Pathfinder 1E OGC equivalent to Yugoloths?

[VelvetViolet]

Since Yugoloths are product identity, they can't appear in any Pathfinder-compatible products, excepting the daemons from the Tome of Horrors (which are still missing the arcanadaemon, nycadaemon, yagnodaemon, mezzodaemon, and ultrodaemon).

What kind of design choices would I have to make if I wanted to create a neutral evil outsider race of cutthroat merchants, mercenaries and nobility? The five daemon types mentioned above aren't OGC, so how much of the basic ideas could I use or how much would I have to alter them to avoid causing legal disputes?

 

[Kinak]

Well, for your own campaign, just copy them over from 3rd Edition and call it a day.

If you're trying to create a 3rd Party Product, I'd honestly restart from the ground up. You can have a race of merchants, mercenaries, and nobility filling the yugoloth's niche without them resembling the yugoloths at all. Then you don't have to work about any legal entanglements.

You obviously can't use the same names and you'll want the mechanics to be distinct. I'd suggest looking to The Iconic Bestiary for inspiration if you want to try and split hairs.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[paradox42]

Something wrong with the Daemons that Paizo put in Bestiary 2? I thought everything in the official PRD was open game content.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Something wrong with the Daemons that Paizo put in Bestiary 2? I thought everything in the official PRD was open game content.

The thing is, those daemons are incarnations of death and oblivion, not cutthroat merchants, and they're missing the daemons I mentioned in my first post because the Tome of Horrors decided not to include them.

 

[Wycen]

At first blush I was going to say focus on alignment. They are neutral evil. Is that not the "purest" evil? That is to say, untainted by thoughts of rigid order or frivolous anarchy? But that would make them a race of being totally out for the individual, never banding together for a greater goal(?) And isn't that what the demons are? But wait! Even demons band into groups so why can't the neutral evils? I suppose, you could make the devils are like that too, at least at a certain intellect, but they struggle within the bounds of the laws they make or pretend to follow.

So, figuring out alignment may or may not help your direction.

I created a bunch of neutral evil fiends for a project many years ago that ended up being abandoned by the "publisher". Of course I didn't know that would happen but understood the need to stay away from IP conflicts. I chose to focus on their martial aspect, so everything I created was a soldier or military leader. I think I tried to avoid using the word "mercenary" but my memory could be playing tricks on me. The point being that the less detail you provide, the more you leave up to users to fill in the blanks. So if your Daemon shock trooper is said to be a front line soldier, you can let the reader make the leap to being equivalent to a yugoloth. Though, maybe somebody would chime in a say you want to avoid that BECAUSE someone would think you are using IP.

 

[Wicht]

Since Yugoloths are product identity, they can't appear in any Pathfinder-compatible products, excepting the daemons from the Tome of Horrors (which are still missing the arcanadaemon, nycadaemon, yagnodaemon, mezzodaemon, and ultrodaemon).

What kind of design choices would I have to make if I wanted to create a neutral evil outsider race of cutthroat merchants, mercenaries and nobility? The five daemon types mentioned above aren't OGC, so how much of the basic ideas could I use or how much would I have to alter them to avoid causing legal disputes?

The simple answer to the last question is that you can reskin the stats pretty easily (rules are not subject to copyright) and can do whatever you want with the story. You obviously want to create new names, but that's fairly easy. The monsters from the Creature Collections are good examples of OGC monsters you have to do something like with anyway. I have used one or two of these in other products but the names are copyrighted, meaning that the monster story and the name have to be completely redone if you want to use these monsters (the stats need a little massaging too); however, if I like a monster enough I am willing to breathe new life into it for the sake of the monster itself and have done this.

The more complicated answer is that you are probably better off, in the case of non-OGC monsters, to just start from scratch rather than trying to reuse the 5 monsters mentioned. You can use the base ideas of the 5 monsters as guidelines for what sort of abilities and powers you are looking for, do some mix and matching and giving them nifty new powers. But just start from scratch and make what you want is my advice.

It sounds to me, reading your posts here and elsewhere, that you like daemons as your base race but feel constrained by Paizo's backstory. I would advise you, if you want to use daemons, do so, just create an alternate backstory for yours that does not necessarily conflict with Paizo's but rather supplements it. Perhaps a subrace of heretical daemons, or alternatively motivated daemons.

