Demonic Lore

[BOZ]

as far as i know, it's never been said that all CE souls become manes... just those that go to the Abyss (as above). there is also Pandemonium and Carceri to consider. of course, not many souls go to either of those planes i'd imagine. and since it looks like there is precedent for some souls going directly to manes, i would not throw that out entirely. if i'd have to guess (thowing wild guesses out there), maybe 80% of chaotic souls become larva and 20% manes. maybe "auto-manes" would be an even smaller percentage than that.

 

[BOZ]

Note that "Gehenna" became "the Pits of Flame beneath the Mountain of Woe" in the layer of Woeful Escarond in 2e. Otherwise, that statement didn't change in Planescape (and manes in Gehenna don't make much sense anyway).

agreed, totally. the relationships between the planes don't seem to have been fully mapped out until mid-later 1E.

 

[Shemeska]

I am considering keeping it this way, and I guess I'm looking for suggestions from the faithful as to why that might not be such a good idea. I should add that I don't have strong opinions on the matter, so my biases are clear.

--Erik

Grover and Alzrius are both largely correct. The vast majority of CE petitioners dumped into the Abyss start out as CE larvae, though the most solidly CE of them may immediately leap into manes given enough time. This is somewhat vague in the sources. CE larvae as default Abyssal petitioners before the Tanar'ri get to them are well established.

These CE larvae are then taken before the Nalfeshnee (those that aren't eaten or killed) and warped into Tanar'ri proper: Manes, Dretches, or Rutterkin. Or in the words of one particular source they are judged and turned into :food, slaves, and food for slaves. Some petitioners that start out as manes, and this is likely to be VERY VERY rare, may skip this process entirely, or just get a pass from the Judges.


Keep in mind that the Nalfeshnee of Woeful Escarand probably have a job split into two parts:

1) Judging and promoting new CE petitioners to the Abyss. As already mentioned, most are larvae, a fraction may be manes already before this point.

2) Judging and remaking larvae harvested outside of the Abyss. The majority of these will come from the Gray Waste simple because the Night Hags of that plane sell them openly, and the Yugoloths don't care because they don't have a link to petitioners anyway, and those larvae are very very easy to imprint with a new purpose and ethos because the Waste has already done its best to scour them clean of any vestige of motivation and self worth (the ones that survive that process become Hordelings, but that's another topic entirely). Larvae from Gehenna will be too lawful for the needs of the Abyss, and larvae from Carceri fall into the same place as Abyssal larvae mostly, they are imprinted with Chaos already and they're difficult to control and manipulate into manes/dretches/rutterkin simply by virtue of their chaotic nature already.

 

[BOZ]

3E MotP, page 100:
"Those souls from the Material Plane that are not simply absorbed into the structure of the Abyss become petitioners called manes."

become? it doesn't say immediately though... perhaps some come in as larva and quickly become manes...?

i still say that some would go auto-manes though.

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

That may sound strange, but the idea here is that CE larva don't hold their forms well - a lot of them are chaotic enough that they devolve back into being larva once promoted (and likewise, LE larva tend to be harder to change, having their own ethos of law). But NE larva accept the imposition of CE or LE better, having no ingrained concepts of the alignments that need changing.

That article (in Dragon Annual #2, by Ed Bonny) was generally pretty good, but I thought that particular argument was clumsy. I actually hate the idea of quasits and imps being made from neutral evil larvae - better by far to make quasits from chaotic evil larvae and imps from lawful evil larvae. To say that neutral evil spirits make better imps and quasits is to diminish the importance of law and chaos in the cosmology and to distort the very shape of the Great Ring into something other than circular.

Why shouldn't imps be made from lawful evil spirits and quasits from the evil and chaotic? It's much more appropriate. Anything else is just an awkward rationalization.

That's actually the best argument for demons and devils starting out as larvae, and probably the reason Colin McComb went that route in Faces of Evil - if imps and quasits are made from larvae, they ought to be made from larvae coming from the planes they're associated with instead of being foreigners, manifestations of an entirely different alignment.

This does diminish the role of night hags somewhat, but I don't see that as a bad thing. They don't need to have a monopoly on the production of imps and quasits to be important in their own way. They supply better quality larvae than most other beings, since they produce them by stealing the souls of high-level characters. Their dominion over bad dreams is also an underlooked attribute of theirs - they should buy and trade things taken from the Dreaming lands.

 

[BOZ]

That article (in Dragon Annual #2, by Ed Bonny) was generally pretty good, but I thought that particular argument was clumsy. I actually hate the idea of quasits and imps being made from neutral evil larvae - better by far to make quasits from chaotic evil larvae and imps from lawful evil larvae. To say that neutral evil spirits make better imps and quasits is to diminish the importance of law and chaos in the cosmology and to distort the very shape of the Great Ring into something other than circular.

