Sammael said:Be prepared for some pretty fantastic (as in, a product of fantasy) 'loth propaganda. He'll tell you the baernaloths are behind it all. For a more realistic version, refer to Chris Pramas A Guide to Hell.
Exactly. Because fantastic devil propaganda is much more realistic.
I think yugoloths pretty much had to be elevated to the state that Hellbound and Faces of Evil had them, as making them interesting was something of an uphill battle. A race that had been established previously as nothing more than mercenaries - puppets of the real villains, the demons and devils - was hard to fear that much.
The solution? As the personifications of pure evil, untainted by Chaos or Law, they are the oldest of the fiends, posessors of secrets the younger races know nothing of - to their sorrow.
The lords of the Abyss and the Hells are iconic, almost heraldric beings, each of them in posession of a full layer of the lower planes, easy to comprehend and use in a game. Yugoloths, spread among three planes, controlling none of them with the absoluteness of their lawful and chaotic counterparts, mere sellswords - they're much harder for typical DMs to grasp. Some big guns were required.
Naturally, they're not as omnipotent as they're sometimes made to seem - but they have a lot more going for them than they let on. They're masters of the double-bluff, both puppets and puppetteers. They don't famously seek to invade and corrupt the Material Plane to the extent other fiends do because they're too busy corrupting the other fiends, all the time making the others believe they're masters of the yugoloths instead of the other way around.
The fact that you're not such a fan of the yugoloths yourself, and that they've been treated so execrably in 3e, means that the yugoloth conspiracy is a more vital part of the game than ever before.
Basically, the yugoloths have a lower profile than the other fiends - seeming even to have been driven from their plane of origin - because they want it that way. They've given the impression of abandoning Hades for Gehenna purely to mislead others and keep them on their toes. It's their way of saying, Look, we've cleared this bloody great battlefield for you to fight over - be our guests. We aren't using it any more. We're certainly not using our mastery of the terrain to secretly control your every move, gracious no. Or are we? Mwahahahahaa... excuse me. I mean... we're not. How could we? You're ruled by supra-geniuses and Asmodeus seems to have created the entire bloody multiverse and our leaders are impoverished creatures who can't even afford proper faces. You have nothing to fear from the yugoloths, trust us. Now will you be paying in cash or credit?
Now that I put it that way, I suspect Guide to Hell was really just a bunch of yugoloth propaganda - their way of making the baatezu overconfident. It seems to have worked superbly, as people still believe the yugoloth lie that Asmodeus is really a giant snake thing to this day.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
