Kyuss (Greyhawk) - Publishing History

Publishing History

The sons of Kyuss, later referred to as spawn of Kyuss, were an iconic monster in the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game before the story of Kyuss was fleshed out. Kyuss was described as "an evil high priest who created the first of these creatures, via a special curse, under instruction from an evil deity" within their creature in the first edition Fiend Folio (1981).

Hints at Kyuss's origins were added in the adventure Rary the Traitor (1992), when sons of Kyuss were said to be contained in the Necropolis of Unaagh, a cursed city of Sulm inhabited by undead. This was made more conspicuous since any of the contained undead that "move or are carried even a few yards from its buildings collapse into inanimate heaps of bone." This is suggested in the work to be the possible consequence of an ancient curse. That makes the creator of the undead ancient as well, painting Kyuss as once having been a high priest in Sulm.

In the From the Ashes boxed set (Atlas of the Flanaess, page 69), the entry for the Storm Lake of the Amedio mentioned that sons of Kyuss manifest in the vicinity after a phenomenon called the Storm of Unknowing.

Later, in Iuz the Evil (1993) the home of the "infamous evil priest Kyuss" was claimed to have been the Wormcrawl Fissure, a "mile-long ravine away from the main body of the Rift Canyon."

Still later, in The Scarlet Brotherhood by Sean K. Reynolds, the entry for Matreyus Lake said, "undead such as sons of Kyuss walk the nearby jungle - the evil demigod is said to have spent time here."