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Once a god of light and justice, now turned into hatred after the loss of all his worshipers. After failing in this ambition, might the demilich's soul have merged with another plane instead, providing some of the malevolent intelligence behind the Mists?Īmon, the Void Before the Altar. I get the appeal of keeping the Dark Powers unknowable and unnamed, but the backstories of some of the vestiges in Tome of Magic do lend themselves to explaining why they would create a Demiplane of Dread.Īcererak, in Return to the Tomb of Horrors, sought to merge his consciousness with the Negative Energy Plane. Should other vestiges-perhaps Acererak, Amon, Balam, Chupoclops, Haures, Orthos, and Otiax-be counted among the possible identities of Dark Powers as well? This explanation for the Dark Powers isn't presented by Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft as an objective fact, just as one possibility, and it seems that the names Tenebrous and Shami-Amourae were added as "whispers in sinister lore" because previous editions called them vestiges. Whatever the truth of the matter, vestiges seem desperate to participate in reality, if only by peering at it through another creature’s eyes." Others say they are true spirits-souls cast off into some plane that is unreachable by all magic due to an agreement between the gods. Some scholars say that vestiges are a common myth-they do not actually exist but are inherent in the minds of all beings. They are untouchable, untraceable, and beyond all powers that might attempt to confine or define them. So the implication seems to be that the Dark Powers might be vestiges as defined in 3rd edition's Tome of Magic, which said "Called forth from nowhere, composed of nothing, they exist entirely outside the rules of reality. Van Richten's Guide included three main suggestions about what the Dark Powers were, and the third was that they were "diminished vestiges," "all that remain of a multitude of vanquished evil deities and demigods." Shami-Amourae, a minor demon lord associated with succubi, appeared in Dungeon #148 as one of the prisoners of the Wells of Darkness in the Abyss, a fate that left her a mere vestige, "neither dead nor alive, but somewhere horribly in between." He appeared in 3rd edition's Tome of Magic as one of the vestiges summonable by the binder class. Tenebrous is the undead remnants of Orcus's divinity, the primary villain of the Planescape adventures The Great Modron March and Dead Gods. Osybus: The priests of Osybus were first mentioned in Curse of Strahd (page 214), but Osybus is described in Van Richten's Guide (on page 240) as a lich from Strahd's homeworld, devoted to the Dark Powers in life and betrayed by his servants, though he became one of the Dark Powers after his destruction and helped create the Demiplane of Dread around the newly vampired Strahd. So Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, while it leaves much about the Dark Powers mysterious and gives a variety of contradictory options about their nature and motivations, breaks the taboo against giving them names.