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The Elder Evils are a loose collection of ancient horrors, often with only minimal ties to one another, but who are often grouped together due to their alien origins and destructive natures, the immense danger they pose to worlds unlucky enough to catch their attention, and their often being the subject of worship by mad warlocks and doomsday cults. Their natures are often very varied beyond that; some are dark gods, others are archfiends, others still are obscenely powerful aberrations or former mortals, and still others are unknowable beings whose origins lie outside the familiar planes and taxonomies of the setting; an ever-growing number (but by no means all) have ties to the Far Realm.
Their first real appearance was in the 2E Powers and Pantheons, which described the Elder Eternal Evils Dendar, Kezef and Ityak-Ortheel. Five more — Bolothamogg, Holashner, Piscaethces, Shothotugg and Y'chak — were named but not statted in Lords of Madness for 3.5E, which described them as beings that the aboleths revere but do not worship. Elder Evils, another sourcebook for 3.5E, gave stats, extensive descriptions and adventure hooks for nine new Evils — Atropus, Father Llymic, the Hulks of Zoretha, the Leviathan, Pandorym, Ragnorra, Sertrous, Kyuss, and Zargon; a Dragon magazine tie-in also introduced another, Shothragot. 4E introduced the idea of dread stars that looked hungrily upon the mortal world, occasionally sending minions known as star spawn there to accomplish inscrutable goals or simply wreak havoc. In 5E's Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes, the Elder Evils are named as the source of the star spawn; this description collects the four previous groups into one, and adds a number of new names alongside a few other beings, mainly Primordials, evil gods and a handful of obyrith lords.
For Dendar and Kezef, see Forgotten Realms Gods.
- Alien Sky: One of the generic Signs of the End Times described in Elder Evils has the night sky grow more and more alien as the Evil's influence grows. At first, the stars appear in different locations and glow in strange and unsettling colors, while constellations warp, shift and move around the heavens. As the sign strengthens, arcane energies burn across the sky in strange auroras, alongside constant meteor showers.
- Alternate Continuity: Write ups of the Elder Evils generally include ways to adjust their natures and backstories to fit different D&D settings. For example a big point in Sertrous' backstory is the revelation that one can channel divine power without worshipping a god but in the Forgotten Realms this isn't the case.
- Ancient Evil: Something every Elder Evil has in common is that they're very, very old, ranging to "merely" a few thousand years old such as Kyuss, to the dawn of creation in the case of Atropus, to possibly even older for extradimensional beings like Father Llymic and Pandorym.
- Apocalypse How: The precise scope, scale and mechanics vary from case to case, but these are the typical stakes of fighting an Elder Evil — if it wins, the world ends. The Elder Evils sourcebook specifically suggests using these things as a way of retiring campaign worlds with a bang, as the players probably aren't going to win.
- Contractual Boss Immunity: Every Elder Evil is immune to a slew of status conditions and magical effects, including petrification, anything that would alter its form or reduce its ability scores, and mind control. Your wizard will not be taking one of these down in a single round with a Save-or-Suck spell.
- Cosmic Horror Story: The Elder Evils are some of the mightiest and most powerful things in existence, their power often rivaling or fully eclipsing the gods'. Some are mindless and others evil, but they're all terrifying, dangerous and destructive beings who can spell the end of worlds with chilling ease.
- Eldritch Abomination: One thing all Elder Evils have in common is being very powerful, very alien, capable of ending the world just by existing, and the kinds of beings whose mere stirring in their sleep is enough to cause madness and destruction among mortal societies.
- Fighting a Shadow: Many of the Elder Evils are so vast and powerful that fighting the actual things is either suicidal or flatly impossible, and the beings actually given stats are only fragments, often replaceable ones, of the actual thing — Atropus's aspect, the Leviathan's manifest dreams, a tiny sliver of Pandorym's mind. Often, these shadows are by themselves some of the mightiest, most dangerous foes the players will ever face in the game.
- Foil: Several of the Elder Evils play off each other in different ways, but Ragnorra and Atropus are the most notable. Both appear as celestial bodies in the sky who influence certain magics with their arrival, but while Ragnorra is a being of pure life energy who strengthens healing magic while weakening necromancy, Atropus is an undead being that feeds off life energy and increases the strength of necromany while weakening healing magic.
- The Great Flood: One of the generic Signs of the End Times described in Elder Evils is ceaseless, torrential and constantly strengthening rainfall, causing the levels of bodies of water to rise more and more with each passing day.
- The Magnificent: Almost all Elder Evils have grandiose and fearsome titles appended to their names, chiefly describing their alien natures or the specific reasons they world is doomed if they return, such as Atropus the World Born Dead, Pandorym the Slayer of Gods, and Zargon the Returner.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: While a few Elder Evils roam free (mainly in realms far beyond the mortal planes, luckily for everyone else), many others are frozen glaciers, trapped in pocket dimensions, sealed within magical prisons, and otherwise tucked away in a number of theoretically secure cans that should hold until the end of time... at least as long as no curious mortals come along to mess with them.
