Teaching new tricks to old gods

[Beneath]

Does the city of brass, by any chance, have an exhaust port that a one-genie ashbrass ship could drop something in to cause it to turn the Scorn of Imix on itself?

[Pronounceable]

Does the city of brass, by any chance, have an exhaust port that a one-genie ashbrass ship could drop something in to cause it to turn the Scorn of Imix on itself?

Nobody would be dumb enough to let that sort of flaw pass.It probably explodes inexplicably when the chief engineer is beaten by a group of 4-6 plucky mortals in the furnace room and falls into it.
Y'all will see this is a very slim picking. That said, it's good. Better idea than the previous one, that was seriously trying wayyy to hard to be nerdouty imo.


CEGILUNE (hag)
Domains: evil, corruption, soul larvae

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The Gray Wasting is generally called the Hadean welcome. A horrible soul disease that immediately afflicts every being within the Plane of Degradation, its main function is to foster selfishness and lubricate the slippery slope toward damnation. Nothing with any kind of soul is immune; even undead, constructs or Hades’ own exemplars suffer its ravages. It starts hurting immediately, causing any afflicted creature to feel unmatched agony as their bodies visibly rot and weaken. No forms of natural or magical cure or remedy exists and the only way to stop the pain and reverse the rotting without immediately leaving Hades is to inflict pain and abuse on others. Moreover, the Gray Wasting seems to have a mind of its own and somehow senses the precise intent behind actions of its victims and rewards the afflicted with recovery proportional to the amount of their enjoyment of the evil they commit. Someone who reluctantly inflicts pain solely out of self preservation is given mere seconds of respite from the agony and a short pause to the rotting, whereas an evil being who enjoys harming others and would do it for fun even if it didn’t have to gets restored fully and feels pretty great.

According to histories, the bizarre soul disease appeared shortly after the great Mechanus started sending souls of dead mortals to Lower Planes. As hags say, Hades used to be a pretty great pit of joylessness and apathy back then but now it’s the best hell that exists. For there’s plenty of victims for them all in the form of soul larvae, the souls of evil mortals that get sent to Hades after they die and transform into tiny and helpless wormy beings that can do nothing but squirm and eternally feel the rotting pain of the Gray Wasting. Soul larvae are absolutely everywhere inside Hades, writhing all over the place in a strangely offending manner, making it extremely hard for visitors to resist the urge to simply grab one and squeeze it a little to make their own pain stop. Hags (and other fiends who visit) have no qualms about that, of course, and the nourishing effects of the Gray Wasting grants all fiendish exemplars a great deal of temporary power (similar to what Positive Energy does for mortals, except the Gray Wasting doesn’t kill fiends from Evil overdose).

The true deviousness of the Gray Wasting is its inability to kill or completely disable its victims, no being will ever be rendered too weak to hurt a nearby soul larva. And since anything killed/destroyed while afflicted by it transforms into a soul larva and respawns elsewhere in the infinite gray desolation, Hades has a very high conversion rate on the good aligned beings unlucky enough to get stuck inside. After all, what kind of idiot would choose an eternity of inescapable damnation over just hurting a few evil (and fugly) souls (who most likely deserved it anyway)? And why not enjoy yourself a little to hasten the recovery and lessen the amount of evil you’re gonna need to commit, you’ll just have to hurt a larger number of larvae to regain enough strength to escape the horrid plane if you’re too reluctant about it after all.

Thanks to the Gray Wasting, Hades has become by far the greatest bastion of Evil in the multiverse. It’s the most dangerous and horrifying plane for mortals and/or beings of good alignment, neither temptations of devils nor tortures of demons have done a thousandth of a good job as the Gray Wasting in converting others to Evil. It is also the place to make people and/or things disappear, since transforming them into a soul larvae is the most reliable way of permanently getting rid of an exemplar outside of mucking about with Plane of Negative Energy (which has a habit of backfiring catastrophically). This has become the basis of the infamous Blood War, as devils (and much rarely demons) bring their captives over to Hades for execution, secure in the knowledge that they’re not coming back after this.

The conspiracy theorists are correct every once in a while, and the apparent sentience of the Gray Wasting is one of those times. The horrific disease does have a mind and its name is Cegilune. The long forgotten twin of Dominus Infernus was the only one he trusted to be a reliable jailor for the great god Laduguer; the only devil he could trust to not be tempted by all the wealth and power Gray Protector could offer for his release. He was right too, Cegilune was the most dedicated and idealistic (for a given value of idealism) devil Inferno had ever spawned, her belief in supremacy of Lawful Evil was even greater than Asmodeus’. Therefore she had no intention of usurping her brother’s place and Laduguer’s offers of a bigger and better Ruby Rod for her fell on deaf ears. But the archdevil twins had made one mistake; they wanted to extort more of his divine knowledge and skill to strengthen Infernal Hierarchy. So Cegilune came to Laduguer’s prison often, talking at length about what was going on in the planes and how his father was failing to make any headway in the war against Chaotic Evil. She was doing her best trying to trick or goad him into coming up with new ideas for tools of oppression for devils to utilize. As centuries passed, Cegilune lowered her guard and became complacent in her jailkeeping duties, for Laduguer appeared despondant and didn’t seem to have any motivation left to do anything. But no matter how dedicated she was to her duties, a mere exemplar’s mind was nothing compared to a great deity descended from Overmothers and she failed to recognize the act and was overplayed. Wasn’t Laduguer’s fall from those heights to such a lowly prison proof of Law’s folly? Didn’t even the infinite divine might of Moradin fail against Chaos and only brought misery and corruption to his celestial followers? Bit by bit, doubts were planted in the archdevil’s mind and, on the day Mechanus came online, Lord Determinant broke free of his prison and turned the tables on her.

Roles reversed, Cegilune recognized that she’d failed in her duty and deserved to be punished. Laduguer however, had a different idea in mind. He convinced her that over the centuries they’d spent together, he’d grown fond of her and renounced Law and she could do the same as well. Not accustomed to either failure or doubt, archdevil Cegilune knew she deserved eternal punishment for her epic failure but was familiar with the fate of failed devils and wanted no part of it. With a little nudge from Laduguer’s divine power, she changed. By turning her back on Law, she was transformed into a Hadean exemplar. It (now bereft of a gendered identity as an amorphous pile of mutable flesh) joined Laduguer who promised a new future and purpose cause and left Inferno.

The new purpose she was promised came in the form of a massive machine, not quite on the scale of Mechanus but closest anyone has ever came, hidden in a secret demiplane orbiting Hades. Gray Protector had been mentally designing it ever since he’d heard of the great machine his father was constructing from Cegilune and it didn’t take him long to build once he was free. He sealed Cegilune inside and the machine modified and ground its evil essence into a functionally infinite number of infinitesimal motes. Then it (in a manner of speaking) hacked into the (metaphysical) soul delivery channels of Mechanus to spray Cegilune all over the souls of judged mortals coming in from Nirvana. It infected the Hadean petitioners, transforming them all into soul larvae before they even reached their destination, then spread onto the entire plane from them. The last thing Cegilune’s conscious mind heard was Laduguer’s assurance that she had now become the instrument of Abyssal destruction she and her brother had always wanted from him. The hidden machine of the Barrens of Doom and Despair (as Laduguer calls the obscured demiplane he filled with the wildest nonexemplar outsider critters he could get his hands on) is still working, scooping up errant bits of Cegilune’s virulent soulbits from Hades and respraying them onto incoming petitoners, making sure Infernal Hierarchy has a reliable way of eliminating demons en masse to curtail the cancerous growth of the Abyss (as Lord Determinant charged them to do so long ago). It’s not entirely certain what Dominus Infernus knows about the whole thing, but Laduguer thinks he’d probably approve too.


As for Cegilune, it might be functionally dead but is still instinctually devoted to Evil. It managed to co-opt the Gray Wasting into a tool of conversion and has even started to steal excess power of the exemplars she’s transforming into soul larvae. This allowed it to slightly reconstruct its shattered mind, becoming a sort of faux ghost haunting Laduguer’s machine and demiplane. While in a state of dreamlike coma so far, its sentience slowly grows and it’s not impossible that one day it’ll wake up and there’s no telling what sort of control it’ll have over the Gray Wasting or the Barrens of Doom and Despair then. Laduguer wasn’t expecting that and is afraid that Cegilune might become a greater goddess overnight with mastery over the Gray Wasting, one even mightier than him. So he spreads false information about various riches hidden in the Barrens, drawing various beings to vandalize nonessential parts of the machine to force Cegilune to spend its power on repairs instead of restoring more of its mind. It’s too good of an asset to give up, so Laduguer has made the hard decision of letting it continue for the greater good (or rather Law).

NotSauron#64789 is back! Even I wasn't expecting that. I tried for hours to write up a philosophers' football kinda deal with the famous succubi queens/rulers (surprise surprise, there's like half a dozen of those in DnD). They even made up a sufficiently stupid* name for it in DnD canon. Hageater Cegilune was gonna be the one whose position was violent conversion at swordpoint, others would have different ideas about best way of embodying evil, all ending up with Malchanthet winning (by quislinging it up with daemons obviously). Alas it didn't work.

BUT! You can assume something like that happened in the background anyway, I even have them pegged as Lynkhab the Lady of Sighs (apathy and sloth), Xinivrae the Mistress of Twisting Flesh (pain/bodily horror), Shami the Forbidden Princess (depravity+sexytimes), Red Shroud the Matron of the Poisonous Reach (moral corruption) and Malchanthet the Queen of Collaborators (**** you, got mine). Feel free to use or disregard these amorphous blobs of evil shaped like hot chicks that rule parts of Hades.

Instead I made this after noticing the word gray. It's like ...of X and Darkness thing, I seem to find best ideas from randomly noticing commonalities among words or concepts.
Also, even after what I did here, Gray Protector still totally sounds like a condom brand. Guess there's no helping that.


*War of Ripe Flesh

[Pronounceable]

Is it me or does the thread really not care overmuch about the denizens of Outer Planes? Odd that the exemplar stuff don't get much commentary, considering how much bloat there is in regular DnD canon about devils and demons.


GORELLIK (greater guardinal), Lord of the Laughing Hunt, the Loner
Domains: hunting, savagery, protection

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Exemplars of Beastlands loathe animals. The nonsentient, weak, mortal beasts are nothing but a twisted mockery of the guardinal form, even down to names of their types; discourtesy of Pelor the Knockoff Father, who’s never created a single original thing in his existence despite his smug proclamations of creatorhood. The ethnocentric bitches of Material Plane make it even worse, calling the guardinals “ascended” forms of the mere dumb beasts they’re accustomed to seeing, as if resembling humanoids (aka bargain bin giants) was something that could be called an ascension. And it’s not like they’ve evolved to resemble those uppity mortals; exemplars of Beastlands had existed since the Dawn War, they were bipedal creatures of fur, tooth and claw long before any of the mortal losers or their miserable mudballs were made. Which is why Hyena Commander Gorellik’s refusal to slaughter the race of gnolls he unwittingly sired is generally considered to be the worst betrayal in Beastlands history and led to his exile and subsequent fall.

After suffering grievous injuries in a battle with fiends, Gorellik was forced to flee through a portal to Material Plane to avoid capture and was accosted by a pack of hyenas on some mortal mudball. The dumb scavenger beasts feasted on the defenseless guardinal’s form, painfully stealing bits of his essence. Unexpectedly, this caused them to grow smarter and stronger and pretty soon, the hyenas started to mutate. They quickly evolved into upright and bipedal creatures with a crude intellect and warlike disposition, becoming the first members of the gnoll race. Gorellik was apalled at first but then a strange feeling of magnanimousness and pride overcame him even as they brought more and more hyenas to gnaw on his wounded body. Growing more sentient by the minute, gnolls started to worship him as a god and Gorellik started to teach them in the ways of tool use. Gnolls proved to be cunning hunters, skilled in ambushes and traps and in less than a decade, the first gnoll tribe became a unique race of bestial mortals. Gorellik was mildly troubled about their tendency to hunt and eat humanoids but only on the numbers front, gnolls were very few and could easily be exterminated if they angered the mortals they shared their planet with. But then a rescue party from Beastlands finally tracked him down and a strike team of guardinals came to take him back home.

They weren’t happy about the gnolls. They demanded Gorellik kill them all and cleanse the multiverse of these half celestial mongrels, for these were an even worse insult to guardinaldom than regular animals or weird double knockoffs of Feywild. He refused. And when they tried to kill the gnolls themselves, Gorellik fought them on grounds of the guardinal motto of protecting the weak from the strong. He hadn’t risen to command of all hyena guardinals for nothing and, even with his unhealed wounds, managed to destroy his ex rescuers. Respawning back in Beastlands, the guardinal strike team brought the news of Gorellik’s critters to Lion Marshall Talisid. As the most gung ho member of a race of beings renowned for being triggerhappy barbarians, Talisid was immediately enraged and vowed to put an end to this travesty. He swiftly travelled to the mortal mudball in question with an entourage of whoever he could find on the way. Gorellik, who knew his brethren well, knew this would be coming and had sent gnolls through Yggdrasil’s roots on their world, for the Great Tree of Worlds is the planar pathway that touches all places where life exists and, unlike the River Styx, protects all travellers from harm or pursuit while on it. Which was an even bigger affront to guardinals of course, for it was them who planted Yggdrasil at the dawn of time and cultivated its growth throughout the ages, to have a method of safely traversing the multiverse to confront evil wherever it might appear. Upon facing Gorellik yet not seeing any of these gnolls, Lion Marshall knew they were on the Tree of Worlds and it would protect the abominable mongrel creatures from their deserved punishment, as it protects all that seek shelter among its branches. Infuriated, Talisid attacked Gorellik personally and tore him to shreds. Hyena Commander was powerful but no match for the Guardian of Guardinals, he took a beating even worse than the one that started everything but Talisid was careful to not kill him, he didn’t want the traitor to respawn back in Beastlands and risk losing his trail.

While he eventually tired out and calmed down (and felt he might’ve gone a bit too far in anger), Talisid had gone berserk in front of too many powerful guardinals and backing off now would be seen as a grave lack of decisiveness and weaken his position as the commander of commanders, for right made might in Beastlands and how could someone be right if their opinions changed with the wind? So Talisid ordered Gorellik dragged back to Beastlands and imprisoned, he was not to be finished off and kept in perpetually painful injuries until his wrong was righted and all the gnolls (who’d have scattered all over the multiverse by then) were hunted down and killed. Later on, Gorellik mysteriously disappeared from his prison and all the investigations came up empty and Lion Marshall roared and growled about it, but Rat Commander Gonzales knew it was for show and Talisid also thought he’d done the right thing by sneaking Gorellik out.

It was just unfortunate that some gnolls had wandered into the Abyss from Yggdrasil and drawn the attention of the Demon Prince of Cannibalism for their uncanny resemblance to his form. Yeenoghu, being an expert tracker and hunter himself, caught gnolls and learned of their origins, followed by tracking down and devouring weakened Gorellik on the mortal world he was hiding out. Typical of demon victims, Gorellik’s soul was trapped inside the demon prince being eternally digested yet never killed, so Yeenoghu could feed on the pain and fear and hatred generated by his endless suffering. Afterwards, Yeenoghu spent centuries tracking down gnolls and subverting them to his worship by feeding them with bits of his own flesh, becoming generally successful and transforming the majority of the gnoll race into evil hunters that relish eating their victims alive. His dominion over cannibalism also helped corrupt gnolls faster, for gnolls are outsider hybrids and, befitting their origin, can only reproduce by force feeding their own (still living) flesh to regular mortal races to mutate them into new gnolls. This has reduced their celestial essence down to basically nothing, for the essence of Good their ancestors took from Gorellik has long been diluted and spread thin and modern gnolls are fully mortal (except for their cannibalistic reproduction).

Nonevil gnolls still exist and can be found on any mortal world, living in a relatively savage but natural societies that worship a mostly inaccurate and wilder version of Gorellik as a god of hunting, but they’re an endangered species for the relentless enmity of their demon worshipping brethren and exemplars of Beastlands. A few extremely small and skilled bands of gnolls have found the secret of saving their savage brethren from demonic influence, which is (in a nonshocking twist) feeding them live celestials to neutralize Yeenoghu’s evil inside them. These gnoll paladins are experts in planar travel and hunting celestials, which makes them mostly indistinguishable from their demon worshipping vile siblings to outsider eyes. So far, only a few extremely compassionate and tolerant angels from Elysium have volunteered to help the Gorellik worshippers in their crusade by offering themselves to maws of demon tainted gnolls, but there’s an infinitesimal hope for salvation of gnoll race still.

