#Eldrazi

[talestobetold]

SHE IS SUMMONED

(i made a lil plushie of Emrakul, a cosmic horror from Magic: the Gathering)

[loreleywrites]

What rules about this is that by the start of BFZ block, the continents of Bala Ged and Sejiri had already been destroyed. Emrakul left, and Ulamog razed Bala Ged, which implied Kozilek razed the polar lands of Sejiri. Yes, this is a lore-compliant card.

[slithergaunt]

All is dust.

A quick Eldrazi from Magic: the gathering, contemplating a curious, finite thing.

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre

Artist: Thomas M. Baxa TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Pro Tour Eldritch Moon 2016 Poster by Dan Mumford

[incorrect-mtg]

Some villains of MTG

Bolas: I refuse to be a lesser being. Godhood is my birthright and I shall claim it back no matter who or what I need to sacrifice to achieve it.

Phyrexia: We are perfection. It is a moral imperative for us spread our forces and make the whole of the multiverse compleat.

Eldrazi: We are the antithesis to existence. We travel the paths of unreality in search of worlds to consume, undo and make anew.

Ashiok: Yo, wouldn't it be kinda funny if this happened? Imma do it.

[xantchaslegacy]

[vampireopossum]

the tension here is thick . imagine what kind of narsty these two get up to

[dailyadventureprompts]

Footnotes on foes: Eldrazi

Hey DMs, do you need an unfeeling aberrant force to threaten your campaign world at various scales but don’t want to use mindflayers? Bored of lovecraftian knockoffs threatening to drown reality in abstract but unspecified “madness”? Well have I got the monster for you friends, It’s the Eldrazi: an unknowable and all consuming horde that’s here to reduce your setting to nothingness.

I’ve always had a fondness for the Eldrazi after they originally debued in magic the gathering, alien beings that sap all life from their surroundings and seem to have no other aims beyond the total and complete obliteration of whatever world they happen to dwell on. (plus they have a super cool look, and in the end isn’t that what matters?)

Eldrazi have a lot of mystery surrounding them, but in trying to puzzle them out I came up with my own headcanon that was too good not to use.  Below the cut I’ll go into detail on how I think the eldrazi function, and how you can best use them in your campaigns.

TLDR: The eldrazi are the great decomposers of the multiverse, reducing dead worlds down into their base components, and then into dust to be reabsorbed by the cosmic cycles of the astral sea. A perfectly natural process, but one that can go catastrophically wrong should the eldrazi be drawn to a world that has not yet died as they often are by witless dabblers or disruptions to those same astral currents. When they end up on a world they’re not supposed to be they end up creating wastelands, fighting against nature like an infection.  

While they’re scattered about many regions of the astral sea where stagnation looms, the eldrazi mainly occupy a region of the multiverse known as the dead realms, a cosmic landfill where realities decay into one another and the faceless horrors can do their work.

It is important to note that the eldrazi are not a species, or in many ways actual organisms: Each eldrazi brood (differentiated by trends in their alien anatomy and what they transmute material into) is the intrusion of a singular will into the cosmos with its own aims, which constructs its bodies from the errant energies of whatever world it happens to interface with. This makes communication with the eldrazi highly difficult, especially for those who encounter them without prior knowledge, as the will that pilots an eldrazi brood experiences the whole of the brood at once, many bodies at once, many dimensions at once. Even the most intelligent and independent members of a brood are merely hands in comparison with the greater body, able to exert a greater tactile degree of control but not actively conscious.

This alien existence extends to their anatomy: resembling summoned or illusory creatures, the body of an individual Eldrazi lacks blood or organs, and is instead a notional matter primarily used to store the magical potential they sap out of the worlds they digest. When an eldrazi dies they do not rot, instead they erode, the magic that composes their being leaking back into the laylines they siphoned dry.  Such transference can cause surges of wild magic proportional to the size and number of the brood slain.

This lack of a physiognomy extends to how Eldrazi seem to “breed”, budding like fungus or grotesquely merging to form larger bodies, which amounts to the prime entity behind the brood splitting up its focus for multiple tasks.  Sometimes the entity needs to actively participate in its act of decomposition, in which case the brood begins draining all it can, growing all it can, and then merging together into an eldrazi titan. These entities can lay waste to landscapes but also think in ways the disparate brood could do nothing about.

Eldrazi have a strange relationship with magic, in that their singular goal seems to be to extract the magical/living/quintessential essence out of dead worlds, meaning they become very adept at reading and manipulating systems that are built upon these primal currents. Eldrazi broods spread along a plane’s laylines like mushrooms along a rotten branch, sapping at its nutrients till the line goes dead and the landscape with it. This infection can even spread to enchantments, curses, and magical constructs, bringing them into a titan’s influence and even providing a seedbed for the growth of more eldrazi.

