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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 2903983" data-attributes="member: 11697">We know that the one time the Archons sought to directly take part in the Blood War they were initially successful, purely by element of surprise. But then the fiends turned on them as a whole, slaughtering them so absolutely that only a handful managed to escape back to Mount Celestia out of an army that had numbered in the millions.Since then none of the celestials have taken any organized action in the Blood War, both from the perceived futility and the horror that would result if they ever convinced the three major fiend races to view them as a greater threat than each other.And then very explicitely, true deities took an active part in the early Blood War, pretty much right after mortal faith caused them to spring into existance. Those deities were just as split along alignment lines, and fought in the war to great effect till each and every one of them started to watch their divine essence whither away without apparent cause till finally one of them just more or less disintegrated. Terrified of the same fate, every one of them withdrew from direct involvement, and sure enough their power stopped its decay and they survived.We don't know how the fiends accomplished the task, we just know that they did not appreciate the unwanted influence of what amounted to powerful children meddling in -their- genocidal war. It might have been a collective thing by all of the fiend races, it might have been the open slaughter and sterilization of entire worlds worth of worshippers on the prime material, it might have been the use of secrets known only to the Obyriths, the Ancient Baatorians, or maybe, more primordial still, the Baernaloths seeking to put their childrens' little experiment back into proper order. We don't know, but damn if it's not fun to speculate. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I think the lesson is that you can't destroy evil using evil's tactics in evil's backyard. Slaughter only empowers the lower planes, drenching the Waste in misery and pointless bloodshed, whispering orders to kill into the ears of Baatezu, and filling the minds of every Tanar'ri with psychotic hatred... this hurts the fiends again how? If you can't destroy them, you occupy them, you contain them, you bottle them up as best you can so that you can turn your attention to bolstering yourselves if the tide of fiends ever does seek to assault the upper planes. You don't arm yourselves and butcher fiends, you let the fiends fight while you turn your attention to the prime material and seek to shape the hearts of mortals.We know that some groups of celestials do seek to perpetuate it, either out of a sense of self-preservation, or out of the notion that keeping evil turned inwards on itself is the best way for Good to combat them without raising the spectre of a law/chaos fracture in their own ranks which an open celestials versus fiends war would undoubtably risk causing.</blockquote>

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