ZEITGEIST a few Demonocracy questions

[efreund]

I'm having a bit of trouble understanding some of the broad details of the Demonocracy.

First off: where are they from?

I always assumed Baator (The Nine Hells).
We use terms like "Golden Legion" to describe them, which has a Lawful feel to it. And when you visit Egalitrix in adv12, it has a strongly Lawful vibe. You even fight Devils there, which are natives of the Hells.

However, there's some evidence they're from The Abyss.
The word "demon" is an Abyssal term. In the Drakr section AiZ, it talks of the "Abyssal Faith" of the Demonocracy. Also in AiZ, in the Travel Between Worlds section, it talks about a "demon lord hopes to use the portal to make his way to the realm of his birth, a chaotic maelstrom called The Tanari Abyss".

I feel like the Demonocracy shifted from Infernal to Abyssal between the original campaign and AiZ. Help me make sense of this?

Secondly: what was the role of Egal the Shimmering?

I gather that he likely never set foot on Lanjyr. But was the Demonocracy loyal to him? Or at least wholly descended from his Golden Legion? Or is he merely the ancestor of a faction of the Demonocracy?

Presumedly, he's still alive out in Baator, yes? What do you envision is his rank and role there?
Would it be safe to envision that he's a significant general under Mammon, and has a his, er, family estate in Jangling Hiter?

Finally, why was Egal (or his lieutenants) interested in Lanjyr originally? The best I can find is that the world was (originally) located at a planar crossroads, and made a convenient staging ground to plunder other worlds.

Third: how did the Demonocracy 'arise'?

I can't find a date for when Toteth Topec enacted the planar ban (only that it was "an untold amount of time later" that King Boyle founded Risur in 1200 BOV). Based on that, I'm going to eyeball it at around 2000 BOV. Then the Demonocracy 'arises' in 1117 BOV.

First off: why that specific year? It's the only non-round year in the entire ZG timeline. I'm guessing it's a cypher of some sort, or has some other symbolic meaning.

What does 'arise' mean here? Do I take in the naturalistic way, of "that's when the troops got their act together and got a-conquering", or it is something a bit more mystical/supernatural?

What were the Demons doing in those thousand-or-so years between the ban and the founding their "-ocracy"?

Finally: where do Demons go when they die?

I know that with the planar ban in place, their evil cannot return to the Hells/Abyss when they are destroyed. I know that 'eventually' they reform in the Waking (which is why the Clergy squirrels away Demonic artifacts in their storehouses). My question is: what role does the Bleak Gate play in this process? I am correct that the Bleak Gate is not involved? That the Bleak is only for mortals who die?



Thank you!

I'm working on a writing up a Drakr-based campaign, and I'm playing a lot with the Demonocracy (and fleshing it out a lot more), but I want my extra content to align with the official material.

 

[arkwright]

I don't believe there's an official answer to any of that, but I can tell you my head canon/fan lore.

Note that the golden chains of the golden legion can transform the wearer into a devil. Thus, my lore is that the Demonocracy were former members of the legion, left behind on Lanjyr after the planar ban, locked away underground by the Ancients. The delay between the ban and their emergence was the time necessary for them to return to their previous form after they were cut off from the legion's magic and the chains stopped working, for the demons to wipe out all other ex-legion, and for them to break through the seal and reach the surface.

Once again, this is just head canon, and head canon that Ryan has never confirmed over the years. But I think it makes a decent amount of sense.

 

[RangerWickett]

ZEITGEIST was not explicitly situated in the standard D&D multiverse cosmos. You can put it there if you want, and thus have Baator and such, or you can have it be in another thematically-similar multiverse. I think that, per EN Publishing, the Level Up product line posits a version of the multiverse that ZEITGEIST could be in.

Personally I see it less as, "Here are the 17 planes of the multiverse, and depending on how you behave in life your soul will end up in one of nine of them," and more like, "There are infinite dots in the night sky, each its own world, and we happen to interact with a few of them in this campaign. Nobody f'king knows what happens after you die. Well, okay, they know what happens for a few days - you linger in the Bleak Gate. But at some point you 'pass on,' and folks have rather heated theological debates about what that means."

There are regions of the cosmos that are dominated by big powers like the Gidim, and there are probably realms you could reasonably call Hell and nobody would bat an eye at it, but in my original conception there isn't like, one Hell that all bad people across all the cosmos go to when they die. Even the Gyre is just a mystical black hole esque place that happened to grab onto our plucky protagonists' planet first, when it could have gone elsewhere or just drifted off into nothingness.

Of course you get the classic suite of glabrezu and osyluths and such because despite the setting being its own thing, it's fun to see familiar concepts recontextualized.

So Arkwright's idea isn't untenable, but I'd say it's a bit tidier than I would have gone with. There were a bunch of forces mucking around on Amsywr, and natives would call a lot of them demons or monsters. And some were part of established hierarchies and others weren't, and then when the Axis Seal went up there was a sort of systemic collapse, but eventually some individuals rose in influence among the survivors and rallied them into new power dynamics, using a lot of slavery and dark magic.

