[Sponsored by Jay on the Patreon. This is my first original quori, after having converted a few from 3e Eberron, and this was a fun design space to play in. I do think it's interesting that I've done two sponsored posts in a row for monsters that weaponize despair; can't imagine why that theme is on people's minds of late.
If you'd like to join Jay in sponsoring monsters, see bonus monsters and writing, or just help out an unemployed trans writer, check out the Creature Codex Patreon here]
Quori, Fa’orrah
CR 13 LE Outsider (extraplanar)
From the waist up, this creature resembles a hooded humanoid figure, except that the hood is its head and it has no face beneath it. From the waist down, eight tentacles of differing lengths grow, dangling beneath it as it floats effortlessly. Its arms end not in hand but in fantastical armaments; a lance that stretches and contracts in one arm and a strange asymmetrical shield in the other. The sound of sobbing surrounds it.
The fa’orrah are sometimes referred to as the “knights of grief”. They are powerful soldiers of the quori, and are often found leading armies of lesser quori and Inspired on behalf of a kalaraq noble. They embody the emotions of sorrow and despair, using these as weapons to pacify populations and crush resistance. A fa’orrah uses its nightmares to target military and civilian leaders, weakening their resolve to fight by showing them visions of their inevitable defeat. Fa’orrah are scholars of history, and use their knowledge of failed rebellions, subjugated slaves and the value of autocrats to turn minds away from the concept of a better future.
Fa’orrah fly magically, using their tentacles to manipulate objects if they need to. Their arms are instead grown into a lance and shield, both of which are especially effective against the demoralized and sorrowful. In combat, a fa’orrah is surrounded by an aura of sobs drawn from the saddest dreams mortals have dreamed, which can shatter the resolve of their enemies and partially blind them with tears. Fa’orrah have powerful psychic abilities that inflict despair, grief and remorse, and use these to debilitate those not affected by their auras and generally spread misery. Against those who are immune to their psychic assaults, fa’orrah can conjure nightmarish weapons of force to wear them down, before finishing them off with their own natural weapons. Fa’orrah understand the value of a tactical retreat, but will sacrifice themselves if so doing will advance the agenda of their kalaraq.
Fa’orrah CR 13
XP 25,600
LE Medium outsider (extraplanar, evil, lawful, quori)
Init +8; Senses darkvision 60 ft., low-light vision, Perception +23, see in darkness
Aura sobs (60 ft., Will DC 21)
Defense
AC 28, touch 14, flat-footed 24 (+4 Dex, +11 natural, +3 shield)
hp 172 (15d10+90)
Fort +15, Ref +11, Will +14
DR 15/good or silver; Immune charm, fear, sleep effects; Resist acid 10, cold 10, electricity 10; SR 24
Offense
Speed 20 ft., fly 50 ft. (perfect)
Melee dream lance +22 (2d6+7/19-20), sorrow shield +22 (1d8+7)
Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft. (10 ft. with dream lance)
Psychic Magic CL 13th, concentration +18
24 PE—crushing despair (4 PE, DC 18), mind thrust IV (4 PE, DC 18), overwhelming grief (4 PE, DC 18), terrible remorse( 4 PE, DC 18)
Special Attacks invade dreams, possession, powerful charge (dream lance, 4d6+14)
Spell-like Abilities CL 13th, concentration +18
At will—greater teleport (self plus 50 lbs objects only)
3/day—dream, nightmare (DC 19), quickened spiritual weapon
1/day—banshee blast (DC 20), greater dispel magic, mantle of doubt (DC 20)
Statistics
Str 25, Dex 19, Con 23, Int 16, Wis 20, Cha 18
Base Atk +15; CMB +22; CMD 36
Feats Combat Reflexes, Improved Critical (dream lance), Improved Initiative, Lightning Reflexes, Missile Shield, Power Attack, Quicken SLA (spiritual weapon), Shield Focus (sorrow shield)
Skills Acrobatics +22 (+16 when jumping), Bluff +22, Fly +26, Intimidate +22, Knowledge (history, planes) +21, Perception +23, Sense Motive +23, Stealth +22
Languages Common, Infernal, Quori, telepathy 100 ft.
