Son of the Serpent
Pupil
Not a bad candidate actually.
D&D 5E What is the opposite of a Modron?
dave2008
Legend
Then make them more chaotic. 4e had a good description of conversation with a Slaadi that help express their chaotic nature. Here is a snip from the Plane Below:
Weiley31
Legend
Dat moment when the next Great March happens because the answer WASN'T 42 all along.
Sword of Spirit
Legend
This, but with a few clarifications.
The most developed form of this all got established during 2e, in which there ended up being 9 Exemplar races. Exemplars are "afterlife beings", formed from the souls of dead mortals.* Each type of Exemplar has various "sub-species".
Archons aren't really analagous to angels--angels(also known as Aasimon) are something different than the Exemplar races. Archons, Guardinals, and Eladrin, as good Exemplars, are conceptually similar to angels though. The Archon subtypes vary a lot, from balls of light, to animal headed people, to something that looks much like an angel.
These Eladrin are completely different than the 5e eladrin, which is a continuation of the 4e eladrin, which was an infuriating case of identity and name appropriation. As explained, original Eladrin are afterlife beings, usually quite powerful (like fiends), not a simple PC level character option. They have a fey-ish aesthetic, but each type is unique, including pixieish types, to firey humanoids, and others. They are not related to the actual fey lords like Titania and Oberon.
Guardinals are anthropomorphic animal people. The most powerful subtype (the Leonal) is kind of like a bipedal Aslan from Narnia, which gives you a bit of their theme.
The ninth type, Rilmani, is the True Neutral Exemplar. They live near the Spire at the center of the Outlands, and the types look like hairless humanoids made of different types of metals.
Devils call themselves Baatezu, Demons call themselves Tanar'ri, and mortals without extensive planar knowledge sometimes call Yugoloths "Daemons".
Slaadi look the way they do due to the power of the Spawning Stone. 5e decided it was Primus who made that happen, but I'm pretty sure that's a new take--kinda like how 5e wants "it's all about Asmodeus" to be the fiend theme and reimagines the origin of the Yugoloths accordingly.
If you can find a download of the authorized 3e Planescape campaign setting, you can read more on this. They also give a description of Slaad (I never remember which form is plural, and I think it may have changed with editions) behavior that puts them into a better CN perspective, rather than the CE way they tend to be presented (though, to be fair, it has been explained that the CE found in the more powerful varieties is a corruption, not their natural state). I highly recommend grabbing the pdfs and considering that take on Slaad(i).
In fact, I highly recommend grabbing that 3e Planescape setting (it's free) in general, as the fluff sections gather together the core lore from 2e. If you want more details the 2e materials are available for purchase on DMs Guild. It provides a really rich take on what it is like on the Outer Planes. While mortals have an understandably simplistic view of the afterlife (demons are different from devils, right?) there is a whole complex multiverse of various beings and the strange dimensions they live in for those who want to make more than a brief visit (and even societies of mortal humans and others who have been living there for ages!)
*Not all Exemplars are formed from the souls of the dead. It depends on a variety of factors, and some specifics can be unclear or variable. Personally, I just say all 9 types are, even if some of them get there differently.
Sometimes I think chaos and Chaos is a false equivalency.
I've read at least one philosophical treatise on exactly that subject, from the Principia Discordia. I'll copy the article here in its entirety (the Principia is public domain) for reference:
"HERE FOLLOWS SOME PSYCHO-METAPHYSICS.
If you are not hot for philosophy, best just to skip it.
The Aneristic Principle is that of APPARENT ORDER; the Eristic Principle is that of APPARENT DISORDER. Both order and disorder are man made concepts and are artificial divisions of PURE CHAOS, which is a level deeper that is the level of distinction making.
With our concept making apparatus called "mind" we look at reality through the ideas-about-reality which our cultures give us. The ideas-about- reality are mistakenly labeled "reality" and unenlightened people are forever perplexed by the fact that other people, especially other cultures, see "reality" differently. It is only the ideas-about-reality which differ. Real (capital-T True) reality is a level deeper that is the level of concept.
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids.
A culture is a group of people with rather similar grids. Through a window we view chaos, and relate it to the points on our grid, and thereby understand it. The ORDER is in the GRID. That is the Aneristic Principle.
Western philosophy is traditionally concerned with contrasting one grid with another grid, and amending grids in hopes of finding a perfect one that will account for all reality and will, hence, (say unenlightened westerners) be True. This is illusory; it is what we Erisians call the ANERISTIC ILLUSION. Some grids can be more useful than others, some more beautiful than others, some more pleasant than others, etc., but none can be more True than any other.
DISORDER is simply unrelated information viewed through some particular grid. But, like "relation", no-relation is a concept. Male, like female, is an idea about sex. To say that male-ness is "absence of female-ness", or vice versa, is a matter of definition and metaphysically arbitrary. The artificial concept of no-relation is the ERISTIC PRINCIPLE.
The belief that "order is true" and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.
The point is that (little-t) truth is a matter of definition relative to the grid one is using at the moment, and that (capital-T) Truth, metaphysical reality, is irrelevant to grids entirely. Pick a grid, and through it some chaos appears ordered and some appears disordered. Pick another grid, and the same chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.
Reality is the original Rorschach.
Verily! So much for all that."
Last edited:
A couple of them have multiple different races, with some being afterlife beings and others not. Yugoloths are not afterlife beings, but Hades does have fiends called "hordlings" which are. Similarly, while the Tanar'ri are afterlife beings, there are two other races of demons that are not - the Obryiths are remnants of an earlier multiverse and the Loumaras are formed from nightmares. Lawful Neutral has three exemplars - the modrons, the formians, and the inevitables - and as far as I know none of them are afterlife beings (except in the sense that modrons are reincarnated as new modrons if they're destroyed (which IIRC is also the system used by the NE(CE) demodands/gereleths). Lawful Evil also has three exemplars; 8n addition to the baatezu, there are also the baatorans who are a holdover from Baator's previous ruler Zargon, and the Kalabons who are more closely related to night hags, being formed from the reanimated remains of Countess Malagarde, the night hag who formerly ruled Malabolge.
Sword of Spirit
Legend
Thanks for expanding the footnote (I just didn't want to research enough to mess with it
).Personally, that particular level of inconsistency always irritated me, so I reinterpret it that any valid Exemplars (demodands would count, while I'm not so sure about formians and inevitables) are formed from mortal souls, even if the method of getting there may be "messy" (ie, they might be born or otherwise spawned rather than just popping out of nowhere as a lemure or lantern archon). And really...is there much canon that "proves" that isn't the case (it's hard to prove a negative!)? I like to approach a lot of lore (especially re-envisioned lore when the older stuff was cooler) by treating most lore (old or new) that isn't a matter of easy verification as coming from an unreliable narrator. "The Yugoloths owe their existence to Asmodeus's schemes? Corellon Larethian is a deadbeat dad? Some people believe that."
Well, Planescape had a thing called the "rule of threes" which stated that mystically significant phenomena always appeared in clusters of three, so the ones where there are three types at least make sense in that contextThanks for expanding the footnote (I just didn't want to research enough to mess with it
Personally, that particular level of inconsistency always irritated me
Similar Threads