As for Gorellik himself, his soul has actually been freed after Yeenoghu’s body was destroyed in one of the endless wars between various demon princes of the Abyss. But the centuries of suffering inside the demon’s belly broke his mind and reduced him to a mostly mindless beast that wanders the infinite Abyss. His mangy and monstrous form looks like a mere petitioner from an army of the damned belonging to some demon prince or another and is still unreasonably powerful when provoked into a fight, so he’s usually left alone to wander aimlessly. By sheer luck, he’s avoided notice or capture by powerful demons and is just one indistinguishable wandering monster among an infinity of them. There’s hope for him as well, for he’s not converted and would certainly respawn in Beastlands if he was ever killed; the trick would be knowing and finding (and also killing) him.

Right, there's a demon now. Tangentially. A very old and famous one too, he's traditionally been one of the major movers and shakers yet never got nearly as much respect as the Big Three. Despite the fact that he canonically offed a god and took his stuff, on top of actively participating in Abyssal politics and having an old household name, Y-man never gets counted among the big boys. Maybe cos his name is hard to pronounce. Iunno, it's just odd. Also another look at the furry fetiscowboy cops of the planes, which is a much clearer origin for Gorellik than random ancient animal spirit thing they had going in canon.

So we're down to Arcadia, Elysium, Asgard and Pandemonium untouched on Outer Planes front in our little multiverse. Elemental Planes are mostly explored I believe, as is Material. There's always more random critters in DnD, I can probably find more and more obscure names to continue fleshing out the multiverse in the deity writeup format. Now that I've kinda let go of godsgodsgods thing that brought us all this way, there's space to cram in more stuff. Expect more random updates at random intervals.

[Fable Wright]

Is it me or does the thread really not care overmuch about the denizens of Outer Planes? Odd that the exemplar stuff don't get much commentary, considering how much bloat there is in regular DnD canon about devils and demons.

The problem with the last entry was that it talked about a bunch of relationships between devils I didn't know or care about enough to look up, and the fact that demons and devils are so overblown with bloated, convoluted and repetitive content that it doesn't get the same visceral 'that would totally fit and make for a game I hadn't considered before' experience that new material for the Inner Planes give. Sure, a demiplane of GLaDOS/GNOMON/God-Machine circling Hades is neat, but that's one immediately actionable idea for an adventure location, as opposed to the interesting but ultimately not conversation-provoking discussion of planar soul mechanics.

That said, I do like the Gnolls as Jägermonsters here; I like the potential of any race joining a non-evil tribe voluntarily, gaining significant strength in the process. Incidentally, I think the reason that Yeenoghu tends to get sidelined is that he's basically the patron god of a specific tribe of low-level monsters, like Maglubiyet. When's the last time you ever heard someone take Maglubiyet seriously in interplanar disputes, despite being in the 1980s Deities and Demigods? He was one of the very first gods made specifically for D&D! Lives in the Nine Hells like Tiamat! But because he's the god of low-level mooks instead of high-level dragons or class-leveled Drow, no one cares. Yeenoghu's in the same boat, really, but infinitely more popular because he's in the demon club.

[Pronounceable]

it talked about a bunch of relationships between devils I didn't know or care about enough to look up

There were a grand total of 3 characters in that... Not like this one, which has a truckload. And you did have inquiring minds about planar mechanics stuff yourself. But the names keep getting more obscure, true, on account of having run out of Pelor and Tempus and so on.

Anyway, without further ado.


RAVEN QUEEN (lesser goddess), Queen of Ravens, Kingsbane, Fate’s Plaything, Tug of Skulls, Red Mariner, Survivor of the Depths, Mysterious Mistress
Domains: fate, darkness, defiance, redemption, ravens, fear, pain, dusk, cold, shadar-kai

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Nera was always a rebellious kid. Both of her cleric parents’ attempts to instill traditional values in her only pushed her further away from common morals. She was especially skeptical of religion. You just had to pledge yourself to a deity? You also had to be a good and obedient follower to your chosen god all your life to be allowed into the cool kids club when you died? Gods had built a machine to evaluate faithless mortals and send their souls to an afterlife they “deserved”? There were all manner of different hells with terrible fiends who had nothing better to do than torture your soul in bizarre and ridiculously exaggerated ways if you lived a “sinful” life? All of that was pretty clearly bull****, made up to give all the earthly power to clerics claiming to be serving dozens of different gods. So Nera rebelled. She defied her parents first, running away from home. Then she defied the society, becoming a thief and a bandit. Finally she defied those precious moral values themselves, turning into an evil prick of a murderhobo who just loved hurting people. She wasn’t in danger, she was the danger. She later returned to slaughter her hometown and tortured her parents to death. Nera’s fellow necromancer murderhobo and boyfriend was just as much of an evil prick as she was and the duo went on to be a scourge to all good folks for many years. Eventually, he found the secret of a magic ritual of immortality on one of their misadventures. Nera was ecstatic, now they could continue their rampage forever. Being stabbed in the back and sacrificed on an altar for her beloved’s lichdom ritual was the greatest surprise of her life, but the even bigger shock was finding out that her parents had been right and all those ludicrous tales clerics spouted were real.

Nera’s soul was dragged into a mind boggling machine and memories of her life were rifled through by strange clockwork creatures, then she was sent to Tartarus. It really was an infinite ocean of horrifically disgusting red sludge that felt like boiling and freezing at the same time, just like clerics had said, and Nera was drowning in it. The taste and smell were revolting beyond reckoning, which was particularly unfair thought Nera, for she was a small lump of soulmatter without a mouth or nose that shouldn’t be experiencing these sensations. Nor did she have lungs but she nevertheless kept drowning in the oily slime. She knew this torment would be eternal and thought it was bad, then demodands got her. Made of the same horrific sludge, fiends of Tartarus are famous for their delight in psychological abuse and overwhelming mental powers in equal measure. They plundered her memories in a much rougher way than the clockwork operators of the gods’ machine and made her relive the worst moments of her life, they watched her crimes, sins and failures over and over, they mocked her “performance” as if she was a crappy actor doing a poor job on a play and made their best Statler and Waldorf impression (not that Nera knew what that was). The worst part was their molding of her emotions and thoughts with terrifying ease, demodands were making her alternately feel the pains she inflicted on others herself and agree with their insults and mock and humiliate herself as viciously as they did. Which (Nera recognized much later) is their method of reproduction; for demodands corrupt Tarterian petitioners by abusing and twisting their minds with their own sins and failures until being just as sadistic, cruel and vicious as them becomes an ingrained habit. The actual worst part was the indescribable spiritual agony the red sludge was causing, of course, but demodands’ mental tortures were an extra layer of terrible.

After an eternity of relentless torment, Nera was suddenly and inexplicably plucked out. She had been fished out by a divine power, it was an ancient and terrible being with dozens of names but she knew him from many stories as Vecna, the greatest prick in history (and Nera’s personal hero and role model while she was alive). She was informed that it had only been a few centuries since her death and she’d be going back into the depths for good if she failed her new master. Vecna had a plan and Nera was going to be uniquely useful; for in the intervening centuries, her dear boyfriend Myrkul had met two men even worse than him and joined their little enterprise, and through might and malice, all three had ascended to godhood. Nera immediately agreed, she’d do anything to be spared of her (admittedly deserved) fate in Tarterian depths and didn’t even care about revenge.

She was reincarnated as an amnesiac woman and was found by a mortal prince on a hunt with his entourage. The prince was smitten and took her back to his castle, named her Ravenova for having found her by following cries of ravens. This caused an outrage in the kingdom, for ravens were disliked in this land and considered an omen of ill luck and disaster. The prince didn’t care because the woman liked her name, and shortly afterwards they married. Ravenova suffered from terrible nightmares that she could never remember while awake, but otherwise theirs was a happy marriage and in a few years her husband became the new king. This was a land where god of the dead Myrkul was revered and he took notice of this Queen Ravenova during the funeral of the old king. He immediately recognized her as the soul of the love of his mortal life, the one he’d sacrificed to shed the aforementioned mortality. The long dead ashes of passion of stirred in his nonexistent heart and Myrkul realized he’d missed her so much. He watched over the new queen obsessively, saw that she had no memories of being Nera and was happy with her mortal husband. Myrkul grew jealous, he wanted his murderhobo girlfriend back and took a mortal guise to try seducing her. He was refused, Ravenova was a faithful wife. He tried again, revealing his real self and told her she used to be his dear Nera. Ravenova didn’t care; she was herself, not some long dead woman the god of the dead pined after. Myrkul got angry and the undead rose to harry the living, his clerics preached it was because of the cursed “queen of ravens”. A rebellion erupted, Ravenova’s husband was crippled in battle and was overthrown, the royal family fled the country. But Ravenova still stayed loyal to her disabled husband, she would never be Nera, no matter how many times the god of the dead asked. Myrkul then went to ask help from his old friends and the Dread Three engineered a terrible fate for Ravenova’s two sons. Even holding her sons’ souls captive didn’t work, for the Lord of Bones was known for his deceitful and malicious nature and Ravenova didn’t trust he’d keep his word and release them even if she did what he wanted.

By then Bhaal had grown sick of his buddy’s uncharacteristic sadness and pathetically indirect methods, so he sent an assassin. The exiled queen survived with an injury but Bhaal’s assassin hadn’t failed, for it was a wereraven and on the next moon, Ravenova turned. This was the last straw for the remaining royal family and servants, who already resented her and saw this as proof that she’d been cursed all along. She was forced to flee for her life and leave her husband behind, the news of her “monstrous” nature spread swiftly and she had nowhere left to turn but Myrkul. He ordered Ravenova to swear her soul to him and become his cleric, which she did, then undead rose around her and tore her to shreds. Once dead, she was under the Lord of Bones’s power and he managed to restore the memories of her previous life. The resulting personality was a mix between the murderhobo prick and the loyal queen, neither Nera nor Ravenova, but Myrkul was obsessed with her anyway. Now christening her his “Raven Queen”, he bestowed her some of his divine power and married the ghost woman.

It didn’t take long for Myrkul to notice the other divine residue on her soul; Raven Queen was bound by another deity’s power, a piddly demigod of necromancy and betrayal, the guy whom Myrkul clearly remembered as Nera’s favorite character from when she was alive. Realizing that he’d been played, he immediately went to confront the Skull of a Thousand Faces. Unfortunately for him, all of that was according to the plan and as soon as Myrkul faced Velsharoon, Raven Queen started performing the massively powerful ritual Velsharoon’s secret and silent partner, the archmage Wee Jas, had taught her in nightmares of Revanova. The ritual sucked Myrkul’s greater deity essence through the tiny bit he’d foolishly bestowed on her and channeled it towards Wee Jas, ascending her as a new goddess of magic. In his surprised and weakened state, Myrkul couldn’t defend against Velsharoon’s part of the divine ritual and lost what power he’d kept from Wee Jas to him. Of course, as useful as this siphon ritual had proven against Myrkul, it wouldn’t have worked on the much more experienced and paranoid goddess Mystra; which was why the Lord of All Magic Boccob had spent so much time and effort to find her secret mortal daughter (and philactery) Wee Jas and taught his secret god killing ritual to her. Mystra couldn’t reemerge from Wee Jas to escape her demise at Boccob and his assistants’ hands on the moment of Wee Jas’ own ascension, just as Boccob thought, and should’ve been destroyed for good. Alas, the deities of the multiverse then learned that Mystra keeps more than one hidden daughter-philactery as she escaped the assassination attempt via yet another reincarnation.

None of that mattered to Myrkul though, he was swiftly crushed by Velsharoon, who made a set of jewellery from his bones to gift to Raven Queen, the reward for a job well done. Raven Queen was bewildered, for she hadn’t realized what sort of conspiracy Vecna had dragged her into and so was the only beneficiary of Myrkul’s demise still out in the open when the furious Black Handed Lord of Tyranny came to avenge his old friend. God of secrets was almost impossible to find if he didn’t want to be and Wee Jas had fled to great god Boccob’s protection, leaving Raven Queen to face Bane’s wrath alone. He crippled her, completely removing her ability to send manifestations or physically move, then sealed her into a tiny demiplane floating in Ethereal full of her old friends, a great mass of red sludge from Tartarus.

It took her a few centuries to move past her trauma, but Raven Queen eventually remembered she wasn’t a hapless mortal soul anymore and used her tiny bit of divine power to stop the demodands tormenting her. She infused them with the power of the dusk, froze their red sludgy forms and filled their sadistic minds with suffocating darkness that left no space for evil. Over time, they became the shadowy, depressed creatures known as the shadar-kai. Like Raven Queen herself, the shadar-kai have been made to abandon their old, evil ways by great trauma; they’re humanoid looking outsiders disgusted by the essence of evil they’re made of and suffer from a crippling fear of regressing back into evil; for the pull of Tartarus is strong and they’re all torn between their conscious desire to stay “clean” (for the red sludge’s touch pains demodands as much as it pains mortal souls) and ther instinctual fiendishness. Incidentally, the extreme fear of regression to evil all shadar-kai suffer from feeds Raven Queen and has increased her divinity over the years, ascending her to a lesser goddess status. Tarterian sludge inside Raven Queen’s prison plane has been filtered by her divine power and the tens of thousands of demodand minds in it have become shadar-kai individuals, the physical aspect of the vile and disgusting sludge has frozen solid to create the icy geography of the demiplane Letherna. If shadar-kai are killed, they respawn as demodands back in Tartarus and return to their sadistic ******* selves, which is why they so rarely leave their little demiplane on Raven Queen’s orders and only because she can banish them back to Tartarus herself for disobedience. To combat the neverending feeling of fear, shadar-kai have adopted a masochistic philosophy that embraces frequent small pains as a tool of redemption, a tool that must be utilized constantly to ward one’s self from evil (and therefore great pain). All shadar-kai are unfailingly polite and utterly humorless, for abuse and mockery is the way of demodands and anything similar to them must be suppressed with extreme prejudice.

Raven Queen’s goals are mysterious and inscrutable, she doesn’t trust any of her subjects (for good reason) and tells them nothing about the reasons behind her orders. She sends shadar-kai out of Letherna on strange and secretive errands, like gathering certain items or passing messages unseen or moving something elsewhere without anyone noticing. They’re almost always ordered to act with utmost secrecy and conceal their true nature even if they are to contact someone. Her only orders that make sense to her servants are when she sends shadar-kai to capture demodands summoned by foolish mortals, these are transformed into more shadar-kai by Raven Queen when brought into her domain. The rarity of shadar-kai causes most peoples of the multiverse to disregard them as myths; destruction of Myrkul is well known but almost nobody knows about the part a random mortal woman played in it and what happened to her later. The very few scholars of esoteric divine lore who know of Raven Queen and the shadar-kai usually believe her inscrutable errands are for weakening Bane’s overall influence so she can break free of her prison, supported by the fact that the few times shadar-kai have been spotted doing shady business on mortal worlds, the continuous war between churches of Bane and Tempus have shifted in Foehammer’s favor. Then again, it might just be a coincidence; Raven Queen is a relatively small and feeble deity, it’d be suicidal of her to challenge the Lord of Tyranny even in the smallest capacity.

What she actually does is mostly trying to save mortals from damnation; almost all of her incomprehensible orders are for setting up miraculous seeming events to convince smart but skeptical mortals be good, to persuade evil people to seek redemption, and possibly spread the worship of deities that provide the happiest afterlives. Raven Queen has bent what little power she has towards detecting pointlessly rebellious mortals like Nera; she’s seen that Tartarus is one of the more pleasant Lower Planes awaiting the wicked and faithless souls, and doesn’t want anyone else to repeat her mistakes. OTOH, she has other, much less altruistic goals as well (at DM discretion)...

I planted this seed a very long time ago, all the way in September if my post dates can be trusted (they prolly can). So, RQ is for some reason the most popular noob of 4E. I don't really get why and I think her default backstory is dumb. What could've possessed Nerull to do something as dumb as take a mortal consort and get his ass overthrown? This spoopyhead right here, however, is an exmortal himself and it's much more reasonable of him to think with the wrong head. And dumb god getting his dumb ass overthrown by cunning mortal is a good story, so here we are. Also when you have DnD's skelliface gods face off in skelet-off, Vecna's gonna win. And RQ is pretty Wee Jassy, so she had to figure in there somehow. Then I went all in on godly conspirathon because it was already a giant cluster**** with Sune behind Vecna behind RQ vs Myrkul to Nerull, so why not crank it up to 12 at that point?

We're also taking a much closer look at my little 4chanceri and its stinky dwellers. Their slimy ability to be stored in bottles (and be Carceriv cocktails in a pinch) has always been the best and most brilliant quality of demodands and I had to build on that. Not to mention how well "Tarterian depths" goes with an ocean. After all these entries, the large differences between the six fiendish exemplar races we've been over so far should be obvious.

Then there's the edgelings, another 4Eism that's weirdly popular. I think they’re also dumb but not unsalvageably so. This seemed like one way to do it, it's not any less contrived than shadow infused fairies/deathless mortals.

Lastly, I wonder if anyone will see the thing I hid up there. I'd be forced to turn in my nerd badge for that too, that's another DnD heresy getting committed between the lines.

