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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nellisir" data-source="post: 6060479" data-attributes="member: 70">Ok.  On one hand, I am rather amused by this sub-thread.  On the other, I feel like I'm going around in circles.  I'll take one more stab at it, but then it's probably over.Many of the original sources aren't online.  If the internet is your only source of information, then you're going to run into problems like that.  I'd suggest a good university library.  Also, check out Project Guttenberg for the Arabian Nights and Victorian-era fairy tale books, like the Blue Book/Red Book/Orange Book/Green Book/Yellow Book/Brown Book of Fairies (yes, and there were more colors). Get Giants, Monsters, and Dragons: An Encyclopedia of Folklore, Legend, and Myth by Carol Rose, and Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia, also by Carol Rose.  Those give definitions rather than quotations from the root source, but you can backtrace them if you want original source material.I don't understand your use of the word "sources", or possibly your use of the word "cultures".  If you're talking about elemental affinities, there are some loose ones that I'm aware of in folklore, but by and large they were made up by Gary Gygax.  If you mean "culture" as in "culture", then the D&D cultures of the genies are based on the cultures of the real-world societies that came up with genies, and which genies are treated as having when such matters come up in folklore.  Put another way, the folklore of genies, djinn, and ifrit in the real world says that they have pashas and sultans just like humans do, but not much is said about it that I know of.This is usually the case.  Mythological creatures have societies that mirror the human society that creates legends about them.  Fairies in medieval England have monarchies, while the Tuatha de Dannan of earlier Ireland have something closer to a warleader, who must be "unblemished". Thus when Nuada loses his arm, he can no longer be king/warleader, but is reinstated when a new arm is made for him out of silver.You were talking about the split between demons and devils.  I said it's an artificial split based wholly on organization/alignment (chaotic/lawful) that has no basis in real life, just as the split between genie races & their elemental affinities is an artificial split with minimal basis in real life.  You seem to find one (demons & devils) acceptable even though there's no real-life basis for it, and the other (genies) unacceptable because there isn't a real-life basis for it.  I'm not sure that you can have it both ways.It got lip service in the Outer Planes Appendix, but wasn't really developed until 1994, with the release of Planescape.Symmetry.  Demons were chaotic evil, devils were lawful evil.  Daemons and Demodands were both neutral evil, I think, which still seems silly.I agree.  Unnecessary.  And a bit silly.<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/erm.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":erm:" title="Erm    :erm:" data-shortname=":erm:" />I really hope you're joking.  Right.  Asmodeus actually stays pretty close to source material.  Geryon is actually a Greek Titan.  Dispater, or Dis Pater, is another name for the Roman god Pluto.  Beelzebub is "Lord of the Flies"; the "Beel" has the same root as Baal, or Ba'al, which meant "master" or "lord", and was used as an honorific or title.  See also Bel and Belial.One thing early Christians were very keen on was converting all the previous gods into demons, so there's whole lists of demons available.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />There's absolutely no real world distinction between demons and devils.Different cultures, different portrayals, even if the story roles are often the same. Elevators, escalators, and stairs all take you to the same point, but they're not the same thing.Except when they're poisonous.No, of course the fire giants don't have a big burning city of brass.  That'd be silly.  It's in the Arabian Nights, not the Prose Edda (but not on the Elemental Plane of Fire.  It is made of obsidian, though, or basalt.)  <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/16/701.html" target="_blank">http://www.bartleby.com/16/701.html</a>LOLTry "E. Gary Gygax".You'll really have to get off the internet for that.  The Arabian Nights are the simplest, most accessible resource.  Jinn are figures in Islam, which is a contemporary religion, and there's probably a lot more about them in Islamic texts and folklore.I suspect what you want and what you're asking for are two different things.I'm saying that the writers of D&D took what they knew of genies, took out the bits that they didn't like, and put it a bunch of stuff that they did like. I'm also saying that probably most of their perception of genies came from the Arabian Nights amd the encyclopedia, and that's the best place for the source of "D&D" genies in my guess. BUT, we are not in Wisconsin in the age of card catalogs and the US Mail. There are many other sources that didn't exist or weren't widespread back then, or have evolved.  There has been a real evolution in the scope of folklore in recent decades.  It used to be all Egypt, Greece/Rome, and Scandinavia, with a chapter on "Eastern" or "Oriental" folklore.</blockquote>

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