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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Jacobs" data-source="post: 5598334" data-attributes="member: 23937">The way Golarion's multiverse works is inclusive; its universe is as big as our own, and works mostly the same way. Some regions of the universe are, essentailly, in regions of dead magic or close enough that they might as well be—that's where Earth, the Milky Way, and everything in between is. Golarion's in some other distant part of that same universe where magic works as it always has in the game. Whether or not Toril, Oerth, Krynn, etc. are all in that universe is left up to each individual GM, but they certainly could be in there. My work on Golarion's demon lords and Abyss takes a similar stance—inclusive without "overwriting" (with the exception of Nocticula). As a result, while we can't and won't officially say that Graz'zt and Malcanthet and Yeenoghu and even two-headed-version of Demogorgon are involved in the Abyss as relates to Golarion—nor will we say they aren't. That decisions' left up to the GM. Pick and choose who you want.Yeah. There's more of this spread throughout my articles and the Fiendish Codex I, but basically, the obyrith were first and the demons came later. Dagon was originally an obyrith, so he was around before Demogorgon AND Graz'zt. Demogorgon was the first demon, so he was around before Graz'zt. And while Graz'zt's a relative newcomer to the Abyss, he's been around for a long, long time. My head's much more in Golarion's version of the Abyss these days, and it's close enough to the D&D version that it can be confusing remembering what happened where and when, but as a general rule... the more humanoid a demon lord looks, the younger he/she is.As for ages... that's hard to say and that's something I never really bothered to nail down. We can say our universe is 13.7 billion years old, but we can't say that about every fantasy world setting. In Golarion, demons (and thus demon lords) came along AFTER the first mortals came along, since they are a direct result of a sinful mortal soul being mixed with the energies of the Abyss and with qlippoth. Which makes demons younger than intelligent, free-willed life on the material plane, but older than pretty much anything currently living on said plane.In the end, I think that the best solution is no solution. As fun as it is to delve deeply into demonic lore, it's sometimes good to leave some things unsaid or leave them mysteries. One of the philosophies I adhered to when working on the Demonomicon article was similar—every time I spent a dozen or so pages on one demon lord, pealing away his/her mysteries and detailing everything out, I tried to introduce 2 or 3 NEW demon lords that no one had previously heard about, so as to seed new generations of demonic fun!</blockquote>

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