Grover Cleaveland
First Post
Upper_Krust said:
No. Dumalduns were opossum-like creatures. (Dance of Demons, p. 66)
Some of Gygax's Abyssal creatures were certainly renamed AD&D fiends (for example, boorixtroi are obviously goristroi), but not the ones I was talking about.
My only intention was to list some differences between Gygax's series and the Planescape cosmology, because someone asked. One such difference is that Gygax has some new kinds of fiends in it, but they were poorly detailed. We know dumalduns are opossum-like, for example, but not much else. This isn't a value judgement - I'm simply saying the amount of information we're given is very sketchy.
I don't think you quite get what I'm trying to say. Naturally the adventures themselves revolve around the adventurers - I'm identifying what I think is a genuine difference in the set-up of the cosmology.
In the Gord books, Infestix (the greater planar being whose avatar is the god Nerull) respects no one but Tharizdun, but certain powerful planar beings are his allies, such as Demogorgon and the archdevils. He fully intends to destroy them eventually, but for now he needs them. Infestix's greatest champion, however, is the human wizard Gravestone.
In Planescape terms, Gravestone would be a proxy. He might be very important in a given adventure, and very important to a god, but figures such as Demogorgon and the Lords of the Nine are infinitely more fearsome, powerful, and cunning than a mortal could ever be. They simply operate on a different level, and human champions and villains don't interact with them as equals.
Meanwhile, the Diseased Eight - Anthraxus, Bubonis, and so on - are treated as nothing but cannon-fodder by Infestix. Their job, in one scene (Come Endless Darkness, p. 242) is simply to guard the door. Infestix doesn't need them - he is the indisputed ruler of daemonkind, not them - so he doesn't hesitate to destroy them when it pleases him. In Planescape, on the other hand, figures like these are more or less equal in power and darksome majesty to the lords of Baator and the Abyss, though their power may come more from bluff, reputation, lies, and ancient knowledge than physical or magical strength.
That's the difference between the two approaches. So when someone says "I prefer the approach Gygax took in his Gord the Rogue series," that's the sort of thing they apparently mean - a multiverse where mortals advance at far faster rates than immortals, and deal with them on an equal basis. A multiverse where the lords of Hell and the Abyss are much more impressive than yugoloth lords. In fact, a multiverse much more like the 3e/Epic Level Handbook approach.
Than the Gord novels? Hardly. They were all fluff - they were novels, after all, not game supplements. In a game supplement, speaking vaguely of spined, opossum-headed armies isn't very satisfying. I think you mean to say the approach in, say, Ed Greenwood's Dragon articles on the Nine Hells or the 1e Monster Manual II had mostly lists of stats and treasures, and not so much on the psychology and society of the planes.
That's something quite different from what we were talking about, but I suspect a lot of people in this thread are similarly confused. They think Gygax=stats, Planescape=Fluff, when actually only the most powerful, plane-defining creatures went statless in Planescape, and they forget that Gygax himself thought statting monsters was pretty boring and often delegated that responsibility (for example, Jeff Grubb statted the modrons based on Gygax's notes) or didn't bother at all (which is why the MMII has a long list of devils only elaborated on by Ed Greenwood and demons who never got any stats or description). Or they think vaguely of DiTerlizzi's art, the brilliant webs of quirkiness of Ray and Valerie Vallese, or an off-hand mention in the boxed set of Sigil as a neutral ground where fiends and celestials could meet and discuss terms (transmuting that into fiends and celestials as drinking buddies) and forget the darker, creepier, even revolting things Planescape introduced - like the demiplane of Maelost, with its sentient parasites, or the hungry Ingress in Pandemonium with her brood, or the slime-drenched city of chains and silent, nightmarish tormentors, Jangling Hiter, or the hideous winged slasrath, or the horrible, sadistic vlaath. They remember that the greatest planar lords and the gods weren't generally statted and forget that the majority of Planescape supplements were perfectly playable adventures, with each encounter meticulously statted just like in any other adventure, or that Planescape had three books and four monstrous supplements dedicated to providing statted monsters, or all the space dedicated to spells, kits, and magical items in the Planewalker's Handbook.
There's no shame in not collecting all the jillion Planescape things, but trying to make a blanket statement about the setting is liable to make you look a bit foolish, at least in the eyes of those few of us uber-nerds who really obsess over it, because we can easily come up with a dozen counterexamples. When someone like Erik Mona casually uses phrases like "typical of Planescape's slap-dash approach to fiends" he forgets how painfully thin the amount of total fiendish material was before Planescape and how detailed, complex, and painstakingly thought-out (and genuinely scary!) the fiendish ecologies in Planescape really were, especially as Colin McComb presented them. I consider that to be both style and substance.
