Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 9556702" data-attributes="member: 63">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.</blockquote>

Verification