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Message: <blockquote data-quote="M.L. Martin" data-source="post: 5169900" data-attributes="member: 4086">There's something in Wizards Presents: Worlds & Monsters about how they scrapped the Blood War because they wanted the focus of demons and devils, and their opposition, to be the PCs and not each other, or something along those lines.   I'm not a Planescape fan (I own the MC, I've read a couple of the other books, but I've never been a big fan of the Gygaxian cosmology and get annoyed at a fringe section of the PS fanbase for its elitism and tendency to try and impose its vision on other settings), and my bible for D&D fiends is essentially Van Richten's Guide to Fiends, so my two cents:    I think the Blood War is fine as an element, and shows off Evil's selfish and self-destructive nature, but it costs something if it's made the defining motive for fiends--too much emphasis on their politicking and infighting takes away from their iconic status as exemplars of evil, corrupters and destroyers of all that is good, true, and beautiful. I also think the Blood War suffers from the nearly 40-year-old confusion about what Law and Chaos actually mean in a D&D context.    If I were given the old Lower Planar system and told 'make something of this', I'd probably motivate the devils/baatezu by Pride and a determination to be supreme over mortals, fiends and all the universe, demons/tanar'ri by Envy (the specific sense) and the desire to pull all others down into the mire so that there was eventually nothing but them, and place daemons/yugoloths in the middle as those who seek to increase their status at the expense of others. Gehreleths/demodands would be the inmates running or seeking to run the prison and making sure that they were on top and everyone else was below them.   Devils would oppose demons because they refuse to bend the knee; demons would oppose devils because the devils are trying to establish themselves as rulers and build something that's not the roiling, destructive chaos of the Abyss. Sometimes they'd launch destructive wars against each other, sometimes they'd cooperate if they see a chance to wreak havoc (CE) or extend their dominion (LE)--but in the latter case, they're always prone to undercut and betray each other. Of course, the same thing applies if you have fiends of a singular type working together--they're just more predictable about how they'll go about it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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