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Quote:
Originally Posted by Reaper Steve
I would like it if the deault setting had just that. Astral and/or etheral planes, elemental planes, and then just 'heavens' and 'hells'...without the Great Wheel. Save that for Planescape, but for the new vanilla D&D, all I need is angels and demons/devils.
Sign me up for some of this.
I certainly hope these suspicions hold water; with reduced mechanical effects for alignment I hold out hope that "angels" can represent a type of being rather than carrying the weight of alignment by implication.
Or supposing "good" and "evil" have a lot more to do with their relationship to the setting's gods than any specific behaviors...angels become "good" because they're keeping the world together in the face of devilish corruption and demonic horror, even if it means breaking a couple hundred people on the wheel in the process...alright, probably not, but I can dream.
__________________ If there's a Homer that relevant to the game as I've played it, it's Simpson, not the author of the Iliad. - Mallus Playing in:Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil having paused at the door to the Inner Fane: 'the Boy' (H Sor 11), Father Sebastian Graythorne (H Clr 11, Pelor), Sir Gavin Dantaros (H Ftr 2/Pal 9, Pelor, mine), Smash II (Orc Bbn 1/Ftr 9, brother of Smash who got Destructioned in his first combat). Law's Player Style says Storyteller 83%, Butt-kicker 83%, Power Gamer 67%, Specialist 58%, Tactician 58%, Method Actor 50%, Casual Gamer 42%. Just so you know.
I don't think I like the sound of this. It's cutting a bit too close to real religions for me.
I don't like this change, not because it is a change of rules, but because it is a change in monsters. I HATE changes in monsters. I HATED the change for instance in the graoning spirits from 2.X to 3.X.
Why so ? Because if ultimately which rule set I use is not so important for me in the end, ADAPTING my HUGE libraries of adventures is WAY harder if not only the powers of the monster are different, but the actual monster coming after a name is not the same;
And if the background of the monster changes as well... well this is the worst case.
And quite frankly, contrary to some other 4.x changes that were discussed, I do not see any reasons why this one was necessary.
Anyways, I have probably a hundred or more 3.x books to read yet, and it would be a shame not to use all this stuff on my poor, poor, unsuspecting players, would it not ?
This strikes me as a change that would be better introduced in a new campaign setting rather than in the core books. It tosses out a lot of the very interesting demon and devil culture that has evolved in the game's loose continuity for 30 years. The change itself isn't a bad one, but it is one more thing that will alienate players of older editions.
__________________ SHADOWSLAYERS: A full fantasy novel, now available on Kindle for only 1 dollar! REALITY CHECK: Everything you know is wrong.
I think that the new direction for the game is putting less emphasis on keeping "story" elements consistent with previous editions. Much like there is little emphasis on keeping mechanics elements from a previous edition just for the sake of them being "sacred cows".
If this is true then I'm more optimistic about 4e than ever.
Break the Great Wheel and 30 years of cosmological cruft and start anew.
Sweet. I'm stoked for the new devils and demons. I just hope they put a little of that fluff in the SRD, otherwise I'll just have to make up my own anyway.
At least now there is a story behind the stuff and its right in the MM not buried in loads of Planescape material.
And I am not knocking Planescape which I love dearly, but this origin at least sparked some cool ideas already and that means a good deal when it comes to D&D
__________________ -John-
"This is much harder than it looks. I wouldn't expect you to understand." -- Skamos Redmoon on 4th Edition D&D.
OK, I get the idea of any publicity is good publicity, but there are usually exceptions. How exactly is it that being identified as some sort of devil worshipper is good for your fellow gamer? I mean, I don't recall hearing about Trump ever insinuating that he worshipped demons for the sake of the publicity...
Though I suppose that if angels were identified as generic servants of many different gods, it could relieve the pressure, a little.
__________________ -Kaodi
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
-Iago, Shakespeare's Othello, Act III. Scene III. Lines 180-186.
I think these are pretty interesting changes. I like how the murdered god's divine realm became the Nine Hells - it's like Heaven being corrupted, giving the story a really dark twist . And I like how devils will tend to adopt a more humanoid form - it's only a cosmetic difference, but it helps distinguish devils from their demon counterparts IMO.
To clarify, I would almost be surprised if there were no fundamentalist group that latched onto the whole, " We killed God " aspect of the devils background. Yes, similar things happened in other religions, but there aren't exactly a lot of devout followers of the Olympians running around. It's like asking for a resurgence of anti-D&D movement.