[Beneath]

"The Raven Queen" is a cool name. I know nothing about her canon lore but this is a good salvaging of the name. Likewise the Shadar-kai; I know hardly anything about them except that they were the 4e devs' attempt to deliberately engineer something that would stick around and be recognizably D&D like drow or beholders (I know they existed in 3e but there was an article about trying to make shadar-kai the new drow in the 4e era), and then they didn't even bother putting them into the 5e monster manual when I needed low-level shadowfell monsters even though they were the same leads.

[Fable Wright]

Ravenova suffered from terrible nightmares that she could never remember while awake,

The technical term for these are usually sleep terrors. Nightmares are from REM sleep, and are usually easily remembered due to the sleeper waking up from the nightmare at the end. Sleep terrors occur in non-REM sleep, involve the unconscious woman screaming and possibly thrashing or sleepwaking, are not woken up from until the terror has long passed, and will not be remembered.

Alas, the deities of the multiverse then learned that Mystra keeps more than one hidden daughter-philactery as she escaped the assassination attempt via yet another reincarnation.

First, phylactery is spelled with a y, not an i. Second, I highly approve of this thought of gods being fully willing to ascend mortals left and right into their privileged club if it means getting that damned Mystra out of the way. Somehow, the Mystra hate never stops being cathartic.

All shadar-kai are unfailingly polite and utterly humorless, for abuse and mockery is the way of demodands and anything similar to them must be suppressed with extreme prejudice.

...My god, these are a race of perfect butlers for the aspiring summoner's private estate. I approve.

Lastly, I wonder if anyone will see the thing I hid up there. I'd be forced to turn in my nerd badge for that too, that's another DnD heresy getting committed between the lines.

Is it turning the Plane of Shadow back into an Ethereal demiplane instead of making it the weird kinda-multiverse-crossing-kinda-Negative-Energy-Plane thing that it's been mutated to since 3.5e and 4e's days? Because it really never really fit the Great Wheel in anyways, when you started thinking about how it played into the rule of three and all.

[Fri]

A bit of feedback if I may, I think sometimes (like in the raven queen story) you put a bit too much backstory.

By that I mean, for example, she's an atheist daughter of a cleric->cruel murderhobo->mortal myrkul's ex->tortured in tartarus-> fished by vecna to be used as pawn->innocent amnesiac queen hated by small-minded people->cursed were raven-> so on so forth.

What I mean is, this gal has too many different previous life which could work if having many different previous life is the premise of her backstory but I don't think that's the case here. I think it'd do it much better if you cut some steps. I'm not actually talking about specifically the many steps, I'm more talking about how each of the steps can be a story on itself, if you get what I mean. Sometimes it feels like the backstory of a single god you have is many separate unrelated story you join together to make the story longer, instead of detailing each others.

Just my random thought.

[Pronounceable]

Shadar-kai; I know hardly anything about them except that they were the 4e devs' attempt to deliberately engineer something that would stick around and be recognizably D&D like drow or beholders

They literally cut themselves on that edge, which is why people (I) think they're stupid. Edgelordship is probably not the path to universal acceptance.

The technical term for these are usually sleep terrors.

The thread has now become entertaining and educational. Hurray!

phylactery is spelled with a y, not an i.

True. That's a typo that I'm certain exists in one of the previous writeups I decided to keep it for some reason I can't quite remember.

a race of perfect butlers for the aspiring summoner's private estate

Now that you mention, they do count as demodand/outsider so can be summoned. Shadar-kai butler Ol'phred helping his summoner's crusade against crimeevil despite his better judgement because it's the good thing to do now exists. He might cut himself regularly but nobody's perfect.

Is it turning the Plane of Shadow back into an Ethereal demiplane instead of making it the weird kinda-multiverse-crossing-kinda-Negative-Energy-Plane thing that it's been mutated to since 3.5e and 4e's days?

No. It's much heresier than that. Not to mention Letherne isn't the Plane of Shadow or Shadowfell.Tip:Ravenova is a very obscure name related to something very much not.

A bit of feedback if I may, I think sometimes (like in the raven queen story) you put a bit too much backstory.

You're probably right. Crammed in a lot of stuff because 1) Raven Queen canon 2) mortal RQ=wereraven tickles my fancy 3) excuse to exposit Tartarus 4) heresy. Unlike Velsharoon, her story isn't about having a bajillion identities as divinity fuel but she's at best a bit player in others' stories and steps of her backstory would be unfitting in anyone else's stuff. Pretty like Apomps actually, that was also a disputably necessarily long story as a result of the lot of stuff I wanted to specifically mention. It definitely makes the story longer instead of detailed, tho I think any further detailing of specific bits can be done if a DM thinks it needed for a campaign.

RQ still fares better than H bros. Maybe their story was more interesting but at least there's something of her as a "current" deity.

For my next trick, I'm gonna try something wildly different from all that came before. Stick around and you might see something odd. Hopefully it won't be distastefully meta.

[Pronounceable]

I have written this in one massive frenzy. Haven't whipped up anything this fast since Auril. Proof that it's awesome, I think. So, here's something really odd and dissimilar to everything that came before it.


THE DEMONOMICON OF IGGWILV (major artifact)
Powers: demon summoning, demon control, porn

Spoiler

Show

Iggwilv is a great and terrible witch from a long line of great and terrible witches. She has summoned a great many demons from the Abyss and has written exceedingly detailed accounts of her encounters. Most demons she summons are adamantly against letting some mortal touch them but they all submit to her dark beauty and terrible power in the end and become wholly devoted lovers and eager participants in Iggwilv’s countless strange and terrifying fetishes. Each demonic encounter is described in a different manuscript, written with loving detail about what the demon’s body was like and how hard it raged and fumed until Iggwilv dominated it fully with her overwhelming power and beauty, followed by a long and adjective laden description of unspeakably perverted acts she made the demon do and how great she felt. The original manuscripts all end with the demon becoming a loyal slave to Iggwilv and her smug self satisfaction as she adds another notch to her metaphorical garterbelt.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Collected Escapades of the Terrible Witch aka the Demonomicon of Iggwilv is demon smut, originally written by an anonymous author in a series of first person narrated short stories starring what’s generally thought to be the author’s avatar, in the form of the powerful witch Iggwilv, living out her fantasies. At first the short stories were a mere curiosity, slowly spreading by word of mouth on outrage and curiosity, until an actual demonologist got his hands on one and was offended at the factual wrongness contained within. He made it his business to hunt down every Iggwilv story and expose their flaws, publishing line by line critiques of them annotated with each and every little detail the author got wrong about demons, summoning magic and the Abyss explained, in an effort to expose the author as the fraud that she or he was. Clearly whoever wrote those tales had no idea what demonology or demons were really like. The demonologist collected and published Iggwilv stories as a series of annotated books meticulously explaining just how wrong they were, but he never quite got why all his hard work only served to make the ridiculous stories even more famous and widespread. In fact, it was the demonologist who first realized through his detailed analysis of the stories that there were multiple authors who’d taken to copying the original’s style and a deluge of even more flawed accounts was now being produced and disseminated by unknown parties. He gave up in disgust when he recognized that his own work was inspiring some of these people to ghostwrite more Iggwilv, but the damage was done. The Demonomicon of Iggwilv (named by bards as a dumb pun on the mythical Necronomicon of Orcus) had taken on a life of its own and was now growing ever larger with many anonymous authors adding their own stories into the books, there even seemed to be some sort of competition among these to write the most depraved and implausible of porn scenes. The story of Iggwilv summoning the Demon Prince of Rapacity himself, whom she locked in her basement and tortured until he fell in love with her is considered to be the turning point for the Iggwilv mythos. Not to be outdone, more authors wrote the two having a long and complicated relationship full of drama on top of the ever grossening smut, culminating in them having a son who later ascended to godhood and started having his own brand of even weirder, grosser smut written (featuring things like plants, undead, oozes or undead oozes).

Meanwhile, in the real multiverse, the Iggwilv mythos had drawn the attention of the goddess of fiction and literature. The Mother of Protagonists Lirr found the whole thing to be hilariously fascinating, especially the exceedingly blasphemous story of Iggwilv and Graz’zt summoning goddess Sune and having their way with her, and decided to reward whatever crazy mortal started it all. With help of her creator/patron Oghma, Lirr found the (now long dead) original author of Iggwilv in Limbo. She had indeed been a scribe who wasn’t very satisfied with her husband in life, as some suspected, and had written Iggwilv as an escape from her dreary and boring day job of copying inventory lists and produce reports. Now a Limbo petitioner, she was free of her mortal form and could transform to Iggwilv for real and have fun with “demons” she willed out of ChAoSmatter, at least in short bursts until she got too distracted and her concentration broke and all her fantasies poofed back into featureless chaos. Lirr told her what’s been happening since her death and it delighted her, she certainly hadn’t expected her little hobby to grow to such insane proportions. Her wish from Lirr was to be able to read all the Iggwilv stories written by others forever, so she could reenact them in Limbo. Instead, Lirr asked Oghma to infuse the author’s soul into a complete set of magically enhanced the Demonomicon of Iggwilv made out of chAOSmatter, so she could live all the Iggwilv stories ever written whenever she wished without having to fight against the Plane of Willpower. As a greater god, Oghma could will things into existence permanently using Limbo’s chaoSMATteR and he did so; for as disgusted as he was at the depravity of mortals in full display on these stories, they were still works of art and had to be protected and disseminated.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on viewpoint), Oghma couldn’t quite manage to keep his complicated feelings from affecting the will he imposed on the item and the Demonomicon of Iggwilv he created out of CHaosmattEr was infused with far more power than he intended. Binding the soul of the author to ChaosmATter by divine will transformed her into something like an elemental, one that was bound to a clump of Limbo’s CHAosMattER instead of Elemental matter from any Elemental Planes. And since that was her “idealized” self, she’d suddenly gained the ability to manifest physically as Iggwilv, without needing great concentration to keep it up (as is the norm for things made of cHaOsmatter). On top of that, she gained the actual powers that she’d made up for Iggwilv in the stories, for chaosMATteR interacts with imagination in extremely weird ways and she had that in spades. Oghma only wanted to give her the ability to harmlessly “be Iggwilv” inside a book that would magically add every newly written Iggwilv story into itself, but had accidentally created what was functionally a genie made of chaos, bound to an indestructable artifact book.

She was now an extremely dangerous being due to the completely impossible powers of demonic summoning and control at her fingertips and Oghma could clearly see where this would go on account of the ex-author’s immediate insistence to be called Iggwilv now instead of her real name. So, over Lirr’s objections, the Lord of All Knowledge handed over the artifact Demonomicon of Iggwilv (from now on not to be confused with regular Demonomicons of Iggwilv that are ordinary porn collections) to his buddy the Lord of All Magic. Boccob was certainly interested in this entirely new type of creature and her imaginary powers that somehow worked. He took the artifact (and an “Iggwilv” furious at this unwarranted imprisonment) to his laboratory and started inspecting it. As far as both great gods of information were concerned, she had nothing to complain about and could simply go back inside the pages to eternally live out the depraved fantasies of mortals. “Iggwilv” (who’d never again admit to ever having been anything other than the terrible witch) would have none of it, she fully intended to use her powers as she wished and demanded to be released. Boccob refused but, like all teachers, couldn’t help himself from trying to educate the ignorant creature before him, so he talked at length about the real nature of demons. While she’d never admit it, what Iggwilv learned from the Lord of All Magic about the Abyss is probably what saved her from randomly summoning demons and ending up as a plaything of some powerful fiend, for she really had no idea what real demons are like and how demon summoning works in the real multiverse.

Lirr however, was unhappy. She was still fond of the ex-author and after trying very hard and failing to convince either Oghma or Boccob to let her go, she wrote an Iggwilv story herself (anonymously of course). In this particular story, Iggwilv’s son Iuz the Wicked had stolen her true spellbook and traded it to Boccob for great magical power; so she summons her own son and screws all the secrets of Boccob’s defenses out of him in particularly depraved ways (Quillmistress felt she had to join the habitual smut-out of the “Iggwiggers” to make her story seem authentic and be taken seriously). The story ends with Iggwilv stealing her spellbook back from Boccob and has, in fact, resulted in someone sneaking into Boccob’s realm and making off with the Demonomicon of Iggwilv in the exact same manner. It’s also generally considered to be the best/worst Iggwilv story ever, which gives Lirr the Punctual no small amount of satisfaction.

Since then, the Demonomicon of Iggwilv has gained notoriety as an artifact containing the imprisoned soul of the infamous witch Iggwilv, who has mastery over unimaginable delights and horrors and will share them with anyone who can find her book and please her. More weird porn keeps getting written as Iggwilv’s journals, containing all manner of movers and shakers of the planes in many shades of heresy and the tome has long transcended regular geometry to keep all the pages inside. While many beings in the multiverse know Iggwilv stories are just made up smut, some are convinced the stories are the real escapades of the great witch, supported by the fact that (for all intents and purposes) she does exist and has strange and inexplicable control over demons.

When the artifact is found and opened, Iggwilv appears as an incredibly beautiful human woman. She’s a chaotic and unpredictable being, able to summon and control great numbers of demons with a few simple incantations and will promise to use her demonic hordes to help her “rescuers” in whatever endeavor they want, so long as they keep the book open and carry it around. Iggwilv can even summon demon princes with ease but is loath to do that, for her abrupt and irresistable summons are intensely aggravating to exemplars of the Abyss and demon princes are impossible even for her to control (she blames the stories with Graz’zt in them, not that she’d ever admit they are made up). She also has an overactive libido and overbearing manner, will relentlessly hit on anything capable of being hit on and is willing to indulge in any and all manner of depravities if asked nicely. She can’t always be trusted however, and might betray the holder of the artifact in an instant if she doesn’t like them (or it seems amusing at the time). She’s not truly malicious, just capricious and impulsive, so it’s possible to get on her good side and even gain her trust, especially for those with a chaotic mindset (and deviant tastes).

Iggwilv can’t get too far away from the artifact or touch it (even the demons she summons can’t affect the artifact in any way), and closing the book traps her back inside. She doesn’t like that and would usually do anything to prevent it. That also banishes all demons she’s summoned so once freed, she usually keeps a few invisible demons nearby, ordered to kill anyone who seems like trying to close the book, for she’s completely powerless to affect the outside when the Demonomicon is closed. Other than threatening to hide the book where it won’t be found, holders of the artifact have no power over Iggwilv whatsoever, which is why she’s dangerously unpredictable and can turn on her rescuers abruptly if she’s suspicious of them. However, underneath all the arrogance and depraved sensuality, she’s still a human soul (and not an embodiment of some alignment or eternal spirit) who has human motives and thoughts so it’s possible to understand and theoretically even befriend her. Anyone who could manage that would have a very powerful and indestructable, if somewhat frustrating, ally.

Of course, the book can also be just read for smut, if that’s how the artifact’s owners roll. She even does dramatic readings when asked.

If anyone had told me I'd one day be writing about "Fifty Shades of Twilight" in this thread, I wouldn't have believed them. Yet here we are. Disclaimer tho, I haven't read either of those and my knowledge comes only from general info osmosis, I might be wrong about what they actually entail. Anyway, as you can see, this is not even a creature, nevermind a deity. But it's something extremely famous and DnD nevertheless.

I have heard of the term "typing with one hand" in regards to the GoT guy. I kinda get that sort of feeling when looking at Iggwilv in DnD, she's even more ridiculous than stuff like Abbathor. So naturally, she was the perfect candidate for Fifty Shades of Abyss. Obviously I can't be having with that straight up, so we're going this meta method. I'm a massive sucker for all the metafiction, that **** doesn't get old. Just look at the avatar. Hopefully it's not too winkwinknudgenudge about it, I'm pretty sure I'm clinically unable to recognize meta overdose.

And of course it's inspired by Umineko, it's the bestest thing ever written. Also considering Iggy is one of those original campaign's players, maybe Gygax can count as Kinzo. You'll notice that Iggwilv indeed did nothing wrong, since she doesn't exist.
This item here is a campaign all by itself. Even comes with its own quirky NPC and random encounters. Her quirkiness is kinda tiresome and lame and cliched but I didn't wanna change her core too much, there's been enough changes.

Also also, I somehow ended up with yet another demons entry despite all my dislike of them. What is it with DnD demons that just pops out of everything?

[Fri]

Haven't read it yet but

Powers: demon summoning, demon control, porn

Should be worth it

[khadgar567]

Any book with nice fifty shades is good in my case so about iggy is there a chance she can write some thing about fifty shades of elisyum ( aka some angelic ahem action)

[Fable Wright]

ChAoSmatter

Pronounceable, you're using consistent capitalization on chAOsmatter. I'm going to have to put a strike against your gamer's license for that. (The 4e wiki still lists the Raven Queen's domain on the Shadowfell instead of Ravenloft, so you haven't had that revoked for blaspheming against the Dark Powers so far.)

When the artifact is found and opened, Iggwilv appears as an incredibly beautiful human woman. She’s a chaotic and unpredictable being, able to summon and control great numbers of demons with a few simple incantations and will promise to use her demonic hordes to help her “rescuers” in whatever endeavor they want, so long as they keep the book open and carry it around.

