Dungeons & Dragons seems to be subtly hiding a mystery in all of its recent adventures, involving tall black obelisks that exude an unknown kind of magic.
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Last weekend, I decided to read through Out of the Abyss, Dungeons & Dragons’ 2015 storyline involving the Underdark and demons, while traveling home from D&D’s ambitious “Stream of Many Eyes” event. While reading through the adventure, I stumbled across a description of a mysterious black obelisk hidden in the Whorlstone Tunnels underneath Gracklstugh, a duergar city in the Underdark.
The obelisk stands 50 feet tall and made of an “alien metal” that exudes a type of strange “quasi-magic.” The obelisk has chunks of metal missing from it. If players find fragments of the obelisk in other parts of the caverns, the obelisk will instantly absorb them and “heal” some of the cracks and deformities.
Interestingly, Out of the Abyss doesn’t provide any greater explanation as to what the black obelisk was. At first, I thought this was just another potential story hook left by D&D for DMs to explore if they like, but then I discovered there were other black obelisks of a similar quality hiding in other past storylines.
For instance, the town of Nightstone in Storm King’s Thunder was named for a similarly sized mysterious black megalith that radiated magic, although it was stolen by giants prior to the start of that storyline. There’s also an black stone obelisk in a place called the Shrine of Bleeding Stone in Princes of the Apocalypse and a cracked obelisk defaced by Acererak that contains a demon stands in front of the Rotten Halls in Tomb of Annihilation. The obelisks vary in size, but they’re all similar in that they all appear to have magic qualities to them and just seem to exist as a tease of something bigger and unknown.
While obelisks aren’t exactly uncommon in fantasy tropes, it certainly seems like D&D is using them to tease….something. In fact, forums like Reddit and Enworld have theorized that the obelisks are all tie-ins to some bigger storyline planned for the future.
They don’t seem random either. In a 2017 AMA on Reddit, D&D franchise creative director Mike Mearls said that he couldn’t give an answer when asked about the black obelisks’ appearance in each 5e adventure.
We’ll have to see if a black obelisk makes an appearance in Waterdeep or the Undermountain in one of the two adventures coming out for D&D later this year. We could also see if the obelisks have some sort of tie-in to one of the campaign settings that will at least be touched upon in a different publication later this year.
What sort of hidden secrets have you found during your exploration of the Forgotten Realms in D&D? Let us know in the comment section!
