D&D 5E Monsters of Many Names - Wandering Monsters (Yugoloth!)

[pemerton]

This works in a passive media, but it isn't as effective in a media where the audience is also a creator. Since one person's silly is another's sublime, there cannot be effective gatekeepers who determine what is permissible lore for millions of people. Either you serve people's games what they actually want and need, or people play a game that will allow that (Pathfinder). The audience isn't a passive recipient of a message, but must be an active creator of their own messages.

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A monolithic vision isn't useful as a game play element.

This strikes me as an argument for my position rather than yours.

Game play isn't monolithic - hence, why are we monolithically applying/preserving Planescape down to the last bit of detail?

And I don't get the significance of the reference to Pathfinder - that is a successful version of D&D despite having fewer classic core lore elements than 4e. So it shows you can have a successful and popular D&D without preserving every last element of Planescape.

 

[Tovec]

This strikes me as an argument for my position rather than yours.

Game play isn't monolithic - hence, why are we monolithically applying/preserving Planescape down to the last bit of detail?

And I don't get the significance of the reference to Pathfinder - that is a successful version of D&D despite having fewer classic core lore elements than 4e. So it shows you can have a successful and popular D&D without preserving every last element of Planescape.

Yes, you can have a successful game without those elements. But if the best and most primary source of a creature (in this case the Yugoloth) is a specific interpretation what is the problem with maintaining that interpretation. Why is it better to completely ignore that interpretation and roll it in with another creature (namely Demons) that already have established lore? Why, if you dislike having this particular flavour of evil outsiders, isn't it better to remove or extract them from the game? Like demons and dislike devils? Simple, no devils in your game and especially no blood war. Or, easier still, roll devils, yugoloths, and demons into fiends aka demons and call it a day. However, if you like planescape and the blood war? Then it would likely be easiest if you had three kinds of fiends to begin with. In the MM book there can be three different kinds of fiends, but all called fiends. Then no one loses. In a later Planescape book you can identify each specifically. Why is this so hard?

 

[Hussar]

That actually started in 1e, and 2e just continued that concept. 3e didn't make it mandatory (see Eberron with its own cosmology, and FR with a nominally sorta-kinda separated cosmology yet with links to the Great Wheel still presented), but the vast majority of planar lore was retained in harmony with the 1e/2e development.




You've said that numerous times in this thread Hussar, and it hasn't been remotely correct in any of those instances. I've pointed it out as have others. It's getting a bit futile to have a conversation here because a half dozen or a dozen pages later you keep repeating the same arguments and some of the same incorrect statements time and again.




Setting specific cosmologies in 3e? They had their own planar lore as it applied, and for instance it was pointed out in places how to handle various D&D planar creatures in setting specific cosmologies like Eberron.

Really?

Let us open our 3e Monster Manual to demons, devils, celestials and Formorians. Those are the sections I happened to check. Note, this is the 3e book, not the 3.5, since I don't have that one. If you read the sections in the Monster Manual, there is not only not a single mention of anything remotely Planescape, like Bloodwar or whatnot, there is no mention that Demons and Devils share any enmity, and that Celestials (the group term for archons, angels and eladrin all lumped together) hate fiends. Formians aren't even given a plane. They are just from "the lawful planes".

Reading the 3e MM, you really don't get the sense that angels and devils might work together (they hate each other after all), nor do you get any sense that demons and devils are locked in a titanic war.

But, fair enough, let's open our 3e DMG (again, 3e, not 3.5, since I don't own those books). Could you please point me to the Planescape material found in that book Shemeska? I'll admit, I didn't look for all that long, but, perusing the index, table of contents and a couple of likely sources, I came up with nothing Planescape in nature whatsoever.

So, where is all this Planescape lore that 3e core contains? I'm having a great deal of trouble finding it. Is it contained in supplements? I have zero problem with that. After all, supplements are exactly where setting specific material should be.

