The Bearer of Disintegration Marks the Passing of Time

Beings as immense and unknowable are out there. They're far more common than anyone would expect, and they're less scary than any cryptid. These are a kind of immense celestial that populate my campaign setting, I call them The Keepers.

Keepers are immense titans that embody concepts held by all thinking beings. Some with feelings of intense aggression manifest an ugly, violent brute. Some with the tenacity to get a task completed, great or small, can feel a guiding spirit leading their path. There's more about them for you to read about in my past articles about them.

Bearer of Disintegration

Some entities are so abstract and ancient that their very being is hard to fathom. The thing they embody is so abstract and hard to comprehend on a natural basis, that it makes the Keeper itself reclusive and hard to understand. Thus is the Bearer of Disintegration.

The Bearer looks on at a place once rich with life and civilisation - Soul of Eternity by Yigit Koroglu

Most player characters and NPCs in a fantasy RPG are just like us when it comes to the big wide universe. Time goes one way. We can't really imagine how the reversal of time would feel to us, and if the natural ageing of things was sped up, it'd be incredibly disorientating. This is the nature of this Keeper. Time is the plot to a story it's already heard.

Bearer of Disintegration Stats generated with Homebrewery

The formless, somewhat humanoid appearance of the Keeper stands as immense or tiny as the viewer perceives. Two people standing beside each other could be looking at the Keeper, one could be eye level to it while the other is dwarfed by its shadow. The immense ashy colour of its shape is constantly shifting. The rings which float behind it are carved in a text lost to time and detail stories that only it truly remembers.

The Bearer exists on the fringes of a natural place or a civilised settlement. Venturing too close to such things would cause it to start to age. Nothing is truly eternal, and in its presence, time has little meaning. It's not that the Keeper speeds time to increase decay and erosion. It helps the people and things in its presence realise that that is what it will become. Living things in its presence don't die so much as stop. The Bearer of Disintegration knows that this is what will happen to anything in its vicinity, even other Keepers (though they'll just reappear somewhere else). This makes the Bearer one of the most lonely individuals in this and many other worlds.

Waiting for the End

To seek out any of the Keepers is an immense quest in itself. Consulting these kinds of beings can offer immense, powerful insight into the universe as well as provide great assistance for some other, bigger task. Seeking out The Bearer of Disintegration is different. Due to its nature, the Bearer is incredibly isolationist and lonely. It doesn't want to unduly affect living things with the power of its presence.

With the reasons limited only by your imagination, we want to hear from you. How would you use the Bearer of Disintegration in games you GM? Will you see the Bearer as an antagonistic, deadly force, or a misunderstood wanderer at the fringes of the world. Let us know in the comments below and on our Discord server.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of fantasticuniverses.com, he writes about card gaming and PC gaming to a corner of the internet he carved out himself. On Youtube, he can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Follow his Twitter @IzzetTinkerer.