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The Role and Purpose of Evil Gods
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8412374" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>What are you talking about? In 1979 and 1980 there are no such "upper plane equivalents".</p><p></p><p>In case it's not clear: I am not arguing that there is some abstract universal "ideal" of D&D that can be created by generalising from all the published material and trying to render it consistent.</p><p></p><p>I am talking about the actual publication history. In 1979 and 1980 nearly all the published evil cleric NPCs worship either devils or demons. The MM tells us that Asmodeus rules the Nine Hells and the PHB (p 120) tells us that the Outer Planes, including the Nine Hells, are "the homes of powerful beings, the source of alignment (religious/ philosophical/ ethical ideals), the deities." There is nothing to suggest any meaningful demarcation between evil gods (whoever those might be) and the archdevils, demon lords and the like.</p><p></p><p>And DDG drives this message home even more clearly by telling us that those beings should be treated as lesser gods, and by having a race of clerical vampires - Ixitxatchitl - worshipping Demogorgon!</p><p></p><p>Ed Greenwood clearly got the memo, because in an article published in 1984 (Dragon Magazine #91) he referred to clerics of archdevils without the least hint that such a thing might be controversial.</p><p></p><p>Nowhere in the AD&D corpus all the way through the 1980s (City of GH is one of the earliest 2nd ed AD&D products, in 1989, and it has a cleric of Asmodeus) is the distinction that you are arguing for actually drawn. Maybe Gygax thought that it <em>mattered</em>, in some fashion, that Nerull is an evil "god" and Demogorgon a demon prince, but he never told us how or why - my best guess is that he associated gods like Nerull and Hextor with a particular setting (GH) whereas he saw Asmodeus and Demogorgon as portable across the whole range of possible D&D settings.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8412374, member: 42582"] What are you talking about? In 1979 and 1980 there are no such "upper plane equivalents". In case it's not clear: I am not arguing that there is some abstract universal "ideal" of D&D that can be created by generalising from all the published material and trying to render it consistent. I am talking about the actual publication history. In 1979 and 1980 nearly all the published evil cleric NPCs worship either devils or demons. The MM tells us that Asmodeus rules the Nine Hells and the PHB (p 120) tells us that the Outer Planes, including the Nine Hells, are "the homes of powerful beings, the source of alignment (religious/ philosophical/ ethical ideals), the deities." There is nothing to suggest any meaningful demarcation between evil gods (whoever those might be) and the archdevils, demon lords and the like. And DDG drives this message home even more clearly by telling us that those beings should be treated as lesser gods, and by having a race of clerical vampires - Ixitxatchitl - worshipping Demogorgon! Ed Greenwood clearly got the memo, because in an article published in 1984 (Dragon Magazine #91) he referred to clerics of archdevils without the least hint that such a thing might be controversial. Nowhere in the AD&D corpus all the way through the 1980s (City of GH is one of the earliest 2nd ed AD&D products, in 1989, and it has a cleric of Asmodeus) is the distinction that you are arguing for actually drawn. Maybe Gygax thought that it [I]mattered[/I], in some fashion, that Nerull is an evil "god" and Demogorgon a demon prince, but he never told us how or why - my best guess is that he associated gods like Nerull and Hextor with a particular setting (GH) whereas he saw Asmodeus and Demogorgon as portable across the whole range of possible D&D settings. [/QUOTE]
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