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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4004095" data-attributes="member: 58197">Yeah, daemons/yugoloths as Blood War mercenaries never sat very well with me.  It's just not very impressive for a race that ought to be the absolute embodiment of evil.If I were to design the "pure-evil" race for a Great Wheel cosmology, they would be malevolent, apparently emotionless creatures.  While the demons seek to destroy the world and devils to control it, these beings would seek only to spread hopelessness and despair, to extinguish all light in the multiverse.  They would seem rather cerebral, even contemplative, next to the other fiends.I agree; although I think also that the Abyss is much more vivid and colorful.When you get right down to it, the Nine Hells is just another ugly, nasty dictatorship, of the kind we see in the real world every day.  There's not much in the Hells to really catch the imagination of players, DMs, or adventure designers; just a series of layers, all full of darkness, fire, and ugliness (except for Cania, which is full of darkness, ice, and ugliness).  The Lords of the Nine similarly lack conceptual "hooks."  To people who haven't made an effort to immerse themselves in Hells-lore, they all tend to blend together; a bunch of nasty, ugly, boring devils grubbing for power, in a bunch of nasty, ugly, depressing places.The Abyss, on the other hand, has bright, clear distinctions and lots of concepts that beg to be explored.  Orcus and Demogorgon aren't just another couple of indistinguishable demon lords.  They're very different both in appearance and in theme, and each has imposed his persona on both the terrain and the denizens of his layer.  When you see crawling reptilian horrors in a diseased jungle, you know you're dealing with Demogorgon.  When you see an endless horde of undead warriors shambling across a desolate wasteland, that's Orcus.  And the Abyss contains every imaginable type of terrain.  Jungle, arctic tundra, desert, swamp, mountains--it's all there, along with all kinds of bizarre places that have no real-world analogues.Part of the problem stems from the rigid hierarchy of the Hells; when every one of the Dukes has pretty much the same array of minions, it's hard to tell them apart.  Furthermore, the constant rise and fall of archdevils means that the leadership of each layer is constantly changing, so it's hard to develop a strong association between a given layer and its reigning Duke.As presented in 3E, the Abyss has vastly more scope for adventure than do the Hells.  I hope 4E remedies this by making the Hells similarly vivid and putting more focus on the persona (appearance, theme, et cetera) of each of the Dukes of Hell.  Develop a set of distinct minions for each of the Nine, and make the layers of the Hells a lot more visually separate.  Adjust the nature of infernal politics so that there isn't this constant turnover among archdevils.  It's supposed to be a plane of rigid order, for God's sake--how come the major demon lords stay the same century after century, but there's a new Duke of Hell every ten minutes?  The Dukes might gain or lose influence, but the actual downfall of one of the Nine should be a world-shaking event.At the same time, deal with the problem FourthBear pointed out by opening up more design space in the Hells for DMs and adventure writers to flex their creative muscles.  Give the Hells a little of the "points-of-light" treatment.  The Dukes of Hell reign from mighty citadels, but their power becomes attenuated as one moves away from those citadels.  In the distant regions of the Hells, there is room for lesser devils to set themselves up as local lords.  Such devils still owe allegiance to their Dukes, but aside from sending a yearly tribute of souls, they operate fairly independently--though most would give up that independence in a heartbeat for a chance to become power players at the Ducal court.  Each of these lesser devil-lords exerts the same kind of terrain-shaping influence over its domain that the Dukes do over their layers, just on a much smaller scale.</blockquote>

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