Demonic Lore

[Grover Cleaveland]

Ah, here's the quote: "Like larvae, manes are still petitioners." - Faces of Evil, page 42.
"Other tanar'ri do not consider the manes to be real tanar'ri - they are just petitioners, spirits of mortal berks who spent their lives on chaos and evil." - Ibid, page 44.

I disagree. Petitioners take all different forms, yes, but larva look like larva; five-foot long worms with heads that resemble who they were in life.

Well, yeah, officially. I think we can stand a little more variety - that's just my opinion, though, and I'm not married to it or anything.

Add in that some appear already being manes

I can't find any reference to that. I don't have a problem with it, but I can't find any 2e source that says it happens.

I can't remember if LE larva had to become lemures first to then become nupperibos...

Lawful and evil larvae evolve into nupperibos. Nupperibos are used as cannon fodder, sold to the yugoloths, or promoted into lemure form. This is the baatezu method of ridding their plane of what would otherwise evolve into the species that preceded them - the so-called Elder Baatorians.

"The nupperibos are slightly higher in station than the lemures, but they can never become higher forms of baatezu without first being demoted into lemure status." - Planescape Monstrous Compendium [page 26]

"The lawful fiends put forth the lie that nupperibos are true members of their race, and that the bloated monsters are turned into lemures as punishment." Faces of Evil, page 14.

So no, the advancement path from nupperibo to lemure to spinagon and so forth didn't change, only the explanation for it did.

I don't think every single lemure had to be forcefully transformed into their lemure state from existing larva or nupperibos.

99% of them do. See Faces of Evil, pages 12-13.

"Baatezu troll the layers for the hardiest larvae... and mold the things into lemures."

"...by the time the baatezu came along, most of the ancient Baatorians'd vanished or simply hidden themselves away. But the larvae still grew into nupperibios... the baatezu tried to put a stop to that by molding the larvae into lemures - the "young" of their race. And it's still going on today. If left alone on the plains of Baator long enough, larvae naturally spawn nupperibos."

"They also herd wandering nupperibos and 'demote' them to the status of lemure so they can join the baatezu race. But it's all a peel. The process isn't a demotion at all, it's a reshaping for selfish purposes, plain and simple."

Lemures are an imposition of an artificial order into Baator's pre-existing order, as befits the generation of a species who personify conquest and domination. They're melted-looking because they're literally having the "impurities" melted out of them, so they can become the only "true" personifications of law and evil - baatezu.

There is one exception - very rarely, baatezu of any rank pull themselves fully formed from the mathematics of Baator itself. This doesn't normally happen, but it's a possibility.

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

You're reading into that article differently than I did. The point he seemed to be trying to make was that NE spirits were already evil, but as far as the Law/Chaos axis was concerned, they were a blank slate, ready to be filled with the messages of Law or Chaos that the tanar'ri wanted them to have; native larva already had their own ideas about what LE and CE were, and it wasn't worth the effort to "reeducate" them.

There's no reason they should be any more of a blank slate, as a group, than any other kind of petitioners. The Abyss attracts souls who were chaotic evil in life; Hades attracts souls who were neutral evil in life. Neutral doesn't mean "undecided" in this case - most NE characters are as convinced that they're in the right (or wrong, as the case may be) as those of any other alignment.

It's like saying that LN characters are a "blank slate" in regards to good and evil, or like saying that LG characters are a "blank slate" that could be easily filled with the messages of LN or NG, or that CE characters could be easily filled with the messages of NE or CN.

Why should NE petitioners have fewer ideas of their own than LE or CE petitioners? I don't buy it.

I like all the ideas in Faces of Evil, but I'm so-so on some of the concepts from the Dragon article you quote.

 

[Alzrius]

Ah, here's the quote: "Like larvae, manes are still petitioners." - Faces of Evil, page 42.
"Other tanar'ri do not consider the manes to be real tanar'ri - they are just petitioners, spirits of mortal berks who spent their lives on chaos and evil." - Ibid, page 44.

No contest there.

I can't find any reference to that. I don't have a problem with it, but I can't find any 2e source that says it happens.