- Set the World on Fire: One of the generic Signs of the End Times described in Elder Evils is the onset of hot dry winds which gradually raise the global temperature, evaporate water, and prevent precipitation from falling. As the Elder Evil comes closer to waking, the winds get stronger and hotter, eventually becoming hot enough to ignite whatever they touch and kick off worldwide firestorms.
- Signs of the End Times: In Elder Evils, the stirring and/or arrival of each entity is heralded by signs and portents, such as symbols in the sky, destructive or unseasonal weather, plagues of deformities, the dead rising from their graves, and infestations of vermin and weirder creatures. These can range from simply unnerving to being as destructive as the arrival of the Elder Evil itself.
- Villainous Legacy: The passage of an Elder Evil is not a trivial thing. Even if the Evil is defeated, destroyed, or sent back into its can before it can destroy the world, its activity will likely have caused millions or billions of deaths and left society scarred and shaken. Even if the being is prevented from actually coming or awakening, its Signs of the End Times are often apocalyptic in their own right and can have terrible effects of society, geography and ecology alike. Dealing with and attempting to heal the fallout of an Elder Evil's rise and fall can be enough to take up an entire post-campaign in its own right.
- Weird Weather: One of the Signs of the End Times associated with several Evils, such as Zargon and the Leviathan, is unnatural weather. The specifics vary from case to case, but can include unseasonal weather extremes, destructive whirlwinds, oddly colored clouds and lightning, and rains of fire, objects or living animals.
Atropus, the World Born Dead
The birth of creation is a subject that few mortal beings truly understand, but fragments of primordial truth, warped and half-forgotten as they may be, linger in many traditions and legends into the present day. These myths, when collected together, point towards an ancient entity, a prime mover, some kind of primeval being, idea or force, from which all of creation sprang and which birthed the first gods.
This being is dead; the birth of the cosmos required it to make the ultimate sacrifice to bring its creation into existence, and God died so that the universe could exist. There is little left of it now but its rotting, undead head, long since driven mad by the torment of its twisted existence. Atropus, the World Born Dead, has had all of time to regret its choice, and now wanders from world to world, sucking each dry of life to fill the void in its existence.
Atropus can never have its life back — the negative energy permeating it erases all positive energy it absorbs — and it knows this. It continues its quest all the same, hoping that once all life is gone, the gods will dwindle and fade and it, too, will know the peace of nonexistence.
- And I Must Scream: Atropus has been stuck like this, in endless agony, since the beginning of Creation. By this point, he's gone quite mad.
- Awesome, but Impractical: The aspect of Atropus's meteor shower attack is a double-edged sword. Sure, it inflicts tremendous damage to everything in a large area-of-effect, but the aspect needs to spend a good chunk of its maximum HP to use the ability, and the aspect is neither excluded from the area-of-effect nor immune to the damage it inflicts. On the other hand, thanks to its Damage Reduction, resistance to fire and Fast Healing, the aspect can likely take two or three of its own attacks. Its opponents won't be so lucky.
- Cast from Hit Points: The Aspect of Atropus can sacrifice fifty Hit Points to call down a meteor shower in combat.
- Colony Drop: Atropus' method of killing worlds is simple and direct: it enters a decaying orbit around them, rams its moon-sized bulk into their surface, and then sucks the life out of whatever survived the impact.
- Death Seeker: Atropus has long since given up on the hope that it might return to its original state of being, and now mostly hopes for the only thing that can grant it release from its torment — the final cessation of its existence. Most its followers follow suit, as they tend to be beings who despise their own existence or no longer see worth in life, and hope to simply take down as many others as they can with them when they go.
- Fighting a Shadow: Atropus is as much a place as it is a(n un)living thing, and the players cannot actually fight it. The being fought in its stead is its aspect, a great headless corpse endlessly wandering on the moonlet's surface. Atropus can replace it if it's killed, in time, but the pain caused by its destruction will cause the World Born Dead to recoil and flee into the depths of space.
- Genius Loci: Atropus' true self is both a planetary body and a living and aware being.
- Giant Corpse World: Atropus is a rotting head the size of a moon, with seas of pus, tears and congealed blood and a vast pit that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a gaping mouth.
- God: Once, very long ago, Atropus was this — the Prime Mover, the First Uncaused Cause, the divine creator that brought the universe, the gods and life into existence.
- Life Drain: The aspect of Atropus can drain life from creatures just by touching them. Mechanically this is represented by the victim suffering Constitution loss and/or gaining negative levels, and by the aspect gaining temporary hit points.
- Meteor-Summoning Attack: The aspect of Atropus can call a meteor shower down on its position by spending 50 hit points. It can also cast the meteor swarm spell up to three times a day.
- Monster Progenitor: Atropals stem from, and are named after, Atropus.
- Multiple-Choice Past: His exact origins are not set in stone. The one detailed above is meant for the Greyhawk setting, while the Forgotten Realms suggests he's either an unintended side effect of Ao creating the universe, or a Primordial.
- Omnicidal Maniac: Atropus wants nothing less than the end of all life everywhere in the universe, including itself.
- Signs of the End Times: Atropus' approach is marked by the presence of a strange, dark star or comet in the sky — Atropus itself — and by the dead stirring in their graves.
