You appear to have a great deal of material laid out already; I'm not sure what exactly you would be looking for?
Printable View
Odd question: trying to come up with a pair of conflicting/rival/opposed/enemy deities for a character for one of my players. The basic concept is Aasimar Favoured Soul, where the Aasimar heritage comes (distantly, obviously) from one deity, and they are the Favoured Soul of the other. Bonus points if one or both are relevant to the Sunless Citadel adventure path. Extra bonus points if they exist in Forgotten Realms, since that's the setting the player is familiar with. Even more bonus points if they have a favoured weapon that isn't absolutely terrible.
The quintessential pair of enemy gods in Faerûn is Selûne and Shar. That one would lock your character into being the Shar worshipper (as Shar would produce tiefling children, not aasimar), and Shar's weapon is the chakram, so maybe that's not that good.
Who else? Hmm...
Clangeddin Silverbeard, dwarven god of war, and Labelas Enoreth, elven god of history and time. They got grudges against each other because of events during the Time of Troubles, and Clangeddin favours the battleaxe (Labelas only favours the quarterstaff). On the other hand, one would need a lot of explanation for why an elven god sired a child with a human (aasimar are humans with celestial ancestry after all) and why that one would be favoures by a dwarven god. :smalltongue:
Well, how about Anhur and Hoar? Both gods that actually walked Faerûn for some time and are likely to have sired mortal children, both worshipped by humans, and Hoar did swear revenge on Anhur for kill-stealing Rannam during the Time of Troubles. Anhur's favoured weapon would be the falchion, and Hoar favours javelins.
Edit: I can also offer the pairs Ilmater and Loviatar, Torm and Bane, Tymorra and Beshaba, and Waukeen and Lliira, but those aren't that good (Loviatar, Beshaba and Bane can't be the ancestor, Beshaba and Loviatar favour the scourge, Loviatar practically only takes female clerics, Bane favours the morningstar, Lliira favours shuriken and Waukeen the nunchaku).
Thanks, that's really helpful. Their original idea was Tymora and Beshaba, which is why I went looking for more options. I quite like Anhur and Hoar as an idea.
We are discussing on another thread how Magic Jar interacts with and outsider's combined soul/body. I am curious on your take. Can a wizard possess an outsider? If so, where does the outsider's soul go? What happens if an outsider casts Magic Jar? Does it physically enter the receptacle?
In general, which exemplar race feels the most relatable and human-like to humans, and why?
Baatezu have some obvious issues with undeath, especially intelligent undead. But they can and do enable necromancy in their cultists in some scenarios (e.g. granting the secret of the Dead Walk to a LE warlock devotee). Which of the Nine do you see having the most use for/tolerance of undeath and why? In practice what does that look like?
I dunno, I feel that Levistus is propably the one who fits undead the best. He's associated with cold, he's the most unorthodox of Hell's rulers, and he's practically burried himself. Otherwise Baalzebul (with his theme of decay) or Mephisto, as the most wizardly inclined archdevil, could fit. Hellfire-powered undead, anyone?
I don't see why the Nine in general would have serious issues with undead. Pit Finds have Create Undead at will for a reason. Liches are kind of a win/win scenario for them: When the Lich's phylactery is destroyed, Hell gets a truly powerful (and possibly ancient) soul. If the Lich stays alive, that's a mortal who has the kinds of enemies and plans that could really use intelligent and capable underlings... and the only ones who the lich could reasonably turn to with any kind of regularity is Hell, who in return gets someone who can make good on generational promises without Hell needing to set up a long-term cult for that. (When you've been working an experiment for a measly decade, many mortals tend to die or wander off. If you suddenly need hirelings? Hell will be there.)
Hell cares about getting souls in bulk. There's like... a handful or two of undead that can actually survive for more than a few centuries before getting murdered by some combination of their enemies and murderhobos. If Hell is good at anything, it's the long game.
EDIT: I'm pretty sure, actually, that Hell would keep actuarial tables for different types of undead and their unlife expectancy. Probably look similar to Elven Druid life expectancy tables, come to think of it. Probably factor that into putting together an undead-transition package, to make sure they get a profit on their dead.
These are all really interesting points and suggestions - I particularly like Levistus. In an old campaign I went with Belial potentially seeing a carnal desire to dominate and control as having some overlap with domination of spawn, and vampirism in general, and that Control Undead might be seen as a form of power through subjugation that would present an interesting space for him to encourage and tempt people into his fold.
At the time it felt like a stretch though, so just curious to see what direction others might have gone.
