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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 2705367" data-attributes="member: 11697">And how isn't it? The level of organization among the major exemplar races is very much based on what alignments they represent on the Law/Chaos axis. The Tanar'ri are terribly fractured among competing powerful Abyssal Lords, the Baatezu are united under the banner of Asmodeus and their armies in the Blood War fight as a unified front, and the Yugoloths are somewhere in the middle. The Slaadi are chaos incarnate, with hardly any heirarchy beyond raw, immediate power, and the Modrons are a collective united under a single being in Primus. The Archons are effectively a perfect vision of a top-down military heirarchy united under the various banners of specific members of the Hebdomad, like 7 seperate divisions of Celestia's military, a shining inverse of Baator. The Guardinals are likewise a mirror of the Yugoloths, without the perverse corruptions of their ideological opposites. The Eladrin have a heirarchy, but its only power is symbolic, like the king or queen figurehead of a modern republic. Morwel's advice might be highly valued, but she can't dictate her whims upon the various Tulani nobles, nor would she. And then the Rilmani, ruled by the Aurumach council, but with each rank of the race having significant autonomy, perfectly balanced between all of the extremes.For what it's worth, that article in dragon was explicitely not to be considered canon within the DnD cosmology, it even said as much within the article. As such, it's a moot point here.Yes, in the Planes of Conflict box set. And there were stats for Daru Ib Shamiq (the one named Baern) in the Hellbound box set. And it was odd, because the level of influence and the frightening level of control they had over the Yugoloths, and arguably the entire lower planes, didn't match with their printed stats. Some of the things they actually did were not possible if you assume them to only have the stats they were listed as having their. And their level of knowledge and prescience regarding the entirety of the lower planes seemed to never be wrong when it came to specific details, specific secrets, specific dark and hidden things. There were suggestions of them being able to control Baatezu and Tanar'ri and the 'loths all but worship them and willingly fall all over themselves to obey their dictates. That's not within their stats. The Baernaloths granted the Baatezu, Tanar'ri, and Yugoloth races collectively their abilities to teleport. Apomps, an exiled Baern, created an entire outsider race (Demodands/Gehreleths). Daru Ib Shamiq created a yugoloth 'ghost' without any link to the ethereal or negative energy planes.They did a hell of a lot of things that weren't given as powers or spell-like abilities within the one stat block given for their type. But there's several ways to look at it:1) This represents the still extant Baernaloths who have, in the eons since the creation of the Gray Waste, simply given up to apathy and the harrowing effect of their own native plane. Whatever they might once have been capable of, they have since forgotten or had leached from them.2) The stats don't represent the frighteningly powerful Baernaloths, 'The Demented', who serve as 'advisors' to the most powerful unique Yugoloths (the General of Gehenna, the Oinoloth, Bubonix, Cerlic/Charon, etc) or to the most powerful Ultroloths. These remaining Baernaloths are entities of god-like power that view the entirety of the lower planes with a mad, dispassionate interest, playing it like a massive shell game of perhaps minor consequence in their own eons long proxy war versus the other abstract alignments.3) The stats as presented are only for the less powerful Baernaloths who remain behind. It's important to keep in mind that once the Baernaloths transferred their overt power over the yugoloth race to the Ultroloths, that most of the entire Baernaloth race simply vanished. They may have merged with the plane, they might have returned to the semi-mythical source, neutral evil in the abstract, that sent them to the Waste as its heralds, they might have withered away in mad seclusion, etc. The original, god-like Baern who created the yugoloth race, and did the stuff of legends, might no longer remain behind in this multiverse, having literally abandoned their favored children to their own devices in an act of wanton cruelty that only fits so well. The 'loths remain convinced that the Blood War is their playground, that they are special in the eyes of Evil, that one day they will control the other fiend races, etc but in truth the Baern have no intentions of doing such, despite fostering this mythos in the eyes of their creations who may have been abandoned by their makers to make their own way.A mix of these latter two is the take that I've gone with for my own elaboration of the members of 'The Demented' that particular group of 13 Baernaloths (though the number there is my own creation). Beyond the series of stories that detail each of those members, I actually wrote up stats for one of them, though it was only by virtue of that particular Baernaloth being encountered about as far away from its native plane, and source of power, as possible.</blockquote>

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