- The Stars Are Going Out: When Atropus gets close enough, he consumes enough of the skies that the stars are impossible to see.
- Undead Abomination: Atropus is the moon-sized, undead head of God — or, in some other proposed cases, the undead "placenta" from which the first gods were born — feeds on the life energy of entire worlds, and can cause a world to be overrun with the undead just by entering its orbit.
- Walking Wasteland: The aspect of Atropus projects a constant aura of negative energy. Said aura greatly debilitates nearby living creatures and may even kill them outright if they're weak enough.
- Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Atropus is a moon-sized Undead Abomination that spends its time killing planets, but is also a tortured being that has been in ceaseless torment since the beginning of time, and does what it does because it wishes to actually, truly die.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Atropus' arrival bathes a world in negative energy. This begins by strengthening necromancy and weakening magic that harms the undead, then causes corpses to begin to rise as undead beings, and eventually allows the walking dead to swarm across the world as all bodies rise as soon as they die.
Father Llymic, the Alien Thought Made Flesh
Unlike other Elder Evils, Father Llymic's origins are clear enough. In ancient times, the elves plumbed every secret of the mortal world and sought to learn more; to this purpose, they built a vast gate meant to open to planes beyond the known universe, to let them learn what lay there. The gate worked all too well and opened into the Far Realm, a place beyond sanity or reality, and though the horrified elves were quick to seal it shut things came through and into the material plane. One of these was Father Llymic.
Material existence was as alien to Father Llymic as he was to it, and the touch of light in particular sent him into a deep torpor and caused him to radiate a chilling cold that soon began to cover him and his surroundings in ice, but darkness allowed him to stir and wake. The elves moved the slumbering thing to a high mountain peak, where the sun would sweep over him each day before he had time to fully awake, and he soon became sealed within a thick, never-melting glacier. He sleeps there still, waiting, and sending a faint psychic call to enthrall any being who passes too close to his prison.
- Acrofatic: Despite looking like a roly-poly mass of icy pudge, Father Llymic is very agile in combat and can fly unaided.
- Evil Is Deathly Cold: Cold and death are Father Llymic's signatures, from the ice age he creates and the killing cold he wields in battle to the way his rise strangles all life and light from the world.
- Evil Old Folks: Llymic appears to his victims as a withered, old elf, trying to lure people to the glacier where his physical body is trapped.
- Extra Eyes: Father Llymic has three eyes in a horizontal row. This is also the only consistent trait that his brood shares.
- Flight: Unlike what his bulk and lack of wings would suggest, Father Llymic can fly at a clip of thirty feet per round.
- Glacial Apocalypse: As Father Llymic stirs, global temperatures plummet as the Sun's warmth vanishes, plunging the planet in an ever-worsening ice age. Should he not be stopped, the world will become a lifeless ball of ice that will never know light or warmth again. Even if he should be defeated, allowing the sun to rise again, there may be very little life left in the world once the ice has finished thawing.
- Healing Factor: Father Llymic possesses a somewhat conditional form of this; he heals from his injuries extremely rapidly, but only as long as he remains in total darkness.
- Hive Mind: The minds of beings who fall under Father Llymic's sway become simple extensions of his will, forming a hive mind centered on and controlled by the slumbering entity itself.
- An Ice Person: As expectable from a being of utter cold and darkness, Father Llymic can wield ice magic of considerable power, allowing him to buffet foes with blizzards and beams of supernatural cold and storms of ice and to shape and control masses of ice, often simply at will.
- Monster in the Ice: He was sealed within a magical prison of ice, which freezes under the sun and melts in the darkness. As long as the sun keeps shining in the sky, Father Llymic remains trapped.
- Mook Maker: Father Llymic can infect beings close enough to it with his alien essence, mutating them into lesser copies of itself linked to him by a Hive Mind; as he comes closer to freeing himself, his ability to infect others spreads farther, giving him legions of monstrous minions.
- The Night That Never Ends: As more creatures fall under Father Llymic's sway, the Sun starts rising later and later and setting earlier and earlier every day. Eventually, it stops appearing at all, leaving the world eternally darkened and allowing Father Llymic to escape his prison. This eternal night comes with a flat ban on light of any sort, as Father Llymic's influence also causes all sources of natural or magical light to be dimmed into nonexistence and enhances and strengthens shadow- and darkness-based magic.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Father Llymic is sealed within a glacier on top of a high mountain peak, which relies on his weakness to sunlight to function — every time the Sun's light touches it, the glacier grows a bit thicker and recovers the ice lost over the nighttime. Should his influence spread far enough to bring about The Night That Never Ends, though, he will break free and end the world.
- Signs of the End Times: Father Llymic's awakening is marked by lengthening nights, the Sun fading in the sky, and sources of light growing dimmer with every passing day.
- Weakened by the Light: Father Llymic has a strong aversion to light; he becomes slowed and clumsy when exposed to any source of light and suffers increased damage from light-based spells, and the touch of the Sun itself causes him to grow insensible and dormant and to become covered by layers of ice. Consequently, a key part of his escape plan involves putting out the Sun for good.
