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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dozen" data-source="post: 6090064" data-attributes="member: 6698275">Hold that  thought. I don't consider a good trashing on stupidity 'bullying'. That is  not against me, that's against a statement. Arguments never should be  about who is right, even though some people seem to think so. They are  about finding out what is right. I'm only a fresh recruit to ENWorld; I  was too ashamed of my grasp on the English language back then to contribute to  foreign communities. I'm not new to D&D, and not new to debates.  Feel free to unleash Hell upon me, and I'll try not to get butthurt for  calling me a newbie, or your apparent disregard to think about what I said. Ah, and no offense to anyone who plays it, but 4th Edition content  will enter my games when the Citadel of Fire freezes over.I do recall the lore about Death Slaadi. In fact, I think I mentioned them in the post that started all this. I believe I already know why you two oppose me. Look, both of you, I know my reasoning behind this is not written anywhere, but there is one. I do not consider chaos an ultimately evil force, or law an ultimately good one. Such a notion is closeminded, and incredibly unreasonable, and I cannot percieve who in his right mind would arrive at the conclusion without an indiscernable mass of logical fallacies. Please, For Lastai's sake, do not even for a moment assume I'm too much of an idiot to not see that.As for Planescape... The short explanation would be that while chaos and law were, originally, the way they are in other settings, it changed, as Asmodeus is a magnificent bastard. The long answer makes more sense, I promise. I presume you have reasonable amount of knowledge of the Pact Primeval? You probably have seen the so called 'backstory' of it in the second Fiendish Codex, in any case. Then I don't have to tell you how obviously it's only shameless propaganda, either. Even if we could accept the idea that none of the Lawful deities who've been fighting the original, non-Tanari demons since time immemorial and possess Wisdom scores in the double digits had the common sense to read the fine print(because honestly, not even Lawful gods can be so trusting towards the people they wanted to throw out of the Heavens for being too ruthless and disgusting), or none of the Chaotic deities tried to interfere with just about everything that happened in the story(which, knowing the attitude of chaotic people in general, is just bullsh*t), Asmodeus could not have been there in the way he's presented, as he's not the original leader of Baator. That was good old Lucifer, who was driven away by Belzebub. Asmodeus took the Nine Hells from him, turned him into a giant slug we know today as Baalzebul, and started his scheme to, uh, take over the multiverse, presumably, we cannot know that for sure, but speculation on his endgame aside, the plan itself is pure genius.The basis of (one of his) cons is to brainwash his people with propaganda, in a fashion typical to tyrants. The plan is going quite well, as every Baatezu without exception appears to genuinely believe every bit of the Pact Primeval's origin story. I'm not pulling that out of my ass, it's written in the Codex in cold, hard print. Now, it's safe to say the Archdevils and a few older devils who remain know it's completely made up, but Asmodeus keeps tabs on all but every grain of sand in Baator - they cannot widely spread the truth without repercussions, and smaller upheavals will be chocked to death.  From a Devil's standpoint, it makes perfect sense: In their opinion, everyone on the side of Good are naive fools, and Chaos is the only philosophical wrong. Of course they are going to believe a story that supports their prejuices from every angle, at the very least to a degree.The real story of how the Pact Primeval came to be is lost to the eons. We can safely assume whoever scribbled the three original copies of the Pact had some leverage on Lawful Good deities and forced them to approve of it in it's current form, and thwarted Chaotic attempts to stop him, if only by hiding the majority of it's contents very well. The pact itself also likely has tricky wording, so the gods could not possibly know for sure what the devils were up to. Why all the other deities who existed at the time remain silent is beyond me, but they're gods, they know what's the best for their own herds. Could have something to do with Asmodeus dumping hordes of devils on everyone who hears it, whatever.For most settings, the plan ends here, but in Planescape, Asmodeus reached further. Belief shapes the Planes. That's the point of the setting, every plane and creature ever can exist within. Let us back up for a moment: Every single Baatezu believes the Pact Primeval's origin story is true. That is a lot of people. Now, the rest of the D&D world who heard of the Pact's story know, for a fact, that the story doesn't make any sense. We know Chaos and Law are independent of Morality. I repeat: we know. Factual knowledge is not belief. The people of the D&D world who actually bother to think about this(not much point to comparing their numbers to Devils') doesn't want it to not be true, because they are already fairly confident it isn't. They have proof and everything they see and know suggests they are right, it's only reasonable. The effort they put into proving it to themselves is miniscule. So there is the unified will of millions of devils versus pretty much nobody to change the extraplanar equalient of a boolean switch. In practice, their belief is not powerful enough to shift all celestials into blabbering, well-intentioned madmen, but it can give the world an origin story. That's because normally, there isn't an origin story to speak of. The planes are the way they are because creatures believed them to be. Maybe the moment the idea of planes sparked among the original primes, the power of belief spawned these wonderful worlds for creatures of the tales to explore and inhabit. Maybe some of the planes were orginially empty or different and were filled with their features and inhabitants later, it doesn't matter. The belief in the Pact Primeval's origin only fills in a void, created something out of nothing. As the majority still thinks of them as they are, the Pact backstory cannot change anything in the creatures of the present: the Celestials remain Celestials, the Slaadi are the same Slaadi, and so on. But their reasons for being the way they are can and did change. It had to. We know belief has effect on casuality, otherwise the cosmology as we know it would have never came to be. And the more people believe Asmodeus is the first and only ruler of Baator, the less powerful are Lucifer and Baalzebul. People barely have a clue who the former was(is?), and he disappeared. The latter's past faded into obscurity, he is but a shadow of his former self. The holder of the Ruby Rod shaped the planes, alone, to their very core, and no one could do anything about it.  Thus had he gained hold over the multiverse and diminished the power of his precedessors, which he uses to his advantage to this day.Khm... So? What do you think? It's entirely possible my logic failed me at one point. In any case, it's beyond what you can call pure speculation or DM bias.</blockquote>

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