Very little of this information is well known by planear scholars, and even less of it is understood by those who might encounter stray eldrazi that’ve ended up scattered on their worlds. What most understand is that the Eldrazi show up following great magical disasters, create a wasteland wherever they go, and seem to have an innate ability to overcome and subvert magical defences. Most are content simply to hunt them on sight, and the prime eldrazi seem more than content to let their stray buds be culled while they focus on the real task of eating worlds.

Adventure Hooks:

High in the mountains there’s said to be the wreck of some kind of flying ship, that locals say they saw hurtling through the sky decades ago only to crash somewhere amid the peaks. The ship is in fact a spelljammer, and salvaging its helm might just be the first step in the party setting off on their first cosmic adventure. All is not well though, as when they begin exploring the high cliffs and isolated valley, they find ship and much of the surrounding landscape has been turned into a spiralling labyrinth of giant bismuth crystals, the haunt of a few eldrazi the jammer crew picked up while fleeing a dying world that ended up scuttling them in the end. 

Powerful spikes of magic draw the eldrazi across the planes, so after the mid-campaign villain attempts their apotheosis and fails miserably, not only to the party have to deal with whatever threat that unleashed, but increasing numbers of sightings of horrifying entities skulking about the countryside near the villain’s old lair. This gives the party a chance to re-explore an old dungeon, finding its corridors warped and its chambers filled with dust. 

Desperate to impress their supervisor by summoning a rare creature from the outer planes, a group of arcane grad students at the local magical college have unwittingly ended up snagging an eldrazi away from its brood, and are intent on studying it. For its part, the eldrazi seems oddly complacent, but is infact exerting its flesh warping influence on the students and the animals surrounding their lab. The party first gets involved tracking drown grotesque chimeras of ratswarms and stray beats, which invariably lead them through the increasingly organic sewers and up into the lab, where the eldrazi has broken containment.   Not all the students are accounted for, and while some got away with benign abnormalities, others have been incorporated into the brood, and will seek new places to take root.

Also, while there’s no official stats for eldrazi, a lot of great creators have already taken the challenge upon themselves, so I encourage you to go out and find some of their work.

[pikethorne]

Emrakul, The Promised End, 3/4s profile shot, Commander Masters style.

[talestobetold]

i love you cthulhu i love you azathoth i love you emrakul i love you kozilek i love you ulamog i love you yog’sothoth i love you yog’sothoth i l’v’ou yog’sothoth i’y’ou yog’sothoth y’i yog’sothoth y’ai yog’sothoth y’ai ng’ngah yog’sothoth y’ai ng’ngah yog’sothoth h’ee-l’geb f’ai throdog uahh ogthrod ai’f geb’l-ee’h yog’sothoth n’gah n’g-ai’zhro y’ai ng’ngah yog’sothoth h’ee-l’geb f’ai throdog uahh ogthrod ai’f geb’l-ee’h yog’sothoth n’gah n’g-ai’zhro Y’AII NG’NGAH YOG’SOTHOTH H’EE-L’GEB F’AI THRODOG UAHH OGTHROD AI’F GEB’L-EE’H YOG’SOTHOTH N’GAH N’G-AI’ZHRO

Ȳ̶̧̡̗̱͙̹̠͈͎̭̓̊͜’̴͚̺̬̌̾̃͗̕A̸̮̭͊̈́̿̎̆Ǐ̷̝̤͓̲͆̚͝ͅĮ̷̨̳͇̜͆̎̋̌̆̋̒̕

Y̶̡̥̥̻̞̣̺̯̙̏̓͐̔͋̈́̀̅’̷̖̣̣̬͈͙͚̻̗̯͑̈̈́̒̕͠A̴̢̅̓̂̐͆́̅̾͗͝I̵̡̘̮̰̩͉͐̂͗̈̔̀̇̈́̚͝Ì̷̖͉͈͚̠̼̖̖͔̙̀͑̅

Y̸͎̣̯̖̻̋̀̄̊̃͆̈́̀̚͝’̴̲̭͕͕̥̜̝͆̈͛̋͊̀͆͛̈́̑Â̵͚̫̄I̵̹̘͙̞̻̲̾̔I̴͇̗͆͘I̶̥̥̹̣̥͊̿̈́̍͐̈́̕̕͝͠I̴̡̝̱̳̜̲̘̐̅̅̓̒͘

Y’AI YOG’SOTHOTH

[littjara-compleated-sage]

OKAY SO THREE THINGS

Yet another hell of an artifact cheat card, lovely.

That flavor text is so raw it's eating the salad.

THAT'S FUCKING NEW PHYREXIA. WITH CRYPTOLITHS. If wotc says it's not canon it's already too late. I've integrated this into my belief system. Eternities radiation is leaking in and doing absolute fuckshit to the Phyrexian biosphere.

[rockyalters]

Kozilek, Butcher of Truth ( Foil | Full Art )

[mtg-cards-hourly]

It That Betrays

All will be harvested.

Artist: Alexander Mokhov TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[icysebzero]

The Ceaseless Hunger