In the far north of the world there are five great monoliths in the shape of crude, hulking humanoids, known only to a few scholars and explorers and to the cults that worship them, believing that they will one day rise to cleanse the world of filth and disease. Their origins are unknown — as far as anyone knows, they've always been there. Even in the time of the earliest empires, they seem to have been already ancient. Their worshippers claim they fell from the sky in the distant past.
There's only one reliable source on these statues — the Zoretha Scrolls, penned by a dwarf known only as I Weep. According to him, the Hulks are the forerunners of colonization from an alien place called Zoretha, sent to prepare the world for the arrival of their people. Should they ever awake, they will scour the world clean of life before birthing a new generation of their terrible kind.
- Bad Moon Rising: As the Hulks stir and come towards consciousness, the moon turns bloody red.
- Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: The female Hulks are giant, rocky-skinned humanoids and entirely sexless by human standards, and have Elemental Powers. The male Hulk is a much smaller Winged Humanoid with a body perfectly matching human standards of male beauty, and can shoot poisonous spikes from his forearms.
- Breath Weapon: Each female Hulks can exhale a blast of fire, lightning, frost or acid, as per her associated element.
- Color-Coded Elements: Each of the four female hulks is associated with an element, marked by her coloration. The red and orange one has fire, the gray and pale blue one has ice, the brown and green one has acid, and the dark blue and yellow one has electricity.
- Elemental Powers: Each female Hulks is associated with an element — fire, ice, electricity and acid. She is immune to damage from it, while possessing an appropriate damaging aura and Breath Weapon and being able to summon its associated elementals.
- Hate Plague: The Hulks intend to let their own victims do the job of wiping themselves out. As they awake, they spread a pall of anger and hostility over the world. By the time they're fully awake, people enter berserk rages every time they wake, riots and wars rage in every part of the world, and the world's populations is well on the way to slaughtering itself.
- Hostile Terraforming: The Hulks' plan is to colonize and spread their kind over the world. In order to do this, they will seek to destroy all sapient life currently existing on it, in order to ensure that there will be nothing left to compete for resources with their descendants.
- The One Guy: There is only one male Hulk, the other four are female.
- Rock Monster: They are sentient monoliths that come in packs of five: four are female and one is male.
- Signs of the End Times: As the Hulks approach awakening, the moon turns red and intelligent beings become gripped by hatred and violence.
- Spike Shooter: The male Hulk can fire poisonous spikes from his forearms.
- Winged Humanoid: The male Hulk resembles a beautiful humanoid man with vast dark wings.
Kyuss, the Worm That Walks
Kyuss was once a mortal, the priest-king of a forgotten people who ruled with an iron fist over his subjects. He had schemed and plotted for power all his life and hated the frailty and mortality of his flesh, and even as the unchallenged ruler of an empire he sought greater heights of power still. Kyuss wanted to become a god, and was willing to make any sacrifice to achieve this. He sacrificed his entire civilization on the altar of his ascension, and in a dark ritual bound his soul to a great dark stone, hoping to achieve apotheosis.
Kyuss failed, but only just. He became something far greater and more terrible than any mortal, far darker than any god. He still yearns for true godhood, but his mind and soul remain trapped in the obelisk he bound himself to so long ago. To this day, Kyuss beats and rages against his prison, calling to anyone who might hear him, but no blow or stratagem has been able to free him so far. This is a mercy for the world, for should Kyuss ever become free he would bring a terrible age of writhing darkness into the world.
- And I Must Scream: Kyuss is fully awake and aware within his prison, and has been such for all the millennia he has spent within it. He has never been able to breach it or escape, and can do nothing but beat against its walls, scream in impotent fury, and go more and more insane.
- Big Bad: He's the ultimate foe and cause of events in the Age of Worms adventure path.
- Bugs Herald Evil: The first sign that Kyuss is coming close to escaping his prison is that the vermin of Wormcrawl Island where he's sealed begin to enter frenzies of breeding and activity. They quickly become too numerous for their island and swarms of worms and centipedes begin to spill out into the rest of the world with increasing frequency. As Kyuss comes close to freedom, his power begins to affect the vermin more directly and cause them to reach monstrous sizes, transforming into powerful and aggressive monsters such as purple worms and remorhazes.
- Genuine Human Hide: Kyuss doesn't need clothing, but nonetheless cloaks itself in a ragged robe made from the tanned skins of everyone he sacrificed to fuel his ascension.
- Godhood Seeker: Kyuss longs for godhood more than anything else. He has wanted it ever since he was a mortal, and even in his current state he is determined to achieve the glory of true divinity.
- Necromancer: Kyuss was a powerful necromancer in life, and created a great variety of new undead beings that still bear his name.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Kyuss trapped himself within a dark obelisk when he ascended to his current state and has remained there since, trapped and impotent.
- Signs of the End Times: The coming of Kyuss is marked by the vermin of the world entering frenzies of breeding and activity, steadily growing more numerous, larger and more monstrous.
- Was Once a Man: Unlike the other Elder Evils, Kyuss started out as a mere man. Not that it will help you, since he has long since left his humanity behind.
