Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss

[Pants]

It's been well over a decade since I read the Gord the Rogue books. Remind an old man of how Gygaxian planar cosmology differs from the post-Planescape cosmology, please.

http://home.comcast.net/~chris.s/outer.html#meeting
That site has A LOT of info regarding the Cosmology of the Gord the Rogue novels.

Notable among the changes are the daemons/yugoloths and the Diseased Eight (which, in my knowledge, only sorta existed in Canon PS).

The existence of the Abat Dolor, a race of powerfully ancient demons of which Graz'zt is a member, is at odds with Graz'zt of 2e/3e. He's the progeny of Pale Night, a mysterious demonic lord of which very little is written. Although 3e never mentions Pale Night, Rhyxali the Demonic Princess of Shadows, is mentioned as being Graz'zt's sister, so I assume that the 'Pale Night is Graz'zt's Mother' thing still holds true.

There's other stuff, but this springs to mind immediately.

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

It's been well over a decade since I read the Gord the Rogue books. Remind an old man of how Gygaxian planar cosmology differs from the post-Planescape cosmology, please.

Lemme think:

1. All the daemons, hags, other NE and LE fiends, and devils wanted to serve Tharizdun and his servant Nerull (also called Infestix), seeing this route as the best way for them to maintain their power in Tharizdun's new cosmic order. The demons were fractious and mostly independent, though some allied with Nerull's camp.
2. There were a bunch of new creatures invented for the books (dreggals, maelvis, etc.), but they were poorly described if at all.
3. There were some new planes invented and inserted here and there as the plot required, including a staircase that stretched between many different planes.
4. There was an additional planar axis. In addition to Astral/Ethereal, Good/Evil, and Law/Chaos, there was the dimension of Probability, which corresponded to Technology/Magic. This axis is one of the things that distinguishes the parallel material planes from one another.
5. There were an infinite number of parallel material planes in the same cosmology, as in 1e and pre-Spelljammer 2e.
6. Graz'zt is part of entire race of demons that look more or less like him. Called the abat-dolor, these fiends are more humanlike in temperment than most natives of the Abyss, though still evil. I don't actually hate this idea nearly as much as I intimated earlier (there's nothing particularly wrong with it, but I prefer Graz'zt as mostly unique except perhaps for a few siblings).
7. The short story "The Weird Occurance in Odd Alley" from Gygax's book Night Arrant introduces an extradimensional city of portals that connects to thousands of parallel material planes as well as the outer and inner planes. I'll be damned if it isn't nigh-indistinguishable from Planescape's city of Sigil, though it's much less well-developed.
8. Lower planar creatures in general tend to be stupid, short-sighted bullies, rather than clever and far-sighted as they often are in Planescape. The big, almost unique exception is Vuron, Graz'zt's demonic vizir. Graz'zt admits that without Vuron he wouldn't be nearly as successful.
9. The hierarchs of daemonkind are generally disposable cannon-fodder in Gygax's multiverse, excepting Infestix himself. In Planescape, every ultroloth and arcanaloth is a criminal mastermind. Some of the greatest villains in the Gygaxaverse are human, putting the fiends to shame, while Planescape put great emphasis on the prowess of the immortal, unthinkably ancient fiends.
10. The lords of neutrality in the Gygaxaverse are of mixed race, including humans, the Cat Lord, and the King of the Plane of Shadow. Planescape instead has an outsider race called the rilmani, an inscrutable group equivalent to the fiends and celestials.
11. In the Gygaxaverse, Baphomet is an archdevil instead of an archdemon (according to "Evening Odds," the Gord story from White Wolf's Pawn of Chaos anthology).

 

[Pants]

Gygaxian planar cosmology had its hits and misses.

Yeah, totally true.
I'd be in favor of taking the current cosmology and sifting out parts and mixing in bits of Gygax's original ideas. Unfortunately, that's probably not possible.

Still, the books had some good ideas, even if they were kinda poorly written and plotted at times.

There was no concept of planar society, either you were powerful, worked for someone who was or you got squashed like a bug.

I think this is fine. Back in 1e, the planes were the stomping grounds of high-level parties. You had to be powerful to make it on the planes. Especially when you consider that the gods dwelled on the planes and many were naturally dangerous to non-planar denizens.

Fleshing them out and including areas safe for low-level parties was an advent of 2e. Both ideas work, I suppose, though the PS method had a way of...prime-ifying the planes (if that makes any sense) and cheesing things up at times, while the 1e method didn't always make sense and lacked some of the mystery and wonder of PS.

IMO of course.

