Changes to Devils and Demons

[pawsplay]

So, to borrow from Marvel comics, 4e is the "Ultimate" D&D cosmology?

It could be the "Ultimate" cosmology, the "New Millenium" cosmology, or conceivably, the "Highlander II" cosmology.

 

[IanB]

Overall I'm intrigued by those ideas. Sure, they contradict previous material, but this just means that for any given game, I have more background choices... after all, I usually kept the para and quasi elemental planes in my 3e games.

I'm only puzzled about the deal with Erinyes. As others have already pointed out they are spirits of vengeance. In the Oresteia by Aeschylus, Orestes is tormented by the Erinyes for the murder of his mother Clytemnestra.

Mythologically yes. In practice in D&D they seem to me to have been used mostly as less sneaky analogues to the succubus.

 

[Oldtimer]

It's cutting a bit too close to real religions for me.

And it's not like D&D hasn't been chopping up real religions for many years?

Zeus, Poseidon, Apollon, et al, belonged to a very real religion.

Odin, Thor, Freya, et al, still do. I've even heard rumors that Thor will make it into 4e...

D&D has always been stealing ideas from human myths. What is new? I'm sure the religions will survive.

 

[kenmarable]

Merging succubi and erinyes is a mistake. A really bad mistake. I can't immediately see how to reconcile this with the material already out there, and even produced in the past year. Hmm. Jacobs did some really awesome material with Malcanthet and her rivals, and this change really makes moving them forward into 4th difficult, unless we want to have succubi/erinyes populating both Baator and the Abyss, having split in an ancient ideological schism (or the CE ones having been perverted by X Abyssal lord, obyrith, etc). The in-game rationalization here needs to be amazing or else this change may really, really present difficulties.

Yeah, I think the succubi/erinyes issue is the one that bothers me the most. If they seem too similar then work on a way to make them more unique, don't just lump them together and call it done. I suppose pit fiends and balors are probably easily combined as well. I can probably list quite a number of "very similar" classics that would get plenty of people up in arms.

Heck, most of the dragons are all pretty similar just different breath weapons, right?

I would greatly prefer not lumping those two together, or at the very least not shifting succubi over to being a devil to fit a rule that "devils look human, demons look weird". While that's a fine rule in general, I think moving the succubi over is taking it a bit too far and is a mechanic change that outright contradicts decades of fluff. It would be far more interesting to keep both but work to make them unique and different. Yeah, succubi don't look like freaky weird monsters, but how are they more chaotic/demonic in the actions and abilities and how are erinyes more lawful/devilish? Make them interesting, don't just lump them together because they happen to fit the same stereotype!

 

[Simia Saturnalia]

I think it's safe to say this edition is not aimed at people for whom the decades of fluff are a priority.

 

[Shemeska]

And it's not like this is the first time the origins of devils have changed in the game. The Planescape origin, from 2E, was new. 1E didn't really have a default, but the implied origins from the old Dragon articles certainly didn't match up with the Planescape material.

As you said, 1e didn't have an origin for the fiends, or any of the outsiders. Heck it didn't even have eladrins or guardinals at all, and it didn't have archons till near the end of its run in an appendix in the 1e MotP. 2e's origin myths were the first of their kind, there wasn't anything before them that they really needed to match up with in terms of origin stories, and even with changes and variations on those during 2e, and continuing on in 3e, it's still been very possible to incorporate them all into a working model of planar history and pre-history (as FC:I, FC:II, and various pieces in Dragon and Dungeon have shown).

From what little we had from Rich Baker's blog, the potential seems to exist to have some of the changes be irreconcialable with those models, or portions of those models. It's a real shame that FC:II's take, and potentially FC:I, some demonomicon material, and associated material in Dragon/Dungeon is going to stand at odds with this alluded 4e dynamic.

Now good writing can reconcile much of this, or present it in such a way to make the changes and the previous material of equally questionable veracity (ie in-game myth, unreliable sources, etc), but given 3e's core books being stripped of virtually any real in-depth flavor text, this isn't a sure thing. Ideally 4e may abandon the design wasteland of early/mid 3e flavor text, and actually give us depth and detail in core books, or even ecology material alongside monsters. This isn't certain yet which way it'll go, but we shall see.

And as an aside, that primordial 1e article "politics of hell" wasn't intended to show an origin for the devils of D&D, and it openly said it was not intended to be considered canonical (with an archdevil as "ambassador to the USA", etc etc). If you're referring to Greenwood's articles later on, I don't recall any real implied origin therein. It was all pretty sparse.

 

[BluWolf]

I like the idea because although I have seen some very nice attempts to "explain" the menagrie of things we call infernal I have always felt kit-bash peices show through the veneer. Never a fan of the blood war.

It needs to be paired down and made more sense of. Although, I will admit, that is my aesthitic.

In the end I don't think it really matters. I mean how many people REALLY use all 478 different devils or demons.

 

[Brian Gibbons]

Unless the Nine Hells in 4E are much smaller than now, I'd guess that, for some reason, Baator expanded considerably after the deity's death; the alternative implies that 4E gods are (or at least this god was) much more powerful than the current norm.

I will be interested to see the details of this backstory.

Personally, were I to use this in a campaign, the god would have been an extremely LG deity who snapped and began killing other deities (primarily neutral and other good deities) that did not measure up to his high standards. His angelic servants, horrified at his actions, realized eventually that they were the only ones who could stand up against this perversion of justice and finally mustered up the courage and power to move against him, though not before he had slain eight other deities and absorbed their realms into his own.

 

[olshanski]

If I ran a Planescape campaign, I'd take one of two tacts: either the new changes to the cosmology is the dark of things, and the PCs are the first of their acquaintence to discover it (adventure hook), or the new ideas are the common chant, and the PCs know the *real* dark, which is the old cosmology.

As a long time fan of planescape, what I really liked was that there were always more powerful creatures around, most of them were right in your face. Many encounters had to be solved with wits or negotiation rather than brute force:

I am referring especially to the published adventures "Endless Staircase", "Dead Gods" and "Great Modron March".

The slang, on the other hand, made me want to punch someone in the yarbles.

 

[Zaukrie]

The Deomonicom articles in Dragon are some of the best fluff of recent/any years of D&D. This post implies things are changing to put much of that story/fluff out of context with the new rules (not the fluff, but the actual design of monsters and other possible rule changes). That, to me, is disappointing. I don't need the blood war, I don't need Planescape, but I really, really like the Abyss/Hell/Demon/Devil mythology implied by the current rules.