- The Worm That Walks: Kyuss is the Worm That Walks, the first and most terrible of their kind. He resembles a towering giant in a ragged robe, composed of countless writhing worms and maggots held together by sheer hatred and a maniacal grip on life.
"Sharp of tooth and merciless of fang,"
"Their bodies filled with poison instead of blood."
"Fierce beasts of land and sea who wore their glory like gods, all bedecked in splendor."
"Terror overcame whoever beheld Leviathan,"
"From its dread body sprang vipers and dragons,"
"And hurricanes, and mighty tempests,"
"And fearsome shaking of the earth,"
"And such abominations as even the gods could not comprehend."
"So did the world shudder at the stirring of Leviathan."
"Gods grant that it lie in peace in the depths for all eternity."
The creation of worlds is a delicate task. When the gods undertake to do this, they have to form a very precise mixture of primordial forces, including law and chaos; too much or too little of either would prove disastrous for the fledgling creation. Should the gods find themselves with surfeit of chaos, for instance, this force will coagulate into a living thing, a vast monster driven only to force change upon its surroundings and drive them into entropy. When such a beast comes into being, the gods seal it somewhere far from prying eyes and set it into a deep sleep, for even its stirrings and dreams could bring disaster.
One such beast is the Leviathan, a vast serpent that has slept in the depths of the ocean since the beginning of the world. Occasionally it stirs, and its dreams take form as vast sea monsters and terrible storms; should it awake, it will destroy the world and in so doing unmake itself. Such is the nature of beasts of chaos. For the moment, however, the Leviathan sleeps, slowly bleeding off chaos energy until it will one day fade away to nothing.
Hopefully. As long as nobody wakes it first.
- Deader than Dead: The Leviathan's aspects create a thousand-mile radius around themselves that renders anyone who dies within it truly, permanently dead, and unable to be raised by any means.
- Fighting a Shadow: The Leviathan is so colossal that there's no way for player characters to interact with it, and so powerful that nothing short of a manifested god or several can send it back to sleep when it wakes up. Consequently, the players never actually face it in combat, and instead battle physical aspects of its dreams that the Leviathan continuously creates as its sleep grows restless.
- Kraken and Leviathan: The Leviathan is an immense sea monster, so large that it encircles the world in its coils and that its head alone is the size of a small kingdom. It sleeps at the bottom of the ocean and will eventually fade away into nothingness, provided nobody wakes it up.
- Sea Serpents: The Leviathan is believed to take the form of a massive serpent coiled around the world. Its aspects likewise resemble less outsized, but still very large, draconic serpents, with long necks and tails and four paddlelike fins.
- Signs of the End Times: The Leviathan's waking is marked by violent weather, unnatural rains, and increasingly common sea monster attacks.
- That's No Moon: The Leviathan is so big that its body, covered by eons of sediment, soil and rock, has in many places become a part of the landscape, forming great ridges, islands and peaks settled by marine and terrestrial beings who have no idea what kind of entity they live on. What's initially taken to be a towering temple-spire to Leviathan is, in fact, just one of its hollowed spines.
- Tulpa: As the Leviathan stirs in its sleep, its dreams take physical form and become living beings in their own right. Most take the form of various sea monsters and aquatic aberrations, while the mightiest become miniature versions of their vast sire.
- Weird Weather: The gradual wakening of the Leviathan is marked by increasingly aberrant and destructive weather, ranging from simply inclement weather such as harsh winds, heat waves and torrential downpours to unseasonal events such as blizzards in summer to rains of blood, acid, sea animals or flaming hail.
Pandorym, the Slayer of Gods, the Utter Annihilation
Once, long ago, a cabal of wizards sought to protect themselves from the vengeance of the gods as they tinkered with forces and knowledge that mortals were not meant to possess. As they explored the spaces between the planes, they found a reality… perpendicular… to the known multiverse, and from that reality the summoned a terrible being. The wizards contracted this being, Pandorym, and tasked it with slaying the gods; then, before it could do so, they sheared its mind from its body and sealed them both away. They then called upon the gods, threatening that they would release Pandorym if their realms and designs were interfered with.
The gods, fearing this much power in the hands of inconstant mortals, struck first. They destroyed the wizards, and their civilization for good measure, but could not destroy Pandorym. Instead, they hid its prisons far from each other and obfuscated all knowledge of them, and hoped that they would stay hidden forever. Pandorym, however, has remained aware within its prison, and alleviates its ageless boredom by possessing mortals who come too close to it. These inevitably crumble under its psychic might, but over time Pandorym has managed to use them to chip away at its prison, bit by bit. Meanwhile, the inevitables of Mechanus have become aware of the breach of Pandorym's contract and, utterly devoted to the principles of law, now consider themselves bound to freeing the ancient terror.
Should it be freed, Pandorym will first seek vengeance against its betrayers — but, since they're long dead, it'll settle for murdering every last descendant of everyone who took part in its imprisonment instead. Despite its betrayal, however, Pandorym is a being of its word — and once it's finished venting, it quite fully intends to finish its job and kill every god in the universe. Once it's done that, it'll just go home — if it can. It may be that it can't. If that's the case, it'll just entertain itself by destroying the universe one world at a time.