...You know, in hindsight, the literal goddess of fiction bringing the universe's first Mary Sue to life should've been a fairly obvious development, but for the life of me I didn't see it coming.

She also has an overactive libido and overbearing manner, will relentlessly hit on anything capable of being hit on and is willing to indulge in any and all manner of depravities if asked nicely.

Though, now I have to imagine that she gets along best with Jubilex, of all the demon lords.

Also also, I somehow ended up with yet another demons entry despite all my dislike of them. What is it with DnD demons that just pops out of everything?

The fact that they are primarily associated with movers and shakers who have the will to change the multiverse, unlike most Good-aligned entities who strive to maintain the status quo? Chaos and Evil are about the individual, and therefore will by nature take the spotlight on most works that follow random individual characters who have made an impact on the multiverse. Not all, but most.

Any book with nice fifty shades is good in my case so about iggy is there a chance she can write some thing about fifty shades of elisyum ( aka some angelic ahem action)

Consensual marriage that results in 2.3 children as a reward for helping out at the local shelters and orphanages regularly is an ideal relationship with no tension to drive a drama that provokes a narrative. It's unlikely.

[Pronounceable]

Pronounceable, you're using consistent capitalization on chAOsmatter. I'm going to have to put a strike against your gamer's license for that.

You... are right. Imma change it.

The fact that they are primarily associated with movers and shakers who have the will to change the multiverse, unlike most Good-aligned entities who strive to maintain the status quo?

That's pretty true actually. Also about that...


TORM (lesser god), Loyal Fury, the True, Heroic Virtue, Straightback, Sword of the Just
Domains: good, law, justice, service, reform, paladins

Spoiler

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When the recruiters came from Celestia on behalf of Moradin, Torm joined up alongside many of his fellow devas of Arcadia. They all owed Emperor of Artifice for bringing an end to the random brownian motions Outer Planes used to suffer, alongside the inevitable planar catastrophies when collisions occured. But more importantly, the cause as explained by archons was just; the Abyss was growing, threatening to break down planar barriers and swallow the multiverse, constant fighting would be needed to curtail it by culling the demons. Torm was a mere Malakim, lowest of the Third Sphere of devas, yet he enjoyed fighting for a good cause. This was a very rare quality among the perfectionist exemplars of Arcadia, who found violence and war to be abhorrent things only resorted to as the last line of defense, yet Torm’s appreciation for fighting allowed him to rapidly grow very powerful. Like (almost) all exemplars, devas feed metaphysically and in Torm’s case, his own remarkable zeal and courage on the Abyssal battlefields propelled him further into new heights of personal power and growth. He became one of the greatest warriors in celestial armies, evolving all the way to the top of the Second Sphere as a Virtue. He was especially good at following orders, Torm could make the plans survive contact with the enemy. The enemy being endlessly variable/unpredictable demons, this was even more significant and later caused him to be given command.

And that was the start of his problems. As a commander, Torm had to give orders instead of take them and finding the right orders to give was very hard in the chaotic battlefields of the Abyss. He had to show initiative, think outside the box and be adaptable to counter various imaginative plots of demons. More and more, Torm found himself giving orders to ensure victory over demons and minimize the losses of those under his command, instead of following protocols and traditions to ensure ideals were upheld and proper conduct maintained. As all devas, Torm knew exactly when the ends justified the means: never. Yet inflexibility inevitably led to defeat against demons and many a celestial under his command was captured and tortured horribly, for demons knew that breaking the invading celestials and transforming them into fiends was the only way to get rid of them for good. Torm had to keep compromising further to protect his underlings, an ambush here, a feint there, the occasional fake battle plans to “fall into” demons’ hands... Then one day, Torm suddenly found himself changed. After forsaking law further and further for the sake of the legions under his command, he had fallen to good. He was fine with it too, he’d long decided that the archons were right and that good of beings came before the good of ideals in war. When the news of Torm’s conversion to archon spread, a large number of other devas followed suit; all (except the most fanatical ones) who fought in the Abyss secretly admitted that blind obedience to traditions or orders led to capture, unimaginable torment and possibly damnation, so Torm’s fall opened the floodgates.

Newly converted archons proved even more dedicated to battling demons than natural ones, so former devas started to fill high positions in armies of Celestia. While the rank and file archons didn’t mind this turn of events at first, the Hebdomad of Celestia soon began giving command over archons to regular devas too. After a while, a great many positions of authority in armies of Celestia began to fill with exemplars of Arcadia, with natural archon commanders becoming a minority in their own hierarchy. Lord Moradin had gone off some time ago on some important errand, leaving the war against the Abyss in hands of the Hebdomad and it seemed that, as far as the seven paragons of Celestia were concerned, archons were better off taking orders from (ex-)devas. Archons knew that the exemplers of chaotic Upper Planes had all but laughed in the Hebdomad’s faces when they tried to assert authority over them as representatives of Moradin, and suspected they were exercising their authority on their own people unjustly to satisfy their wounded egos.

Meanwhile, Torm had no idea about the trouble brewing in the heavens and was fully focused on fighting demons. And was doing one of the best jobs at it too. Naturally, at some point even demons noticed that and he was assassinated. Respawning back in his new home Celestia (which he had never seen before), Torm asked for a short respite and was granted it. His fame preceded him among the archons, the Hebdomad officially accepted him into Sword (warrior) choir of archons with a great ceremony. Torm lived among the more peaceful ones for a time, trying to understand what being an archon of Celestia meant by observing Lantern (philosopher), Hammer (laborer), Tome (mage) and Word (judiciary) choirs. Everything he saw of Celestia’s brand of Lawful Good made him more certain that he’d been right to turn away from inflexible idealism of Arcadia and determined to fight harder against evil when he went back. That is, until he noticed the unrest among his own Sword choir about the prevalence of devas and converted devas in positions of authority in the war. He started to dig deeper and finally, with help of some archons particularly disgruntled with the Hebdomad, discovered their true purpose in adopting this policy.

Inspired by Torm himself, the Hebdomad was giving devas command and authority they were unprepared or unsuited to take. Exactly as Torm did, they were finding that trying to uphold uncompromising Arcadian ideals on a battlefield against demons led to defeat and suffering of their underlings, fostering a great deal of regret and anguish in them. This was pushing all such deva commanders towards converesion and there were detailed reports on each, profiling and tracking their mental states to predict the time tables for their transformations to archons. And more and more exemplars of Arcadia were joining up the armies of Celestia now, encouraged by the “respect” and “admiration” their fellows were getting for doing the “good work” in keeping the planes safe from demons. The very small losses of archons to demon torturers had been deemed acceptable when compared to the expected influx of converted devas from the program. It was utterly shocking and completely unbecoming of the so called paragons of Lawful Good. The Hebdomad had co-opted the King of the Mountain’s war against Chaotic Evil and were aiming to decimate the devas to swell the ranks of their own; effectively weaponizing the demons, the ostensible common enemy, for this selfish purpose.

This was a grave injustice, a gross violation of their station and a horrific betrayal against all that was Lawful Good; Torm wasn’t gonna let that stand, especially since because he had unwittingly inspired it. However, learning the Hebdomad’s true goal had a different effect on the more (for the lack of a better term) nationalistic archons accompanying him. They restrained the furious Torm and went to the Hebdomad and confessed what they’d done, for they had completely turned around and thought their paragons justified in their actions. The Hebdomad tried to persuade Torm to keep quiet; Torm himself had already admitted that archons were superior for battling evil by transforming into one, they claimed the mass conversion was for the greater good because, as Torm knew, exemplars of Upper Planes needed all the advantages they could get against the demonic threat. He refused, such trickery was against everything Celestia stood for and the Hebdomad were traitors to their own selves first, and to devas second. But hadn’t Torm himself utilized every trick he could think of against demons to ensure the safety of his underlings, had he also not sacrificed the few for the many on numerous occasions, wasn’t the Hebdomad doing exactly the same thing here? Except there was a great difference in doing what’s needed on the field of battle and scheming like a devil outside of it... After a long and fruitless argument about the position of Lawful Good in the idealism vs pragmatism scale, the Hebdomad imprisoned Torm in secret, he couldn’t be allowed to disrupt their plans.

It was a good, inescapable prison. Torm was securely bound with chains and wards, he couldn’t even twitch. This was to ensure he couldn’t possibly kill himself to respawn elsewhere and normally it should’ve worked to contain him indefinitely. Except Torm was no regular archon; he noticed his Arcadian ability to feed on zeal, courage and patience had also transformed with him, it was much slower than before but now the ambient goodness of Celestia was empowering him instead of his own virtues. Torm patiently sat in his hidden cell alone for decades, the irony wasn’t lost on him as he grew more and more powerful exactly like an imprisoned demon stewing in its own hatred and fury would, until he finally broke his bindings. He escaped his cell, then found his way to Arcadia. There, he gained an audience with the rulers of devas, the four Solars of the First Sphere. Unfortunately for Torm, one of the Hebdomad was waiting for him with the Solars, as his attempt to return home and warn his rulers was entirely too predictable. The archons had reported Torm disappeared long ago, lost in a battle with demons and now, much to Torm’s frustration, the Solars had been convinced that demonic tortures had transformed him to a fiend like had happened to so many other unlucky devas, and he was now here to execute some sort of fiendish plot. With the paragon of Tome archons there to coat him with illusions and cloud the minds of Solars, Torm had to fight his way out through legions of devas who were convinced he was a disguised rakshasa and fled Arcadia. The fact that he managed that was a testament to his incredible power.

Hunted by exemplars of Celestia and Arcadia alike, Torm fled to Astral Plane. Now his only recourse was to find Moradin and hope that he would be a just monarch deserving of service, one who would right the wrongs committed under his name. He scoured the multiverse, spending more years looking for King of the Mountain and evading his hunters, until finally he found him in the plane of Nirvana. Emperor of Artifice was building a vast, impossibly complex machine with his brother the Sun Father, and didn’t appreciate being distracted. But Torm had worked hard to get to this point and wouldn’t leave until he was heard. Moradin grudgingly listened and was extremely unhappy about what he heard. In fact, (after checking to see if Torm was telling the truth) he got so angry, he crafted the god of war Clangeddin using the scraps of the massive machine on the spot and tasked him to straighten out all the armies of celestials. Clangeddin went to do just that, he took over command of every celestial army by force, even bringing the Lion Marshall of Beastlands to heel, and imprisoned the Hebdomad in their own palaces, never again would they do anything except manage the internal affairs of their plane. Then Clangeddin seperated all exemplar armies and gave them different spheres of influences so that none of them would interfere with the others in the Abyssal wars (not that the chaotic celestials had ever paid much heed to what archons were saying but nevertheless). All converted archons were given a complete explanation of what had happened and given the choice of being turned back to devas or staying as is (most chose to go back).

As for Torm, Moradin granted a small measure of divinity to him and elevated him to a demigod of justice, service and reform, before banishing him out of Nirvana and erecting the Gearwall to make certain no aligned creature could ever enter again (the great Mechanus was almost ready and he had no intention of letting any exemplars know it was coming, even LG ones). Torm returned to Celestia and, when Clangeddin asked, choose to stay an archon. But he was now a hero, celebrated all over the Upper Planes as the paragon of Lawful Good after the Hebdomad’s betrayal and the Solars’ incompetence, even acknowledged by exemplars of chaos as a better example of LGness than the previous ones. Over time, Torm functionally became the ultimate authority in Lawful Good, greatly venerated by devas and archons alike, even Moradin is known to ask him for advice on the proper conduct of Lawful Good for especially tricky situations. Torm’s legendary exploits are many, including his eventual persuasion of Moradin to abandon the Abyssal wars completely after he recognized it only served to strengthen demons after a famous defeat at the tentacles of the Demon Prince of Demons (who had yet to give up on their ambition to conquer the Abyss). Somewhat to his chagrin, this act gained him the blessing and support of Dominus Infernus, who proclaims even to this day that Torm is the guy when it comes to being Lawful Good (not that it prevents him from trying to destroy or corrupt Torm). Asmodeus recognizes that if it wasn’t for his efforts, the professionals, the ones who actually had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning in the end (i.e. devils), might never have been allowed to handle the war against the Abyss; therefore Torm is the only being from Upper Planes who’s been promised safe passage among the Infernal Elite and gets invited to all the parties archdevils throw (he doesn’t go of course, cos he ain’t stupid). The ages he’s spent being the biggest damned hero of the multiverse didn’t go unnoticed by mortals of Material either, where Torm has gained a substantial number of paladin followers. He refuses to have mortal clerics or worshippers however, and forbids his paladins from trying to establish dogma or spread his faith because that would be against the ancient compact between Moradin and Pelor (Empress Berronar might’ve been breaking it left, right and center for centuries out of petty spite against deities of mortals but Torm won’t). Despite that, the number of Torm’s paladin followers has grown explosively as more and more mortals flock to his brand of Lawful Good, a vast majority of all mortal paladins follow him, and the gratitude their good works inspire tend to spill onto Torm as more divinity. Coupled with his reputation as the ultimate authority on Lawful Good in the Outer Planes, the reverence of mortals has pushed Torm into true divinity ages ago and despite his efforts to stay obscure on Material, he’s ascended to lesser deityhood.

Known throughout the multiverse as the heroes’ hero, Torm illicits strong reaction in all movers and shakers of the planes. There probably isn’t any force of evil or chaos left he hasn’t stymied at some point but he holds no grudges and helps out all in need, even demons can count on his support if they come to him with a cause he’ll deem good (usually involving ruining the day of other fiends). Torm believes there’s hope even for demons, for while it isn’t nearly as numerous as the other way round, he’s seen a number of fiends convert to celestials over his unimaginably long tenure as the god of justice and reform. But he’s picked up a few tricks by now, any evil being hoping to take advantage of his optimism inevitably finds that they’re going to be just another entry in the thousands long list of such villains who were outsmarted and humiliated by the Heroic Virtue. And while he spends most of his time travelling the multiverse looking for those in need of help, Torm recognizes his own importance as a symbol and avoids risking himself foolishly (such as trying to tangle with the likes of Gruumsh, Umberlee or Nerull in person), even if only to spare the multiverse from hearing the destruction of the paragon of Lawful Good.

Torm isn’t just a good guy, he’s the good guy and is respected/feared even by the vilest, cruelest and malevolest beings of the multiverse. His stalwart vigilance against evil shines brightly in a multiverse full of uncaring and petty powers and his existence as a beacon of hope is somewhat even more important than his endless heroic acts.

Now this here is a straight up superhero. Admittedly I've never liked Supes very much, but I tried to write this whole thing as a huge pile of WWSD?. It probably works to some acceptable degree. I've had this deva-archon conflict brewing in my mind for a very long time and it took me an embarrassingly long time to remember a god that'd fit. I blame Helm (and his stupid name) for this lapse.

Our man is no protector of the status quo, no siree. In fact, he's all about going up against it for goodness. And this being a made up story instead of some real world parable, he wins. Twice. It's a coincidence to come up right after the comment above, but I didn't want the good guy god (we were sorely missing one of those) to be yet another badass asskicker who kicked ass. So he's a peacemaker instead, a stopper of wars and conspiracies, an inspiration to everyone else. Course, he still kicks ass, but that's not his focus. Torm is here to know how to be a good guy and teach it to all who asks (and some who don't), ironically including the "Lord of Celestia". Comes from being an incarnation of pure good and law instead of being tainted with various mortal foibles like the rest of the deities.

Unrelatedly, Asmodeus wants to marry Glasya off to him for Law solidarity (and also to get rid of her millenia+ teen rebellion), but Torm, as mentioned repeatedly, ain't dumb.


Even more unrelatedly, if anyone has some old and/or famous DnD thing they particularly wish to see, mention it. It doesn't have to be a god; items, weird monsters, obscure locations, anything might prove inspiring. No delivery promise tho, and it also must be recognizibly DnD (by google if not by me).

[Fable Wright]

Asmodeus recognizes that if it wasn’t for his efforts, the professionals, the ones who actually had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning in the end (i.e. devils), might never have been allowed to handle the war against the Abyss;

It's funny, because Stygia. Seems like Asmodeus has a plan there...

But he’s picked up a few tricks by now, any evil being hoping to take advantage of his optimism inevitably finds that they’re going to be just another entry in the thousands long list of such villains who were outsmarted and humiliated by the Heroic Virtue.

...And now I'm picturing him as the true master of the Reverse Paladin's Dilemma. Placing fiends in situations where any course of action, even suicide, somehow advances the cause of Good, causing them to ascend.

Even more unrelatedly, if anyone has some old and/or famous DnD thing they particularly wish to see, mention it. It doesn't have to be a god; items, weird monsters, obscure locations, anything might prove inspiring.

Never forget the classics: Mimics, Treasure Bugs, Darkmantles, Cloakers, Gelatinous Cubes, and all the dungeon traps were probably made by the same guy.

I've always been interested in how Acheron, Rust Monsters, and Rust Dragons interact.

