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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 9578267" data-attributes="member: 11760">Except if you say something is a ghoul, a new player will know A) this is a dangerous man-shaped thing and B) it almost certainly wants to eat me.If you say "yugoloth," they're going to say "gesundheit."Some of this stuff is obviously cruft from 50 years of D&D development, much of which has just been someone grabbing a thesaurus and saying "I bet I can make a new monster out of the word 'ghastly,'" but a new edition is the perfect time to hit the reset button.Maybe all fiends are divided up among the 7 Deadly Sins, with some of them (wrath, for instance) going to demons, some (envy and greed) going to devils, others (lust) going to another category (succubi/incubi). Then you have thematic lines to tighten up what the fiends represent.If someone is trying to tempt you, it's a devil, although the sort of temptation will vary (a pit fiend is probably trying to turn a courtier into a bloody tyrant ruling over a terrified empire, while an imp is probably trying to convince the local burgomaster to embezzle from the town treasury).If you're trying to summon a fiend to destroy your enemies and not worrying about who else gets hurt, it's probably a demon, although again, there will be variations in approach based on what sort of demon shows up.Within this framework, it wouldn't be hard to find specific jobs for yugoloths. Since we already have a connection between them and plagues, maybe they're covering sloth and gluttony, for instance, which also helps explain why they're not as prominent, as adventurers aren't necessarily suspecting there's a supernatural reason behind those sins.</blockquote>

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