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

the lake of reality,

It was kind of like Limbo, as I remember, but much more potent in its response to the imagination. It was fine, but probably would unbalance a D&D game.

the demi plane were Thazaduin was confined

I really, really liked the Child Emperor version of Tharizdun.

uber-godlike personifications

I'm fine with ubergods as long as they know their place - in the background, not interacting with lesser beings in any apparent way. In this respect, I think Gygax's use of them was almost perfect, far better than the wretched, annoying Ao character in the Forgotten Realms. It got a bit over the top at the end, though, when the personification of Entropy manifested on a single world. That sort of thing can be done well if you're Neil Gaiman, but unfortunately Gary Gygax is not.

 

[Alzrius]

I'm drooling over the prospect of a Gehenna/Hades/Carceri book on Yugoloths.

Meh, I can just see the entry for the Tower of Incarnate Pain:

"Will Bubonix and Cholerix ever finish the Tower of Pain? Or will Apomps and the gehreleths bring on the pain, and send them packing? Find out, in the next fiend book to come out...in 4E!"

 

[Shemeska]

Meh, I can just see the entry for the Tower of Incarnate Pain:

Hey, you can't not like a living tower miles high and miles across built out of millions of screaming, agonized petitioners. Between that unfinished tower in Carceri, Khin-Oin in the Waste, and the Tower Arcane in Gehenna, Yugoloth architects had style

 

[Krypter]

This book is good news for planar adventurers, surely. Perhaps it will buttress a more comprehensive effort to flesh out the planes in third edition.

Much as I love Planescape, there are elements of it that really were not well done, and the demons and devils are one of those. It would be far better to treat fiends not as races of flesh and blood but as vile emanations from the minds of mortals, or as corrupt essences - a force of evil - springing from the material world. The whole Blood War concept doesn't sit well with me either. Planescape demons are far too comfortably human in their vices and physical behaviour. When they sit down with a party at a bar in Sigil it just makes it worse. DiTerlizzi's artwork in Planescape was great, but it failed utterly to convey the overpowering monstrosity of the standard demons. Demons are not faeries. (no, my avatar does not make this statement ironic; I like the pic for entirely different reasons.)

To truly inspire horror from the players demons and devils have to be portrayed more like the Nephandi from Mage the Ascension; elemental forces of wild madness, depravity, and unrelenting evil. Look to Warhammer as an example of scary fiends. Make them irrational and mysterious instead of just another monster with high stats.

Then again, I also fondly remember the hierarchy of fiends from the 1E Monster Manual II.

Any possibility of a 30-page writeup on Arcanaloths in the upcoming Minions of Gehenna (book 3)?

 

[Kobold Avenger]

I know very little about the gord novels, but a lot about PS.

Yet, I had Pale Night down as the 'mother' of the entire Abbat-Dolor race...

 

[Grover Cleaveland]

I had her adopt them when they were driven from their home layer by the gnomish god Urdlen. And then birth Graz'zt with one of their chieftains.

But I decided I don't like the abat-dolor. Yesterday, in fact.

 

[Mouseferatu]

It would be far better to treat fiends not as races of flesh and blood but as vile emanations from the minds of mortals, or as corrupt essences - a force of evil - springing from the material world. The whole Blood War concept doesn't sit well with me either. Planescape demons are far too comfortably human in their vices and physical behaviour. When they sit down with a party at a bar in Sigil it just makes it worse. DiTerlizzi's artwork in Planescape was great, but it failed utterly to convey the overpowering monstrosity of the standard demons. Demons are not faeries. (no, my avatar does not make this statement ironic; I like the pic for entirely different reasons.)

To truly inspire horror from the players demons and devils have to be portrayed more like the Nephandi from Mage the Ascension; elemental forces of wild madness, depravity, and unrelenting evil. Look to Warhammer as an example of scary fiends. Make them irrational and mysterious instead of just another monster with high stats.

Wow. You've just summed up something that's bothered me for years, but I was never able to put into words. Thank you.

Planescape--which, I must point out again, is a setting I love for the most part--made the cardinal error of humanizing the fiends.

Fiends aren't human. They don't have human motivations. They aren't creatures who just had a bad upbringing, or are trying to survive in a hideous world. They do not, do not, do not "hang out" in bars with mortals, even in a place like Sigil.

Fiends are primal evil. They know nothing else, they are nothing else. They are terrifying, and all the more so because they cannot be anything other than what they are. They cooperate with mortals only when they have something to gain from the deal. They have no friends. Even their love, when they can feel it at all, is ultimately perverse and self-serving.

Anything less than absolute, nigh-incomprehensible evil isn't worthy of the title "fiend."