Maglubiyet is still waiting in his forgotten corner, and Redcloak seems busy with Xykon at the moment.

The Well of Worlds and Spheres of Annihilation are always interesting conversation pieces, especially together.

Kinda curious how you'd take on the Elder Evils; Pandorym, Father Lymic, and to a lesser degree Atropus are all pretty fun.

I don't believe you've taken on the Gith, and by extension, them being the original Gishes and their strange city on their corpse-god.

Then there are the overly egotistical giant magpie-lizards with hydrogen sacs inside them, but I doubt you particularly want to deal with those *******s.

Oh, and if you've got anything on how those random dungeons pop out of the ground fully formed and waiting for adventurers, those explanations are always fun.

[Beneath]

If you're taking requests, how about a patron god(dess?) of treants?

Also, seconding the Gith.

The Demonomicon is definitely cool. One of the things in this thread that's easily ported to people with limited knowledge of D&D because it's based on other tropes, which is great. I like Torm, too; it's good to know someone is Good for the sake of doing right by others.

[Fri]

Oh man that's good. It's rare to have a honest to good heroic story here without any bad twist.

(Though the Igglywiv story ends well if not "good")

[Yora]

Also, seconding the Gith.

Vlaakith perhaps?

[khadgar567]

If we choose gods for pantheon my vote goes to ishtar morigan fusion

[Pronounceable]

Muchos commentos.

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Mimics, Treasure Bugs, Darkmantles, Cloakers, Gelatinous Cubes, and all the dungeon traps were probably made by the same guy.

Yea, DoubleD. We've been there.

I've always been interested in how Acheron, Rust Monsters, and Rust Dragons interact.

Dragon? Whassat?

Maglubiyet is still waiting in his forgotten corner

No he's out and about, doing his three worlds per year gig.

The Well of Worlds and Spheres of Annihilation are always interesting conversation pieces

Google tells me Well of Worlds is a Planescape book with a bunch of adventures in it and not a place or thing. Maybe it's Wells of Darkness you're looking for?

Kinda curious how you'd take on the Elder Evils

More than one big Elder Evil would dilute it I think. Not that EEE hasn't spawned some crap that'd fit into old Howard's mythos.

the Gith, and by extension, them being the original Gishes and their strange city on their corpse-god

It seems too much of a coincidence that I'd've been preparing Gith before remembering Torm. Yet there we are.

Then there are the overly egotistical giant magpie-lizards with hydrogen sacs inside them, but I doubt you particularly want to deal with those *******s.

Yep, **** those guys.

Oh, and if you've got anything on how those random dungeons pop out of the ground fully formed and waiting for adventurers, those explanations are always fun.

Probably a wizard did it.

how about a patron god(dess?) of treants?

Emmantiensien seems, if such a thing is possible, more obscure than all the stuff we got here combined. He's about a hundred times more interesting than canon Silvanus tho, I'll give him that. I see potential with Yggdrasil-Rillifane-Seelie connections. Maybe he can make it.

It's rare to have a honest to good heroic story here without any bad twist.

You mean unique, as we haven't had a single one of those.

Vlaakith perhaps?

Yes, the Lich Queen's Beloved will indeed feature heavily when it's time to write some giths.

If we choose gods for pantheon my vote goes to ishtar morigan fusion

Sadly neither of those two have gained any good DnDisms of their own, leaving them in the lame league (alongside "Mulhorandi" and "Untheric" pantheons). They will not make it here, but bits and pieces of them can appear in various forms.

Also it's about time I shill a bit.
This blogger right there is doing a much more systematical and comprehensive version of what I've been doing here. He also doesn't hate dragons.
This page right here has a ****load of awesome info about various gods and silently have contributed quite heavily to this thread.
And this blog in particular is all kinds of greatness if you're looking for canonic DnD stuff and also done much good for this thread.

Look at this lot. They did good.

[Beneath]

The treant god is up there with the aboleth god (who you've also referenced but not done anything with) in obscure canon D&D gods I didn't know about. Forgotten Realms wiki has him as a red link one other minor deity's page. Greyhawk wikia has nothing, the Great Library of Greyhawk is giving me a PHP version error. I'm impressed that you even came back with "oh, yeah, there's a canon one of those, we wouldn't have to repurpose someone else for that" at all.

I think Treants have a lot of potential to be interesting (being reclusive hasn't stopped anything else from being campaign-defining) that goes mostly untapped, but this isn't the place for rewriting the monster manual.

[Pronounceable]

Forgotten Realms wiki has him as a red link one other minor deity's page. Greyhawk wikia has nothing, the Great Library of Greyhawk is giving me a PHP version error.

I just asked treant god to google, and it showed me a wikipedia quote from "fey deities" right on first page saying Emma is the guy. Haven't found all that much by googling his name later but identifying him wasn't a great feat of research. There's very little on him but it does have potential to go somewhere.

And speaking of rewriting the manual,


GITH (divinity), Warrior Queen, Great Savior
Domains: githyanki, githzerai, mindflayer genocide

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The githyanki are known as ruthless immortal pirates who plunder the multiverse from their strongholds in Astral Plane built atop corpses of gods. They’re strange creatures with even stranger manners, nursing an inexplicable grudge against mindflayers and their own seemingly identical cousins, the mad githzerai who live in Limbo and try to bring order to it. But their oddity runs so much deeper than most know, including themselves.

The most well known oddity of githyanki is their “immortality”. The same floating pirate ships manned by the same pirates will return again and again to attack settlements on Material no matter how many times they’re defeated, their ships destroyed and they themselves killed; not stopping until they’ve defeated the defenders and taken off with as much loot and captives as they first demanded for tribute on their first appearance. Killed githyanki and destroyed ships disappear, leaving nothing behind and captured ones kill themselves at the first opportunity too. This creates the impression of immortality and unlike most outsider or elemental beings, githyanki seem able to appear out of nowhere instead of having to enter Material through established and known portals. The truth of the matter is, as usually the case with the twin gith races, much weirder. The technique known as Astral projection (invented by genies who’re incapable of physically existing in Astral Plane and beyond) allows someone to create a magical replica of themselves on Astral with all qualities and abilities of their real self, even with the ability to travel to Outer Planes using planar pathways or portals, at the cost of leaving the real body comatose and defenseless until the projection is destroyed. Projecting is the safest way of entering Astral for mortals, who’re all but defenseless against the lethal side effects of timelessness in person. Despite appearances, the githyanki are mortal creatures and are just as vulnerable to timeshock as any mortal, they too will die instantenously after leaving Astral Plane after a long time (in a manner of speaking) as all the suspended requirements of mortality come crashing down as the flow of time on their body returns in force. It’s the Material projection invented by githyanki that gives them the appearance of immortality, letting them visit all the planes of the multiverse without dying to a horrifyingly painful mixture of suffocation, starvation, dehydration, exhaustion and rapid aging followed by endless pain as a wraith (an especially tortured form of disembodied undead created only by an extremely traumatic yet “natural” death, the only known phenomenon to cause it is the timeshock). They can Material project to pretty much anywhere they wish (but will need to use preexisting portals to send their plunder and captives back home).

The second most well known oddity of githyanki is their silver swords. Called Gish, these weird weapons are wielded only by the highest ranking githyanki warrior mages (also called Gish) and are somehow capable of harming divinities. In the hands of a true Gish, a silvered sword will cut through any and all godly defenses and could kill even the strongest of deities while on Astral Plane (Material projected copies can’t do this and no githyanki will let a real one get taken off Astral so long as they live). But for all its mysterious power, Gish swords provide no protection of any sort and even the flimsiest of deities is able to easily kill or incapacitate hordes of hostile Gish with relative ease in a confrontation. Nobody, not even gods have a clue how the swords work and all attempts to replicate the effect has failed. Just as incomprehensibly, the silver swords lose this ability when wielded by any being that’s not a Gish officially ordained by the Pirate Queen of Astral, the nominal ruler of githyanki race, in a grand ceremony. It’s generally accepted that their swords are the only reason githyanki can get away with blasphemously carving up corpses of gods in Astral to make their cities without divine retribution of some sort.

However the greatest oddity of githyanki is their reproduction, which should be impossible in their timeless plane. Without flow of time pregnancy (or egg laying in githyanki’s particular case), birth (hatching) or growth cannot happen. Yet the githyanki do reproduce to replenish their fallen and keep up their total population against the native threats (such as phase spiders). The big secret of githyanki, the true reason behind their endless lust for piracy, is the propagation of their species. They might look like taking valuables and slaves in their raids, but what they actually steal is life and all the treasures are simply neat bonuses. Captives of githyanki raids are strapped to the contraptions hidden in the deepest parts of their strongholds, where their lifespan is taken by the impossibly advanced machines githyanki call hypertime siphon chambers and transferred over to githyanki couples in the form of “simulated time”, letting them experience enough of a time flow to reproduce without suffering timeshock. The males finish up as quickly as possible and leave the females inside the machine, the females also try to lay their eggs as quickly as they can and leave to minimize their own aging. Eggs will hatch and the newborns will grow inside the hatchery rooms as long as there’s enough captives to keep the simulated time flowing. Of course the process is extremely inefficient, burning up hours of a captive’s lifetime for each second of simulated time and each new batch of githyanki adults requires dozens of captives from conception to maturity. The siphons stop working when the captive has run out of lifespan but, thanks to the timelessness, such captives don’t die (or even grow any older than they started). However they’re now technically dead and will become physically so the moment they leave Astral Plane (with an almost certain transformation to a tormented wraith), which the githyanki are kind enough to explain. Such captives are then given the choice between swift execution to avoid the eventual horrible timeshock death or endless slavery in githyanki cities, disbelievers (or slaves that later prove troublesome) get thrown out of Astral and will have the dreaded timeshock. Most slaves to githyanki eventually resort to suicide (out of boredom if nothing else) but there’s always more where they came from.

For all their factual weirdness, the myths of githyanki are even more weird. As they tell it, the githyanki are the saviors of the multiverse from the terrible mindflayers. Both gith races say that illithid liches of Astral despoiled the entirety of existence by finding ways of eating deities and, after consuming and ruining everything worthwhile irrevocably, built machines out of the corpses of the gods they’d killed to travel hundreds of thousands of years back in time to a pristine multiverse where they’d do it again. But the courageous People (who were still one people then, made by horrific genetic experimentations of illithids on creations of Pelor and Tiamat after their destruction) stole one god corpse and sabotaged the rest, leaving mindflayers to die with the multiverse they ruined as they set a new course for the machine to prevent the illithids from even getting started; coming down on and utterly destroying the unsuspecting mindflayer empire of Astral Plane before they could discover the secrets of lichdom and combine it with psionics for terrifying results. Thus ensuring the illithid liches will never come to be, the gith saved the multiverse and stopped their elven ancestors from getting genocided by mad science. Which would make no ****ing sense even to a slaad; for if they had prevented their own creation by time travel, they wouldn’t have existed to prevent their own creation, not to mention the alledged mindflayer plot couldn’t have worked either for the exact same reason. So gith races are considered to be the biggest liars and/or nutjobs of the planes by the rare few who’ve gotten friendly enough with them to hear their myths. Gish swords, the corpse of the unknown god Tu’narath (a deity that’s never existed far as anyone has found) their capitol is built on and the hypertime siphon chambers remain as inexplicable and resistant to understanding as they’ve ever been.

The story of Gith and Zerthimon is the point of great contention for the twin gith races. Both agree that Warrior Queen Gith was the leader of the uprising against the mindflayers and Wiseman Zerthimon was the brains behind her brawn, but their actual relation is shrouded in mystery. Whether they were good friends, grudging allies, lovers, siblings or frenemies, they had a big conflict after the fall of illithid empire. To hear githzerai tell it, Gith wanted to replace the mindflayer empire of Astral with themselves and Zerthimon tried and failed to save her and her followers from their folly. Githyanki, however, call Zerthimon covetous of Gith’s power and possibly a traitor under mindflayer influence who let the elder brains get away by causing a schism among the People. They came to blows after Zerthimon’s Pronouncement of Two Skies (a manifesto denouncing Gith as insane and unfit to lead) and both of them died in the end; the event broke the People in two, causing them to insist that they’re entirely different races now (despite being completely identical) and mortal enemies only slightly less hated than the flayers. Githyanki stayed in Astral to continue on the path Gith wanted, while githzerai left for the uninhabited plane of Limbo where they could construct a utopia of their liking without being beholden to anyone else, for there was no point in having to deal with timelessness now that mindflayer threat was averted.

Currently, the githyanki race is ruled by Vlaakith the 157th, the Pirate Queen of Astral. Like her 156 predecessors (more than 100 of which are still around as her council of advisors), she’s a lich queen: a hybrid of lich and deathknight with the most fearsome powers of both. The original one was the second in command of Gith herself and fell in battle against githzerai, but it was her will that established the rule of lich queens. The city of Tu’narath owes its relative safety and prosperity to its legion of lich queens, it’s one of the more infamous armies of the multiverse and armed with silver swords, can give pause even to gods themselves. Any time a female Gish manages to attain enough power to become a lich and a deathknight, she gets named Vlaakith and crowned as the newest queen while the previous one steps down and joins the council of other Vlaakiths. Vlaakith must take counsel from her predecessors on important matters (this usualy takes a lot of time) but the final decisions belong to her alone. Male Gish can’t become Vlaakiths but nothing is stopping them from becoming lich kings (except all the downsides of being undead). Any Gish can, upon getting enough magical or martial power, become a regular lich or a deathknight but those are slightly looked down upon for quitting halfway. After becoming undead, githyanki no longer fear timeshock and can leave Astral, even a few Vlaakiths have done that. But they’d have to give up their silver sword, those aren’t allowed to leave Astral under any circumstance, and many Gish feel it an integral part of their identity so stay with their live brethren.

Not even closest friends of githyanki are told where new silver swords come from, because even githyanki don’t know. Neither gith race knows how improbable they really are; for the undivided giths were the chosen people of Luminous Overmother, empowered by her at the cost of releasing the Naught That Was. Gith was touched by Selune, for Luminous Overmother was in despair over the twisted fate of her multiverse at mindflayer tentacles and conceded at that point it was better to let it fall into the Yawning Void below than continue in unending agony. Tu’narath’s paradoxical function was fulfilled only at the cost of literally everything, the unchained Allmother annihilated all that existed when Lady of Silver Tears directed all of her will towards taking the unnamed race led by Gith back to a point where the multiverse could be salvaged, leaving the two Overmothers alone in emptiness once again.

The touch of Overmother lingered in Gith’s soul and after she died, it transformed her body into a silvery, divine metal infused with a tiny bit of Selune’s own omnipotency. After placing Gith’s transmuted body in an extravagantly built tomb on Tu’narath, Vlaakith the First thought to craft a sword from Gith’s metal body as a symbol of the violent conquest she dreamed of, unwittingly chaining the omnipotent bit of divinity before her to that idea. The first silver sword appear in Gith’s hands at that moment, shaped into existence by Vlaakith’s thoughts and she saw it as a sign from Gith. More swords keep forming in silvery hands of Gith at set intervals, all with an unmatched ability to hurt and kill gods, bound to whoever takes it from there. The official ordaining of the Gish is simply mimicking the original Vlaakith’s taking of the sword from the hands of the ancient “statue” of Queen Gith (only brought out for such special occasions) surrounded by a mass of confusing ceremony to obscure the simplicity of attuning to silver swords (and give some mystical import to Vlaakith). Gith’s soul lives (for lack of a better term) trapped inside her corpse, unnoticed even by Vlaakiths, and is furious for the utter waste githyanki made of the omnipotency in their hands and the idiocy of gith races in splitting. She’s waiting for a worthy member of the People to appear, one who isn’t such an idiot as the damned Vlaakiths; one that’ll be worthy of speaking to and granting the virtually infinite divine power lying dormant inside her. The divinity Gith can grant would make anyone into a peer of Overmothers’ children instantly but she has no control over it herself and has to sit and watch it get wasted on making petty trinkets. She’d rather sit silently for eternity than let someone unworthy take Luminous Overmother’s power, though.

Completely unaware how disappointing they are to their revered ancestor, most githyanki live as bands of roaming pirates who raid Material and other Outer Planes, trying to take as much treasure and captives as they can manage before they return to their cities to offload the loot and enjoy some comforts of civilization. Such bands are usually led by a Gish and might contain more than one in high positions. These dreaded pirates are at their most vulnerable at the end of their raids, where their projections need to send their booty to Astral through an existing portal where their real selves will take over, making them weak on both sides for having to divide the crew and no githyanki on either side can cross to the other if anything happens. Anyone making a move at this moment has the best chance of slaughtering githyanki and capturing their ship. Such defeats are generally the leading cause of death to the ageless githyanki and necessitates more reproduction to restore their population (aka even more raiding, thus more risk).