- Crystal Prison: Pandorym's mind is trapped within a giant crystal made from solidified magic, which will subject anyone who touches it to several kinds of harmful magical effects and then suck their souls in as well.
- Kill the God: Pandorym's plan of action, once it frees itself, is to kill every god everywhere.
- Life Drain: The shard of Pandorym can hijack divine casters' bond with their gods to drain their life away to heal itself.
- Mind Control: Pandorym can psychically enslave other beings — in-game, its shard automatically attempts to place any being within thirty feet of it under its control every turn — and it mostly works through mind-controlled pawns in this manner.
- Psychic Powers: Pandorym is a psion of obscene power; even a shard of its mind can devastate minds, control other beings, and warp reality with the power of its thoughts.
- Reality Warper: The shard of Pandorym has access to high-level psychic powers to this effect, such as bend reality and reality revision.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Pandorym's imprisonment was thorough. Its mind is trapped within a crystal formed from a solidified prismatic wall spell, which attempts to disintegrate any being that touches it and sucks in the souls of the survivors, preventing them from coming back to life by any means. The crystal itself is held within two great circles of binding, located in a buried and long-forgotten ruin in the middle of nowhere patrolled by ancient constructs that try to kill any living thing they encounter. Its body, while not actively described, was sealed in a pocket dimension accessible only in one specific spot of the Material Plane.
- Sealed Evil in a Six Pack: Pandorym's mind and body were separated from one another and and trapped, respectively, in a Crystal Prison and an isolated Pocket Dimension.
- Signs of the End Times: As Pandorym comes closer to freedom, an increasingly complex and visible sigil appears in the sky, and it becomes increasingly difficult to contact the gods.
Ragnorra, the Mother of Monsters
Before the time of mortals, there was the time of the gods. Before the time of the gods, there was the time of ancient, primeval forces. The gods defeated these forces, slaying many and sealing the others in dark voids or in spaces between the planes, to prevent them from harming their creations. These beings did not stay dead, however, and many, over time, returned.
Ragnorra is one such being. She is a thing of twisted life, fecundity and fertility, a living cancer that knows no ceasing or moderation. Every 1,500 years, she visits a mortal world and spreads her spores and influence over it, birthing hordes of monsters and turning its native life twisted and horrid. She does not act with cruelty — she simply seeks to undo the mistakes the gods forced upon the world — and largely lacks the capacity to understand or care about the harm she causes. Of course, this is cold comfort at best for the worlds that find themselves under her touch.
- Achilles' Heel: Once Ragnorra merges with the worldskin, she becomes effectively invulnerable to direct harm. Her only weakness is a chord that she uses to draw energy into herself; harming it causes her great pain, and destroying it forces her to sever herself from her worldskin and leave the world altogether.
- Body Horror: Ragnorra's influence begins to manifest by causing people and animals to develop unsightly warps and boils. These eventually grow larger, more common and more unsightly, eventually bursting open daily to release swarms of living vermin, while living beings become more and more deformed until they eventually turn in twisted monsters.
- Bugs Herald Evil: As Ragnorra's twisted fecundity begins to grow in power, cities begin to teem with great swarms of insects, spiders and other crawling vermin (alongside small vertebrates like bats and rats) born from the living bodies of larger creatures.
- Garden of Evil: Parts of Ragnorra's worldskin become covered by tangles of overgrown, malformed plant life, heavy with bulbous fruit, many of which were living creatures overwhelmed by surges in positive energy and turned into plants.
- Light Is Not Good: Ragnorra is a being of positive energy and life, and its arrival causes magical healing to become more efficient and eventually spontaneous while cleansing the world of the undead. This overabundance of life energy is very dangerous for mundane beings, however, who are slowly turned into gibbering abominations while the excess fecundity covers the world in hordes of crawling vermin.
- Mana Drain: Ragnorra can absorb magic cast in her presence, nullifying its effects and using its energy to regenerate or expand a part of her body or of the worldskin she grows around herself.
- No Ontological Inertia: Rangorra's arrival causes hideous mutations to twist the bodies of every living thing on worlds she lands on, slowly turning them into aberrations. If Ragnorra is defeated and her consciousness severed from its hold on the material plane, however, all of these mutations will wither and rot away, so that even creatures that had been completely twisted into writhing monsters will quietly return to their original shapes in short order.
- Signs of the End Times: Ragnorra's arrival is heralded by a red comet — her body — appearing in the sky, while the Elder Evil's increasingly strong aura of positive energy causes living beings to develop warts and blemishes that burst to reveal swarms of vermin and to slowly turn into twisted aberrations.
Sertrous, Demon Prince of Heretics
Sertrous was once a minor obyrith lord of vermin and crawling things, during the rise of the Queen of Chaos. Rebellious as only demons are, he refused to bow to her and slew every emissary she sent to treat with him. Eventually, the Queen grew tired of his insubordination, slew him, and cast his corpse out of the Abyss. As his essence plunged past the Material Plane, Sertrous desperately grabbed at something, anything, that might keep him from slipping into oblivion. All he found was a lowly serpent crawling through a swamp.
