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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6133559" data-attributes="member: 2067">But now I'm getting pie, because I explained my point better and illustrated how the article has bearing on the conversation!I mean, if folks don't care enough about my point to bother reading something that could take 15 minutes and help them understand my point better, I can't say I'm particularly interested in reducing it to a sound bite. Some ideas are better communicated in longer essay form, with a complete thesis and supporting evidence, so that they can stand as a larger declaration. The idea of all design being local is one of those ideas. And if my point's unclear, well, that's why I'm here engaging in this conversation, to help someone who might want to understand, to understand. And as for kender-buckets: the idea is that the things that make up a kender, things like energetic optimism and bold-or-stupid bravery, are things that reach beyond the containers of D&D and Dragonlance, which is why part of the kender circle falls outside of those circles in the diagram: there are many things about kender that are not the exclusive domain of either D&D or Dragonlance. Ultimately, what that diagram was showing was that kender are a part of D&D, not apart from it. This serves to demonstrate that any particular game element is a part of D&D. Because of the phenomenon of local design, any particular part of D&D may be define what D&D is for a particular table. So an edition of D&D that wants to unify the base would do well to blatantly sign on to the idea that it will be something you can play your local version of the game in. Which means it must not invalidate old lore wherever possible. Which means leaving room for god-hating yugoloths in the core. Which means not re-defining them as servants of the evil gods. And if you'd like to add extra yugoloths who for some reason serve evil gods, I would still question as to what you actually gain from that. Well, for Lawful Evil and Chaotic Evil, it's pretty obviously devils and demons. And specific deities of course have specific servitors (ie: an evil god of fire, regardless of alignment, would probably call on fire elementals, and just make 'em evil). So the question seems to about either specifically Neutral Evil gods in general and/or about trans-evil gods, gods who would like to unite all evil. And really the answer is the same in either case: undead.Take a look at the NE gods of D&D, or the gods described as living on the Grey Waste/Hades. What are their areas of control? Death, death, disease, death, death, death, the underworld, death, and death. Creating undead is what these guys do for fun. The underworld is full of souls. Neutral evil gods in D&D have long been associated with and defined by death (and thus, the undead). More than just specifically gods of death, though, evil clerics of any alignment since the invention of the evil alignment (CE, LE, NE, whatever) have always had special power to control the undead, while good clerics of any alignment have always had a special power to turn the undead aside. And even before the invention of "evil" as a distinct alignment, the undead were clearly aligned with Chaos, and a Chaos priest could not turn them. This is the fundamental good vs. evil conflict as described in the mechanics of D&D of any edition: the undead vs. the living, healing vs. killing, life vs. death. If you're a D&D god, and you're evil, you and undead go together, even if you're some sort of god of evil life. Similarly, if you're a D&D god, and you're good, you hate undead, even if you're some sort of god of benevolent death. And if you're an NE evil god, undead are your go-to for "powerful supernatural beings at your command." Be ye a power of death or a power of hatred or a power of darkness, the undead are yours to create, and while your enemies have devas that announce the good news and sing their praises, you have the corrupted souls of their former creations, wailing in their pain, perverse examples of the failure of the forces of good to protect all of their charges from your desecration. If the forces of good will soothe your soul, the forces of evil will ensure it remains forever restless.This association has waxed and waned, and there's clearly gods for whom this is not a major concern. But this isn't about any individual evil deity, but about evil deities in general. In the survey of divine evil in D&D, the undead are a constant unifying presence, and the life vs. death conflict is a constant reoccurring motif. If you want to create a splinter group of yugoloths that seek to serve evil deities, you first need to un-seat zombies and skeletons and wraiths and specters and wights and ghouls and even vampires and mummies, and then you might need to un-seat turn undead and reversed cleric spells and necrotic/radiant dichotomies. And that's before all the other risks you run with any new IP, and the problem that this splinter group doesn't contribute anything to the existing awesome of the rest of the 'loths. So a splinter group of 'loths wouldn't be unacceptable because of an invalidation of a previous lore, but they still would likely be not a great idea, in part because they'd be newly arrived in the place where undead have been consistently delivering, and they'd be far from the strengths of the existing yugoloth-as-mercenary-with-a-hidden-agenda account.[sblock]PS: As an aside, the undead have a fairly unique relationship with the PS setting, and because of that, they were never really major antagonists on the planes for the PC's, unless said PC's went up against Orcus or a death god or the like. The evil of the undead was downplayed in part of the effort to present a more grey-and-grey morality spectrum in D&D, and in part due to the sympathetic characters found in the Dustmen faction, and in part due to the distance of the negative energy plane in the 2e cosmology. So Planescape didn't worry too much about the undead, itself. Which gives us the circumstance of having the most powerful servitors of evil divinities being much more present in an "average" campaign than in a planar-centric one.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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