The githyanki society, while living in their cities atop (or inside) corpses of gods, is maternal and while males aren’t discriminated against, all dangerous jobs in githyanki cities and actual fighting in Astral is done by them on account of their physical superiority, for female githyanki have to grow older faster due to hypertime siphon chambers. This makes their society comprise mostly of middle aged women and young adult men, at least in appearance (most githyanki refuse to reproduce after reaching a certain physical age, which is traditionally a lot higher for females, but their actual ages are on average the same [aka ageless]). Such distinction doesn’t exist for raider bands seen throughout the planes, where no githyanki is particularly more endangered than another.

Meanwhile, mindflayers haven’t the foggiest idea why or how some weird elf-reptile things have mysteriously appeared out of nowhere and destroyed their (somewhat) peaceful civilization in Astral dedicated to science and progress, and drove them into Material Plane, where they had to start infesting bodies of sentient beings with their tadpoles to reproduce (after death of every single natural adult of their species) and eat their brains to survive. The few who have heard of the gith legend would dismiss it as trolling, if they had words for it.

I did mention I was doing this just before Torm. And is totally rewriting githyanki entry of MM. We've been kinda doing that, what with duergar and goblinoids and demodands and rakshasi and shadar-kai and so on.

So. Everyone knows the silly time traveling mindflayers from the grimdark future of the 40th millenium story. Maybe it's not really silly but watching Flash and Legends of Tomorrow has surgically removed my ability to take time travel even slightly seriously. Anyway, it didn't really fit our stuff here, with Tiamat making all abominations one by one, but if DnD gives you lemons, you make lemonade. So giths got that instead and when that happened, I had to justify it somehow. It'd have to take something really big because I've disallowed even Shar from ****ing with time despite being literally omnipotent just so we wouldn't have to deal with time paradox crap. Therefore, this.

Also, the timelessness quality of Astral is criminally underused. Sure canon has few lines here and there saying githyanki have small hideouts in Prime to raise their kids but taking literally the easiest way out imaginable is lame as all hell. We're not writing Flash episodes here >_> This also helped convince me to use the time travel thing, it stands to reason various things that muck with time should be lumped together.

Also also, the silver swords. They were just mediocre and didn't deserve nearly the amount of obsession githyanki had for them. Fixed that too.

I daresay this is one of the coolest entries I've written up, maybe even better than Demonomicon (not as cool as Auril tho, nothing will be that cool). It was another frenzy of writing thing that I spent a block of many hours on. Those are the best ones. It's also pretty long without any sign of Douchenozzle, so I'm breaking all sorts of grounds here.

[Fri]

Okay, at first I find the story weird (blandly weird? weirdly bland? is that a phrase?) but that last paragraph cinches it.

Though, even before reading that last paragraph one sentence caught my attention.

(Wraith is)an especially tortured form of disembodied undead created only by an extremely traumatic yet “natural” death, the only known phenomenon to cause it is the timeshock

I wonder what other death can possibly creat wraith, since I like to imagine there's a reason why they're called "wraith" and not say, "time ghost." In fact, a death worthy of wraithification that's not a time shock might be worth a story of its own.

[Pronounceable]

^Because time wraiths.Not sorry.

And it cinches it as weird or cinches it as bland? Cos weird is , bland is .

[Fri]

Cinches it as great.

I mean. "this story seems strangely too normally written" then last paragraph, BAM! that's the moneyshot.

also I guess it's true that Time Wraith For No Man.

[Fable Wright]

I wonder what other death can possibly creat wraith, since I like to imagine there's a reason why they're called "wraith" and not say, "time ghost." In fact, a death worthy of wraithification that's not a time shock might be worth a story of its own.

Drowning. It's about as horrific and traumatic as you can get, and entirely natural.

where their lifespan is taken by the impossibly advanced machines githyanki call hypertime siphon chambers and transferred over to githyanki couples in the form of “simulated time”, letting them experience enough of a time flow to reproduce without suffering timeshock.

So, to confirm, we have life-siphoning devices, dread pirates, and true love all in one sentence here.

Have you been watching the Princess Bride recently, by any chance?

Thus ensuring the illithid liches will never come to be, the gith saved the multiverse and stopped their elven ancestors from getting genocided by mad science. Which would make no ****ing sense even to a slaad; for if they had prevented their own creation by time travel, they wouldn’t have existed to prevent their own creation,

Gohan: Multiverse theory?
Trunks: Multiverse theory.

she’s a lich queen: a hybrid of lich and deathknight with the most fearsome powers of both.

On first reading, I'd thought she was just a deathknight whose sentient armor happened to be a lich. Kill her, destroy the armor, and the armor regenerates from the phylactery, she regenerates from the armor. She touches you with the armor's hand, you get the lich's paralyzing touch, making it seem like she's somehow both types of undead. The gith males would be the ones who learned to make (or become) the lich-armor, making it a more egalitarian society rather than its seeming matriarchal roots.

Ah well. I'll save that headcanon for my home games.

Meanwhile, mindflayers haven’t the foggiest idea why or how some weird elf-reptile things have mysteriously appeared out of nowhere and destroyed their (somewhat) peaceful civilization in Astral dedicated to science and progress, and drove them into Material Plane, where they had to start infesting bodies of sentient beings with their tadpoles to reproduce (after death of every single natural adult of their species) and eat their brains to survive. The few who have heard of the gith legend would dismiss it as trolling, if they had words for it.

Pure poetry.

[Beneath]

Very nice. Vlaakith being like Caesar, something between a name and a title, is a nice touch, as is the fact that Gith has her own ideas and goals for the people and thinks they're dreaming too small, even though they're doing the thing every GM is scared their players will do with astral projection to become the terror of the material.

In a plot twist, will their destruction of the initial Illithid empire in the astral lead to the illithids creating their cosmos-spanning empire in the future, causing the Overmothers together to send the Gith back? Are they a stable time loop, or the survivors of a branch timeline that now cannot happen? Does anyone know the answer?

(kinda reminds me of my gnome backstory, where the gnomes send a scientific expedition on a one-way trip back in time into the oldest gnome ruins ever discovered to observe the creation of their species, but when they crack open the vault their explorers were to use as a time capsule, they find logs stating the mission was a failure: there were gno gnomes, and the children of the original expedition have decided to abandon it, despite the risk of changing the timeline. These gnomes who abandoned their mission and spread over the primordial world are of course the ancestors of all present-day gnomes. because creating themselves in a stable time loop is exactly the kind of thing gnomes would do)

[Pronounceable]

Have you been watching the Princess Bride recently, by any chance?

Guess it says a lot about me that the concept of love (true or otherwise) didn't even twitch in my mind while writing about reproduction of a fantasy species living outside time. I definitely have no romance in my soul.

On first reading, I'd thought she was just a deathknight whose sentient armor happened to be a lich.

That's kinda more awesome than my fighter/wizard > deathknight/lich idea. But it also sounds to be a cooler thing for one particular baddie instead of an entire dynasty.

Vlaakith being... something between a name and a title, is nice

Vlaakith the 157th is the canonic gith queen during Lich Queen's Beloved. It's one of the cooler and hipper bits about yankis that needed to be included.

Are they a stable time loop, or the survivors of a branch timeline that now cannot happen?

Luminous Overmother works in mysterious ways.

gnomes

Gnomey indeed. Also rad.


Speaking of souls and romance, today we're trodding some extremely well trodden ground. In fact it might be the single most trodden bit of ground ever trodden well. Also we've had a load of demon stuff so this was only a matter of time.


DANTE ALGIERNI (petitioner), the Magnificent Poet
13458-13502 (ME)

Spoiler

Show

Dante Algierni was the spoiled son of a rich noble who spent his days spending daddy’s money on frivolities. At some point, he decided that he was going to be a great poet to impress ladies and started scribbling poems. Despite spending a lot of money on tutors and books, Dante found he wasn’t getting much in the way of recognition and chalked that up to people’s inability to understand his artistic genius. In time, he got mixed up with other bored rich dilettantes and found himself affiliated to a bunch of diabolists. Since Dante hadn’t seen a bad idea in his life that he hadn’t immediately wanted to latch on, he decided to become a powerful diabolist commanding legions of devils and show those plebs who refused to acknowledge his greatness.

He proved more adept at diabolism than poetry and was accepted into the lowest circle of the cult (with his grand power of controlling one imp). The familiar was doing his job, encouraging Dante towards more lawful evil behavior and he grew meaner in his daily life (such as not thanking the servants when they brought his meals). The imp was certain he’d get this particular mortal damned to Inferno in a few decades and possibly earn himself a promotion if he could nudge the wretch to properly use the vast wealth of his family. Unfortunately for the tiny devil, a mighty angel from Elysium took pity upon the mortal and came down to help him.

Dante was shocked by the sudden appearance of a celestial and upset that his familiar was vanquished. She introduced herself as Virgilia and explained him that she was here to save his eternal soul from damnation. And she would do that properly, by showing Dante what Inferno was truly like when stripped bare of the lies of devils and diabolists. This had all the signs of a bad idea about it, so Dante immediately agreed to be bodily taken to the plane of devils.

Thus started the grand journey of a poet that would reveal the inner workings of Infernal Hierarchy to the multiverse at large.

Virgilia first took Dante to Avernus the First Circle, the outermost and largest of the nine concentric circles that made up the infinite plains of Inferno. Ruled by Archduke Bel, Avernus was a land of barracks and armories patrolled by legions of devil warriors against intruders (such as Dante and Virgilia). It was here that Virgilia taught Dante the true purpose of devilkind, to assemble in grand armies and to venture into the Abyss to fight demons that would devour everything if allowed, so that the good exemplars of Upper Planes could stay untainted by war. Dante was exceedingly impressed, for the power of devils was palpable here in their monuments and engines of war, their legions shone with great purpose (and infernal weaponry). Virgilia’s powers hid them from devil patrols as they made their way deeper; crossing Avernus and seeing the might of Infernal Hierarchy with his own eyes, eavesdropping on devil soldiers talking about great victories and bitter defeats against the demons, had convinced Dante he’d been but a wretch that would distract these noble defenders of the multiverse with his petty grudges. Virgilia didn’t comment when Dante proclaimed he’d become a much better diabolist when he went back, one that’s dedicated to the infernal cause and doing his own part to protect existence. Instead, she led him towards Bronze Citadel, the castle of Archduke Bel, and together they snuck into an underground cave near it. Here Dante found a surprise; a great and terrible lady of devils was bound in this tiny, nondescript cave. Virgilia introduced him to archdevil Zariel, the former Archduchess of Avernus, who was happy to have any company after millenia of isolation, even a mortal wretch and some celestial harlot, and would trade words. She told Dante how Lord Bel is the golden child of Inferno, a rare devil that started as a lowly lemure and worked his way to the top and how his unstoppable rise ruined Zariel. Zariel had been a mighty warrior and brilliant general, utterly devoted to her duties and had never made a single mistake, yet she’d been cast aside just because someone else turned out to be even better at the job. Such was the gratitude one could expect from devils but Dante was unswayed, the noble nature of the war against demons justified this cost. Archdevil Zariel laughed at that, it was her own motto back in her day.

Virgilia then led the way to Dis the Second Circle, the grand metal city of devils that seemed to be infinite in size. It was a city of unmatched dread and splendor in equal measure, streets thronging with all manner of fiends from all the Lower Planes who came here to trade. Dante was shocked to see even a few demons were roaming freely here, buying and selling items of incomprehensible nature, shadowed by devils that Virgilia called osyluths, the spies/agents/assassins of Archduke Baalzebul in charge of keeping peace within Inferno. All streets and buildings were made of a pure green metal that Virgillia called infernal green steel, a magical substance capable of harming all manner of fiends (even tiger tyrants of Acheron), extracted from the mining tunnels running under the city. Archduke Dispater ruled the city, he was the oldest lord of devils (predating even the Emperor of Devils). Virgilia explained that Dispater is the father of the art that mortals call alchemy, he invented the infernal green steel back in the Dawn War and used it to outfit his soldiers and become the very first ruler Inferno had seen; Dispater was also the first devil to swear his fealty to Dominus Infernus when he appeared. Today, he controlled all the factories and foundries of Inferno where craftsdevils and their slave workers built weapons of war and oppression. As the oldest and most entrenched lord of devils, Dispater is the most secure of all Archdukes and even Asmodeus would probably fall before he did. Dante then visited the green steel mines and weapon factories, still hidden by Virgilia’s power, and saw the slaves toiling endlessly to feed the infinite hunger of devilish war effort for more weapons. There was little glory in the hellish working conditions but devil overseers didn’t seem to mind, they were content enough to whip and cut their slaves. Dante was disturbed; the slaves were working themselves to death already, then they respawned and did it again and again, the burning whips and barbed blades didn’t seem very necessary. Virgilia showed him a familiar face, it was one of the cultists Dante had known who’d died a little while ago. He revealed the secrets of devilish arms to Dante, the infernal enchantments on weaponry of devils were crafted by the relentless oppression of their slaves and the more opression and pain went into creation of a devilish weapon, the more powerful it ended up. Virgilia assured Dante there was no way to save the wretched cultist’s soul, he’d signed away his soul for a bit of fleeting power in life and now it belonged to Archduke Belial forever, like all other foolish mortals who thought to get the better of devils. As they left the damned cultist begging to be saved behind, she asked Dante if the noble nature of the war against demons justified this cost. His certainty was shaken and he didn’t answer as they left the Iron City behind.

The pair entered Minauros the Third Circle, the corrosive bogs under Archduke Mammon’s jurisdiction. This was the beating heart of Inferno’s economy, as Virgilia called, the place of endless suffering from which the devils extract their precious Mammbrosia, the concentrated liquid pain, the currency of Infernal Hierarchy. Far as devils are concerned, the so called “precious” gems and metals are useless, pointless objects, only good for tempting stupid mortals who don’t recognize what value really means. Devils know value means power and all its forms to uphold tyranny and oppression, not petty shinies that aren’t even useful in a fight, and thus use the most direct form of oppression as their currency: infliction of pain. The Golden Duke of Minauros is another member of the “old guard” like the Iron Duke of Dis, an ancient lord of devils that predates the establishment of the Hierarchy by the hand of Lord Asmodeus. His own unique invention Mammbrosia (like all old school devils, modesty isn’t exactly Mammon’s strong point) grants great power to fiends that consume it and Lord Mammon had used it to stengthen his troops and conquer his own realm back during the Dawn War, becoming enemies with neighboring Lord Dispater. But today, the two oldest lords were close allies and they controlled vitually all of Infernal economy between them. Virgilia then led Dante to an excruciatorium, a factory of pain where damned mortals are eternally tortured to distill Mammbrosia. Dante was sickened at the sight of the infernal mint and begged Virgilia to take him away from this horrid place, starting to realize that this might be where he’s gonna end up if he stays on the diabolist path. He refused to visit the Sinking Stone City where Archduke ruled from or witness a ritual of promotion where a devil is transformed painfully into a higher rank by imbibing massive amounts of Mammbrosia. Virgilia obliged him and let them move on, she seemed happy that Dante was beginning to understand the folly of dealing with devils.

Next was Phlegethos the Fourth Circle, the most stereotypical realm of Inferno covered with volcanoes, lava lakes and blasted sulphurous wastelands. This was domain of Archduke Belial, the lord in charge of corrupting mortals and immortals alike. Almost every diabolist cult of Material is ultimately tied to Lord Belial and his archdevil courtiers, no matter how lowly an imp they think they’re dealing with, and every deal and contract mortals make with devils ultimately fall under his jurisdiction (including what Dante’s own imp familiar was nudging him towards). Belial is also the chief diplomat and negotiator of Inferno when dealing with powers of other planes. As a result, Phlegethos is the most open circle of Inferno to outsiders and is the reason why most denizens of the planes think all of Inferno is a burning wasteland of sulphur and lava. Dante wanted to know more about this circle, his terror at seeing his potential fate in an excruciatorium was waning in the domain of his would-be patron and his thoughts were turning again towards what he might personally get out of dealing with devils. However Virgilia was anxious, her powers might not have been enough to hide them here, Phlegethos devils were intimately familiar with outsiders and threat of detection was high. But Dante insisted, so Virgilia reluctantly took him towards the city of Abriymoch where Archduke Belial and his consort daughter Lady Fierna rule. That bit seemed interesting to Dante, so Virgilia explained that no, Fierna isn’t Belial’s daughter or concubine (since devils don’t and can’t reproduce) and it simply means she’s been taken in by the Archduke as an advisor and being groomed as his successor in the event of his downfall. This causes a lot of disdain for Belial, especially from the old guard who claim the millenia of dealing with mortals corrupted him. The existence of this “daughter” can only mean Belial is either planning to step down (certain madness) or deliberately cultivating a rival to his own power (certain stupidity), yet nobody is entirely certain which is true. Dante was a professional spoiled rich boy and lived for this celebrity/nobility gossip column crap and kept pestering Virgilia about more infernal politics trivia.