Ecology
Environment any land or underground (Dimension of Dreams)
Organization solitary, patrol (2-4) or flight (5-9)
Treasure incidental
Special Abilities
Aura of Sobs (Su) All creatures within 60 feet of a fa’orrah must succeed a DC 21 Will save or be overcome with grief. A creature that fails the save is stunned for 1 round, and then weeps as long as they remain in the aura and for 1d4 rounds thereafter. While weeping, a creature suffers a 20% miss chance on all its attacks and a 20% spell failure chance. Creatures with blindsight or without eyes do not suffer the miss chance, and a calm emotions spell or similar effect can remove this penalty. A creature that succeeds its save is shaken for 1 round and immune to that fa’orrah’s aura of sobs for the next 24 hours. Quori are immune to a fa’orrah’s aura of sobs. A fa’orrah can suppress or resume its aura of sobs as a free action. This is a mind-influencing emotion effect, and the save DC is Charisma based.
Dream Lance (Ex/Su) A fa’orrah’s dream lance is treated as a primary natural weapon that deals 2d6 points of piercing damage. Any creature that is suffering from a harmful emotion effect takes an additional 4d6 psychic damage when struck with a dream lance.
Flight (Su) The fly speed of a fa’orrah is a supernatural ability.
Invade Dreams (Su) When using a dream or nightmare spell-like ability, a fa’orrah can appear as any other creature that can be mimicked with a polymorph spell. Creatures that fail their save against a fa’orrahs nightmare spell-like ability are affected with timidity, suffering a -2 penalty on all attack rolls, damage rolls and initiative checks for the next 24 hours. This is a mind-influencing emotion effect.
Possession (Su) A fa’orrah can possess an adjacent willing or helpless humanoid, as per the possessionspell, except that the duration is 15 days. A creature that succeeds its saving throw against this ability is immune to the possession of that quori for the next 24 hours. Unlike other extraplanar outsiders, a quori that possesses a host leaves its body behind (and usually well protected).
Sorrow Shield (Ex/Su) A fa’orrah’s sorrow shield is treated as a primary natural weapon that deals 1d8 points of bludgeoning and piercing damage, as well as granting a +2 shield bonus to AC. The sorrow shield grants its bonus to AC even in a round when it is used as a weapon. The fa’orrah gains its shield bonus to AC to its touch AC and CMD against any creature suffering from a harmful emotion effect.
In her last years before retiring, the painter Losted all her interest for the great families and royalty and fell in disgrace. She ended in Sharn and we have a collection of portraits. She represented lone falled people like her. A last stroke before vanishing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Du'ulora Quori
Large aberration, lawful evil
Armor Class 17 (natural armor)
Hit Points 157 (15d10 + 75)
Speed 5 ft., fly 70 ft. (hover)
Str 23, Dex 13, Con 20, Int 15, Wis 18, Cha 19
Saving Throws Dex +5, Int +6, Wis +8
Skills Arcana +6, Deception +8, Perception +12
Damage Immunities fire
Damage Resistances psychic; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks
Condition Immunities charmed, frightened
Senses darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 22
Languages Common, Quori; telepathy 100 ft.
Challenge 11 (7200 XP)
Empathic Aura. The quori has an intuitive awareness of the emotions and thoughts of creatures within 60 feet of it. It has advantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks made against those creatures. As a bonus action, the quori can choose to focus this empathy on a single creature within 60 feet of it. When it does, the quori can choose at the start of each of its turns to either grant itself advantage on attack rolls against that creature until the start of the quori's next turn, or cause that creature to have disadvantage on attack rolls against the quori until the start of the quori's next turn. This effect lasts for 1 minute, or until the quori uses a bonus action to switch targets.
Actions
Multiattack. The quori can use Burning Rage. It then makes three slam attacks.
Slam. Melee Weapon Attack: +10 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 13 (2d6+6) bludgeoning damage and 3 (1d6) fire damage. If the target is a Large or smaller creature, it is grappled (escape DC 18).
Burning Rage. Each creature grappled by the quori must succeed on a DC 16 Wisdom saving throw or take 21 (6d6) fire damage. A creature that fails its save by 5 or more takes 35 (10d6) fire damage instead. If the quori kills a creature with this ability, the quori regains 10 hit points.
Also known as blackfuries, these quori are capable of driving beings’ innermost anger, exploiting it in battle, and even tapping into it such that the victim spontaneously combusts from sheer rage. It appears ghostly, yet is quite solid, grappling creatures with tentacles formed of shadow.
