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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Jacobs" data-source="post: 5595090" data-attributes="member: 23937">It probably is more than a coincidence, but I certainly didn't design Sifkesh to be a replacement for what's-her-name. The fact that they're both demon lords of suicide, though, means that they're going to be similar. The fact that I wrote a lot of the 3rd edition demon content AND that I wrote all of the Pathfinder demon content also means there's similarities. You can see similar similarities in Dagon, Lamashtu, Mazmezz/Lolth, Kabriri/Yeenoghu, Socothbenoth/Graz'zt, and a few others. Had Wizards of the Coast made all of the demons in the Abyss open content, I would have been more than happy for those demons to be the same ones in Golarion/Pathfinder. That's not the case, so I do the next best thing—I expand and develop along similar, parallel routes so that even though I can't talk about Malcanthet and Graz'zt and Lynkhab and all the rest in print, in anyone's home Pathfinder game (including mine, if I so choose), including closed-content material from D&D is a relatively simple task.I chose to avoid using those almost-but-not-quite names because I kind of think it's a little silly and a little petulant. I'd rather come up with something brand new or something from mythology and run with it there. In the case of the Sifkesh/Lynkhab similarities, those are indeed mostly coincidental, since of all my demon lore, very little, relatively, comes from Planescape (I wasn't allowed to read/buy a lot of Planescape stuff back in the day since I had one of THOSE GMs who controls a lot of the world content, and he wanted very much to run a Planescape game, so Lynkhab never really settled into my mind as a significant character in the same way the 1st edition Gygaxian demon lords did).In the case of Fraz Urb'luu, who IS open content thanks to the Tome of Horrors, we chose not to do anything with him in Pathfinder and Golarion for other reasons. He's not from mythology, after all—he's like Graz'zt in that he was more or less created whole-cloth out of nothing, and is very integrated into Greyhawk and that world's history. I'd rather leave Fraz in Greyhawk and not try to transpose him elsewhere. Moving him (or Graz'zt, or Iuz) out of Greyhawk devalues and weakens those characters in my opinion.</blockquote>

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