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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grover Cleaveland" data-source="post: 2658411" data-attributes="member: 34932">It's mentioned in Faces of Evil, which is essential reading for the fiend-literate. Also, and more importantly, it's damned cool.Well, exactly. That was the original poster's point - fiend lords ought to, by rights, be far more powerful than mere gods in some respects. Although I think the radii given for divine realms is pathetically small, and that ought to be fixed as well. First, you have to understand that distances don't really exist in the Outer Planes as such. Space and time as they're known on the Material Plane don't reach beyond (or into) the Astral. The Outer Planes are realms of archetypes and ideas, of souls and spirit. Terrain shifts and warps as the ideas that make it up change, all travel times are variable, and things look different depending on who is looking at them.Infinity, then, is just another idea, and an infinite realm is not necessarily more potent or more full of resources than a finite one.I suppose it's like your "outsider hit dice don't correspond with size" maxim - the power inherent in a realm, and the difficulty of controlling it, has nothing to do with perceived size or travel time.Even given that, the power of an entire planar layer dwarfs that of any mere god's domain. Abyssal layers, being only a small percentage of the entire Abyss, are generally not as important as the layers of other planes, however.Secondly, even if you don't buy the preceding (though I believe it is not only the only interpretation that fits what evidence we have in both Planescape and the 1st edition Manual of the Planes, but also far more interesting than treating the Outer Planes as if they were mere Material landscapes) it should be obvious that a fiendish lord doesn't increase the size of her holdings linearly. She doesn't, for example, add 100 miles to the diameter of her dominion until the end of time. Conquering a layer of the Abyss means that the will of the would-be conquerer is pitted directly against the will of the layer itself, and the layer, if it is conquered at all, is conquered all at once.Fraz'Urb-luu, then, doesn't control "his" layer yet. He controls a realm within it, as if he were a mere godling. When he regains his previous status, the entire layer will be his to mold.This is obviously not true, or there would be no endangered species in the real world. Predation, the hostile nature of the Abyss itself (which despises all life, even its own), and constant warfare keep the numbers down to whatever level you need them to be at. Although, as I said earlier, numbers alone aren't really important - it's the power of the alignment they represent.You could also assume that demonic populations are limited by the power supplied by the Abyss itself, and can never exceed the amount of (let's call it primal flux - you understand the reference, I think?) provided by chaotic and evil actions on the Material Plane and elsewhere</blockquote>

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