Situation arose when a player roled up a Hellbred Dread Necromancer. At the time I needed to come up with who might have reincarnated him, and why. Clearly the character was either the soul of a necromancer, or a damned soul that had actually been empowered with necromancy by an infernal patron.
Green Ronin do have a midling Duke named Nergal who fits the bill pretty well, but not sure how canonical he is.
There's a Nergal associated with pestilence in the Rabble of Devilkind. Is probably not in a good position, considering he shares his name with a Mesopotamian god of death.
So there's quite a few fallen celestials among the devils, at least according to some sources. Mephistophles, Dispater, Zariel, Asmodeus, erinyes as a whole, etc.
Are there any demon lords that were said to formerly be eladrins or another type of good outsider? Or is Lawful Good to Lawful Evil just an easier path for whatever reason?
Well, Lolth used to be a good goddess, fell down to demon-queen-dom, and ascended back to divinity. Does that count?
I think the reason for why there are fewer ex-celestial demons than devils is backed into the concept. Back when the idea of devils and demons being different things cropped up the first time (Dante's Inferno, in case you're curious) demons were the natives of hell, while devils were fallen angels. And this carries over into D&D: no matter what origin story of Asmodeus and the baatezu you go for, he always fell from somewhere. Demons, on the other hand, are practically always "of the Abyss", no matter which story you read.
As for why there are so few named fallen eladrin: because TSR and WotC never gave a rat's ass about them. Eladrin and guardinals are after-thoughts, there to fill a gap, but nobody cared about them enough to do anything interesting with them. That's why Cirily of Sigil is practically the only named fallen of them.
Those are Doylist reasons. I can't really come up with any Watsonian reasons for why there should be less fallen celestials amongst demons. Just choose some background demon lords and make them fallen. Munkir and Nekir for example feel like ex-eladrin to me.
Watsonian reasons are that Law cares about proper conduct and orthodoxy and Chaos does not; if an Archon does a Bad then it is Evil and must be cast out.
Conversely, there probably are Evil Eladrin, but they are still Eladrin and still get invited to Eladrin parties, because the nature of Chaos is fluid. By the same logic, it's probably easier for an Evil Eladrin to return to Good than it would be for an Archon.
I could definitely see chaotic good to chaotic evil being a thing that could happen. I envision it as something that starts with a special resentment for allegedly "necessary" evils and ends with hunting hunters, neutering vetrinarians, salting the fields that the slaves are forced to farm, killing watchmen, purging dynasties, declaring war on the gods, and crashing a public execution to hose the crowd and the officials down with napalm.
Just as a heads-up, I've been contending with... we'll say a lot lately. Nature has decided to be exceptionally fun to the Dark Lord of late and other matters have been pressing on me, some good (you'll hear about it when it happens) and some considerably less so. I urge you all to support each other, and if there are any questions you need me specifically to weigh in on, I hope they can hold until I'm more available. Apologies to all for not making this public sooner; I hope you continue to enjoy the thread, and rest assured that I will make a new one should this hit the size limit.
You've already done far more for these random internet usernames than most of us really deserve. If you ever get a hankering to come and not talk about Zargon again, you know where to find us.
I don't comment much but I love this thread. Hope everything goes well, AA.
Good luck for whatever you're going through, and don't worry for us, we have approximately 373 pages of afro-lore to binge-read if we ever feel like there's not enough D&D planes in our life, all thanks to your work through the years.
Between Azzagrat and Dis, which is more likely to have a subregion referred to as "Bat Country"
For some reason I feel that Dispater dislikes fliers in his city, so Azzagrat. Unless the God Street has a bat god in it somewhere.
"Bat Country" also sounds entirely too uncontrolled. It implies wild animals (and wild hallucinations, because movie reference), that wouldn't happen in a Hell City.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas has a very famous (read: I haven’t read the book or seen the movie and I know it :smalltongue:) line, “We can’t stop here! This is bat country!” I don’t really know the details of the scene, but based on what I know of the movie overall, the speaker was likely hallucinating and/or experiencing chemically-induced paranoia. (The Wikipedia article on the Avenged Sevenfold album confirms this; apparently they were driving through the desert to Las Vegas and the speaker hallucinated bats and manta rays filling the sky above them. The Wikipedia article on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas itself describes it as capturing the zeitgeist of the early ’70s, with culturally-important retrospective on the ’60s and what happened with the hippie movement. It’s also the quintessential example of what’s called “gonzo journalism,” after a character in the book, Dr. Gonzo.)