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Fiendish Codex II next month--Any scoop/rumors/etc.?
- Thread starter Shade
- Start date
Knight Otu
First Post
I suppose we'll hear more tomorrow or on Monday, when a new Previews for ... is due. And of course, more in December, where it will likely be the featured product.
johnnype said:
That's what I am worried about. See, it really wasn't that bad with FCI because we had Demonomicon from Dragon Magazine to look forward to if we wanted better stats for the demon lords. But we don't have an alternative source for the 9 Lords of Hell. We're going to be stuck using the 3.0 BoVD versions if we want better Archdevils. Unless Paizo surprises the hell out of us. (no pun intended)
Then again, maybe they will present two different stats for the archdevils considering there's only 9, with room leftover to do a higher CR version? Who knows. I just hope for the best, though.
Shemeska
Adventurer
Razz said:
The problem is that you've got Pit Fiends at the top of the orthodox Baatezu heirarchy, but then beyond them you have the various dukes and other ranks of Baatezu nobility, and beyond them you have the Lords of the 9. So we're either going to get CR 18ish dukes of hell, and low CR 20 Lords of the 9, or the Baatezu nobility are going to be more appropriately powered and then lightyears more powerful than the corresponding Abyssal Lords.
It's a conundrum to be certain. Blarg. :\
Baron Opal
First Post
I'm hoping that the dukes and lords are calculated along a similar measuring stick as the demon lords in FC I. I do expect them to be more powerful individually than a specific demon lord, but I want them to be on the same metric, if you will. That way when I adjust the demon lords I know to adjust the devilish lords similarly. It will be quite a mess if I have to adjust different entities differing amounts dependant on which book they were in and the current level of public outcry.
Aus_Snow
First Post
Sure, except isn't that part of what we'd be paying *them* to do, i.e., by buying the book they put together?Pants said:
Besides, the advancement methods given in the core rules hardly do these kinds of cases justice. In fact, they tend to fail dismally.
There are other methods out there, for sure. Still though, not everyone knows about them, or likes them if they do know about them. Which can leave one with a rather poor bunch of alternatives, even not including leaving the lords of the nine as the ludicrously pathetic beings they might be statted out to be.
I hope something is done to remedy that problem this time round, I really do.
They're epic beings, guys. For ***'s sake, make them epic.
Kelleris
Explorer
Aus_Snow said:
Uhm, you don't exactly have to use the bog-standard core rules advancement. The Fiendish Codex I specifically says that these are the minimally-powered versions and provides quite good advancement guidelines for demon lords beyond simply adding Hit Dice (pages 57-58). Personally, I love that approach - it's the best of both worlds, since you have the demon lords as (very tough) capstone opponents for a nonepic career and solid advancement suggestions for the crazy-go-nuts epic crowd. I hope they do the same thing for the devil princes, myself, though perhaps the Lords of the Nine should average 1-3 CRs higher than the demon lords, for reasons already noted. I think the 23-27 as a base range for them (the devils) is darn near perfect, with the additional advancement guidelines they provide.
Personally, I'll be quite irritated if they waste page space with multiple stat blocks for the devil lords at different levels, and especially annoyed if the devil lords are on a totally different scale than that already established for the "standard" versions of the demons.
Aus_Snow said:
As some others have said - regardless of your opinion on whether the CR bracket they were put into in Fiendish Codex was correct or not, are you seriously suggesting that the two companion volumes of the Fiendish Codex series should have their uber-bads in a totally different scale? I would rather have two sets of comparable monsters in the same CR bracket (even if' it's not my personal preference for them) than in wildly different ones.
It's like suggesting that Dragons aren't powerful enough in core rules, so MM2 does Crystal Dragons a good 10 CRs above at each age category. Now you've got a disparity which wasn't there before, and /neither/ side of the "how powerful should Dragons be?" debate will be happy because both have to deal with "wrong" Dragon CRs!
End of the day, I'm quite looking forward to the book, and the Archdevil stats aren't the big draw for me - but then I'm not as big a canon buff as some other people, so I'm perhaps just not seeing "the big picture". I suspect we'll see similar ideas for advanving them to higher levels as is FC1, which is the best you can hope for: and it's a hell of a lot easier for people who want them bigger to do that than for people who want them smaller to reverse engineer them, IMX. And hey, perhaps some of the whinging on this board will make Dragon consider a companion piece of the Demonomicon for higher level versions of Mephistopheles et al?...