Why shouldn't imps be made from lawful evil spirits and quasits from the evil and chaotic? It's much more appropriate. Anything else is just an awkward rationalization.

That's actually the best argument for demons and devils starting out as larvae, and probably the reason Colin McComb went that route in Faces of Evil - if imps and quasits are made from larvae, they ought to be made from larvae coming from the planes they're associated with instead of being foreigners, manifestations of an entirely different alignment.

i'm going to agree with you again completely, there.

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

as far as i know, it's never been said that all CE souls become manes... just those that go to the Abyss (as above). there is also Pandemonium and Carceri to consider. of course, not many souls go to either of those planes i'd imagine. and since it looks like there is precedent for some souls going directly to manes, i would not throw that out entirely. if i'd have to guess (thowing wild guesses out there), maybe 80% of chaotic souls become larva and 20% manes. maybe "auto-manes" would be an even smaller percentage than that.

I'd assume that a more or less equal number of petitioners travel to Pandemonium, the Abyss, and Carceri, although cultists of the various demon lords probably increase the flow to the Abyss somewhat. I don't think there's any reason to think there are more Chaotic Evil beings in the multiverse than Chaotic Evil (Chaotic Neutral) or Chaotic Evil (Neutral Evil) beings, though.

Petitioners in Pandemonium and Carceri seem to mostly resemble the way they looked in life, rather than becoming manes or larvae.

 

[Shemeska]

as far as i know, it's never been said that all CE souls become manes... just those that go to the Abyss (as above). there is also Pandemonium and Carceri to consider. of course, not many souls go to either of those planes i'd imagine. and since it looks like there is precedent for some souls going directly to manes, i would not throw that out entirely. if i'd have to guess (thowing wild guesses out there), maybe 80% of chaotic souls become larva and 20% manes. maybe "auto-manes" would be an even smaller percentage than that.

Petitioners in Carceri are CE and they tend to resemble their forms in life oftentimes, with a fraction of them instead becoming larvae. These larvae are likely collected by Tanar'ri to bring back to the Abyss, or if we're talking about the layer of Othrys on Carceri, the plane's contingent of Yugoloths are using them to build the Tower of Incarnate Pain.

Petitioners in Pandemonium seem to resemble the form they had in life, and I'm not aware of any larvae in that plane ever being mentioned. Larvae seem tied down to the Abyss, down through the 3 planes of conflict, and back up to Baator. Acheron and Pandemonium are both too lawful and too chaotic, respectively to generate larvae.

And now I'm making these numbers up, but they seem reasonable given the source material:

CE souls in the Abyss: 90% CE larvae, 10% CE manes

NE/CE souls in Carceri: 70% appear as in life, 30% larvae

NE souls in the Waste: NE larvae who either get used in terrible ways by the Yugoloths, sold by Hags to the Tanar'ri and Baatezu, or who transform into Hordelings (and possibly Hags? The link is suggested but not firm). Larvae absorbed by the plane itself will eventually become mulched up and their spiritual essence pooled into the plane itself where it gets recycled into Mezzoloths.

 

[Alzrius]

NE souls in the Waste: NE larvae who either get used in terrible ways by the Yugoloths, sold by Hags to the Tanar'ri and Baatezu, or who transform into Hordelings

Don't forget that as of Dungeon #124, hordelings are CE critters who come from the Abyss and Pandemonium now.

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

If I remember correctly, there's a creature called an Abyssal Larva in the Creature Collection II. They look really different from the wormlike larvae of the Gray Waste - like infants or fetuses with crablike legs.

What I'm getting at is that "larvae" may have different appearances on different planes.

I've always seen things this way: that in the Abyss larvae can evolve on their own into manes relatively quickly, and they're still petitioners, not true tanar'ri, when they do so. In the Nine Hells they evolve into nupperibos on their own - and these nupperibos are still petitioners as well. In the Gray Waste, larvae evolve into hordlings. Baatezu can only be created by other baatezu, however - lemures aren't "natural" in the way that manes and nupperibos are.

I don't think the nalfeshnee are an essential step in tanar'ric evolution. Those who rule the Mountain of Woe have taken it as their role to speed up the process in order to supply the balors with vast hordes of troops. If they didn't do this, the tanar'ric armies would take longer to muster, but the tanar'ri race would still exist in all its forms (though some forms that are now common thanks to nalfeshnee interference would be rarer, largely confined to the layers in which they originally evolved).