it an AU; it is its own thing), Connor Szarvas is a kalashtar who grew up in the Cult of the Night Weaver, an offshoot of the Cult of Dendar, who rewrote history to make themselves seem correct and heroic in the face of devastation of the existence of their plane. Struggling with his predetermined nature as a weapon in the cult and his quori spirit, Szarvas pacts himself out to a shadow being, making himself into a different type of weapon in a bid for his freedom.

After his violent escape from the clutches of the cult, his prison, an unknown benefactor of a seemingly mortal nature reaches out to him to offer safety and relative freedom for the low price of becoming their sword. They are Sasha, a self-made kalashtar boss of the criminal syndicate he has been using to profit and protect himself from this cult, and an unknown older brother to Szarvas. (In this universe, Sasha can defend himself in combat though.) Szarvas is pretty pissed about being left to rot and having to rely on an outsider to secure his escape, so keeps stubbornly telling Sasha to fuck off. ("You left me there. You knew I was doomed to be their tool and you did nothing." "Well, you know how difficult it was to escape the clutches of the Night Weaver. Now we need to have each other's backs.")

As his pact with the shadow being solidifies, the aberrant nature of his soul becomes unstable and manifests itself in strange and powerful ways. He is becoming more quori than mortal in some ways, and he naively embraces it, because he wants nothing more than the power to forge his path. He doesn't know what else is out there, what vies for his attention.

#connor szarvas #dnd #kalashtar #hexblade #aberrant mind sorcerer #aberration #quori #slaps connor's and sasha's hoods; these bad boys can fit so many eyeballs and cosmic horror in them

[hazard100]

Day 16 - Cocky Kalashtar Artificer

When you are a member of the Church of Frozen Thumbs, mixing the natural world with the artificial and creating hybrid inventions is common. One example is Koneto’s Stratosphere Crown, an invention that allows a kalashtar to conjure their quori and transform their psychic abilities into elements such as cold or lighting. This incredible creation may have gotten to the creator’s head, though, metaphorically speaking, as she has begun to dress and act like a princess, seeing herself as better than her kind. This arrogance has caused her to take part of the city for her own, creating an artsy and pompous district and giving herself the title of Snow Queen. It’s safe to say that members of the Church of Frozen Thumbs have decided to distance themselves from the diva and have been trying to reclaim the Stratosphere Crown ever since.

#D&December2022 #d&d #dnd #kalashtar #artificer #quori

[duscarasheddinn]

If you can’t read these, the top one acknowledges that this character is a living construct. But how is that possible if she’s not a Warforged or Bladeforged? She’s an Artificer that took Construct Essence followed by Improved Construct Essence, which turned her into a living construct. Her race is still listed as a Drow Elf and she doesn’t look any different.

I assume that the bottom one has different dialogue if I’m not a Drow. That one is in the Forgotten Realms, where Drow being evil is more common than in Eberron. An NPC was confused that I, a Drow, was freeing her. But she realized I was different from the Realms’ Drow even if she had no idea where I came from.

#ddo #ddo screenshot #ddo screenshots #dungeons and dragons #dungeons & dragons #dnd #d&d #dungeons and dragons online #dungeons & dragons online #menace of the underdark #path of inspiration #the path of inspiration #quori #inspired #drow #drow elf #construct #living construct

[immult]

Predathos said WAKE *US* and i said damn, the Reilorans are already up and about do they need to be extra awake or something?? and then i said DAMN, are the ruidusborns actually vessels and the Reilorans are gonna wake up in their bodies?

#this post is brought to you by the quori 5e wikipage that i read a long time ago. #immult speaking tag #thunk tag

[elphael]

out of context rowan spoilers

#my dm is being coy about whether or not there's a fucking quori living in rowan. #BUG IN ME?

[dailyadventureprompts]

Do you have any ideas/tips/tricks on running a campaign with (former?) bandit-likes as the protagonists? Inspired by your deep dive on the archetype, kinda had ideas of 'main prophecied adventurers are slain by the party, have to take over for the prophecy so as the world wont explode', but if you have alternate ideas or ways to spruce it up, super open.

Adventure: Where the Low Road Leads

Through unworthy means the sword has come to you, and with it you grip a destiny that some part of you knows is too glorious for your dirty hands. You can't help but think perhaps this is your chance to be remembered for anything other than an ignoble end.

The Sword can come into possession of the party in any number of ways:

As the original asker suggested, it would be a great opening for an evil or dark-grey aligned party to pull it from the bodies of a group of adventures or bountyhunters who were hired to stamp them out. If I were running this as the start of a campaign I'd have the story pick up shortly after the fight and subsequent looting has taken place, to ensure your anti-heroes are set on the right course.

Alternatively the sword could very easily be found in a treasure horde, picked off a corpse lost in a the wilderness, or bestowed upon them by some wellmeaning patron.

All that matters is that the sword finds them, and then shortly after that the dreams start: Pitched battle in darkened corridors, a few valiant warriors standing against an onslaught of robed figures and formless horrors, warriors bearing the same amber and knot design that decorates the hilt of the sword's crossguard. The last echoes of a desperate struggle.

