Demonic Lore

[Shemeska]

Don't forget that as of Dungeon #124, hordelings are CE critters who come from the Abyss and Pandemonium now.

Which doesn't make sense. I honestly think that there may have been confusion there of the Hordelings with the 'random demon' table in the 1e DMG. When I talk about Hordelings I'm referring to them as in their chapter in Faces of Evil, and other sources, rather than what seems to have been an honest mistake in Dungeon 124.

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

Petitioners in Pandemonium seem to resemble the form they had in life, and I'm not aware of any larvae in that plane ever being mentioned. Larvae seem tied down to the Abyss, down through the 3 planes of conflict, and back up to Baator. Acheron and Pandemonium are both too lawful and too chaotic, respectively to generate larvae.

Specifically, this seems to be related to the origin myth of the fiends. The ancient yugoloths cleansed their race of "impurities," and these "impurities" became larvae. Those tainted by Chaos were driven into the Abyss and those tainted by Law were driven into Baator, while those with neither lawful nor chaotic taint remained in the Waste.

This is why those three planes have larvae indigenous to them, and no others (although Carceri may have already existed at the time). It seems that mortal souls, when they formed later on, took on the forms already common to the planes on which they arrived.

It's a bit of a just-so story, but that seems to be the explanation.

 

[James Jacobs]

Don't forget that as of Dungeon #124, hordelings are CE critters who come from the Abyss and Pandemonium now.

There's still hordlings on Hades and Carceri.

 

[Alzrius]

What I'm getting at is that "larvae" may have different appearances on different planes.

I disagree. Petitioners take all different forms, yes, but larva look like larva; five-foot long worms with heads that resemble who they were in life.

I've always seen things this way: that in the Abyss larvae can evolve on their own into manes relatively quickly, and they're still petitioners, not true tanar'ri, when they do so.

Add in that some appear already being manes, and I suppose I agree with that, for the most part.

In the Nine Hells they evolve into nupperibos on their own - and these nupperibos are still petitioners as well.

I can't remember if LE larva had to become lemures first to then become nupperibos...I think that was how it worked. It was just that nupperibos were a "dead end" that could only transform back down to lemures (similar to rutterkin for tanar'ri). It was only later we found out that nupperibos were the first step towards become ancient baatorians; and baatezu forcibly pushed them back down to being lemures.

In the Gray Waste, larvae evolve into hordlings.

See above.

Baatezu can only be created by other baatezu, however - lemures aren't "natural" in the way that manes and nupperibos are.

Nothing said this, as I recall. I don't think every single lemure had to be forcefully transformed into their lemure state from existing larva or nupperibos.

I don't think the nalfeshnee are an essential step in tanar'ric evolution. Those who rule the Mountain of Woe have taken it as their role to speed up the process in order to supply the balors with vast hordes of troops. If they didn't do this, the tanar'ric armies would take longer to muster, but the tanar'ri race would still exist in all its forms (though some forms that are now common thanks to nalfeshnee interference would be rarer, largely confined to the layers in which they originally evolved).

This seems about right.

 

[Shemeska]

3E MotP, page 100:
"Those souls from the Material Plane that are not simply absorbed into the structure of the Abyss become petitioners called manes."

become? it doesn't say immediately though... perhaps some come in as larva and quickly become manes...?

i still say that some would go auto-manes though.

*nod* The 3e MotP was a bit brief there, but it doesn't really dispute the material from Faces of Evil. I'd say most come in as larvae, with a fraction starting out as manes. Given the Abyss though, they don't stay long as larvae before being killed/absorbed or being warped into proper Tanar'ri.

 

[Alzrius]

There's still hordlings on Hades and Carceri.

Whoops! My bad! Their entry in Dungeon does indeed say that (I was confused because Arodnap's Box, the source of the hordelings in that adventure, opened to Pandemonium specifically). Sorry!

 

[BOZ]

Bringer of Doom?

 

[Alzrius]

Bringer of Doom?

Arodnap's Box wasn't ever said to be the Bringer of Doom, but I suppose there's room to understand that it is (I think it's just similar, though).

 

[Alzrius]

That article (in Dragon Annual #2, by Ed Bonny) was generally pretty good, but I thought that particular argument was clumsy. I actually hate the idea of quasits and imps being made from neutral evil larvae - better by far to make quasits from chaotic evil larvae and imps from lawful evil larvae. To say that neutral evil spirits make better imps and quasits is to diminish the importance of law and chaos in the cosmology and to distort the very shape of the Great Ring into something other than circular.

You're reading into that article differently than I did. The point he seemed to be trying to make was that NE spirits were already evil, but as far as the Law/Chaos axis was concerned, they were a blank slate, ready to be filled with the messages of Law or Chaos that the tanar'ri wanted them to have; native larva already had their own ideas about what LE and CE were, and it wasn't worth the effort to "reeducate" them.

 

[James Jacobs]

Originally, Arodnap's box was going to be the Bringer of Doom. But since opening the Bringer of Doom causes explosions, and we didn't want to explode Maure Castle... Arodnap's Box is a different (although related) artifact.

The Bringer of Doom brings Hades-flavored hordlings, in any event, and we needed Pandemonium-flavored ones for the adventure.