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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 7670741" data-attributes="member: 2067">Hell, if Paradise Lost counts, that's a treatment of Satan Hisself that's EXCEPTIONALLY relatable (but still, as it is a text written by a good Christian, in the wrong). In most of D&D, and probably in this adventure, the demon lords are ultimate evil bad guys who are horrible people and also kick puppies or whatever. D&D is like pulp adventures or Star Wars, its villains aren't exactly nuanced, even when they're grandiose and compelling in their awfulness, and you know who the Bad Guys are. But likely in this adventure, characters like goblins and derro and perhaps even the occasional mind flayer or ooze or kuo-toa or whatever are not just there to be monstrous, but there to be characters you interact with. It's an adventure taking place in the underdark, not everything you meet is going to want to kill you, probably. So a little more "character" in the "monsters under the earth" (that in many games are irredeemably evil and corrupt monsters). In Planescape, the fiends are not just there to be monstrous, but are there to be characters you interact with, since it's a setting that uses hell itself as a stomping-ground on occasion. Because these are in most D&D games the epitome of debased, horrible evil, using them as shopkeeps (A'kin), patrons (Shemeska), informants (Rule-of-Three), whatever, and by depicting them not as all Gothic horror and HR Geiger unsettling weirdness, but as DiTerlizzi's "dark whimsy"...that's part of how PS tweaks D&D into something a bit morally greyer. Even an epitome of debased evil might not be such a bad dude....or maybe he is...it's really an individual consideration, and you can't approach them all the same way. As others have said, it's not ALWAYS the most appropriate take - sometimes your mind flayers are not wizened old intellectuals, and your gelatinous cubes are not always awakened potential allies, and your fiends are not always shopkeeps. But it works for certain circumstances - like if your adventure is about madness in the underdark and the PC's are going to need to do something other than kill all humanoids, or if your campaign setting is about mortal morality in a world of angels and demons and the PC's are going to have to deal with a devil in a non-soul-risking capacity. And in PS, at least, I'd say that the ULTIMATE EVIL is largely a matter of who your characters think it is, not who the game tells you it is.</blockquote>

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