Elder Evils

Illus. by J. Zhang
64
read Leviathan, who spawned monster serpents,
Sharp of tooth and merciless of fang,
Their bodies filled with poison instead of blood.
Fierce beasts of land and sea who wore their glory
like gods, all bedecked in splendor.
Terror overcame whoever beheld Leviathan,
From its dread body sprang vipers and dragons,
And hurricanes, and mighty tempests,
And fearsome shaking of the earth,
And such abominations as even the gods could not
comprehend.
So did the world shudder at the stirring of Leviathan.
Gods grant that it lie in peace in the depths for all eternity.
—An ancient tablet carved in Draconic,
origin unknown
Spawned by the raw and undiluted chaos of creation,
the world-spanning creature called the Leviathan
slumbers deep beneath the waves, its dreams and
stirrings producing monsters and disaster in the
world above. Few on the surface are aware of the
terrible threat that the Leviathan represents, but in
the depths of the ocean, a creature of unspeakable
evil seeks to use the mighty creature for his own
nefarious purposes.
BACKGROUND
Most legends depict the creation of the universe as an
ordered, methodical process carried out by the gods. Only
a few myths describe the difficulties and obstacles that the
gods encountered. A handful of legends told by the oldest
elementals and dragons spin a different tale, however. These
stories are all but forgotten today.
When the gods created the worlds and the various planes
of existence, they did so by manipulating law and chaos,
adding one to the other, subtracting, combining, subdividing.
Each world is a precise mixture of the two, with order
providing stability and chaos producing change. Inevitably,
one force or the other falls out of balance and must in some
fashion be restricted or controlled. The beast called the
Leviathan is nothing less than the raw chaos resulting from
the creation of the world, given flesh and form. (Knowledge
[religion] DC 34)
Balance must be maintained in the universe, with law
weighed against chaos. When worlds are created, however,
these forces become unbalanced—generating “leftovers”
from the process of creation, nearly always an excess of chaos.
A chaotic imbalance can result in the creation of creatures
that are almost pure chaos, existing only to bring about
change and move their surroundings toward disorder. The
Leviathan is one such entity. (DC 37)
These chaos-entities can be forced into prison demiplanes
or eternal slumber where they stir restlessly and dream,
eventually disappearing as their energies slowly drain away.