Hm... It's not directly related, but since I haven't got much else to write in this thread, can I ask you two questions, James Jacob ?
First, the most related question - Is Golarion part of the DnD multiverse, in your idea of it ? Just another besides toril, oerth and the rest, sharing the same abyss with a sensibly different knowledge of it ? And among other things, do you use both lines of demons (lords or otherwise), whether as additions or as a combination ?
Second, less related but more important for me and my poor imagination - As you developped the stories of the abyss and its lords, did you get an idea of their age, in orders of magnitude (or more precisely perhaps) ? For example and three different generations, how old are Dagon, Demogorgon and Graz'zt ? And the abyss, and the rest of the planes ?
Their history is related to the rise of mortals, so time scales meaningful for us should not be meaningless for them. But, if we are to use our real universe as comparison (why not, after all the material is constitued of stars and planets), intelligent life could have appeared less than six billions years after the universe (less that one billion years for the first stars and galaxies, a few millions years for a good part of those to go supernova and create the heavier elements, an undetermined time for those to form a solar system comparable to ours, which takes something of the order of the hundreds of millions of years, 1 billion years for the formation of the relevant planet and the apparition of life on it, and 3 billion years for the natural evolution of an intelligent form of life).
This universe is 13,7 billion years old, and is expected to create new stars for 20 billions of years more. Since life on the outer planes is older than that, we can take into account outsider interventions to speed things up, and assume that mortals rised anywhere between 30 billions and, say, 50 thousand years before the present time in the DnD settings to account for legendary times and lengthy recorded histories. So, if we follow probabilities, Demogorgon, as one of the first tanar'ri, is billions years old.
And on the other hand, abyssal history evolves at a rythm relatively close to human history : the loumaras are thousands years old, the title of Queen of the succubi is said to be 2000 years old, Broken Reach 200 years old, the death and rebirth of orcus is more recent yet... And Demorgorgon's savage tide plan doesn't seem to belong to an entity with an history of internal and external struggles spanning billions of years. Most of what is known about the abyss and its inhabitants points to a shorter timescale, and seems more in line with a "Young material plane" theory, that ignores probabilities and postulate that mortals and tanar'ri are less than a few millions of years old.
My best idea yet to reconcile the two is to hijack planescape's rule of rings. Intelligent life on the material planes is somehow organized to come and go in generations, synchronized with a cyclic history of the outer planes (in the abyss, obyriths succeed loumaras which succeed tanar'ri which succeed obyriths, and similar lords for each kind raise each time). That limits the usable life of most immortal entities to hundred thousands or millions of years, with a few exceptions (Dagon, Asmodeus and the Queen of Chaos can be good candidates for survival through the cycles).
But I'm not really satisfied with it.
First, the most related question - Is Golarion part of the DnD multiverse, in your idea of it ? Just another besides toril, oerth and the rest, sharing the same abyss with a sensibly different knowledge of it ? And among other things, do you use both lines of demons (lords or otherwise), whether as additions or as a combination ?
Second, less related but more important for me and my poor imagination - As you developped the stories of the abyss and its lords, did you get an idea of their age, in orders of magnitude (or more precisely perhaps) ? For example and three different generations, how old are Dagon, Demogorgon and Graz'zt ? And the abyss, and the rest of the planes ?
Their history is related to the rise of mortals, so time scales meaningful for us should not be meaningless for them. But, if we are to use our real universe as comparison (why not, after all the material is constitued of stars and planets), intelligent life could have appeared less than six billions years after the universe (less that one billion years for the first stars and galaxies, a few millions years for a good part of those to go supernova and create the heavier elements, an undetermined time for those to form a solar system comparable to ours, which takes something of the order of the hundreds of millions of years, 1 billion years for the formation of the relevant planet and the apparition of life on it, and 3 billion years for the natural evolution of an intelligent form of life).
This universe is 13,7 billion years old, and is expected to create new stars for 20 billions of years more. Since life on the outer planes is older than that, we can take into account outsider interventions to speed things up, and assume that mortals rised anywhere between 30 billions and, say, 50 thousand years before the present time in the DnD settings to account for legendary times and lengthy recorded histories. So, if we follow probabilities, Demogorgon, as one of the first tanar'ri, is billions years old.
And on the other hand, abyssal history evolves at a rythm relatively close to human history : the loumaras are thousands years old, the title of Queen of the succubi is said to be 2000 years old, Broken Reach 200 years old, the death and rebirth of orcus is more recent yet... And Demorgorgon's savage tide plan doesn't seem to belong to an entity with an history of internal and external struggles spanning billions of years. Most of what is known about the abyss and its inhabitants points to a shorter timescale, and seems more in line with a "Young material plane" theory, that ignores probabilities and postulate that mortals and tanar'ri are less than a few millions of years old.
My best idea yet to reconcile the two is to hijack planescape's rule of rings. Intelligent life on the material planes is somehow organized to come and go in generations, synchronized with a cyclic history of the outer planes (in the abyss, obyriths succeed loumaras which succeed tanar'ri which succeed obyriths, and similar lords for each kind raise each time). That limits the usable life of most immortal entities to hundred thousands or millions of years, with a few exceptions (Dagon, Asmodeus and the Queen of Chaos can be good candidates for survival through the cycles).
But I'm not really satisfied with it.
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