Sertrous lived as a snake for centuries, slowly changing his form to reflect his growing power as he healed. In time, he came to see mortal empires rising and making great shows of worship to their gods, and came to covet such devotion. Raising an army of serpents and monsters, he emerged from his swamp to wage war on mortalkind; the beleaguered mortals begged their gods for aid, and were sent a heavenly army led by the solar Avamerin. Avamerin eventually struck Sertrous down and, as he lay dying, the demon asked the solar a question: why serve gods when mortals can gain the same strength of power through their own will?
Avamerin found this thought ridiculous, struck off Sertrous' head, and mocked his last words to the priests of the nation he had saved. Yet, the demons' words held truth, and by studying them, the mortals realized that the same divine power they gained from gods could be achieved by worship of anything they wished — war, truth, the elements, themselves. They could even gain it by worshipping a slain demon lord. Avemerin was harshly punished for this, losing his status, his rank as a solar and his place in heaven, and was cursed with a serpent's head himself. Bitter and hateful, he stole Sertrous' head and fled, vowing to one day resurrect the one being whom he knew to speak the truth.
- Animalistic Abomination: Sertrous and his aspects take the appearance of a heavily mutated snake upon manifestation, despite hints being dropped that this grotesque form is simply the mind dumbing down his true appearance for the sake of the viewer and their sanity. He's also a fully-fledged Elder Evil, with all that title implies.
- Breath Weapon: Sertrous' aspect can exhale a cloud of poisonous vapor.
- Flower Mouth: The head of Sertrous' aspect is a set of five snake heads, missing their lower jaws and arranged radially like petals around a gaping maw.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: Sertrous was only a minor obyrith once, but after his near-death experience with the Queen Of Chaos he would ultimately resurface as a world-ending threat.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Sertrous' first war on the Material Plane was driven first and foremost by bitter envy — envy for their cities, envy for their accomplishments, and especially envy for the reverence they gave their gods, which he wanted for himself.
- The Heretic: Not him himself, but he was responsible for teaching mortals about heresy.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Sertruos is long dead, but his lingering spirit remains bound within his skull.
- Signs of the End Times: As Sertrous comes closer to life, the earth vomits forth torrents of snakes. This begins with increasing numbers of normal snakes, but as the sign grows they're joined by serpentine monsters such as hydras, nagas and mariliths. As Sertrous' resurrection becomes imminent, the serpents grow more and more deformed — some have multiple heads, others are inside out, and others still are simply masses of coils with no ending or beginning.
- Small Role, Big Impact: He's only statted out in this book, but he's the reason Naytheists exist.
- Snakes Are Sinister: Taking after the serpent of Eden, Setrous is a primal liar and corrupter, the source of heresy and the one who first lured mortals away from the gods. He's served by serpentine monsters, such as nagas, hydras and yuan-ti, and as he rises the earth becomes covered by great tides of writhing snakes. Notably, he wasn't a serpent originally — his original form isn't known — but adopted his current aspect when he possessed a regular snake in order to hide from his enemies.
- Supernatural Fear Inducer: Looking at Sertrous' nightmarish form risks causing the viewer to develop a profound case of ophidophobia, becoming deeply terrified of snakes and snakelike monsters of any sort — including, of course, Sertruos himself.
- You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Like other obyriths, Sertrous' true form is not something mortals can or should be able to understand. His appearance as a monstrous snake is simply the mortal mind's attempt to rationalize the hideous, writhing mass of scales and coils that he really is, and looking too closely at him invites madness and worse.
Zargon, the Returner
Hell was not always a place of devils. In the distant past, it was ruled by a race of whom little remains, who are now known only as the ancient Baatorians, and Zargon was their lord. When Asmodeus led the devils into Hell, they slaughtered the Baatorians, cast down their lords and enslaved the survivors, but not even Asmodeus could lay Zargon low as long as his horn, the source of his powers, remained intact. This did not much deter the lord of the devils, who tore the horn from Zargon's brow, threw it out of Hell, and put the defeated horror out of his mind.
Zargon did not stay forgotten.
His horn landed on the Material Plane, burying itself deep within a luckless planet, and he reformed around it. He took over the ancient kingdom of Cyndicea, turning it into a place of terror and depravity as its terrified citizens turned to awful rites and mass sacrifice to appease Zargon’s hunger for death and thirst for blood. In time, Cyndicea's depravity and raids led a barbarian horde led by a god-blessed champion to attack it and raze it to the ground, and in the ruins of the capital, their leader fought Zargon for seven days and seven nights before the horror prevailed and tore him to pieces. Even the gods who came to his aid were struck low by the abomination's powers, and it took Asmodeus' intervention to seal Zargon in stone and end his reign.
Zargon yearns for vengeance against Asmodeus, but after all this time he stands little chance of taking back his kingdom. He's aware of this, and has made his peace with it; he's grown to quite like obeisance paid to him by terrified mortals, and after a bit of cleaning house the Material Plane will make a fine new realm...