Speaking of the devils proved unwise however; the pair were found by archfiend Fierna herself (who’d heard her own name being spoken by foreign mouths in her domain). She had them captured and bound, then decided to have a little chat with this puny mortal who’d dare talk behind her back inside her own lands. Dante couldn’t decide whether to be aroused or terrified by the attentions of the incredibly beautiful archdevil (and did both) but he introduced himself as a novice diabolist and tried to learn more about devilish deals and what he might get for himself. Fierna summoned the imp familiar he’d had and listened to what he had to say about this uppity mortal. She seemed satisfied and impressed (which was of course an act that even Dante wasn’t dumb enough to fall for, he knew he was yet a crappy diabolist), then offered to promote Dante straight into a greater devil upon his death in return for eternal loyalty to Fierna. While Virgilia was bound and gagged, Dante could see her frantic squirming in the background and recognized the flaw in this offer; he asked if she meant eternal loyalty to her father, earning himself a furious smack that almost killed him. He wouldn’t die however, death would be an escape, Fierna wanted this obnoxious mortal scum to suffer much more and healed his wound so fast, Dante wasn’t certain if he’d even been hit or just afflicted by some sort of mental trick. Instead, she sent for some excruciarchs (as torturer devils were called) from the nearest excruciatorium. Fierna wanted to make Dante watch as they gave the angel a proper Infernal welcome and think about what was in store for him, she also made certain to inform him that if he hadn’t been a loudmouthed idiot invoking the names of devil nobles willy nilly, the brave Virgilia who only wanted to save his soul wouldn’t be getting damned to an eternity of torture now. Dante was left weeping as Fierna went to do devil things until the torturers arrived. His old familiar stayed nearby, taunting Virgilia who’d cost him Dante’s soul. Unfortunately for the tiny devil (again), she was quite a powerful agnel and only Fierna herself posed a danger to her here, which was why she’d stuck to being the distressed damsel until the archdevil went away. The imp was incinerated by holy light once more, along with the orthon and hamatula devils that made up Lady Fierna’s personal guard, and Virgilia carried Dante off to the relative safety of the next Circle.

Stygia the Fifth Circle would protect them from Fierna’s and even Belial’s (if Fierna would be humble enough to ask him for help) wrath, for it’s the icy realm of Archduke Levistus and the whole domain was frozen solid after his betrayal of Dominus Infernus. Virgilia assured Dante that they were safe here, for all archdevils in Levistus’ court were also frozen with him after he assassinated Domina Infernus Bensozia, the beloved wife of the Emperor of Devils, and the regular devils of Stygia were completely unused to outsiders and had no way of overcoming Virgilia’s hiding veil. Their close brush with death left behind, Dante once again started asking Virgilia about infernal gossip. She was an endless well of such things, and told Dante about the great civil war that raged a scant few centuries ago in Inferno, called the Infernal Reckoning, where the “old guard” among devil nobility squared off against the “new guard”, triggered by the sudden murder of Devilish Empress by a terrible artifact known as the Allmother’s Eye, which irrevocably annihilated her. The artifact belonged to Archduke Levistus, who used to use it as part of his duty as the maintainer of morale and discipline in Inferno by permenantly destroying troublesome or rebellious devils. Enraged Asmodeus froze Lord Levistus and all his court, thus offending Archdukes Dispater, Mammon and Mephistopheles who were all ancient devil lords predating the Hierarchy like Levistus. They demanded Dominus Infernus release Levistus and give him a chance to explain himself. Archdukes Bel, Belial and Baalzebul opposed them, saying Lord Asmodeus was their master and had the right to do whatever he pleased (such as, in a totally unrelated example, giving important positions to unorthodox and/or young devils like Bel, Belial and Baalzebul). Asmodeus himself was pretty silent then, he’s known to have a strange sense of sentimentality at oddest times and was presumed to be in mourning, which allowed Heres Infernus Glasya to stoke the tensions on both sides. The Infernal Princess wanted to see everything burn down to avenge her mother and didn’t particularly care who was guilty, or so it seemed at the time.

Dante and Virgilia had reached the border of Stygia then, they had passed all of frozen Circle without encountering anything, completely absorbed in their conversation. Virgilia’s demeanor had grown warmer and warmer and she positively glowed now, she clearly enjoyed talking about failings of devils and Dante was an avid consumer of petty gossip (though she’d probably been using her aura of light to protect Dante from freezing to death, which is what should’ve happened immediately upon entering Stygia). Virgilia suddenly stopped and asked Dante if he learned the lesson of Stygia, which was unexpected. He looked back to the frozen hellscape and thought about their long walk full of amusing but ultimately empty banter, noticing that he had indeed learned something else about the nature of Inferno. Dante told Virgilia he learned that the cold and empty truth of devils was too easily eclipsed with entertaining diversions that they were experts at providing, even a holy and pure being like Virgilia just talking about their quite interesting history could become a cover for infernal happenings under right circumstances. She seemed to take offense at his words and huffed at him, but Dante could tell by now when she was happy despite looking angry and when she really was angry at him despite looking unperturbed for saying dumb crap (like he’d done back in the first Circles). Virgilia warned him that they were now entering the deeper Inferno, where things were more convoluted and the nature of evil became less tangible.

Then the pair entered Malbolge the Sixth Circle, the contested realm. As Virgilia said, now evil was taking a much more abstract form, for Malbolge belonged to Heres Infernus Glasya now. Her apparent destructive rage at her mother’s assassination had turned out to be not entirely real in the end and she had used the chaos created by the Archdukes fighting one another to depose the previous Archduchess of Malbolge and crown herself. They travelled through the ruined buildings dotting the barren landscape where devils were being punished in ways that didn’t seem at all punishing to Dante, for the ruler of Malbolge is traditionally in charge of discipline and devilish understanding of crime and punishment is much different from mortals. Virgilia explained that while these devils sitting around or doing light errands might seem much better off than the tortured petitioners they’ve seen on the previous Circles, being forced to do nothing evil or lawful is as distressing to them as torture is to mortals. Repairing buildings, playing with cards or dice or stones, collecting fruits, cooking, making clothing, digging trenches, carrying supplies and all the normal activities of life was unbearable to the average devil. The worst of all, however, was having to help each other complete their tasks, said Virgilia. That’s when Dante noticed that some devils were indeed pausing their own errands to help others with theirs, the likes of which he hadn’t seen anywhere else in Inferno. There were no overseers abusing them to work faster or harder either, the entire realm could pass for a collection of entirely normal towns and villages if it wasn’t wholly populated with devils, but the atmosphere of this Circle was far more grim than any that came before it, these devils were Unhappy. Feeling that it’s time he contributed a bit to his own salvation, Dante said the evil of this Circle had to be dissatisfaction and resentment bred by the banal necessities of life. Spoken like a true rich dilettante who’d had everything delivered on a silver platter all his life, pointed out Virgilia, but she was still pleased at his effort. She then took Dante to an especially dilapidated yet massive building, which must’ve been a palace at some point. Inside Dante met another former Archduchess, Malagard the Hag Countess, who appeared to have been dissected neatly and had her pieces spread out like a picture out of anatomy books before a broken throne. It somehow didn’t bother him at all (maybe it was the lack of screaming and begging and lack of gleeful torturers nearby that made it a better sight than the excruciatorium).

At Virgilia’s urging, she told her story to Dante (not like she had anything better to do). Converted devils don’t normally advance too high, doubly so for enslaved exemplars converted to devildom by mindbreaking torture, but this former succubus had managed to become an archdevil by the skin of her fangs and joined the court of Lord Geryon, the original Archduke of Malbolge ages ago. All archdevils dream of toppling Asmodeus one day and taking his place but Geryon was the only one dumb enough to not only speak openly about it, but to challenge Dominus Infernus to a duel where their stations would be wagered. This made him the most unpopular devil in the history of Inferno, for even the old guard who resented all the modernities Asmodeus brings have never rebelled against him. There are some lines that one does not cross, at least if one is a true devil (at least according to Lord Dispater, the voice of conservatism itself), and rising up against your rightful liege whom you’ve sworn to serve for eternity is one of them. Geryon didn’t care, he was arrogant, certain of his own considerable power and hated Asmodeus with a deep passion. So risked his own lofty position as the leader of Internal Infernal Affairs (known as watchers of the watchmen) for it. Of course he was defeated in front of the entire devilish nobility, Dominus Infernus can never be felled so long as he has his Ruby Rod, and Geryon was exiled from Inferno in disgrace. Then suddenly Hag Countess Malagard (still called that despite having been converted long ago and loyally serving Inferno ever since) was appointed as Archduchess of Malbolge, becoming the least secure ruler of Inferno due to the deplorable actions of her predecessor, on top of the ordinary planist prejudices she’d had to deal with ever since converting. As a result of her insecurity and lack of influence, she didn’t dare to pick a side in the Reckoning and tried to hunker down, which let the treacherous Princess Glasya defy all traditions and Pact Primeval itself to usurp her without any interference from other Archdukes (who were too busy fighting each other). Dante asked what that was, but Malagard was too absorbed in her story to notice, she kept spewing bile about the usurping demon bastard and her accursed turncoat mother who brought ruin to Inferno. As Malagard’s rant became viler and more disturbing, Virgilia motioned for them to leave. The dissected archdevil didn’t even notice them going and was still venting at Archduchess Glasya as they exited the ruined palace. Virgilia said “punishment” once then nothing else as they walked, maybe she knew Dante was remembering swearing to punish all the plebs who hadn’t recognized his artistic genius.

Maladomini the Seventh Circle was next and it seemed more fantastic than all the terrible vistas Dante had seen until now. Archduke Baalzebul was the ultimate perfectionist and had personally reconstructed his realm stone by stone. The result was this incredibly beautiful landscape that Virgilia assured him could give all the Upper Planes a run for their money. Not a single blade of grass stood out or stooped low, not one bit of mud marred the roads, every single geographical feature was flawlessly geometric from rivers to mountains. This perfectionism stemmed from Lord Baalzebul’s past as a deva of Arcadia, explained Virgilia, one who had been captured by demons and twisted until he broke. But even demonic tortures (that Virgilia assured Dante would make what he’s witnessed in excruciatoriums look like bliss) couldn’t break Baalzebul’s dedication to law, so they ransomed him to Infernal Hierarchy once he converted to a devil. After he was officially accepted into Inferno, Baalzebul dedicated himself to philosophy of lawful evil, obsessively studying to become the foremost expert of it and he rose swiftly. The converted deva faced much less prejudice than the Hag Countess, for he was both male and of lawful origin. Just like another, more famous former deva did for lawful good, Baalzebul was eventually recognized even by the old guard as the most lawful evil creature in existence and was promoted to Archduke of Maladomini, the head of Infernal Intelligence and spymaster of Dominus Infernus. Virgilia took Dante straight to Grenpoli, the magnificent crystal city from which Lord Baalzebul runs his domain, saying that it’s impossible to hide from Lord of the Flies in his realm and he already knows they’re there. Virgilia needed to meet him and get his permission to continue deeper with Dante. Thus Dante met his first (reigning) Infernal Archduke. Like all devils, Lord Baalzebul was a red skinned humanish creature with batlike wings and a tail but his eyes had been replaced by oversized, multifaceted gems that made them look like a fly’s. He forbade Virgilia from speaking, he’d already heard everything they’ve spoken about since they entered his realm, and asked Dante what he expected to accomplish with this journey. Dante answered he hoped to learn the true nature of Inferno and begged to be allowed to continue so he can see the deepest truths. Baalzebul questioned him further, asking about what he’s learned so far. It felt too much like an exam before a tutor but Dante was only terrible at making decisions, not learning or remembering things. He talked about all the lessons he’d learned from previous Circles; importance of a noble façade, willingness to hurt others for gain, ruthlessness in pursuit of exploitation, essential nature of seduction/manipulation, cold emptiness of the truth behind the façades and cycles of punishment and resentment propagating themselves. Baalzebul seemed pleased, then asked what Dante learned from his perfect and pristine domain, as Dante had feared he would. He couldn’t dare to look at Virgilia, so had no way of even trying to guess what she thought, so after what felt like an eternity, Dante answered “self awareness”. Archduke Baalzebul’s perfectionism was just a trait, a quirk of his personality that didn’t have anything to do with the truths of Inferno; it was his dedication to lawful evil that mattered, that was what got him his Duchy and that was why he had questioned Dante about truths of Inferno (which were of course the truths of lawful evil). One had to be aware of their true nature, not make excuses for it or try rationalizing their actions as something other than evil. Only then could someone embrace and internalize lawful evil fully and be a proper servant and practitioner, and only a self aware servant could work in the most efficient manner to spread an alignment. Like Lord Baalzebul had just done by spending his valuable time to check if some random mortal learned the correct truths from Circles of Inferno, why else would he not simply kill Dante as soon as he arrived and go back to his own affairs?

Baalzebul was satisfied and granted Dante passage. Then, as if to remind the pair he was still an Infernal Archduke, he told them they were free to continue deeper into Inferno but the angel would be captured and tortured until she converts if she came back here when their journey ends. She could leave right now and let the mortal continue on alone, or go on with him and be trapped in the last two Circles of Inferno forever (or fail to fight her way out and suffer an eternity of unimaginable torment). Dante asked her to leave him, he wasn’t worthy of such a sacrifice, but Virgilia was a being of pure good and determined to not leave a salvation half done at any cost. Dante begged Baalzebul, who told them to move on before he got angry, he’d spoken and didn’t care what they’ll choose to do. On their way to the border of Maladomini, Dante kept begging Virgilia to save herself; he was a dumb mortal who’d damned himself out of petty stupidity and something as pure and beautiful as Virgilia shouldn’t have to pay for it. Virgilia said nothing, gently but firmly shook off his hands when he tried to stop her, and when they came to the border of darkened Cania, she walked right in. He had no course but to follow then, for she had damned herself for his sake and nothing he could do now could change it.

Cania the Eigth Circle was a big change after the perfectly utopic looking Maladomini. For one, it was small; Dante could see Maladomini encircling it fully. All horizons were Maladomini here, creating a strange sense of confinement despite being a massive open space. And it really was space, there was absolutely nothing here, not even a speck of dust covered the strangely black and featureless ground. Then Virgilia pointed upwards and Dante saw the incredible fortress of fire, metal, crystal and light. Mephistar, the seat of Archduke Mephistopheles, explained Virgilia, was created by using every single thing in the domain down to specks of dust, everything here had been consumed to feed Lord Mephistopheles’s ego and Dante had to stay inside her aura, because there wasn’t even air to breathe. He finally understood the sadistic intent behind the choice Baalzebul presented to her and hugged her in tears. Virgilia waited patiently as Dante wore himself out crying, then told him she had one thing to show him here. She led him towards what appeared to be the exact center of Cania and pointed on the ground. He looked and looked, even laid on the ground to see, but there was absolutely nothing except the strange unreal ground seemingly made of infinite darkness. When he admitted to seeing nothing, Virgilia told him this was the tomb of Archduke Mephistopheles, a monument he erected in his name when he consumed himself. Dante was flabbergasted, wasn’t Lord Mephistopheles the number two in Infernal Hierarchy right after the Emperor? He’d killed himself and even forbade building of some monument to his power and glory, yet was still the Archduke of Cania? Virgilia corrected him, saying Mephistopheles hadn’t killed himself, he’d consumed himself. After his side lost the Reckoning, Mephistopheles had to apologize to the victors by edict of Dominus Infernus. While other Archdukes of old guard hated that too, having to bow before the B-team (as the winners have mockingly started to call themselves) was too much for Mephistopheles. When he returned to Cania, he drew up plans for a mighty castle that will be called Mephistar, a castle that would shine like a sun that could be seen from all of Inferno and built such that nobody will ever be capable of threatening him again. Dante remembered seeing that one single star in the horizon ever since they entered Inferno, always showing which direction was going deeper. Mephistopheles placed a great darkness around his Circle and closed his borders, so none could see what was happening from the outside. Dominus Infernus had gone right back to his silence inside his own palace after stepping out long enough to put an end to Reckoning (and officially acknowledging Princess Glasya’s Archduchess status), so nobody could do anything to stop Mephistopheles. After many years of silence, the wall of shadow collapsed one day and Mephistar could indeed be seen shining from everywhere in Inferno. Except Cania was now gone; what used to be a realm of horrific living flesh full of monstrous mouths and claws that constantly rent and chewed at itself was replaced with this void. Ever since, nobody has heard anything from Mephistopheles, archdevils of his court or his personal armies of devils and slaves and it’s completely impossible to reach Mephistar despite its appearance.

Without any prompting from Virgilia, Dante said the truth of Cania was all consuming pride. Mephistopheles had effectively destroyed his own self out of sheer pride and took all of his realm, all of his servants and wealth and power with him. This was the lesson of evil above and beyond what Baalzebul had shown him; a pride so great, an inability to admit defeat so deep, even being aware of it wouldn’t stop one from performing the act of self destruction. This is what Dante would be doing now if he were to sell his soul to devils and this is what Virgilia had saved him from. In fact, along the way, Virgilia had shown Dante how flawed he’d been all his life, how petty and stupid his actions were until meeting her. She hadn’t just saved his eternal soul, which seemed such a trite and lame term before he’d seen Inferno with his own eyes, she’d made a better person out of him right now. And he’d repaid her with eternal imprisonment. Virgilia smiled, it was the prettiest Dante had seen on her face, and congradulated him for completely understanding and rejecting evil. As a being of pure goodness, there could be no higher purpose or accomplishment for an angel and being saved by her was the greatest gift Dante could’ve possibly given her. Yet she reminded him that one question remained.

