The Heart of the Abyss

[dededo11]

I have an idea for a powerful artifact, but I need some help with it

I know what it is. The artifact is a large crystal containing a massive amount of Abyssal energy. If a demon lord were to lay his or her hands on it, they would gain incredible power.

What I need to know is where did it come from. What are its origins?

Any ideas?

[Naanomi]

My first inclinations would be either:

~Something from the War of Law and Chaos, perhaps some item that the Queen of Chaos used to elevate Miska the Wolf Spider as the Prince of Demons... could even be the literal heart of Ob-Ox

~If we want to go older, it could be the original mass of Chaos-tainted Evil the Baernoloth extracted and discarded in their attempts to create a 'pure' Evil Outsider race

[JackPhoenix]

Does it *need* to have origin? It's like the planes themselves: it's always been there.

[Naanomi]

Does it *need* to have origin? It's like the planes themselves: it's always been there.
(Note: the Planes themselves have definitely not always been there in classic Great Wheel Cosmology)

[Tanarii]

(Note: the Planes themselves have definitely not always been there in classic Great Wheel Cosmology)
In 5e lore? Or pre-5e?

[Naanomi]

In 5e lore? Or pre-5e?
For sure in pre-5e; but 5e has some ‘when the Planes were young’ sort of talk here and there... eternally existing Planes cannot be ‘Young’... I’m AFB so I can’t cite specific examples

[micahaphone]

How much FR lore does your party know? I'm not a huge adherent of official lore, but I'd go with forces other than Mechanus getting their hands on an Orderer Machine and using it in the abyss. Maybe celestials, maybe devils. For a time it weakens the demons, the blood war is almost won, but just like with Limbo, it created a concentration of the chaos and evil it had been soaking up

[loki_ragnarock]

Once I had a Glabrezu in a mine plagued with demons make a deal with the characters to not fight them for a favor in the future.

To break the binding that kept him there, he ripped his own heart out of his chest and ate it. It was pretty metal.


Never really gave much thought to what happened to the heart after that, but what if that was a demon's specific gimmick? What if he just discorporated himself repeatedly by eating his own heart again and again, drawing power from every bargain undermined this way until someone screwed over by these antics manifested him as just a heart as an ironic punishment?

Now a bunch of other demons are looking to eat the heart/shapechanged glabrezu to gain his most coveted power; the ability to immediately return to a non-abyssal plane when their projected image is destroyed rather than waiting the X number of years/centuries/eons in spiritual time out.


That might seem like it's of limited use to an adventurer, but to a demon? That's a game changer. Suddenly being smote by the paladin doesn't foil them for a generation, it just inconveniences them for as long as it takes to get back. Now the only way you're getting rid of them is by going to the actual Abyss and destroying their true form on their home turf... which is a huge problem for any adventurers who want to foil their demonic influence on their own home plane. So it becomes important to keep it out of the hands of any of the myriad demons that covet it, and gives someone a reason to go to the abyss to actually end the one that gets it.

So PCs travel to the Abyss, kill the demon, only to find that after overcoming the challenge of killing said demon in the only place it can really be killed, that the heart eats the body from the inside in a gross bit of body horror to lay there glistening again, ready to be eaten by and bestow it's powers upon the next cosmic threat.

I'm tired. It's late. This is poorly formatted.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

The lower planes deal in souls for power. It's an ancient demon lord's emergency supply of souls, his backup plan that was hidden away ages ago. He was destroyed by a powerful coalition of three other demon lords, who immediately after started fighting among themselves for control over his domains. His fortress was basically destroyed in the battle, so it was plundered and left to rot.

One of that demon lord's lieutenants who'd been bound by a mortal spellcaster when his master was defeated had hoped to retrieve the crystal, but that spellcaster had pried that information from him before trapping him in an iron flask. That flask was hidden away for ages, but now a powerful demon has sent his (her?) lackeys to track it down so she can learn the crystal's location.

The above spellcaster had left notes or possibly an item which cryptically contains the crystal's location, as well as the iron flask's. It may be mixed in with other magical writings of his and held by a collector, and/or it may be a magic dagger or similar which has found its way into the hands of an oblivious adventurer.

Of course the crystal is hidden in a secret room in the ancient demon lord's ruined fortress. That fortress is now inhabited by feral demons who serve no master and constantly fight among themselves, but will quickly forget their rivalries if outsiders show up seeking any artifacts that had been missed.

[Unoriginal]

Rather than making it very old, I would instead make it very new, as fitting the Abyss as a chaotic, twisted source of new things. Like, so new basically no Demon has heard of it yet.

For the origin, I would make it be an entire layer of the Abyss that was collapsed into itself and compresses into a transportable form. I would probably say that a Nagpa is involved in the creation, because Nagpas are awesome and because large-scale ruination like that is kinda their thing.

Now compressing a whole planar layer makes me think of an Atral-shaping machine Illithids could have had before the Gith destroyed their empire (well, the one they had in the past, not the one they had in the future). Maybe someone found the blueprints (which could tie-in with the Nagpa, as they constantly search for the lore of destroyed civilisations to acquire knowledge and power) and decided to create it with modifications? And they targeted the Abyss for the performance test because a) it has an infinity of layers, so one missing wouldn't attract too much attention b) it's filled with powerful beings c) the Abyss's own malleable nature would make it easier to modify with their Planar Shaper.


The lower planes deal in souls for power.

Far less than one might think. It's mostly the Devils and the Night Hags doing that. Yugoloths don't get anything from collecting souls, although currency is currency so they can still trade if they get some, and it is noted that consumming souls (which you have to do to get power from them) is one of the few things Demons consider taboo.

Some Demons still do it, mind, most notably Orcus, because they wouldn't be personifications of chaotic malevolence and malevolent chaos if they couldn't/wouldn't transgress their own standards

[Millstone85]

I am late to the discussion but I want to mention that, in 4e Nentir Vale lore, the Abyss began with a shard of pure evil.

It came from a reality the obyriths had successfully consumed, and was the way through which they hoped to reach their next target.

The shard was found by the NV version of Tharizdun, who was driven mad by it. The obyriths thought they had the god fully under their control, until he surprised them by planting the shard into the Elemental Chaos instead of the Astral Sea. That's right, even the obyriths were pissed that 4e rewrote demons as elemental creatures.

Later on, the NV version of Asmodeus journeyed into the Abyss and acquired a sliver of the shard. He used it to craft the Ruby Rod and take control of the astral dominion of Baator, formerly the realm of a benevolent god.

So yeah, completely incompatible with typical lore. Still, it can be a source of inspiration.

[Naanomi]

In 2e/3e Lore, when the Outer Planes (which themselves didn’t appear until a few other parts of the cosmos were already formed and doing stuff) were very young the ‘space’ between the cardinal alignments was nebulous and unformed... long before almost all the mortal races existed (dragons and probably Aboleth being exceptions, and some ethereal/elemental beings)

The first primordial beings of Evil (the Baernoloth) learned of the other alignments and hated them; and performed vile experiments to ‘purify’ Evil from the influences of Chaos and Law (a process which, in the lore of the time, eventually created the Yugoloth); and they ‘removed’ the Chaos tainted evil from themselves and their home and discarded it at the far boarders of their domain, where it sank into the Planes and formed the Abyss (on the other side of their territory a similar process formed Baator)

From there the newly formed Abyss made reflections out of its own essence (no meaningful number of souls existed at the time) to form the first Obyrith, who much much later created the Tanar’ri that largely replaced them (a common theme in Outer Planar history; nearly every one of the original planar inhabitants of the Planes were replaced... though there are questions about the Modrons and Archons)