Sparked by the , I started thinking about the Temple of Id and its inhabitants.

I have previously suggested that the members of the Temple of Id are followers of Thanatos. In addition to the fact that Thanatos is a big bad deity, the fact that both Id and Thanatos are terms from psychology. Dungeons of Castle Blackmoor hints at various links between the Cultists of Id and the Egg of Coot, bringing us another psychological term, Ego ("Egg-o").

I don't know about these coincidences, but they are sort of funny. Anyway, In My Campaign, the object of the Temple of Id in the Year 500 was to awaken the Egg of Coot. Since they were destroyed, the Egg was not awakened untill much later, ultimately being raised from its sleep by the magical energies released during the Mage Wars.

The Egg of Coot is a dangerous foe indeed, but one can only imagine what dangers it could have presented if it had become an instrument of the Id Cult. I believe that this group did not only want to awaken the sleeping Egg, but control it and use it to further their own destructive goals.

What other resources might that order have had at its disposal? Coming from the Mystara community, I have always associated Thanatos with the Dimension of Nightmares (comparable perhaps to the Far Realm in later era D&D).

Creatures serving Id might include denizens of Nightmare as well as Displacer Beasts.

For this reason, I always believed the Malfera Woods were important to the Cult of Id (Malfera being specifically described as Nightmare Creatures).

I think it could also be interesting to include some connections to the Burrower Wars. Could there still be Neanderthal Burrower Cultists servin the Temple of Id?

-Havard

This is good stuff. What we need to collect all of the canon and "semi-canon" stuff together into a single Blackmoor Gazeteer or something like that. :D

Perhaps the brute-men/neanderthals were but the first generation of Id Cultists. Maybe the Temple was one of Thanatos' first efforts to revive the Burrowers, and in so doing, they discovered (or drew the attention of) the EGG, only to be defeated before bringing about its rising/awakening?

I love this digging of terms associated with psychology 8)