Otherwise, if you are not comfortable doing this, just go ahead and make a new "race". There aren't really any design choices you have to make in this regard. I would advice you to give them a name, give them a home (or alternatively make them a race of wanderers), give them an ultimate goal, give them a leaders, a few nobles, and some weaker minion types.

 

[N'raac]

It sounds to me, reading your posts here and elsewhere, that you like daemons as your base race but feel constrained by Paizo's backstory. I would advise you, if you want to use daemons, do so, just create an alternate backstory for yours that does not necessarily conflict with Paizo's but rather supplements it. Perhaps a subrace of heretical daemons, or alternatively motivated daemons.

Without knowing what you (Raneth) intend to use them for, it's tough to make any blanket statements. However, I see no reason you can't use the exact same creatures as "cutthroat merchants" if you want to. Seems to me some upstart publisher 5 or 6 years back decided that Goblins detest reading, and hate horses and dogs enough to make special weapons to kill them, with no actual change to the Goblin stats. What ever happened to them? Are they still around? I think they did OK, didn't they?

 

[Shemeska]

Honestly, just use the OGC stats and alter the fluff to suit your purposes. I was given a directive to make sure the PF daemons didn't directly resemble the 'loths when I worked on them for Paizo, except for a few small open content things like their being an Oinodaemon (though the PF Oinodaemon is seriously considerably different from Anthraxus/Mydianchlarus). A much of a giant fanboy for the 2e Planescape 'loths as I am, I did just that, so their being different is deliberate. They occupy different niches for game use as well, and I've been tempted to mix them both into play in a game at some point (just not in my current campaign, because my players were punched in the face with 'loths for like six years straight, so new villain time there).

 

[ImperatorK]

It sounds to me, reading your posts here and elsewhere, that you like daemons as your base race but feel constrained by Paizo's backstory. I would advise you, if you want to use daemons, do so, just create an alternate backstory for yours that does not necessarily conflict with Paizo's but rather supplements it. Perhaps a subrace of heretical daemons, or alternatively motivated daemons.

This.

Honestly, just use the OGC stats and alter the fluff to suit your purposes. I was given a directive to make sure the PF daemons didn't directly resemble the 'loths when I worked on them for Paizo, except for a few small open content things like their being an Oinodaemon (though the PF Oinodaemon is seriously considerably different from Anthraxus/Mydianchlarus). A much of a giant fanboy for the 2e Planescape 'loths as I am, I did just that, so their being different is deliberate. They occupy different niches for game use as well, and I've been tempted to mix them both into play in a game at some point (just not in my current campaign, because my players were punched in the face with 'loths for like six years straight, so new villain time there).

And this. Just reskin the daemons as bloodthirsty merchants or whatever you like. You clearly don't play in Golarion, so Golarion fluff is irrelevant to you. And even if I'm mistaken and you do play in Golarion, you still have all the right to just change whatever you like about the setting in your games.

 

[VelvetViolet]

They're not meant to be yugoloths, but to fulfill a similar niche: I want to create a race of neutral evil fiends whose shtick is "feudalistic cutthroat merchants and mercenaries motivated by greed for wealth, knowledge and recruits." I'm thinking of using the statistics presented at this webpage, because those are significantly different from the statistics in the Monster Manual II and Manual of the Planes. The standard castes are knights (eyeless fiends with two hands fused with swords and a second pair of claws), spies (scuttling lizard-like fiends that drool acid), counts (lizard/insect-like fiend with a pair of huge crushing fists), aces (faceless flying fiends), assassins, magocrats (animal-headed fiends resembling Egyptian deities), and warlords (multi-armed fiends resembling Hindu deities).

I created a bunch of neutral evil fiends for a project many years ago that ended up being abandoned by the "publisher". Of course I didn't know that would happen but understood the need to stay away from IP conflicts. I chose to focus on their martial aspect, so everything I created was a soldier or military leader. I think I tried to avoid using the word "mercenary" but my memory could be playing tricks on me. The point being that the less detail you provide, the more you leave up to users to fill in the blanks. So if your Daemon shock trooper is said to be a front line soldier, you can let the reader make the leap to being equivalent to a yugoloth. Though, maybe somebody would chime in a say you want to avoid that BECAUSE someone would think you are using IP.

Do you still happen to have any of the material related to that project? Not that it's any of my business, but is any of it OGC?