ECOLOGY

Environment any (Abyss, Limbo, or Negative Energy Plane)
Organization solitary, pair, or mob (3–5)
Treasure none

In the nightmare dimensions of unreality beyond space and time, the power of alien Gods is sufficient to give life to intention. Hunduns are the incarnation of the desire to reduce the multiverse to a space filled with nothing but randomly fluctuating energy fields and gravitic curvatures.

Hunduns are primordial alien monks who embody aspects of the gaping, formless void that preceded the creation of the multiverse. They are out of step with reality, which accommodates their individual existences as intractable errors that must be continually accounted for yet that can never fully be corrected.

These bizarre aberrations of life are sustained by negative energy—life's antithetical force—yet they are not undead, nor do they differentiate between the living and the unliving in the pursuit of their purpose. Few beings can exist on the Negative Energy Plane for long, making the hunduns, who often make their homes there, something of an anomaly. Some scholars speculate that early hunduns came to the Negative Energy Plane as explorers, and remained there, addicted to the mixture of pain and euphoric release caused by the effects of negative energy on their skin.

Hunduns are tireless antagonists of archons, asuras, axiomites, devils, inevitables, kytons, and other exemplars of law. They oppose any effort to impose or maintain discipline, structure, or regulation. They loathe and undermine the prospect of peace or tranquility, and relish confusion, disorder, and destruction. Though these attitudes would seem to make them ideological allies of the proteans, hunduns hold those creatures in contempt, caring nothing for that race's strange religion, nor the spontaneous, ephemeral acts of creation in which proteans delight.

Hunduns believe that the freedom and truth of pure entropy are preferable to the artificial illusions of structure, and they seek to spread this brand of enlightenment to others as part of their goal to free all creation from order's fetters.

Hunduns appear as gigantic humanoids with faces hidden by voluminous, hooded robes made out of their own wrinkled skin. In truth, their faces are not hidden, for they are faceless; the interiors of their hoods are just filled with more folds of skin. They carry staff-like objects known as strange attractors, which appear as different things to different observers but always as something that causes some form of revulsion or nausea: a shaft of knotted intestines and vital organs, studded with colored, weeping eyes; a polished metallic rod on which distorted reflections of the observer indulge in extreme self-harm; a column of darkness in which worlds spiral toward a black heart that snuffs out the life on them. These implements are not artificial objects, but part of a hundun's body.

As well as being weapons and snares, they are methods of reproduction. Two hunduns can bring their strange attractors together, causing them to merge into an eggshaped object under the control of one of the parents; the other parent must create a new strange attractor. This ovoid is still a strange attractor in all respects save for its shape, but if it is moved, the development of the embryonic hundun within must begin anew. The gestation of the new hundun takes many years. When the egg hatches, the strange attractor is destroyed and a fully formed hundun emerges. Reproduction between hunduns doesn't involve any sort of love or even affection. Rather, the two hunduns feel a premonition that another hundun will be needed to fight order in the future, then meet and breed wordlessly.

Hunduns can be found floating in the Negative Energy Plane or within stable voids in the planes of chaos, meditating on ways to corrupt universal truths and undermine the laws of nature on a cosmic scale— anything they can exploit to trigger the collapse and implosion of entire dimensions or planes of existence. Though they spend the majority of their time in solitary contemplation or action, hunduns sometimes gather to oppose forms of creation or manifestations of law that require greater numbers to counteract. The creatures come together spontaneously, drawn by an innate sensitivity to the structuring forces that operate on reality.

Hunduns stand around 10 feet tall, yet weigh only about 700 pounds. Sustained entirely by negative energy, hunduns never eat or rest and are immune to aging; they are effectively immortal and die only through violence.