Obyriths and Far Realm

[klofft]

I haven't been able to pick up FC1 yet, so I was wondering if anyone could give me a brief synopsis of who the obyrith demons are. I read about them in the Dagon article in Dragon, and it seems that there may be room to make a link between them and the atmospheric elements usually attibuted to the Far Realm.

I love the flavor of the Far Realm, but I'm using a basic Great Wheel cosmology and it's really metaphysically problematic to me to have a realm that exists "outside" of it. I was hoping that the obyriths might help me "re-locate" Far Realms-type elements to the Abyss instead. Yes? No?

Thanks.
C

 

[frankthedm]

Some don't agree with it, but IMHO the far realm type stuff can work well enough on the malignant side of chaos if one wants to stay within the great wheel.

Normally Far realm stuff is outside the great wheel and the humanod type deities want to keep it that way.

I've never liked Limbo as D&D presents it. Too sanitized and normalized

 

[paradox42]

Obyriths are the demons that arose spontaneously from the Abyss itself, back before there was a Material Plane, and as such their forms don't remotely resemble anything found on the Material Plane. Creatures of the Material Plane accordingly can go insane just by seeing an Obyrith's form.

As far as demonic traits go, Obyriths are slightly different from the Tanar'ri (originally, slaves the Obyriths created from petitioners of Material Plane souls sent to the Abyss); they have different energy resistances, all have Fast healing and constant True Seeing, and as previously noted can drive oponents insane just from being there. That's where Dagon's Form of Madness special quality comes from; all Obyriths have it (though each type of Obyrith causes a different effect in victims of the insanity). Obyriths also tend to be more focused on the Law-Chaos conflict than the Good-Evil one, which you may also have noticed from Dagon's entry in Dragon.

Far-Realm style elements might be located in the Abyss, but only if you're willing to forego any possibility of benign Far Realm inhabitants. Technically, the Far Realm as written can contain creatures like the Lumina from Legends of Avadnu, which are creatures that are so suffused with Good that even the miniscule amount of Evil present in our realm (like the Material Plane) is poisonous and painful to them. But those can't exist if your "Far Realm" is really just a remote section of the Abyss, since it's all evil, all the time there.

 

[BOZ]

I've never liked Limbo as D&D presents it. Too sanitized and normalized

i wonder if Limbo and the slaad would work well as connected to the Far Realm...

 

[Shemeska]

Obyriths are the first fiends of the Abyss, (one of) the ancient creations of the Baernaloths (the first fiends). Their counterparts in Baator are known as the Ancient Baatorians (and there's some similar alien flavor to them as well.

Obyriths represent and embody a form of primordial Chaotic Evil that tends to be virtually inconceivable by mortals, maddening and sanity draining by its purity. They're the scions of malignant chaos as it existed prior to mortal life and the influence of mortal belief, and so in that sense it presents to mortals as alien and wrong in many ways, thus causing madness. Their 'wrongness' is one of hideous purity of a fundamental part of reality in one of its most raw forms.

The Far Realms on the other hand is another reality altogether, divorced from and possible not even having the same abstract alignments as the Great Wheel. It's not chaotic, not in the sense as we understand Chaos; and for all we know it's a realm of harsh and utterly strict Law, just a version so different from that of the Great Wheel as to be unrecognizable. Its 'wrongness' is by virtue of being based on principles different from and perhaps nonexistant in the Great Wheel, for being utterly removed from the conceptions of any creature from our multiverse (and likewise the Great Wheel is the same to beings from the Far Realm; they're mutually anathemic realities).

There's some atmosphere similarities on the surface, but the root cause of each are subtly but importantly different.

