The original concept of Tharizdun was the Emperor of all evil. He was imprisoned in a demiplane locked by an artifact broken into three parts, each one representing an alignment of evil. In the now non-canonical Gord The Rogue books, the artifact is found, and this leads to vast upheaval in the planes, with the forces of balance manipulating events to ensure only the demons possess the artifact, since their natural chaotic nature will prevent the joining of the artifacts. Entropy betrays everyone and frees Tharizdun, because Tharizdun will serve his own goals well. Tharizdun conquers the lower planes, and leads his armies against the other planes. He actually wins, but at the very last moment, Entropy turns on him and the two start to fight. This was actually a trap laid by the gods of time and fate, and they sever the connections between the planes Tharizdun and Entropy have conquered and the rest of reality. They figure Tharizdun and Entropy will battle for several billion years, and Entropy will win because it always wins in the end. Meanwhile they can create new universes free of the two fiends, and the recreate much of what was destroyed and killed in a new form. The modern conception of Tharizdun seems to have fused the original Tharizdun and Entropy. Gygax's Tharizdun didnt want to destroy the universe, but conquer and enslave it. He was Evil. Entropy simply wanted what Entropy wants..an empty universe of perfect stasis where nothing happens. Tharizdun was perfectly aware that his and Entropies goals would eventually conflict, but in his arrogance he thought he would find a way to destroy it. The final books of the Gord the Rogue series were written after Gygax had been forced out of TSR, and they were his way of ending his campaign world. As it says in the end..evil wins, and loses, but life goes on somewhere else.
They aren’t non-canonical in my world! I love those books. A few years ago I bought them and I’ve been rereading them. Just on book 2 for now, but these books are my go to for Greyhawk, Lore, and demon battles too. And of course, an over arcing campaign.
Tharizdun is my very favorite entity in dnd. The first campaign I ran with my current table, I had an insane Archmage trying to break tharizdun's chains. In response, the players caused the material plane planet they were on to become a link in one of his chains- basically making planar travel to that setting a one-way trip. This was not a good idea. The players have erased two demon lords from my setting because they rationalized that since they can't go back to the abyss, they should permanently die if killed there. It's been a really "fun" time figuring out how a lot of spells work.
Ik I've been in a lot of campaigns and kept my imagination alive for as long as possible but this is one of those i didn't know he was this guy. Gotta see how to go about with this guy as a horror campaign
In some versions of the Lore he's been battling copies of every other god in existence, it was implied he'd killed most of them already and was working his way towards freedom the whole time..
I find it interesting that chaos is often represented by a sickly orange in media Be it the Darksiders franchise, or even - more recently - Elden Ring And apparently D&D also Just an interesting thing I've noticed
@@The_NaturalOnes "he" is a sword, and that sword in that dwarves back looks just like it, the hilt is 95% the same. It sucks the souls out of its victims, i would say its pretty evil, though i don't remember the lore that well at this point.
@@The_NaturalOnes He's the one character in the series that could be described as heroic. Everyone else, including the other protagonist, is duplicitous and self serving.
