Cronus

Cronus, also known as Kronos, is a greater titan and deity of sinister ambition who is the progenitor of the first generation of Olympian gods. His progeny went on to usurp him, banishing Cronus and his siblings to the depths of Carceri, the plane of imprisonment.

Description

Cronus had a handsome visage, with dark gleaming eyes, and stood over a 100 feet (30 meters) tall.

He wielded a sickle made of adamant, carrying a +5 enchantment and the ability to cut through nearly any material it touched.

Personality

Anger simmers beneath the surface for Cronus over his eons of imprisonment, liable to boil up at any moment and causing him to unexpectedly lash out at people. He is also quite paranoid.

Divine Realm

The divine realm of Cronus is Mount Othrys, the primary home of the Greater Titans following their imprisonment in Carceri. There within a crumbling palace of marble, brought with them down into Othrys and looking like a twisted echo of the edifices found on Olympus, Cronus resides at the center in a throne room measuring a 1 mile (1,600 meters) wide. All who visit Mount Othrys are encouraged to meet with him, for with his near-omnipotence he knows of all visitors and so in retaliation will declare for some nasty form of doom to befall them. Once in the throne room, Cronus examines the thoughts of his visitors so as to ensure that they haven't been sent by the Olympians or his fellow Titans on some evil plot to discredit him.

Activities

Cronus rules as a tyrant over his fellow Greater Titans and keeps a close eye on them all, for he is constantly paranoid of them plotting against him.

When not bothering his fellow Titans, Cronus sits alone brooding upon his throne, plotting ways for him and his siblings to escape their imprisonment. To that end he frequently sends out messengers to scour for secret ways of escaping the prison plane.

Cronus humors the occasional visit from baatezu and tanar'ri seeking to petition the Titans to lend their might against the other side in their eternal Blood War, hoping that they might one day offer him some sort of secret means of escaping Carceri. He will not grant aid for anything less than his freedom, for he has no desire to raise the combined ire of Hades, Anthraxus, and the other yugoloths.

Worshippers

Cronus wasn't actively worshiped by mortals following his imprisonment in Carceri, for the Olympians discouraged mortals from showing the Greater Titans any reverence.

Rituals

The Norse trickster god Loki was counted by Cronus as one of his allies. And among his notable progeny was the centaur-like being Chiron.

History

Cronus was born as one of the many Greater Titans of the primeval deities Gaea and Uranus. According to some sources he was born last, being the youngest of them, while others claimed he was the oldest son out of the bunch. After birthing the Titans, his mother went on to birth more creations. Some were fair in appearance like the Titans, whilst others were far more monstrous, such as the cyclopses and the hecatoncheires. Uranus, proving to be a cruel and jealous man, would keep all of her more monstrous children locked up as he hated to look upon them. Some accounts told of them being locked up inside her earthen depths, causing Gaea pain, while others told of them being locked up in Tarterus. Either way, with time Gaea grew sickened over the imprisoned state of her children.

Gaea turned to Cronus for help, convincing him to overthrow his father, thus avenging her mistreatment and freeing his non-Titan siblings. Accepting the goading of his mother, Cronus did battle with Uranus. However, none of the other Greater Titans came to his aid. He critically wounded his father, whose blood fell upon Gaea and fertilized her once more, causing the creation of the Furies and the gigantes. The wounded Uranus fled from the battle to the farthest reaches of the multiverse.

Assuming his father's mantle of leadership, Cronus became ruler of the titans and married the Titan Rhea, but went back on the promise he had made to his mother. Furious, Gaea laid a curse upon Cronus, proclaiming that one day his own children would usurp him, just as he had his usurped his cruel father. Fearful of the curse, Cronus devoured each of his first five children as they were born to his wife. These first five children were Demeter, Hades, Hera, Hestia, and Poseidon.

By their sixth child, one who would later be known as Zeus, Rhea had grown furious and would not allow Cronus to takeaway another of her children. She tricked him into instead swallowing a stone in swaddling clothes. This gave their mother Gaea the chance to smuggle the child away and leave him in the care of nymphs on a remote island. When he reached adulthood, Zeus returned disguised as one of Cronus's cupbearers and gave him a potion that induced him into vomiting up his five other children.

Zeus and his siblings, the newly formed Olympian pantheon, then usurped Cronus. After their victory over him, they then fought the rest of the Greater Titans, a conflict that would come to be known as the Titanomachy. After a decade of battle, Cronus and his siblings were ultimately defeated and cast down into the bowels of Carceri.

History with Toril

In the month of Hammer, in the Year of Rogue Dragons, 1373 DR,[note 2] a group of adventurers from Ravens Bluff defended the githzerai fortress of Tah'Darr in the Astral Plane from a tanar'ri incursion. The wizard Simon Regulus then appeared before them and asked them to provide aid to the githyanki known as A’rinthorm, who was studying a captured githyanki device known as the Great Machine. The machine had opened a mysterious portal and was flashing with a glyph of a black-and-white chain. He implored them to enter the portal and bring back to him the meaning behind the symbol.

When the adventurers stepped through the portal they found themselves transported to the plane of Carceri and met the fallen paladin Elendil. At his urging they sought out Mount Othrys and its ruler Cronus for a way back to Toril. Along the way on a Carcerian skin balloon, he explained that he wished to save his friend Uri who was being held captive by the Titans, ommitting that he had abandoned his adventuring party when they were being slaughtered by fiends.

When the group eventually arrived to Mount Othrys and got their audience with Cronus they found him deep in the midst of some kind of Cosmic Game with the marilith Cucathne, the latter of whom was entertaining the titan with the game in hopes of negotiating the use of Othrys as a tanar'ri staging ground against Tah'Darr. Cronus was unwilling to answer any questions that the mortals posed, but offered to gate them home if they would fight as part of his forces in the game.

As part of this "game of the gods" the adventurers each had their bodies and minds temporarily merged with a powerful fiend somewhere in the multiverse, then were placed in a combat arena. There they did battle with bronze golems and a weak child of the hecatoncheires, unintentionally slighting Cronus as they were creatures of his own realm.

Following the Cosmic Game, a jovial Cronus told Elendil that his friend Uri had died at the hands of the visiting tanar'ri and then gifted the adventurers the items that he had won from Cucathne, knowing they would one day use the items in battle against the fiends and took pleasure in that knowledge. Then, having learned of what they were seeking from his mind probing, Cronus explained to them that the black-and-white chain was a physical representation of the power of Carceri. Finally, he revealed Ellendil's deceptions and why he was thus trapped on the plane before opening a portal for the adventurers, yelling at them to leave before he could change his mind.

Cronus

Primordial Titan

Basic Information

Pantheons

Primordials

Attributes

Alignment

Lawful Evil

Realm

Tarterian Depths of Carceri/Othrys/Mount Othrys

Portfolio

-

Following

Worshippers

Domains