After one or two of these visions a strange messenger arrives: Jott, a boisterous homunculus delivering a greeting and a communication stone from his master Telbhar the Wizard. Mostly bound to his far off tower these days, Telbhar is relieved beyond measure that he managed to tack down whoever was in possession of the sword, as it is the keystone in a great undertaking he has been involved in since his youth.

As Telbhar explains, back when he was but an apprentice he and his teacher served a now extinct group known as the Order Fulgoric, who battled many evils in their day but perished preventing an incursion from an unknown otherworldly entity. The blade, Sequester, was crafted to shut out that entity forever, but it was lost in the final rout against the entity's cultists and though the ritual of its summoning was disrupted, the entity ended up half in, half out of our reality, bleeding out its corruption into the world.

Challenges & Complications:

As you may have guessed, Telbhar is not being completely forward with the truth. He was in fact one of the cultists trying to summon the otherworldly entity on the day the Fulgoric order made their final march, and though he fled while his fellow acolytes were being slaughtered he retained enough of their knowledge to reconstruct the ritual many years later. It didn't matter, the Order had succeeded in trapping the entity between worlds and the only way to un-trap it was lost with the sword. Telbhar spent decades searching for it... only for it to resurface in the party's possession. Now he either needs to convince them to bring it to him, or find a means of picking it off their corpses.

The entity the cultists were attempting to summon was a powerful quori dreamspirit known as Uaxt, which was spoken of by ancient sources as a thing capable of granting wishes. Called "Yearning beyond reach" by those that studied it in the past, the entity's true power was in mass delusion, creating waking dreams that would seep across entire kingdoms like a plague. While its body remains entwined through the depths of the dungeon, flash fossilized by the energies of botched planear travel, its mind is imprisoned in the blade, slowly taking root in the party's minds as it uses their dreams to reconstitute itself.

Consider introducing Telbhar when the party is in a deep bind, most in need of wizardly council. It should not be directly related to the sword, alternatively, if your party ends up wanting to seek out a lorekeeper of some kind you may consider introducing Telbhar first and have him ask them to seek the sword in return for helping them with their current woes.

#press start #wizard #low level #cursed item #quori #treasure #lorekeeper #evil party

[kissingagrumpygiant]

ooo i just saw your kalashtar and i love her design !!!!!! can you tell us anything about her ?

oh hee hee, i'd love to~

her name's Irashti and her Quori's name is Lot, so Irashti Lot

she's a circle of the moon druid

like most kalashtar she's on the taller side, maybe around ~180cm

in her early-to-mid 20s don't let the eyebags fool you

she's very soft spoken and gentle in a mia goth kind of way. she's kind and quirky, often says bizarre things out loud without context and the straightest expression, and seeks to help others always and in any way, with little regards to how that would effect her own life

Lot is a rather melancholic character and often thinks of past events and dreams, missing each generation of Irashti's ancestors that passes away and missing their own home and agency. that melancholy made Irashti's family quit monastery life decades ago, in hopes to soothe their spirit elsewhere, but most often lost parts of themselves without proper meditation

Irashti does not properly madidate or gave up on the practice entirely, and often finds herself unsure if sometimes the things happening around her are her present reality, a memory of someone else, or Lot's dreams

sometimes she falls to dream-logic when facing a problem, unrealizing that's not a realistic option in the plane she's in

because of her being a Kalashtar and being so connected to the memories of her family, she does not fear death as much as she should. to her it is not freighting as a part of her always existed before she was actually here and will continue to do so after she's gone, so no biggie if something happens to her. Lot often tries to keep her in check and out of harm's way

#irashti lot #ask #anon #trying to figure out the quori-kalashtar dynamic so badly like hhughugh

[lowtideandhightea]

im being SO normal abt the quori appearing in dnd tonight

#i! love! the! quori!!!!! #lets not talk about how much i read abt the kalashtar and dal quor!!!!! #im so normal!!!!!! #emma plays dnd

[ccsven]

My naming process for Vesefsermak, my sleep token inspired dnd character. He’s a Kalashtar, his human name is Vesper and his Quori’s name is Sefsermak

Solomon is unrelated. That’s a name I wrote down for a different character

#sleep token #dnd #kalashtar #Quori

[glory-hasnoplacehere]

Added a muse again. Welcome back. Quori Len.

#gif #quori #join the ranks//new muse #when you see my face hope it gives you hell//Quori #text #words #witchcraft

[pagesofkenna]

so anyway, D&D last night I finally got to roleplay my character chatting with her incredibly intimidating mentor, got a secret job to hunt down drug dealers (the other players know about secret job ofc, but not their characters), then while pursuing another job we found evidence of what might by a quori/dreaming dark plot?? which has my secretly-a-kalashtar character VERY freaked out!!

#last arc we fought some monsters that #based on the way NPCs described them my girl THOUGHT they might be quori and got real freaked out?? #turned out not to be ofc but now she's real on edge #mentors mad at her but what else is new. hunting for drug dealers on the down low thats not stressful at all