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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6297592" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm afraid you aren't going to be able to inform me about my own emotional states.  You find it disturbing.  I find it gross.  Heck, now that I'm seeing the pictures I'm not even finding it gross.The rest of your description has the same problem.  You are trying to inform me about my internal emotional state.  You are missing the mark repeatedly, except when you say, "Disturbing things are also scary."  Point is, it isn't a disturbing scene (to me), and neither my logic nor my emotions with regard to this scene are what you are expecting them to be.  For example, a peryton isn't clichéd despite being a monster from mythology because people have no idea what to expect.  Is it going to be silly?  Is it going to be lame?  Is it going to be scary?  What does it 'do'?   In that regard, a peryton makes a better 'demon' - in the sense of an implacably evil foe - than a demon does.Part of the reason that there is a link to Slaad in my signature rather than demons is that at least with Slaad, there is more of an unknown quantity.  With a demon, the only way to make it an unknown quantity is to not make it a demon.  My word for that later approach is 'lame'.  This isn't in fact anything people haven't noticed before.  When Paizo did it's version of 'Return to the Isle of Dread' in Savage Tide, many people complained (rightly I think) about the fact that instead of giving the island a Lovecraftian theme, it ended up being just another 'stop the demon lord worshiping wierdos' adventure path.  It ironically made the scenario more normal and less frightening than their own riffs of imagination had been when they only had those weird heat loving salamander things to deal with.   One way to deal with this is to go ahead and make demons Lovecraftian, which is reasonably at some level, but involves tearing down peoples expectations until you might as well not call them 'demons' at all.  Lovecraft didn't bother to do so, and wasn't the worse for it.</blockquote>

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