Who's that demon?

[Rechan]

Bah. The demon lord of lubricants.

OK, maybe that isn't necessarily bland, but it's a tricky concept to work into a D&D session nonetheless.

Were I trying to work them into a campaign as a decent threat or at least involved in the story, I could make a few jumps to get there:

1) Since Juiblix and Zuggtmoy share the same layer, and because their areas of influence are similar, I'd just say they are a duo who work together.

2) Because of #1, I'd look at where their tastes correspond. So, that means Slimes, Oozes, Fungus, Mold (and is Zuggtmoy over disease too?).

What do these things have in common? Well, environment. Molds and fungi exist anywhere that's damp and dark. The best places for that are: Swamps and Underground. Slimes make sense for these areas too; lots of organic matter to munch on, easy to blend into the environment.

3) So seeing their environmental favor, I would say that the duo are trying to either 1) take over these environments, or 2) orchestrate a grand plan to create large swaths of these environments. For 1, you can have the easy "Invasion of the underdark", flooding it with yellow fungus spores and the like. #2 would be engineering a plot to darken the sun (or change its nature), so direct sunlight is eliminated, while increasing rainfall/causing lots of floods all across the material plane.

 

[Desdichado]

I'll take "who appears to have missed the joke for $500", Alex.

 

[I'm A Banana]

To me, Juiblex has a special spot as The Demon Lord of Thoughts That Should Not Be. A sentient ooze, vast an unfathomable, alien, concerned with acid, chemicals, discovery, sentience, invention, madness, inhumanity. He is a constant reminder of the hubris of the "intelligent creatures," overconfident in their dominion of a world truly ruled more by murk and mire, by plague and chemical, then by anything with thumbs or a language. Juiblex represents the maddening dissolution of society, genius, and, ultimately, humanity. A Demon Lord of mad scientists, of the ones who created the Warforged, of those who tinker with the nature of unnatural life.

In my setting-in-development, where Great Wyrm dragons and Demon/Devil Lords have replaced the gods, he's considered the God of Civilization, Slayer of Erathis, and people build tall buildings to escape his sucking presence at the base, in the sacred sewer temples that serve as the true purpose for any city: to channel waste into Juiblex's hungry maw. Politicians wear his crown, and he is also considered a God of Democracy, of cooperation, of mindless entities working together for a greater purpose, the chaos of the crowd, of mob mentality...

Of course, that setting also makes Asmodeus into the head of a world-spanning theocracy, bent on making him the only deity in existence, and the Blex and his chaotic brethren gibber at the gates of Rome as heathens, so his crown is, of course, not worn inside the Hellscape...

Anyway. Juiblex is cool, and haters can stare into one of his millions of unblinking eyes until they come to understand his oozy majesty.

 

[Desdichado]

To me, what it sounds like you're saying is that D&D in general gave us a weak-tea, bastardized version of Azathoth, and that you're now trying to build him back up to an Azathoth-like condition.

Which is actually really cool; but that's not really Juiblex as he's been presented in D&D.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Which is actually really cool; but that's not really Juiblex as he's been presented in D&D.

It's D&D. It's however cool you decide to make it.

Though Juiblex has always been an impersonal, distant demon, who cares more about the single-celled bacteria than about war and souls. In a way, he's perfect for the 4e conception of demons as elemental destructive forces, since he's raw destruction, without any desire other than to consume, dissolve, and destroy. He is entropy in the form of a gibbering mass.

And I think he's always been a little Mythos-lite.

 

[Desdichado]

And I think he's always been a little Mythos-lite.

One of these days, I'm gonna take the Juiblex stats from the Fiendish Codex and find another d20 version of the Shoggoths (either Paizo's or the d20 CoC game) and put them together in a cage match. Two oozes slime in, one slimes out!

 

[Stoat]

I've long assumed that Juiblex is some sort of Far Realm interloper. Not quite Azathoth, not quite Shoggoth, but somewhere in the middle.

 

[Rechan]

I've long assumed that Juiblex is some sort of Far Realm interloper. Not quite Azathoth, not quite Shoggoth, but somewhere in the middle.

Honestly, I think Dagon is more Far Realms than Juiblix.

 

[Desdichado]

Dagon is very Lovecraftian (literally) and so is the Far Realms, but honestly, I've always thought that the Far Realms and Dagon dug into different aspects of Lovecraft and didn't really resemble each other all that much at all.

 

[MrMyth]

Wait... incubi are demons but succubi are devils? What gives?

At least one DDI article - on Hestavar - had an NPC that was a male succubus. So it could be that succubus covers both genders, and they are reimagining the incubi as something else entirely?