Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss

[Sundragon2012]

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.

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."

You are both channeling me....

I have felt this way for years but not only myself but my players. One of my players, my brother, noted that fiends and celestial beings and all the other critters that inhabit the planes are more like merely alien species than the incarnations of absolute good and evil. Taverns in Sigil where these guys would all have an ale reminded me conceptually of a bar scene in star wars as opposed to a gathering of immortals who saw things in fundamentally, essentially and completely different ways than did mortals.

In my campaign when I had a tavern where treaties were signed and things were discussed between the heavy hitters I had them take mortal form and only in a rage would they take their true form. In Sigil itself one didn't see angels and demons walking around, folks saw people who had something different about them....an aura of love or cruelty for example, a look in their eye, a manner of moving that was....different....unnatural.

Ripping away the mystery of the archetypal beings of good and evil (which in part was necessary to run planescape as intended) was the very thing IMO that ruined it for me and my players. Wow we saw the man behind the curtain and what we saw wasn't ineffable good or evil but beings who seemed a bit like humans in funny costumes or sci-fi aliens for all their humanity.

Fiends in love.....Jesus, please. Yeah right....incarnate EVIL that can care for another as much or more than it cares for itself. Incarnate evil that trusts another and can be trusted by another to work in that other's best interest even at personal cost to itself. That is love.

If fiends are capable of selfless affection and placing the welfare of another on the same plane as their own or even higher then they aren't evil incarnate. Sorry but that isn't incarnate darkness......its mortal. Its a mortal in a funny costume.



Chris

 

[Shemeska]

Even their love, when they can feel it at all, is ultimately perverse and self-serving.

Aint that the truth

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

Sometimes the fiends were too human, but it wasn't a uniform treatment in Planescape like that. Some of the imagery involving the fiends presented in the setting was just truly horrific and honestly jarring.

And really, the 'Fiends and Celestials getting drunk alongside mortals in bars all over the place in Sigil' is honestly an unfair stereotype that gets tossed around but wasn't ever there. The setting gets maligned for it anyway.

 

[Soel]

we saw the man behind the curtain and what we saw wasn't ineffable good or evil but beings who seemed a bit like humans in funny costumes or sci-fi aliens for all their humanity.

This also sums up my feelings on deities...

Very interesting points here, and very likely the reasons why I have never focused on fiends to a measurable extent in any Planescape games. I wanted them to be like the demons I imagined as a child, something so twisted and incomprehensibly evil that an encounter with any, for any measure of moments, would leave a mortal scarred and profoundly affected...

 

[DaveMage]

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

...But such a thing that's close to it may be titled "ex-girlfriend."

 

[Napftor]

I've just started a planar campaign based in Sigil so news of this book comes with open arms. New demons that I can dump into the adventuring sandbox that is the planes are great!

 

[JoeGKushner]

I'm not sure I agree.

You make some good points of comparission.

However, the new books tend to use the new stat blocks which eat up more space.

The new books tend to have on average three pages of ads. Some of them (Mainly Eberron), reprint the cover and have a credits page.

The newbooks tend to be heavier on the fluff side when dealing with game mechanics like PrCs with numerous entries on lore, using them in the campaign, etc... all good stuff afaic but eat up lots of space.

The new books tend to have encounters and locals set up for the DM to easily use in his campaign. Once again, for me a good thing, but add in a map and a big old DMG II stat block, and well, the space is eaten up again.

The new books also tend to have new races which get a PHB treatment and a Monster Manual style treatment. Useful for GMs but perhaps it's time for the MM style treatment to go away and save the space.

This doesn't count things I'd like to see like various overland maps of different planes of the Abyss and monsters that may not necessarily be tanari but make those layers their home.

 

[Sundragon2012]

This also sums up my feelings on deities...

Very interesting points here, and very likely the reasons why I have never focused on fiends to a measurable extent in any Planescape games. I wanted them to be like the demons I imagined as a child, something so twisted and incomprehensibly evil that an encounter with any, for any measure of moments, would leave a mortal scarred and profoundly affected...