"Evil spirits who end up on the Lower Planes often become larva." (emphasis mine) - On Hallowed Ground, page 30.

"In the Abyss, particularly evil petitioners can become manes; on Baator, lemures." - Ibid.

That seems to suggest (if not make it pretty clear) that exceptional petitioners do seem to jump straight to those forms.

 

[Shemeska]

"Evil spirits who end up on the Lower Planes often become larva." (emphasis mine) - On Hallowed Ground, page 30.

That's probably referring to the fact that petitioners claimed by specific deities can take alternate forms, and on some of the lower planes such as Gehenna and Carceri where they aren't automatically larvae, but not suggesting anything about manes.

"In the Abyss, particularly evil petitioners can become manes; on Baator, lemures." - Ibid.

By promotion most likely once there, or spontaneous evolution of larvae into manes in the Abyss. That quote is ambiguious enough for you to claim it, but there's no other evidence really in what I've read suggesting that they can start as manes.

That said, I don't mind the idea of a very small fraction of CE Abyssal petitioners starting out as manes. There's not much difference between that and Tanar'ri being spontaneously born out of the raw stuff of the Abyss, which does happen occasionally. They're not bubbling up regularly like mezzoloths on the Waste or Gehenna, but they can appear de novo from time to time. While there's little to directly come out in support of the idea, I don't mind the most extremely CE petitioners starting off as manes.

By the sources though, it should be more like they spontaneously evolve to manes in very short order from larvae once there in the Abyss.

 

[BOZ]

(rhetorical) question:

Is the 7th-level spell from the 1E PHB, cacodemon, being considered for conversion?

 

[James Jacobs]

(rhetorical) question:

Is the 7th-level spell from the 1E PHB, cacodemon, being considered for conversion?

It was considered for about a minute before I came to the conclusion that it's already been converted into the various planar binding spells. There's no real need for a spell that does the same thing but just for demons, even if cacodemon IS a cooler name for a spell.

 

[Erik Mona]

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).

This is very, very interesting, and I like it a lot. I don't particularly care for the idea that the Lords of Woe judge _every single_ larva that comes to the Abyss, but rather that they are attempting to jump-start the process to provide troops for the Blood War. That strikes me as a pretty ingenious way to have our cake and eat it too.

--Erik

 

[Erik Mona]

I can't find any reference to that. I don't have a problem with it, but I can't find any 2e source that says it happens.

Check the manes entry in the PCMC appendix 1. I seem to recall that it doesn't mention anything at all about larvae.

--Erik

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

Check the manes entry in the PCMC appendix 1. I seem to recall that it doesn't mention anything at all about larvae.

--Erik

You're absolutely right about that. I meant that post-Faces of Evil, which I think introduced the "Grand Unified Theory of Larval-based Fiendish evolution" or GUToLF, as I like to call it when I'm feeling familiar, as I am right now - and which, now that I think of it, pretty much only existed in that book and possibly Hellbound - didn't explicitly mention the possibility that souls turn directly into manes as well as evolving thence from wormhood. Which is a pretty narrow thing to say, but I mean that the GUToLF didn't in itself require the spontaneous be-mane-ing of souls, and manes are still petitioners anyway (though dretches are not). I mean, if we can consider pre-GUToLF texts we should also consider first edition ones, which certainly didn't use the GUToLF.

But I mean, if I can formulate this in yet another way without trying everyone's patience, is that if you accept the GUToLF - as I do - there's no book that uses it that explicitly allows for spontaneous bemaning. Having some larvae simply evolve quicker than others seems more cogent to me, since you don't have to explain why some souls would become a maggot-thing and some a humanoid, but Shemeska's point about how the Abyss is a plane of Chaos and chaotic things happen there is a good one. Cogent isn't always better, not in the planes of Chaos.

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

As an addendum, I just coined the word "bemaning" above to refer to the formation of manes, either directly from incorporeal souls or evolving from larvae. Just because I like to make up words sometimes.

The verb I use to describe the equivalent process in nupperibos is "nupper," which is a much better word all around.