Entrope

The multiverse is riddled with holes, whatever one calls them: portals, conduits, leaks. The Inner Planes are especially porous, with countless tiny seepages where one element trickles into another's realm. Some old sages predict that in the remote future the walls between the elemental planes will collapse entirely and all the elements will merge, which might well mean the end of everything.

A faction devoted to entropy decided to make sure that prophecy comes true, and sooner. Its wizards and alchemists spent centuries of trial and failure learning how to dissolve the boundaries between the elemental planes, and at last produced the entropes, magical beasts that devour the very stuff of those borders. As an entrope feeds, the two neighboring planes mingle and pockets of alien element are pushed into places they do not belong. The faction hopes that eventually the barriers will thin until the planes bleed together without pause and become one.

The first generation of entropes slipped free of their makers and now roams the Inner Planes at will, chewing holes in reality wherever they please. A second, later group is kept under tighter control.

Beauty was no concern of their creators. An entrope is a long, wormlike body bristling with arms, eyes and mouths. At least one pair of arms ends in claws, and one mouth, larger than the rest, is packed with wicked pointed teeth. Its makers saw no point in letting it speak or communicate, but it does understand planar common so that it can obey orders.

A creature that can literally unmake the walls of reality is nothing to trifle with. Anywhere in the Inner Planes, an entrope can bite through the boundary and tear a small, brief opening into any other Inner Plane of its choosing. The foreign element erupts violently through the gap. The entrope itself is unharmed, but everything within 25 feet is caught in the elemental blast, with effects that depend on which plane the hole opens onto.

It can open such a rift once every three rounds. Between rifts it fights with two huge claws for 1d8 each and an enormous fanged maw for 1d12. It is immune to every elemental effect, even shrugging off the impact of hurled boulders and similar attacks. Sages know only two ways to hurt one: weapons of +2 or better enchantment, or spells with no elemental basis, such as magic missile or cause light wounds.

These sullen engines of ruin hate everything, even the space they happen to occupy, and want only to see all things destroyed. They have never formed anything but hostile relations with any creature, including other entropes, and the faction controls its tame ones only through careful use of potent magic. Because they can chew their way from plane to plane and ignore elemental harm, they turn up anywhere in the Inner Planes, attacking whatever they meet. Their power is confined to the Inner Planes, however. The Outer Planes have no true borders of this kind, so entropes cannot touch them.

The faction has always been fascinated by the elemental planes, where the building blocks of creation began, and what better place to watch things crumble, or to help them along? The entropes were its crowning achievement, bred and refined at its fortress on the plane of Salt. The fortress's lord conceived the project, and his great-granddaughter is said to have seen it finished.

Some worry about what other horrors such skilled makers might have in store. The grim reality, though, is that creating and maintaining the entropes takes everything the faction can currently manage, so no new creatures of comparable power are likely soon. The entrope is bad enough on its own.