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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 3745877" data-attributes="member: 11697">Not at all. And I'm going with the same disclaimer as you had in your post: this isn't intended to offend, so roll with me here.And it's wierd, it's honestly wierd, because that's precisely the opposite of what I walk away from the same material with. I don't get the feel from the 1e presentation of those beings that they're unholy, soul devouring terrors, "masters of reality and time". I get from the earliest material that they're the monsters at the end of the planar dungeon. Now it's very possible to go beyond the slim to frankly nonexistant details given to many of them in the 1e MM and MM2, and a lot of DMs did that and spun some really good material from it, but I don't find any of that potential flavor and atmosphere present in the actual written material.Fast forward to the 2e material on the same subject, and it's there that I finally see some of the fiends portrayed as truly dark, malevolent beings that represent bedrock elements of reality and mortal fears and failures taken physical form. I find towers constructed of billions of screaming mortal souls, grafted together like so many agonized living bricks. I find entities that are virtual living paradoxes, epitomizing selfishness while at the same time wholly prostrating themselves to Evil like a religious concept. They were no longer just monsters, but much worse and the material explored the philosophical elements of just what they were, and how they were different from one another. The further into 2e's planar material I look, the material gets progressively darker, to a point that in some cases that we haven't seen an equal in 3.x until the past few years (FC:I, FC:II, etc). Some of the early 2e material is still tinged by TSR management's misguided PR attempts, but it ends up darker by far than anything that came before it.And if you're looking for elements of lovecraftian terror, I don't see it in the early 1e material so much as a see some very fine examples of it in mid/late 2e, such as the description of the "Bells of Othrys" in the Planes of Conflict box set, or whole chapters of Guide to the Ethereal Plane (penned by Mr Bruce Far Realms Cordell).Now this is only my take on that material, but I'm inclined to believe that the 1e material was more a blank slate, undeveloped enough that you could put whatever thematic spin on it you might have wanted with a creative DM and cooperative players, but that we never really saw those thematic elements actually put into the published planar material to any great extent till the 2e period, with a resurgence of that in late 3.x.</blockquote>

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