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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Low" data-source="post: 5597379" data-attributes="member: 6677986">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.</blockquote>

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