 

[Hussar]

And now they are moving back to Great Wheel because maybe 4E lore wasn't quite as good as they thought

4EMM lore was heavily criticized on Wotc boards, even by 4E diehard fans. Fluff was poorly written and full of Primordials vs Gods stuff.

A lot of people, including people who did not migrate to 4E, enjoyed World Axis cosmology, but as for lore per se (with a few exceptions), I don't recall much initial love.

And, hey, fair enough. Have you seen me defending 4e lore simply because it happens to appear in 4e? I'm not saying that they got it right. Just that at least they had the intestinal fortitude to try something different rather than regurgitate the same tired stuff edition after edition.

 

[Hussar]

Incorrect. You're thinking, I believe, of the hardback volume. The original MC came out at the start of 2e like the other books, just in a loose-leaf binder. The yugoloths were contained in the first two or three volumes and specifically mention the Blood War. I.E. not Planescape - CORE.

Sorry, but that's MC 8 when the outer planar stuff came out. With a publishing date of 1991, three years after 2e's release. Remember, 2e had no demons for quite some time.

 

[pemerton]

if the best and most primary source of a creature (in this case the Yugoloth) is a specific interpretation what is the problem with maintaining that interpretation. Why is it better to completely ignore that interpretation and roll it in with another creature (namely Demons) that already have established lore? Why, if you dislike having this particular flavour of evil outsiders, isn't it better to remove or extract them from the game?

I can answer these specific questions in my own case.

I learned about mezzodaemons and nycadaemons from the original DMG and then the Vault of the Drow and Fiend Folio. The MM2 introduced more daemons. As per my quotes upthread, they are described as being very similar to demons - they have a society in which the strong bully and dominate the weak, and mezzodaemons at least dislike devils' rules and regulations - but differ in being NE rather than CE. Once you jettison nine point alignment (which I did in 1986 after reading an article in Dragon 101), there is no longer any reason to distinguish daemons from demons.

To put it another way - I don't dislike the flavour of daemons. In fact, that flavour is virtually indistinguishable from the flavour of demons. (As I noted above, I might treat Arcanadaemons and Charon's mob differently - they work well as devils, I think. And ultradaemons also have a subtlety that means I wouldn't necessarily assimilate them to demons, although 4e does.)

What I personally dislike is the Planescape take on daemons - which postdates the introduction of these monsters by over 10 years, and is not the only viable take on them. 4e's approach fits more smoothly with my use of daemons then does the Planescape, precisely because it is closer to the original AD&D approach, simply purged of the need to differentiate neutral evil "daemons" from chaotic evil "demons".

easier still, roll devils, yugoloths, and demons into fiends aka demons and call it a day.

I've mentioned multiple times upthread (and/or on the other thread) that I think this would be the best way to go provided that WotC can resist the temptation to want to slap alignments on them that would then undo the good work of this approach.

 

[pemerton]

let's open our 3e DMG (again, 3e, not 3.5, since I don't own those books). Could you please point me to the Planescape material found in that book Shemeska? I'll admit, I didn't look for all that long, but, perusing the index, table of contents and a couple of likely sources, I came up with nothing Planescape in nature whatsoever.

I mentioned the same thing upthread. The 3E DMG had very little to say about other planes, as best I recall.

It is the 3.5 DMG that changed this - page 147-167 summarise some of the basic ideas about planar mechanics (eg energy traits, alignment traits, etc) from the 3E MoP, and then present a glossography of the D&D cosmology informed by Planescape (eg p 160 mentions the Blood War in the entry on the Abyss).

There is also a little more than a page explaining how to write one's own cosmology. Moving somewhat tangentially to your comment, I note that this section of the book is focused a lot more on mechanical elements, or on very basic story questions, than on what I would regard as serious and important story elements. For instance (p 167):

Here's a list of features that a "typical" D&D campaign needs a cosmology to provide:

• A place for deities to reside or originate from.
  
