Kobold Press CEO and Kobold-in-Chief, Wolfgang Baur, is here to give you some insight on the origin of the Void.
I remember exactly when and where Kobold Press started its obsession with the life-devouring, soul-stealing, evil-purple theme of the Void and its followers. That would be the pure evil Void, with overtones of raw power and sadistic glee and life-snuffing badness.
Let’s tear it apart a bit from the inspirations to the growth of the design over time.
Whence Evil Cometh
The Void is the empty whisper in an abandoned house, the urge to wipe out the village, the hunger for ultimate, unstoppable strength. It’s Villain Motives 101 with cool aesthetics.
There’s at least four pop culture sources for the theme, none of which quite captures what it has become with Kobold Press. I enjoyed tracking down the evolution of the concept, and here are the headline results for the look of it.
Mythos. The connection between mind-shattering evil and a life-destroying source of unspeakable magic should be fairly clear. The roots of the Void grew in a Cthulhu compost of darkness and non-Euclidean horror. Both editor Scott Gable and I have drawn on this well in our work over many years. We’re upfront about it. Our obsession is manageable, truly.
Legend of the 5 Rings TCG. I played a lot of TCG tournaments (and won some of them) back in the early aughts. The Void Dragon and its various dark powers were always fun in game play, and I’m sure that was an early inspiration for the Labyrinth Void. Frankly, I think playing the Void Dragon in TCG tournaments was the start of the Void design path that led to … well, everything else here.
Just look at that charmin’ darlin’. Cuddly, right?
World of Warcraft. There’s purple Void creatures and magic in the World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, including Hearthstone cards named Void Scripture, Void Ray, and Voidwalker. There’s no direct connection, but the themes are similar. The Blizzard folks even have a card named Mind Flayer and a class called Death Knight, so inspiration goes back and forth between games.
Emperor Zurg from Toy Story. For some reason, the cartoonish evil look of this guy makes a light-hearted sense of ultimate evil. After all the grimdark, sometimes the void needs a trickster or an all-out buffoon. Which is, surprisingly, kind of how things got started, monster-wise.
Here’s how the Void came to be, design-wise and in hideous growth. If you want to bring a bit of the void into your campaign, the easy way is to pick up the Labyrinth Worldbook and see its chapter on Void magic, monsters, cults, and items. However, there are traces of it everywhere in Kobold Press adventures and campaign supplements, not just in the big obvious titles like Demon Cults & Secret Societies.
Let’s go back about 12 years.
Dark Fey (2013)
The selang from Dark Fey are the first servants of the Void to show themselves in print. Either Adam Roy or I wrote them up for Pathfinder RPG. I suspect a bit of Pink Floyd’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn might be behind the pipes of madness they use. There’s clear Mythos influence.
The important thing here is that other designers liked them too. Heck, 3D modelers liked them: here’s a free Selang STL file for 3D printing!
Soon enough, selang were showing up as dark satyrs in Midgard and elsewhere. This is also the origin of the Court of a Million Stars by Dan Dillon, which can be described as a high fantasy space station. It’s so close to the emptiness of space, even satyrs go mad.
Voidling in Deep Magic for Pathfinder RPG (2014)
The 7th-level spell call voidling included stats and art for the voidling, a creature made of pure dark energy. The sidebar discusses the Dark Tapestry source of Void energy, and names other spells in this category, such as deepen shadow and horrid revelations.
Design-wise, this Pathfinder RPG title is where it became clear that Void was a school or style of magic.
Void Speech and Void Dragon in Tome of Beasts 1 (2015)
I’ve always loved languages, and the Black Speech of the orcs in JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is one of those languages that was fascinating from the get-go. A corrupted form of Elvish? SIGN ME UP.
From the beginning, I designed Void magic and lore to include the concept of Void Speech, a language that evil creatures spoke. This speech could literally draw corrupt energy into the world. Evil spellcasters empower their words and boom, the Void manifests some new horror.
So I asked Dan Dillon to design a Void Dragon around that language and a creature of the dark emptiness between worlds. WHOOOO boy, did I get more than I bargained for!
The void dragon is one of the early touchstones of Kobold Press monster design, as developed by Steve Winter and brought to glorious life in art and adventures ever since. There’s even a void dragonborn PC lineage and related monster in the Labyrinth Worldbook!
And yes, the voidling and the selang were printed in Tome of Beasts 1 with 5E stats for the first time.
Deep Magic: Void Magic 5th Edition PDF (2016)
Dan Dillon brought void magic to 5th Edition D&D, shortly before he went to work at Wizards of the Coast. It’s pretty great if you like whispery nightmares and bolts of undead energy for a villain, plus there’s Void corruption.
Midgard Worldbook (2018)
Void corruption was a few years old when Dan Dillon brought it into the Midgard Worldbook appendices. To keep it cleaner, the all-in-one system was divided into two forms, which influenced the later Shadow Plane work in Book of Ebon Tides. The short version is that void corruption became two things: bodily corruption in a body horror mode, and mental decline in a poisoned-spirit mode.
The corruption tables inspired later publications, such as Ebon Tides’s Shadow Corruption section. (Not too surprisingly, Wastes of Chaos leaned more into chaos magic than void.)
Satarre in Tome of Beasts 2 (2021)
It was time to give the Void an entire lineage of servants who were not human, but rather, thralls to dark power. These are the satarre (Suht-TAR), malign void-casters who seek to bring the end of all things. Their patron, Yskarakta, is an eternally-reborn creature; the entire race of satarre would need to die to kill Yskarakta permanently.
They’ve been fun, mystic villains for a long time in the home campaign . . . well, fun for the GM. The players know that satarre interference usually means some heavy doom-and-void casters and warriors armed with void blades. They break heroes sometimes. It’s wise to pack potent healing or emotion spells.
Warlock Zine: Void Magic (2022)
This 32-page zine expanded the concept of the Void as inspiring various factions and cults, and expanded the magic they control. To fill in the Void with objects of power, I fashioned dozens of void-flavored magic items including the Doombringer’s Blade, the Shield of Annihilation (which comes with a mini-sphere-of-annihilation effect), and the Bones of Holy Myegathar, the first appearance of the term “void-saint”.
Going all the way back to the start of Void design, this is the first appearance of the malachite selang, a figurine of wondrous power that picks up the mad pipers and gives them disquieting new form. Kelly Pawlik designed a deeper bench of void magic. Finally, this zine also features the origin of many of the specific cults of the Void that later show up in Labyrinth Worldbook and Labyrinth Adventures. And not long after this, came the first reference to Nargoth, first and greatest of the void saints.
From A Bad Seed, an Evil Empire
So . . . the Void features a destructive cult with inhuman servants, its own language, its own style of spellcasting, and even saints and deep lore. It’s a long way to come from a few dark satyrs playing some Pipes of the Void. It’s also one of the most successful themes of villainy in the Kobold archive.
Do you have a bit of evil void creature or cult in your campaign? If so, I’d love to hear about it on Bluesky or on the Kobold Discord server.
If there’s no Void in your game yet, why not? I sense a lack, an emptiness, a missing thing, a whisper just beyond hearing . . .
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