Kunimatyu said:
Is there anything in particular you're referring to here? I could be missing something really obvious, but I don't recall that much difference between some of the Planescape material on Baator and the material today.
He's talking 1st edition versus 2nd edition, not Planescape versus 3e. In 1e (after the MMII), the Hells were ruled by Tiamat, Dispater, Mammon, Belial, Geryon, Moloch, Baalzebul, Mephistopheles, and Asmodeus.
Early 2e (pre-Planescape) eliminated all references to the archdevils, mentioning only the Dark Eight, a group of pit fiends who were, as far as even the wisest sages knew, the highest-ranking baatezu rulers, some of whom had been previously mentioned as working for the archdevils.
Later on, Colin McComb snuck the unique fiends back in, but wasn't allowed to use Biblical names, and he elected to (or was forced to? I don't know) redesign them entirely instead of making them barely disguised versions of the 1e archdevils. The only one who managed to get through completely unmolested was Dispater, and only because he had already appeared in the Planescape adventure
Fires of Dis. (And he had been mentioned by name in the Planescape boxed set, the only 1e archdevil who could claim that). This set off a firestorm of criticism among long-time fans of the plane; Erik Mona has said it showed a great disrespect for prior canon. Personally, I think the Lords of the Nine are a lot more interesting than their one-dimensional predecessors, but I can't deny it was an extreme change that makes it difficult to use 1e canon directly.
In response to the criticism, Colin McComb backtracked quite a lot in
Faces of Evil (which was published by the easier-going Wizards of the Coast, and very vague about the Nine in any case), bringing in a lot of references to 1st edition fiendish nobles and hinting strongly that the Lords of the Nine were only the 1st edition archdevils under different aspects.
Monte Cook, in
A Paladin in Hell, also made a stab at reconciling the two sets of diabolic lords, but he went in a very different direction, introducing a civil war in Hell (eons ago - the standard 2e assumption was that the 1e cosmological stuff was true or mostly true, but was accurate for a time centuries or millennia before the present day;
Throne of Bloodstone happened centuries ago with regard to Planescape, and Moloch and Geryon have been gone for much, much longer).
Guide to Hell, by Chris Pramas, embraced Monte Cook's explanation and gave the war a name: the Reckoning. During the Reckoning, Geryon and Moloch were cast from their positions and many other lords were transformed into new forms.
Book of Vile Darkness, again by Monte Cook, continued the Reckoning narrative into 3e. By this point, it seems irreversable. The fact that all the 1e material on the Nine Hells is now on the other side of a major civil war and countless millennia of cutthroat politics means that, while it can be alluded to, it can't be used completely as it was in anything new written on the plane. 3e even aggravated the situation by, in the
Manual of the Planes, introducing yet another coup and purging in Mephistopheles' court (in
Guide to Hell, Molikroth was assumed to still exist as one of Mephistopheles' aspects, rather than as a now-discarded charade as in 3e). So all of the pit fiends and many of the nobles who formally worked for Mephistopheles are now destroyed after the unmasking of Molikroth.
Tome of Magic sealed the matter by killing Geryon off.
If they had gone in the direction of the
Faces of Evil retcon and said things like "Moloch sometimes appears in the form of a withered old hag; Geryon, sometimes known as Levistus, was for a time imprisoned in a glacier" they could have phased out McComb's versions of the Nine altogether. Too late now. I think all of this adds an interesting new dimension and texture to Baator, but I completely understand that some people dislike it.