  
• A place for fiendish creatures to originate from.
  
  
• A place for celsetial creatures to originate from.
  
  
• A place for elemental creatures to originate from.
  
  
• A way for spells that use the Astral Plane, the Ethereal Plane, or the Plane of Shadow to function.

None of these are an absolute requirement . . . You can run a campaign without deities at all . . . You can decide that fiendish and celestial creatures come from the same plane, or that all elementals come from the same swirling maelstrom.​

Page 168 is a discussion of planar traits - ie the effect on action resolution of various metaphysical properties of other planes.

The only discussion of the serious story role that a cosmology might provide is found in the last paragraph on p 167:

Your cosmology can reflect your own desires for the direction you want the campaign to take. If you want to stress the struggle between good and evil, then setting up strongly aligned planes for these concepts is an excellent idea. Similarly if you want a strong conflict between organization and freedom, strongly law-aligned and strongly chaos-aligned planes are recommended.​

The actual definition of a "strongly aligned" plane is given on p 149: on planes that are strongly aligned, a -2 circumstance penalty applies on all INT-, WIS- and CHA-based checks made by all creatures not of the plane's alignment.

I may be an outlier, but if I wanted to give someone advice on how to build a cosmology that stresses the struggle between good and evil, I wouldn't start by suggesting a fairly esoteric mechanical penalty that (i) will apply on certain planes that the PCs are unlikely to end up for the first N levels of the campaign, and (ii) make it easier for evil to fight evil than for good to fight evil. Rather, I'd start by addressing the sort of stuff that 4e addresses - like, how to design a cosmology that puts good and evil into play as stakes that the players, via their PCs, will have little choice but to engage with.

That's part of what I mean when I stress 4e's emphasis on the playability of a cosmology.

 

[Echohawk]

Sorry, but that's MC 8 when the outer planar stuff came out. With a publishing date of 1991, three years after 2e's release. Remember, 2e had no demons for quite some time.

Technically, Savage Wombat is correct that there were yugoloths in the MC2 (September 1989), since the three "Guardian Daemons" appeared in there. But yes, proper yugoloths and the first mentions of the Blood War only appeared in MC8 (January 1991).

 

[I'm A Banana]

This strikes me as an argument for my position rather than yours.

Game play isn't monolithic - hence, why are we monolithically applying/preserving Planescape down to the last bit of detail?

And I don't get the significance of the reference to Pathfinder - that is a successful version of D&D despite having fewer classic core lore elements than 4e. So it shows you can have a successful and popular D&D without preserving every last element of Planescape.

So, in the first case, I'm not arguing for a monolithic applying of Planescape, but rather for an applying of a multiplicity where such multiplicity exists. The Great Wheel has a mulitiplicity within it (what it would be to most normal campaigns, what it was in 1e, what PS helped make it into) but more than that, the Great Wheel is only one particularly quirky cosmology amongst untold millions -- there's also the World Axis, where yugoloths and demons have entirely been subsumed into each other! There's also Dragonlance's cosmology where everything's the Abyss. There's Dark Sun's cosmology of elements and the Gray without any philosophical planes. There's Eberron's Orrey cosmology, waxing and waning planes and moons. I want all that. But that includes within it Planescape.

In the second case, Pathfinder is successful in part by supporting the lore people want, rather than drastically changing it. Golarion itself has its own lore, but this lore is a reflection of greater D&D lore, and is not monolithic (it is understood that Golarion isn't the only world in which Pathfinder takes place).

In comparison, 4e's monolithic vision of its fiction abrogated diversity, dictating one vision for what a given world element was and could be, possibly in the pursuit of iconic branding and what Jon Schindehette has identified as guidelines for other media.

 

[pemerton]

4e's monolithic vision of its fiction abrogated diversity

Maybe. But it did have Dark Sun. And the alternative version of demons as immortals in MoP. And all the commentary on alternative worlds in the DMG and the Rules Compendium.