Certainly the Golden Legion could have been a source of a lot of those stranded nasties, perhaps even providing an odd sense of collective identity to previously mind-controlled demons. Maybe all those demons are the sorts that upon death creep into the environment and curse something again. I would just want to also include some outliers to show that the demonocracy was formed from a hodge-podge of extraplanar beings, and they don't all follow the same rules. Maybe the Clergy has stuff locked up that they could have just killed, but they were hedging their bets.

Regarding Egal, I never fully fleshed him out. I figure the devilish hierarchy he's part of does that thing you see in D&D occasionally of using souls as currency. Egal is all about being rich, so would fill a role similar to Mammon, lord of avarice, though with good fashion sense and the best bling. So if you want to use the classic D&D cosmology, yeah, he could be an underling of Mammon. You're exploring the multiverse and yo, there's this plane that a few centuries ago barely had any sentient life, but you come back and find out that there are civilizations forming, and moreover the place has really loosey-goosey walls with the rest of the multiverse, which means you can slip in and start corrupting people and then branching out to other planes! It's great.

And then, ugh, the Gidim show up, those pricks. And some angelic hosts swooping in like the United Federation of Planets trying to protect the locals. Boo. So you throw a bunch of forces there and try to extract a return on investment, only to eventually find out the plane's druids used your gold as a focus of a ritual to seal their world off! This pisses you off, so you get petty and tell one of your warlords, the guy you've got pillaging all the worlds that die and get sucked into a big gyre, that he should let you know when this upstart world finally dies and shows up. I mean, it can't take long. Mortals are always apocalypsing themselves. Eventually you'll get a chance to torment the descendants of the dumb orcs who had the gall to steal your gold.

Regarding dead demons, I think of them like the water cycle and rain. You melt an iceberg, it goes into the ocean, it evaporates, turns into clouds, precipitates, and maybe you end up with another iceberg somewhere. Only a bit faster. The energy flows into something with sympathetic importance, which could be a person or could be an object or place. Heck, you could have a cursed phrase - arguably many memes on the internet today are cursed.

And if there was a person with a soul that got corrupted by a demon, when they die maybe they'd drag some of the demon's essence with their soul into the Bleak Gate. Sure, why not?

---

I'm really intrigued what your plan is efreund. I hope my answers don't discourage you.

 

[efreund]

Thanks! This helps. I'm still drafting out where I'm going with this. (Working title: Mirskwood Chronicles.) After I noodle on the above, I'm going to have some follow-up questions.

Spoiler: Mirskwood Chronicles nonsense

The early-campaign antagonists are the Ashen Choir, a society of automatons functioning in the Bleak Gate. It quickly becomes clear that they are a servitor race, and are worshipfully serving their masters. A little ways in, the PCs make friendly contract with the Choir, where they gleefully reveal that they are serving the Demonocracy, who they believe still control the Waking. However, the Choir don't seem to possess evil intent, if anything, they are sympathetic and pathetic. (Shades of Nier Automata here.) Turns out, they are serving various wizards and other (living, mortal) citizens of Drakr who are harnessing demonic power (and these folks are evil, to be clear).

Somewhat unrelated, eventually a huge mechanical tower thrusts itself up from the ground near Knutpara. It appears to be high-tech and all indications point to it being from the future. (Black Omen from Chrono Trigger vibe.) In actuality, it's from a parallel timeline where Tigrenes failed, and the Demonocracy still rules (and later invented industry on their own). (Taking the Sestra Proyekta idea from AiZ and running with it.) Their goal is to use the tower as a bridge through which to conquer this timeline.
(So I have to invent "what would several thousand years of Demonocracy advancement look like?" Hence my need to understand these guys.)

The question of what happens next is the central "Zeitgeist-y" question of the campaign:
Fight a two-front war against the parallel-timeline Demonocracy plus the Ashen Choir? Sever the timelines, and cast the Choir into the dark one? Convince the Choir to renounce their old masters and help out the heroes' timeline? Break the planar ban and hope the angels bail you out?

Clearly, I'm grabbing the bull by the horns, and working with the idea that this is a setting that you do huge, setting-breaking things with.

The campaign isn't "all Demonocracy all the time", like it might sound from above. I'm cutting out huge amounts of content here to just give focus on why I'm asking the sorts of questions that I am.

With that madness for context: anything I should know, or am seriously misaligned on?

 

[RangerWickett]

I just woke up, but that sounds cool.

Um, thematically or like ideologically, I might distinguish the primary timeline industry from the alternate timeline industry by saying that the demonocracy Would have more one-off inventions, rather than like modern industrial production lines, maybe.

I'm thinking of something more along the lines of the patron- artist model that you got from Renaissance art, where some powerful individuals said make this cool thing, and it got made. By contrast, the industrial Revolution was a bunch of independent folks who were moderately wealthy and started making stuff to make themselves more wealthy.

But that's just my initial boop of an idea as I get up before I hop into the shower.