THARIZDUN: ORIGINS

As we set about looking for a story that could span the worlds of D&D without turning into one of those crazy comic-book mashups that pits Spider-Man against Superman in an event that strains credulity, we ended up drawing on elements that stretch way back in the history of D&D to the Chained God, Tharizdun. Created by Gary Gygax himself in the 1982 adventure The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, the Chained God clearly hearkens back to the malign ancient deities imagined by writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. Monte Cook’s Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil adventure (2001) drew on the Forgotten Temple’s mythology and made Tharizdun, also called the Elder Elemental Eye, a central figure.

In 4th Edition, we gave Tharizdun a key role in the early days of the universe. As described in the Monster Manual, Tharizdun created the Abyss by inserting a shard of pure evil into the swirling maelstrom of the Elemental Chaos. As punishment for his crime, the other gods locked him away in an extraplanar prison.

And that’s the starting point for the Abyssal Plague event. As we plotted out the story, we decided that Tharizdun’s prison was actually the remains of a dead universe, where the Abyss had grown to consume the entire cosmos. In sort of a divine act of poetic justice, the gods locked Tharizdun away in a universe that symbolized the threat of his own crime.