Which, honestly, isn't very scary anymore. Fundamentalists are against a lot of things, and while D&D may currently not be the rabble-rousing prod du jour, even if it becomes so, I don't see it hurting sales.
My best guess would be the baseline D&D consumer is 22-35 years old, and makes up his own mind about whether or not a D&D book is going to damage his spiritual well-being.
__________________
"Even if you’re a snake, and even if you’re on fire, adventurers will still kill you."
-- Logan Bonner
Explanation of monsters' nature and origin is the kind of fluff which I actually enjoy reading a lot, because it can give me inspiration for writing adventures and campaigns. But at the end of the day, I'm free to pick what I like, discard the rest and make up as much fluff as I want.
For instance, when I started gaming I was intrigued by the wacko cosmology of the great wheel and blood war. Two years later, I was bored by the wacko cosmology of the great wheel and blood war Lately I've been assuming very different things, like Hades, Hell and Abyss being on top of each other: Hades be the entance to Hell where the souls of the damned are gathered, Hell being the eternal punishment for those souls, and Abyss being a place below Hell where mortal souls never go, but where devils or other outsiders may be sent as their own punishment.
In this new case, fine for me to say the gelugons are demons (to be honest, I do hate devils that look like insects, it makes no sense to me). Fine for me to say that Succubus are devils, but at this point I see no reason to keep the "devils are always LE" mantra. I like that Succubi tempt humans not because they want to gain a soul for hell/abyss/whatever, but "just because", which is quite CE if you ask me.
I'm not sure about Erinyes, but I seem to remember that they are spirits of fury and vengeance and have nothing to do with tempting the mortals, and maybe they are such in D&D only because of some designers mistake/ignorance?
__________________ "There is no survival without order, there is no evolution without chaos." "You have to see past the RAW to understand the rules of the game." "And rules are OVERRATED by the way!
I'm a long-time Planescape fan, and I love the new ideas. I particularly like the notion that the devils are trapped in the Hells and need some mortal assistance (coughdiabolicalpactcough) to win their way free. Love it.
One of the core conciets of the Planescape game was that whatever you thought you knew, the planes would have some more mysterious secret or deeper truth that could be revealed.
If I ran a Planescape campaign, I'd take one of two tacts: either the new changes to the cosmology is the dark of things, and the PCs are the first of their acquaintence to discover it (adventure hook), or the new ideas are the common chant, and the PCs know the *real* dark, which is the old cosmology.
Turn the 4e rollout in to an adventure.
__________________
"Even if you’re a snake, and even if you’re on fire, adventurers will still kill you."
-- Logan Bonner
Lately I've been assuming very different things, like Hades, Hell and Abyss being on top of each other: Hades be the entance to Hell where the souls of the damned are gathered, Hell being the eternal punishment for those souls, and Abyss being a place below Hell where mortal souls never go, but where devils or other outsiders may be sent as their own punishment.
That's great fluff, and it turns the evil planes into a Gygaxian dungeon; the lower you go, the worse it gets.
__________________
"Even if you’re a snake, and even if you’re on fire, adventurers will still kill you."
-- Logan Bonner
They could probably release a 4e Planescape book as a sop to the fans of the current cosmology.
Yeah, they could.
But it seems kind of pointless to have to reprint the statistics for succubi and whatever other demons and devils they retcon to fit where they've been for 30+ years.
And since it's one campaign setting per year, and FR is first and Eberron second, the first chance these fans can be satisfied is 2010.
"I won't kill you, but I don't have to save you." - Batman, Batman Begins "You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." - Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight "Yeah, I can fly." - Tony Stark, Iron Man
Inside my hands these petals browned;
dried up falling to the ground,
but it was already too late now.
I pushed my fingers through the earth,
returned this flower to the dirt;
so it could live, I walked away now."
Rise Against - "The Good Left Undone"
Merging succubi and erinyes is a mistake. A really bad mistake. I can't immediately see how to reconcile this with the material already out there, and even produced in the past year.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't that the point? They're not trying to reconcile with material already out there, they're trying to clean up material already out there and make it make more sense.
I'm with Moog---I really dislike the Great Wheel, and as far as I'm concerned in my campaign, a fiend is a fiend is a fiend, and I make no distinction between devils, demons, yugs, oni, or any other variety. So I'm actually cool with them creating a reason for me to care about the distinction, because previously I never have.
Lately I've been assuming very different things, like Hades, Hell and Abyss being on top of each other: Hades be the entance to Hell where the souls of the damned are gathered, Hell being the eternal punishment for those souls, and Abyss being a place below Hell where mortal souls never go, but where devils or other outsiders may be sent as their own punishment.
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