 

[klofft]

"Subtly and importantly different" though they be, such a distinction makes little or no sense metaphysically. In the basic Great Wheel, the concepts of good, evil, law, and chaos are objective realities. Hence the actual planes embodying these concepts. To say that there is a different objectivity to chaos requires a curiously postmodern addition to an otherwise consistent enough cosmology, i.e., there are more than one version of "objective chaos." "Objective chaos" is not inherently oxymoronic either; the manifestations of chaos may be manifold, but chaos as an abstract concept in the Wheel can admit of a singular definition (and thus, the ability to define chaotic alignments). This is the reason why I am looking to "relocate" the Far Realm to another place in my own cosmology.

Shemeska, I recognize you as one of the authorities here on planes mythology in D&D. My comments are not an attack on you, but rather the actual cosmology as it has developed over the past generations. Also, I'd rather be completely unburdened by that past mythos in adding to my homebrew. So I'm seeing if the obyriths can be re-cast in my game.

C

 

[paradox42]

For the record, many people (I might even venture to say most) who use the Far Realm in their games essentially house-rule it to be That Which Is Beyond The Multiverse, a sort of "ultimate layer of reality" beyond even the Outer Planes. That's the way I use it in mine, and I know from numerous posts made here over the years that I'm far from the only one.

Anyway, being what it is, the Far Realm is quite simply beyond "objective concepts" as we think of them- that's part of what makes it so maddening. It's not Chaos in any meaningful sense, because Law and Chaos simply don't exist there- or perhaps, as Shemeska suggests, they do exist, but in so many forms that the concepts we know are rendered trivial and meaningless by comparison. Likewise, the Far Realm is beyond Good and Evil, which is why the majority of its denizens (or anyway those that are occasionally seen in the Great Wheel) are Chaotic Neutral in alignment. In this sense, the Chaotic part of the alignment isn't there because the Far Realm is itself Chaotic; it's there because the beings are so radically alien and different in modes of thought from Great Wheel inhabitants that predicting their actions is essentially impossible in the long run (even if one can detect a few apparent patterns in the short run).

That's how the Far Realm "makes sense" in the metaphysical- er, sense. It makes sense by... not making sense. It's beyond anything that makes sense. That's why it's usually placed Outside "everything." The twists your brain goes through while trying to come to grips with those logical paradoxes are precisely what the Far Realm is all about, and why it's best if sparingly used. People are supposed to get headaches when really contemplating the ideas the Far Realm represents (at least the first few times)- that's the whole point.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Obyriths are the demons that arose spontaneously from the Abyss itself, back before there was a Material Plane, and as such their forms don't remotely resemble anything found on the Material Plane. Creatures of the Material Plane accordingly can go insane just by seeing an Obyrith's form.

As far as demonic traits go, Obyriths are slightly different from the Tanar'ri (originally, slaves the Obyriths created from petitioners of Material Plane souls sent to the Abyss); they have different energy resistances, all have Fast healing and constant True Seeing, and as previously noted can drive oponents insane just from being there. That's where Dagon's Form of Madness special quality comes from; all Obyriths have it (though each type of Obyrith causes a different effect in victims of the insanity). Obyriths also tend to be more focused on the Law-Chaos conflict than the Good-Evil one, which you may also have noticed from Dagon's entry in Dragon.

They also line up phenomenally with the Galchutt of Ptolus.

 

[klofft]

OK, I can understand that (I personally still think it's silly, but I understand it). However, what denizens that come to the material plane are CN? Honestly, I can't think of any Far Realm beings specifically, but my memory seems to be that they are CE. Thus, even though they are "beyond comprehension," beings on the material plane can recognize their behavior as evil...which tautologically returns us back to the idea that they don't exist outside objective concepts.

I have no interest in starting a debate about fake metaphysics here. I don't mean to provoke anyone. Really, I was just looking for a way to get some desired "Lovecraftian" elements into the Great Wheel, without needing the Far Realm to do it, and I was wondering if obyriths might be the way to go.

C

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I was just looking for a way to get some desired "Lovecraftian" elements into the Great Wheel, without needing the Far Realm to do it, and I was wondering if obyriths might be the way to go.

The answer is yes.

The Dagon article was explicitly written to have some of that in there, in fact.