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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 4848512" data-attributes="member: 11697">It's important to note that there's no monolithic conflict like the Blood War going on between demons and devils. It's much more fragmented and much more involved in Golarion's planes. It also breeds strange allies of convenience at times. For the most part its the Abyss versus everything it touches, and the Maelstrom (CN) versus the Lawful planes (but also versus the Abyss with perhaps more fury than anything else, since it and its natives -the proteans- view the Abyss as a corruption of itself, though this might or might not literally be the historical situation).The Abyss (CE) - similar to the D&D Abyss. The layers of the Abyss connect to one another at random, constantly shifting, and when they connect to other planes they manifest as physical cracks and chasms within the borders of the Maelstrom. Populated by demons (who are the result of a daemonic experiment that vastly outstripped the daemons ability to even dream of controlling their creations), the original natives known as the Qlippoth, and others. Only one Abyssal Lord, Lamashtu the Mother of Monsters, has achieved actual godhood. But even so, she faces almost even odds versus her main rival Pazuzu, and others like Nocticula, Socoth-Benoth, Abraxus and others.The Abyss might have been created by a heretical chorus of corrupted Proteans, or it might have simply been discovered and unwisely opened up into Golarion's reality.Hell (LE) - Asmodeus is a deity, and Hell is quite literally his divine domain with the other archdevils as effectively the saints and cardinals of his religion. It's also the only plane that can be conceptualized as having distinct, seperate layers in the same way that they were considered in Planescape terminology. Like an evil matroishka doll full of fascist awesome. Influenced in appearance in some places by Dante, but unlike in Dante or Milton, there was no Fall in Golarion's cosmology. Asmodeus was never Good, nor did he ever fall from grace. He's one of the oldest of the true gods along with Pharasma the TN goddess of birth, death, and prophecy, and he would like nothing more than to fashion the universe in his own perfected vision of what it should have been versus what it has become.Abbadon (NE) - Lit by the half-light of a perpetually eclipsed sky and home to the youngest of the original fiendish races, its daemons are the incarnation of death and oblivion. Unlike the yugoloths from Planescape, the daemons are intimately connected to mortals, and they exclusively form from the souls of dead, evil mortals. And it's ironic, because the fiends of Abbadon are the devourers of souls, and they would like nothing more than the eradicate the very concept of mortality. Were the capable of it, they would snuff the stars and turn the planets of the material plane into sterile husks, believing somehow that the mortals they derived from are the source of their misery, or an anchor holding them back from something greater, or that mortals aren't even their true source, that they -must- have been formed by something greater and with some profound purpose.The archdaemons model themselves after the concepts of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War (Szuriel), Plague (Apollyon), Famine (Trelmarixian), and Death (Charon). They're also rumored to follow a fifth archdaemon, [spoiler]a godlike being known as the Oinodaemon who directs their activities. In truth, the archdaemons know him as the Bound Prince, their godlike master who they betrayed, dissected alive, and bound to an altar to themselves. The only problem is, they can't kill him. They've tried. And every year they devour the parts of him that regenerate like an unholy sacrament, and from time to time his screams become lucid, and unerringly prophetic. They hate him, they fear him, they're nothing without him.[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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