- Achilles' Heel: Zargon's horn is his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. He cannot be killed as long as it's intact — even if he's otherwise slain, his body will regenerate around it — and it grants him his Healing Factor. However, it's also the key to his defeat — if his horn is dropped within the Eye of Zargon, the pit from which he first crawled into the world, it's destroyed and Zargon dies.
- Acid Attack: Zargon's bite is laced with acidic slime, and he can release a cloud of caustic gas once per day.
- Combat Tentacles: In place of arms, Zargon has two clusters of six tentacles, each ending in a wicked, hooked barb.
- Complete Immortality: Zargon cannot be killed by gods, and mortals are too weak to overpower him and do the deed. Originally, he was killed by Asmodeus, who's as powerful as a god but not divine by technicality. Of course, since then, Asmodeus has ascended to full-on divinity, taking him out of the action.
- Covered in Scars: Zargon's frame is covered in a long, long lifetime's worth of injuries, ranging from ancient scars to fresh, weeping wounds and festering tumors.
- Cyclops: Zargon has a single, bloody red eye staring out from his brow.
- From a Single Cell: Zargon cannot die as long his horn remains intact. Even if the rest of his body is entirely destroyed, it'll all grow back from his horn within a few days at most.
- Healing Factor: As long as he has his horn, Zargon can regenerate damage with shocking speed. His regeneration restores a little over a seventh of his health every round, he can regrow any severed body part in about a minute — unless he can just hold the limb against the stump, in which case it reattaches immediately — and he can regrow his entire body as long as his horn is intact.
- Lightning Bruiser: Zargon combines a wide suite of powerful melee attacks, including the ability to lash out with twelve tentacles, his horn and his bite every run, with a large health pool kept topped off by a powerful Healing Factor and a considerable turn of speed. The only field where he's lacking is ranged combat.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Zargon is imprisoned within a mass of stone, kept buried within an ancient ziggurat in the middle of the desert.
- Signs of the End Times: Zargon's return is marked by corrupt weather that leaves the land covered in foul brown slime, which eventually forms itself into humanoid creatures under Zargon's control.
- Weird Weather: Zargon's return is marked by unnatural weather extremes, including violent storms boiling into existence out of the blue, surges of unseasonable warmth or cold, and rains of noxious slime.
Tharizdun, the mad, imprisoned god that seeks to end of all reality, has been working subtly towards his release. He secretly whispers into the minds of all Elder Evils, trying to stirr them to awaken and bring unpararelled destruction, hoping their rampage will be enough to tear down the bindings of his chains and set him free. Despite being called Father of Elder Evils, only some heed his call.
Shothragot is one of them, awakened by Tharizdun's whispers beneath one of the temples of Elder Elemental Eye, its origins unknown. Shothragot was weak and powerless, subsiding on prayers to its new master to regain former power, forming a strong enough bond with the Ender to become his avatar. Now it seeks to free itself to find Tharizdun's prison and release him, so that they can bond together as one being and destroy all that is.
Unlike the other core Evils, Shothragot is described in Dragon Magazine #362.
- Body Horror: Every blow from Shothragot can turn the victim into an amorphous blob that cannot use any item or cast spells, can barely move and is constantly struggling to keep clear form, slowly going insane and losing Wisdom points. if reduced to zero Wisdom, the victim is outright transformed into a Chaos Beast.
- The Corruption: Just being in presence of Shothragot causes one to risk going mad. Even the gods aren't protected from this power — in fact, they're more vurnerable to it than mortals, who at least get a saving throw.
- Downloadable Content: Shothragot wasn't introduced in the same book as other Elder Evils, but in a tie-in in Dragon Magazine. Later issue of Dungeon also featured whole lair for this Elder Evil to inhabit.
- The Dragon: It's an avatar and agent of Tharizdun in the mortal world, and its primary aim is to reunite with its master and set him free.
- Elemental Powers: Shothragot's spell selection list includes variety of powerful elemental spells like Cone of Cold, Earthquake and Whirlwind, befitting avatar of Elder Elemental Eye.
- Fighting a Shadow: Shothragot is effectively a fragment of Tharizdun's power made into an independent being — powerful, yes, but nothing compared to the fullness of the original being.
- Multiple-Choice Past: As with other Elder Evils, Shothragot was written with the Greyhawk setting in mind, and has smaller writeups for adjusting his backstory to others. For Eberron, he is a weapon created by the minions of a particularly nasty daelkyr warlord to set their master free from the prison in which even his fellow lords of the Realm of Madness found it necessary to cast him. For the Forgotten Realms, he is a creation of Ghaunadaur intended to break the worship and power of the other gods.
- Ominous Obsidian Ooze: Shothragot's form is a giant floating ball of black tar.
- Omnicidal Maniac: Shothragot's goal would mean destruction for the entirety of creation.
- Shock and Awe: One of Shothragot's abilities is to cast quickened Chain Lightning.
- Signs of the End Times: Shares the same sign with Pandorym — as Shothragot comes closer to gain freedom, dimensional travel and summoning becomes harder, or outright impossible, in a desperate attempt by gods themselves to seal the entity in the material plane and cut it off from ever reaching Tharizdun's prison.