Don't get me started on deities.

It used to be that only on FR, after the Time of Troubles, that deities had such an intimate connection to worshippers that they would weaken and die if their worship disappeared on the world. In Planescape it became a universal assumption that gods NEEDED worship to exist. This was never the case on Greyhawk or Krynn. On Krynn for example, certain gods actually helped create the world so they existed long before mortals came to the world.

Essentially instead of the relative youth of gods being a peculiarity of the FR setting, Planescape translated that to the entire multiverse and every setting therein effectively negating the creation stories of the peoples of the material world who believed that their gods were more than just suped up figments of their own imaginations who actually created the universe in which they lived. Nah, that was just silly clueless talk.

However, what PS did to deities was nothing compared to what 3e did to the gods of various settings by turning them into what amounts to big bad boss monsters that the PCs can fight instead of being anything approaching what many consider beings worthy of worship. This necessitated the conceptualization of other kinds of creatures like the Illithid elder beings who are even beyond the gods in power fundamentally becoming what the gods were so in effect the "real" gods of the game, the ones who have power beyond which some orc smashing little PCs can ever attain are these weird alien type creatures. For all intents and purposed the gods beyond which mortals can reach haven't disappeared they just changed form and name from Zeus and Isis, Nerull, Tharizdun, Odin, Chauntea, Shar, etc. to Xeoltorepmh and Ithilorgh the Cthulhu rip offs.

Great design decision.


Chris

 

[Mouseferatu]

However, what PS did to deities was nothing compared to what 3e did to the gods of various settings by turning them into what amounts to big bad boss monsters that the PCs can fight instead of being anything approaching what many consider beings worthy of worship. This necessitated the conceptualization of other kinds of creatures like the Illithid elder beings who are even beyond the gods in power fundamentally becoming what the gods were so in effect the "real" gods of the game, the ones who have power beyond which some orc smashing little PCs can ever attain are these weird alien type creatures. For all intents and purposed the gods beyond which mortals can reach haven't disappeared they just changed form and name from Zeus and Isis, Nerull, Tharizdun, Odin, Chauntea, Shar, etc. to Xeoltorepmh and Ithilorgh the Cthulhu rip offs.

Great design decision.


Chris

This is hardly unique to the 3E era. As far back as 1E, Deities and Demigods provided complete stats for deities, and was accused of turning the gods into just bigger monsters.

 

[Sundragon2012]

This is hardly unique to the 3E era. As far back as 1E, Deities and Demigods provided complete stats for deities, and was accused of turning the gods into just bigger monsters.

True, true. I forgot 1e with its 400 hit point Zeus and Odin. I should have stated that 3e brought that travesty back from the abyss from which it had fallen and stuffed what could have been a book rich in useful information about gods, their churches and their manner of interacting with the worlds into a book stuffed with monsterous stat blocks so that uber-munchkins can sharpen their +15 swords of Excessive Grandiosity upon the greatest monsters in the universe.

Green Ronin's treatment of gods and their churches as found in the Book of the Righteous is an infinitely superior and mature representation of gods as gods as opposed to super beasties.


Chris

 

[Desdichado]

True, true. I forgot 1e with its 400 hit point Zeus and Odin. I should have stated that 3e brought that travesty back from the abyss from which it had fallen and stuffed what could have been a book rich in useful information about gods, their churches and their manner of interacting with the worlds into a book stuffed with monsterous stat blocks so that uber-munchkins can sharpen their +15 swords of Excessive Grandiosity upon the greatest monsters in the universe.

I didn't really expect anything different. The books even had the exact same name; I'm not at all susprised that they had (more or less) the same format.

Not that I like it either; just about the only 3e book I like less (well, of the ones I own, anyway) then Deities & Demigods is the Epic Level Handbook, but I wasn't really surprised too much by either. Sadly.