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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 165332" data-attributes="member: 2174">Well, I'm glad people are enjoying the book, despite what most people seem to consider a lackluster class. I designed the Thaumaturge (and a lot of the demon princes, honestly) based on the types of people who routinely made pacts with demons in real world history. These are for the most part scholars, folks who almost always had a familiar, and who didn't really have anything to do with "switching out" healing spells or turning undead.As a result I may have made them too weak, but I thought the constant struggle between getting more and more corrupt and eventually losing your primary casting ability score made for an interesting moral struggle. I also suspected anyone playing a thaumaturge would mess around with some of the feats, particularly Influence Chaos Warp, which pretty much gets you out of any unplesantness that would lower your Charisma. I personally would not play a thaumaturge without that feat. If one assumes you have some control over your corruptions, it's not too difficult to imagine choosing stuff like Eyes of Fire, No Corruption, or Forked Tongue over stuff like Milky Eye, Splotchy Skin, or Raspy Voice. This becomes, in my opinion, a better strategy once you get to the greater corruptions. Bestial Snout, Third Eye, Scaly Skin, or Appetite Loss are really quite good.There's a pretty healthy design contingent that would see the removal of any kind of random dice rolling as an affront to play balance. Since the thaumaturge is so obsessed with chaos, I thought a little randomness would be appropriate. That said, I completely understand people preferring to just use clerics, and I think it's worth pointing out that the bulk of the material on demon princes is every bit as applicable to that core class as it is to the one I made up.As for the motivations of various cults. . . I discovered that the main reason demons have the bloodthirsty "I'll eat anything that moves" reputation is because they were given that reputation during the middle ages. Though seldom completely "good" in the D&D sense of the word, I figured that the demonic philosophies expressed in Armies would have to make a certain amount of sense to a just-short-of-rational human being, or else they would become cartoonish. I didn't feel like designing a book of cartoons.I don't believe that most "evil" characters imagine themselves to be evil, and so I preferred to portray the evil in Armies of the Abyss as extremely pragmatic or self-interested, rather than bloodthirsty. That said, the demon prince Shax is pretty revolting in the traditional sense of "scary" demons. He's also in the minority, as the others are, if I did my job correctly, a good deal more subtle.--Erik</blockquote>

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