jgbrowning
Hero
Umbran said:
It's amazing how many times you have to say the same thing, isn't it Umbran?
joe b.
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D&D 4E What do you think of the 4E background to demons & devils?
- Thread starter Glyfair
- Start date
It's amazing how many times you have to say the same thing, isn't it Umbran?
joe b.
Erik Mona said:
Here's my uninformed guess: there are two, probably mutually contradictory things going on with the planes. One is that they are trying to make them interesting places to adventure. The other is that they are trying to make them distinctive from each other. Now *all* demon lords are mindless killing machines and *all* devil lords are schemers? Sooner or later they are going to discover that a whole plane full of mindless killing machines is as boring as an entire plane of Earth/Dirt, and we'll be back to scheming demon lords.
The afterlife issue is the same thing - it's hard to have the kind of variation that makes for an interesting adventure environment if there is some sort of spiritual theme to an area. This problem has existed since the outer planes were conceived of - they try to tell you that monsters find their way into the upper planes of good so that PCs have something to fight while they're there, but it seems a little weird to me.
Ultimately, either everything is going to wind up being like the Prime Material Plane (except everyone has horns and tails), or the designers are going to have to accept that some environments are not going to be as much fun for adventures in terms of variation. I guess it's possible that you could thread the needle here and having a setting with both a strong theme and interesting variation but I don't think it's likely or will be frequent.
Intrope
First Post
I'm digging it. Especially because it implies that the Implacable Horror role will revert back to Demons, rather than Far Realms creatures. Because that's what Demons ought to be: the monster everyone *fears*. As far as I can see, the whole reason that the Far Realms caught on was because Demons lost the threat to all reality role when they got made into Side B of the Blood War (after all, the Blood War is a struggle for Dominion!).
lukelightning said:
Why? I don't see any reason why that has to be the case. Dwarves and elves are different, but dwarves don't have to be 6 inches tall and have two heads to distinguish them from elves. Things can be different without having to be completely different.
It's not clear to me why killing is somehow more "chaotic" than scheming anyway - I can think of lawful or chaotic flavors of either one. I don't think the change in demons/devils is really important. I also don't think that alignment is a good thing to base any game mechanic on - I really don't like alignment once it comes out of the shadows - there is just too much circularity in the definitions, as most/all alignment threads on this board demonstrate IMO.
Irda Ranger
First Post
Maybe, but I thought RE did a good job of calling Arashi on his b.s. without being crude or "lowering the bar" in any way. Just my 2 cp.jgbrowning said:
But on topic ...
I did not vote in the poll, because I neither love the change nor care about the "core setting." The Great Wheel never did anything for me. On the merits, I think the desire to clearly distinguish demons and devils is commendable; but I am unsure about how I feel about the execution.
On the Devil side, what is this "order" that they're trying to impose on the Multiverse? Do they have any goal besides escape from the Nine Hells? It would get old if all demon-related quests were "Astral jailbreaks", so I hope they flesh this out some more.
On the Demon side, I could use some more dimensionality than "kill! kill!". That gets boring too after a while. And why don't they care about souls? Maybe they don't want to collect souls, but surely they'd like to destroy souls, and if the only way to destroy a soul is to corrupt it (souls can't be gutted or ripped like flesh), surely there are some demons who take this up as a hobby? It's subtler work than simply tearing things apart, but can't demons be subtle when they choose to be? I can easily imagine a demon spirit taking over a King's mind (like Saruman took over Theoden); I mean, why destroy just one man when you can issue orders and brew feuds that destroy entire Kingdoms? That's a win, baby!
I really, really like name-dropping Tharzidun and the "seed of evil" and the Abyss being a corrupted pustule on the Elemental Tempest. Good themes there. I'll wait and see about this whole "Astral Sea" business. Could be good, but also could be cliched. I'm also hoping that the original "seed of evil" came from the Far Realm ...
What I don't want is a neat and easy "Elemental-Ethereal-Prime-Astra-Dominion" progression, from top to bottom and without room for anything else. One reason I did not like the Great Wheel is that you could not drop or add any new Planes without wholly changing the justification of the cosmos. Everything had to be shoehorned into the Wheel somewhere. This was a "bad thing", IMHO. The same idea behind the "points of light" campaign setting (lots of gaps for DM's to fill in) should apply to cosmology design too. I don't want to be forced to choose between "Ethereal demi-plane" and "Astral dominion." Have a "DM's option" option built right into the cosmology.
