"Sweet Jez-us dude, let it go. LET IT GO! Seriously, stop with all the Tharizdun talk and Iuz too" is probably what you're thinking. Hear me out (have I ever led you astray before?). Tharizdun should be played like a nice Cthulhu god; alone, asleep, mad and in the middle of creation somewhere. With that being said, let him sleep. Iuz is the equivalent of Greyhawk's Elminster or Drizzt. Enough already, I agree.
What ever happened to the real Kyuss, the real Vecna, Accerak (sp?) and that hoppy fellow Wastri? Give me a good villain vampire like Strahd. Give me a Rakshasa or an Illithid. Give me a elf that wants the rebirth of her people, not this weepy "fading." Give me honest to goodness bad guys that look at the cults of Iuz and Tharizdun and say, "You had your chance. Now if you want to run with the big dawgs, be prepared to run long, hard and fast!" Give me the resurgence of the Ur-Flan and the Horned Society. I say "Give me...." because no matter how good of a villain I come up with, I simply don't have the marketing power WotC has to distribute said villain.
In a world as large as WoG, is there no Baklunish villains? What about the Pomarj? How about the barbarians of the north? Come on, seriously, has WoG become so impotent that it can't give rejuvenate itself into a kick-a$$ setting? Oh wait, I forgot, there's the totally evil "Scarlet Brotherhood" that sits safely without so much as an invasion on it's shores. Grrrr...... We all know WotC folks visit here, so what can we do to help them help us?
Where's Gr'zzt?
Dwarf from Nyrond on a drunken rant
We need a Tharizdun drinking game. Everyone time Tharizdun or any colloquialism of his name turns up on a heading, we should drink a cup of drain cleaner.
DISCLAIMER: I am not advocating suicide, nor drinking drain cleaner. My words were in total jest and I am not liable for anyone actually drinking a cup of drain cleaner because people won't quit yammering about Tharizdun long enough for Zargon to rise to power again.
There's a need for Tharizdun. Greyhawk needs a great, dark danger lurking in the background. None of the other Evil Gods are literally trying to destroy the world. They're only interested in taking it over.
Still, I, too, feel he's over worked. Iuz, Vecna, et al, have both their place and their uses, but I think that they get a little over worked too. You "hear" their names everywhere!
Kysuss would be good, as would Murq, but being from the Yeomanry, I think I'd like to use either Asberdies or Arinanin-b-Koran. Both are liches and neither was ever destroyed.
Arinanin-b-Koran disappeared "into the north" thousands of years ago, from the Suel Imperium. A lich easily "lives" (exist) thousands of years. He could/would be very powerful "today" and would control untold minions; undead, monsters of the mountains and underdark.
Just my thoughts _________________ Mystic's web page: http://melkot.com/mysticscholar/index.html
Mystic's blog page: http://mysticscholar.blogspot.com/
It irrates me to no end to see bad guy bashing on these forums.
I'm not saying that you HAVE to use Iuz, Vecna or Tharzidune but the do make really good bad guys.
I interpret evil deities into two groups. PC acceptable deities and PC non-acceptable deities. Some of deities that are evil that work fine for PC's are Nerul, Erythnul, Wastri and Hextor. These are good examples of the first group with worshipers being typified by the respective real world equivalents of HooDoo-Men/Voodoo priests, underground MMA martial artists, Ku Klux Klan members and Republican Neo-Con hardliners, all of which are evil but can be very fun to play.
Unacceptable deities would be the likes of Iuz, Incabulos, Lolth, Tharzidune and Vecna. With the exception of Lolth I use fantasy models for the evil deities. The respectively correlating models I use for worshipers of these cults are Sauron, Brad Pit's character from Twelve Monkeys, Irma Grese, Cthulhu and, well Vecna is pretty much uniquely Vecna.
I don't understand why so many people seem so hotly contested when it comes to these guys. One of my favorite things about Greyhawk is the diversity in religions and I typically go through a ton of different deities as PC groups move across the countryside exploring different religious faiths and having players jump through hoops to avoid offending the local village priest or HooDoo man. That being said, there is something that's fun about having the all pervasive thereat in the background. In almost 20 years of running D&D games I've never gotton tired of using these guys although I must admit to having used Iuz only a handful of times. Being called 'The Old' tends to evoke images of Geriatric Homes in my mind and he just doesn't seem as all that bug of a threat to me.
Iuz seems more like a pissant dictator of some backwater third world **** hole then the a legitimate threat. Personally the Great Kingdom was always one of my favorite enemies to use. Ivid is (or rather was) a rabid expansionist and seems like Caligula or a Hitler and even though he's only a mortal he seemed like more of a threat to me.
I think to many people use Gods as a threat. The Political Machine is a bigger threat then some ancient lurking evil that only some deranged madman would want to unleash. It is said that evil triumphs when good men do nothing but what about when good men on opposite sides of the border have differing goals and those goals are in conflict with one another? Those are my favorite kinds of plots to run. Right now the game I am running involves an Order of Paladins as the antagonists. I like complex plot lines and having clear cut, cookie cutter bad guys makes doing that very difficult but having badguys that are good in alignment blurs the lines a loooooong way and makes players think twice about killing their enemies.
Iuz seems more like a pissant dictator of some backwater third world **** hole then the a legitimate threat. Personally the Great Kingdom was always one of my favorite enemies to use. Ivid is (or rather was) a rabid expansionist and seems like Caligula or a Hitler and even though he's only a mortal he seemed like more of a threat to me.
I like your thinking on this.
One of the reasons I like Arinanin-b-Korin is that his family were secret worshipers of Tharizdun. He disappeared "into the north" some fifty-six hundred years ago (Oerth Journal #1). Were is he?
My thoughts are that he might have (eventually) followed after Zofar ad-Zol and his Zolites, into the Tilvanot Peninsula. Zofar had collected five of the nine Great Binders (imprisoned Genie Princes) including Ali Ben Yala, the Genie King. Zolar was known to still have two of the Binders, in addition to the Genie King's, when he and his followers entered the Tilvanot Peninsula. Powerful artifacts these.
1. Arinanin was known to believe in his right to rule the Suel Imperium.
2. Arinanin's family worshiped Tharizdun; I give you the decendants of the Zolites -- the Scarlet and Black Brotherhoods.
3. Arinanin would desire the remaning Binders to further his own power. The hierarchy within the Scarlet Brotherhood would most likely be in possession of the three remaining Binders. If not, they are "lost" somewhere in the Tilvanot, hence, Arinanin's presence.
I like to think that Arinanin-b-Korin, Oerth's first lich, is "alive and well" and serving Tharizdun's interest. And he's using the Scarlet Brotherhood to do it. Thus, he's their "invisible" head man.
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