Yugoloths: Do They Have an Identity Beyond the Blood War?

[dave2008]

As somebody with some expertise with the literary, religious and historical scene...no, not really. It has more to do with original pulp creations and filling the grid, and pretty much nothing to do with anything Medieval or Catholic.

I think perhaps you misunderstood me (or I wasn't clear), I was arguing against it being medieval or Catholic.

Regarding the grid, I don't know if devils and demons (what we were discussing) were separated simply to fill the grid or not, but that was not what we were discussing.

 

[Elderbrain]

To me, the idea that we don't need Daemons/Yugoloths because we have Demons and Devils is like saying we don't need Kobolds because we have Orcs and Goblins... variety is the spice of life, and more monsters = more fun.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

To me, the idea that we don't need Daemons/Yugoloths because we have Demons and Devils is like saying we don't need Kobolds because we have Orcs and Goblins... variety is the spice of life, and more monsters = more fun.

I'm not necessarily anti-Yugoloth, I just think they need something to do besides being players in the Blood War.

Out of curiosity, what are Pathfinder's Daemons like?

 

[gyor]

I've been thinking that since they are mercs, having Evil Gods not linked to the Hell hiring them as servants and effective counter parts to Angels would give them a function. After all many Evil Gods would see Devils as Asmodeus's personal minions and Demons aren't relible, but Yugoloths and Succubi are relatively free agents and an Evil God might be able to create Yugoloths of their own or trade souls to the Ultraloths or Nighthags in exchange for creating Yugoloth armies for them. And they could simply breed Succubi.

 

[gyor]

I'm not necessarily anti-Yugoloth, I just think they need something to do besides being players in the Blood War.

Out of curiosity, what are Pathfinder's Daemons like?

They want to destroy the universe and then ultimately themselves when there is nothing left. They are made from souls damned to their plane who evade being hunted by Daemons for long enough (Daemon hunt and destroy souls for fun). Also they are lead of the Four Horsemen of the Apcolyse and Ahriman who is awesomely horrifying. They share their plane with another race of fiends who are corrupted Genies called the Div who have their archfiends.

Pathfinder used the coolest parts of fiend lore and then dialed it to 100 with other unique races of fiends. Kytons stopped being Devils who became their own Shadow Plane race of Cenobite type fiends.

And more. Wish WotC had taken more inspiration on creating new fiend types from Pathfinder's fiends.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

They want to destroy the universe and then ultimately themselves when there is nothing left. They are made from souls damned to their plane who evade being hunted by Daemons for long enough (Daemon hunt and destroy souls for fun). Also they are lead of the Four Horsemen of the Apcolyse and Ahriman who is awesomely horrifying. They share their plane with another race of fiends who are corrupted Genies called the Div who have their archfiends.

Pathfinder used the coolest parts of fiend lore and then dialed it to 100 with other unique races of fiends. Kytons stopped being Devils who became their own Shadow Plane race of Cenobite type fiends.

And more. Wish WotC had taken more inspiration on creating new fiend types from Pathfinder's fiends.

If the yugoloths want to destroy everything, then what do the demons want? Normally that's how I understand the demon/devil.distinction: one wants to kill, the other wants to rule.

 

[Shemeska]

I'm not necessarily anti-Yugoloth, I just think they need something to do besides being players in the Blood War.

The 'loths are a paradox of utter selfish self-interest and quasi-religious (yet brutally misotheist) zealots and slaves to the abstract concept of primordial Evil and their creators the baernaloths. To quote 2e's 'Faces of Evil: The Fiends', yugoloths only desire a perfect universe: one in which the concept of mercy does not exist. They want raw, uniform, pointless cosmic suffering. The Blood War was their own instigation, a long-term plan to breed evil in all its forms through brutal self-cannibalization, until they eventually lull the upper planes into complacency and unite the entirety of the Lower Planes beneath their own banner and turn on the other planes one by one, eradicating hope, starving the gods until the Astral plane is littered with the withered, rocky husks of deceased divinities, and then smile over all that they have wrought. Having them as greedy mercenaries is a public face that hides a primordial monster that has been there since the dawn of time, since before the gods, since mortal life existed.

Not that MToF gave you even a hint of that prior and very deep lore.

Out of curiosity, what are Pathfinder's Daemons like?

Well I suppose this is my question to answer given that I wrote most of the PF daemon content.

 

[Shemeska]

Out of curiosity, what are Pathfinder's Daemons like?

They would tell you that they're the physical manifestation of a universe grown old, sick, and self-loathing, a cosmos burdened by its own failures and now crying out, begging to end its own pain, the source of which is of course mortal souls. Daemons are a paradox in that they're specifically created from mortal souls themselves, and yet they hunger moment by moment to glut themselves on mortal souls, extinguishing the light of life, grain of sand by minuscule grain of sand gnawed from a mountain stretching to the heavens.

PF's daemons are also almost pitiable wretches, adrift and alone in the cosmos. The duality of their natures and the question of 'what happens/what do we do when the stars wink out and all mortal life is extinguished?' haunts them because they don't have anyone to answer that for them. The only being who might have been able to do so, the Oinodaemon/The Bound Prince/The First Daemon... its servitors and the daemons' current rulers, the Four Horsemen, betrayed, killed, and ate them (and keep eating them every year because whatever they did might not have necessarily killed them and possibly just made things worse by fusing it with the plane of Abaddon such that the perpetual eclipse in the sky is the single, lidded eye of their dead/not dead mother/father).

Each daemon caste represents one way in which mortals die, and there are a lot of ways that mortals can die...

 

[Shemeska]

If the yugoloths want to destroy everything, then what do the demons want? Normally that's how I understand the demon/devil.distinction: one wants to kill, the other wants to rule.

The 'loths don't want to destroy anything. They simply want everything to suffer: uniformly and pointlessly. There is no reason, there is no meaning, there is no purpose, but you will suffer all the same. Universe by universe, reality by reality, Evil will infect and devour from within like a cosmic virus.

I thinks folks might notice that I really, really like NE fiends. Between the 'loths and PF's daemons, I've written a lot of stuff there.

 

[Shroomy]

It has been a long time since I perused D3 (I played through it once too, but I don't remember the daemons coming up), and I don't have a copy, but it might be interesting for the discussion if anyone knows off the top of their head what the daemons are doing in that adventure and what their business is in the Underdark. It might shed some light on why Gygax, et al. felt it was desirable to introduce a third group of fiends into the game.

They're muscle and guards. Nothing more grandiose!