Where was the next one? There was nowhere else to go from here, they were standing exactly in the middle of Inferno so where could the Ninth Circle be? Dante could guess, he’d learned enough about nature of evil. It was right there inside his heart, and inside the hearts of every mortal. Virgilia then hugged him, saying she was proud and it was time for him to back to his life. If Dante really wanted to, he could go to Nessus the Ninth Circle by willpower alone from this spot. Virgilia couldn’t come with him, she was a celestial and reality of Nessus itself would reject her. She would have to stay here, trapped inside the emptiness of Cania lest she wanted to test her strength against the entirety of Inferno by angering Archduke Baalzebul. Dante hugged her and refused to leave, he would stay here with her until he grew old and died, a proper punishment for his folly. Virgilia rebuked him sweetly, that would defeat the entire purpose of their journey and her sacrifice. Dante had to go to Nessus, the abode of Dominus Infernus Asmodeus himself, and then leave through the Gate of Salvation (an ironically fitting name for the door out of Inferno), which had to power to take Dante anywhere in the entire multiverse. Virgilia made him promise to go back home (and also steer clear of Lord Asmodeus who’s very unlikely to appreciate a mortal traipsing through his house). Just before willing himself into Nessus, Dante admitted his love for her and was rewarded with a single kiss. The kiss mark on his cheek would stay until he died, adding considerably to his fame, and even today, his soul bears the brand of Virgilia’s lips.

Dante found himself in the sort of luxury he couldn’t even imagine existing. Nessus was a massive palace, strangely empty of any devils (for which he was grateful), filled with thousands of rooms each more extravagant than the last. He made his way to the exit with apprehension, somehow he could sense where it was. He could also sense where Lord Asmodeus was by a feeling of opressive dread and wisely steered clear. Dante entered the Gate of Salvation after it asked him where he wanted to go, and found himself back in his father’s summer home’s basement, where he used to dabble in diabolism. His clothes stank of sulphur, his hands still had wounds on where Fierna’s devils had tied them and his cheek bore the darkened mark of Virgilia’s holy lips. It had very clearly not been a dream, which was confirmed soon when servants assured him he’d disappeared for a whole month.

First thing he did was to burn all of his diabolist paraphnelia. He then wrote a very long poem chronicling his journey into Inferno, spending a whole year, pouring his soul into it. This finally did get him that recognition he once craved, it became one of the most influential works of literature ever written, he was hailed as one of the greatest poets of his world and did become incredibly popular with the ladies. He never showed any interest back however, his heart and mind had been completely consumed by thoughts of holy Virgilia.

Later in life, Dante became a great philantrophist and something of a holy man, lauded all over the world for his utter dedication to good. He spent the rest of his life (and his family’s wealth) to eradicating diabolism and had a very good track record of convincing even the most diehard diabolists thanks to his zeal and the mark on his cheek that shone with good magic (like an actual celestial).

Befitting his life, Dante’s soul was judged good and sent to Elysium when he died. He was ecstatic, he’d get a chance to apologize to Virgilia’s fellow angels for his unwitting damnation of her, maybe even organize some sort of rescue effort considering all the good that’d come out of her sacrifice. Exemplars of Elysium, however, were appalled at the very idea of one of their fellows going to a mortal and working so hard to change him; that sort of intrusion, even (and especially) when done in the name of good was unthinkable to them. This was the sort of unasked for imposition upon another being only a meddlesome archon would do. Dante didn’t believe it at first, thinking maybe they were teasing or mocking him, but he soon saw angels to be deadly serious when it came to the matter of interference and imposition; there was no way Virgilia had been an angel. She could’ve been another type of celestial but as a petitioner, Dante’s soul had no way of leaving his plane and all his requests, demands and supplications to be turned into an angel himself to go look for her were denied (he was clearly unbalanced and angels thought he might be reckless enough to go to Inferno by himself). Dante is one of the very few souls who manages to be unhappy in the Plane of Freedom, forever pining after his mysterious and lost love.

The immense popularity of the poem Inferno eventually spread out of its world and throughout the multiverse, causing many a curious planar to try to learn more of this “holy Virgilia”. The idea that anything, least of all a celestial, could enter the very center of Infernal Hierarchy unnoticed (and also know so much about Infernal politics and history) seemed ridiculous; yet the events mentioned in the poem were all completely true as far as any nondevil could verify. Devils mentioned in the poem (at least the ones that could be found by outsiders) were all tight lipped and refused to comment and any sort of rescue attempt from the Eigth Circle of Inferno by any would-be do-gooder would be preposterous.

Internally however, the debacle over the poem forced a lot of sweeping changes in many Circles to make certain that information becomes obsolete and outdated, so it can’t be used by enemy saboteurs and spies to harm the workings of the devilish war machine. A second batch of sweeping changes so soon after the first Reckoning upset a lot of devils high and low but the chaos let certain younger archdevils assume much greater powers and responsibilities after the restructuring. Such as the newly restored Marchioness Zariel in charge of Avernus’s defense so Bel can focus on the Abyssal offensive. Or Duchess Fierna’s increasing authorities as her father keeps retreating deeper into his basement dwelling hobbies. Or the long lost Countess Baalphegor’s surprise confession of having killed and replaced Hag Countess millenia ago and swift promotion to Archduchessy. This continues to rub the old guard of devil nobility (still headed by Dispater and Mammon) the wrong way but, as the unofficial leader of this newly forming clique of allied she-devils, the Infernal Princess keeps reminding them that neither of those Reckonings would’ve happened if the old farts had just sat the hell down and let Empress Bensozia do her equalizing reforms slowly, steadily and peacefully.

Outside of Heres Infernus’s still unnamed clique of Infernal ladies, only Torm the True, God of Righteousness, knows the dark of this matter (she thought the riveting tale of her bringing redemption to an especially worthless mortal soul would impress him, she was wrong) but he simply doesn’t have the heart to destroy petitioner Dante’s dreams.

Maybe taking inspiration from Divina Commedia wasn't that good an idea. This has to be the single longest thing I've ever written in my life, including my graduation project from years ago. I'm not sure what I'm doing with my life. Also if you copy all the entries I've written up on this thread into Word, you'll find it now exceeds 100 pages. It's kind of a bummer when you put it like that.

Anyway. I'm pretty sure the world didn't need yet another Inferno knockoff but I like to think I added a few bits and bobs and flairs unique to DnD and appropriate to our thread here. And I didn't even think about writing this in verse, which means there's some slim hope for me. I was quite torn between Beatrice and Virgilia for names, but decided to go with V in the end since we're in Inferno (and the real Beatrice thing with the real Dante was creepy as all ****). Hopefully the order of lessons I made up here is logical and adds up to a satisfying narrative. Also hopefully the "final swerve" (my glaring weakness in made up ****) doesn't retroactively ruin the damn thing I spent so much time building. Yet another hopefully, archdevil stuff won't be too wildly divergent from DnD roots I'm at least pretending to stick with.

Lastly, there will not be Purgatorio or Paradiso in this vein.

[Pronounceable]

Gonna assume everyone's bedazzled by my artistic ability to craft neat stuff. Or maybe nobody actually read that cos it was too damn long. It's always possible.

Either way, now I'll take a little break from our usual MO and post a bunch of straight up Manual of the Planesy stuff. The difference here in this particular post is that it's not solid and will get rewritten as I change my mind. Y'all are free to offer changes or criticism, I might completely change one of these if I see some particularly neat idea. I could especially use cooler names and/or concepts for their various planar qualities. Even previous entries aren't safe, I might retcon any previous writeup that feature these guys if a substantiallly cooler substitute is offered here.

Habits and Inhabitants of the Outer Planes

Spoiler

Show

DEVA
Devas are arrays of floating geometric solids covered in orderly patterns that form a vaguely humanoidish shape.

They are divided into Spheres. Third: malakim, cherubim, seraphim (regular population of Arcadia) Second: principality, authority, virtue (leaders respected for their skills, knowledge and power) First: lunar (only 64 exist), planetar (only 16 exist), solar (only 4 exist). First Sphere rule the plane and their lessers with absolute authority. Planetars and Solars can be replaced if all 4 of their personal underlings decide they’re unfit and one among them is better suited; lunars can get voted out and virtues voted into First Sphere if there’s an unanimous Solar decision.

Devas feed on their own virtuous qualities (bravery, patience, humility, tolerance...) to grow stronger, smarter and skilleder and will morph into a higher form upon reaching required power. New malakim are created by Solars when they feel more devas are needed. Unvirtous devas grow weaker and can shrink to malakim but never fall without extreme stress (devas have no tendency and can fall to any nonchaotic exemplar if pressured).

Eternal Stability: no outside force can affect change on a deva; immunity to any and all effects aiming to create changes on their souls, minds or bodies

ARCHON
Archons are blue/green skinned pretty humanoids with glowy eyes and wings made of bright light.

They are divided into Choirs: hammer (laborer), sword (soldier), lantern (philosopher), tome (mage), trumpet (administrator), word (justice), throne (ruler). Ruling body of Celestia is the Hebdomad, made up of the strongest members of the seven Choirs.

Archons cannot feed by themselves, one must give away their own good essence to another to permenantly strengthen them, crippling themselves in the process (such wounds will slowly regenerate while on Upper Planes). Archons might learn to cannibalize aligned essences from other exemplars but then fall swiftly (usually to devil) without exception. No archon ever switches Choir. New archons are created by infusing the most virtous of Celestial petitioners with good essence but only by the Hebdomad’s permission.

Melodious Resonance: archons find strength in numbers; their powers and skills increase from proximity to other archons

KAMI
Kami are floating translucent heads capable of sprouting a spine with as many arms as they need whenever they wish.

All kami are equal without inherent power imbalances and all positions of authority in Bytopia are filled by officials democratically elected for set time periods, with two Utopic Overseers at the top.

Kami feed on working for others’ benefit but don’t grow any stronger, channeling excess good essence into Bytopia itself. A selfish or lazy kami eventually falls (usually to eladrin) and abandons Bytopia. New kami are occasionally unearthed during mining operations.

Toilform: kami can transform into objects to help others; all kami can become magical sentient tools that greatly aid their users in any and all benevolent and nonviolent tasks

ANGEL
Angels are winged silhouettes made of brilliant golden light.

They have no ranks, types or leaders and all live together in harmony and happiness on Elysium, only leaving their home when they absolutely must.

Angels feed on happiness and freedom of others, growing stronger and smarter by making all beings around them feel happy, free and appreciated. They never try to influence any being’s thoughts or actions despite their incredible power and are loath to even interfere with fiends’ evildoings unless endangered personally. Angels are the nicest beings and the vanishingly few ones to ever fall are the ones reverting back to whatever they used to be before converting into an angel. New ones are created when two or more angels love each other very much.

Limitless Benevolence: angels are as strong as they need to be; an angel determines his or her own power level by absorbing as much good essence from Elysium as they’ll need for the task at hand (but normally try to get by with as little as possible), any angel encountered outside their home will be loaded for bear just in case and roughly as strong as a demigod

GUARDINAL
Guardinals are furriebipedal animals with large muscles and teeth and/or claws.

They are divided into many species (wolf, bear, lion, elephant, rat, rhino, rabbit, fox, bat, dolphin...) named for their similarities to mortal mammal animals, with each guardinal species internally ruled over by their Type Commander who answers to Lion Marshall Talisid.

Guardinals feed on violence, growing stronger the more they fight against (what they see as) evil (aka gain xp like murderhobos). They gain no power if they’re not fighting evil in some way and a guardinal that refuses to confront evil or gets addicted to violence itself falls (mostly to angel or einherjar). New guardinals randomly spawn in Beastlands.

Warp Spasm: guardinals become monsters in battle; a berserking guardinal becomes more powerful and keeps bodily warping into increasingly bigger and monstrous forms as battle goes on

ELADRIN
Eladrins are humanoids with rapidly and continuously changing bright pastel colors (aka epilepsiloids).

They have no discernible castes or ranks except for their ruler, Queen Morwel, and it’s impossible to gauge the strengths or skills of eladrins from their appearances. Whatever method they have for understanding their fellows is unknown to everyone else and there are no positions of authority in Arborea (except for the Queen).

Eladrins feed on strong passions of themselves and others to grow stronger and smarter. The objects of such passions are irrelevant to eladrins’ ability to gain strength from them, which was what used to make them the strongest of exemplars before their Queen forbade being violent asskickers and forced Arborea down a more constructive path. Those that let passions consume them sometimes fall (to any exemplar depending on specific passions they’re overwhelmed by) but eladrins fall the fewest out of all good (nonangel) exemplars. New eladrin are created by the Queen.

Plucky Underdog: eladrins thrive where anything else would’ve faltered; the more alone and unsupported and unappreciated and outgunned and outnumbered an eladrin is at a task, the better they get at it (making them terrible team players).

EINHERJAR
Einherjar look just like humanoids, except bigger and *epicer*.

Einherjar are too chaotic to have any sort of organization or widely accepted ranks or types but they’re broadly called lessers and greaters depending on their personal power (not that there’s any way to tell without engaging them in some sort of contest).

Einherjar feed on rivalry and competition to grow stronger and smarter and skilleder by struggling against their peers. While this doesn’t have to be combat, it usually is due to their oversensitive pride and tendency to get carried away with ****talking. Fighting against too weak rivals or simply struggling in abstract is useless to them so they avoid exerting themselves by trying to do good or improve their (or anyone else’s) lot. Einherjar sometimes get less self absorbed or grow malevolent over time, causing a slow but steady fall (to guardinal or demon). New einherjar coalesce after unusually great and terrible struggles in Asgard and petitioners who’ve amassed enough power by fighting can transform to one.

Asgardian Spirit: einherjar are tenacious warriors; defeated einherjar will keep recovering instantly and continue fighting if they believe victory was close and can only be stopped/defeated after a thorough pwning to convince them there’s no chance of victory at all.

SLAAD
Slaadi are ugly and fat froggish bipeds with impossibly smooth and colorful skin that swell or shrink with Pandemonic winds (aka frogballoons).

There are two types of slaadi; regular and peace. A slaad’s power is easily determinable by size. The bigger the slaad, the more souls it contains, thus stronger (and madder) it gets; the number of trapped minds inside one slaad body can reach millions in extreme cases and there are slaadi the size of continents stuck in tunnels and caves of Pandemonium. A peace slaad is one that managed to subdue all the other minds inside it (allegedly by giving them peace, though everyone else calls them death slaadi instead) and is in full control of its body with a constant size and level of power. Peace slaadi are as mad as regular ones but theirs is a much more focused kind of madness that almost resembles ordinary insanity.

Slaad bodies feed on mental pain and fatigue, extracted from the bodiless minds fighting for control trapped inside them. Slaadi bodies gain and lose souls to the passing winds, leaving them with a changed strength and size at completely random times. Slaad souls feed on nothing and are just as much prisoners inside their bodies as petitioners or soultorn victims of Pandemonic winds they absorb (except for death slaadi who are always much weaker than their size indicates). Slaadi aren’t even exemplars in the most technical sense and cannot fall (and might contain minds of other exemplars soultorn by the winds trapped within).

Gaping Mouth: all slaadi are conduits to the Howling; slaadi are filled with Pandemonium’s soulshearing wind and can summon tiny gusts of it to knock souls off of bodies (killing mortals and banishing outsiders to their homeplanes), infuse an object (not necessarily a dead body) with one of its trapped souls to create a haunted item or vomit out the trapped souls as mad ghosts; they can also suck in loose souls or devour mortals to trap theirs.

DEMON
Every single demon is unique with completely different powers and appearances, demonkind defies classification. There’s no such thing as types or classes of incarnated chaotic evil (cos it's dumb). Demon princes/princesses are those that have bound large numbers of Abyssal petitioners to themselves and fed on them to grow extremely powerful but aren’t fundamentally any different from the regular demons.

Demons feed on negative emotions of themselves and others; mostly fear, hate and pain. Their great hatred of everything and fear of their betters constantly feeds them but they also actively work to foster and spread the feelings they feed on. But demons are inherently chaotic and might get obsessed with all manner of things, with capacity to fall into even law and good (though most converted demons become daemons or einherjar). New demons are constantly spawned in the Abyss by the legion.

Abyssal Sense: demons have a nose for alignment (even ones without noses); nothing short of direct divine intervention can prevent a demon from immediately noticing the presence and quantity of all aligned essences or their absence in an extremely large radius, letting them see through all illusions concerning such beings or items and also detect all outsiders no matter what guise they’ve taken (and know exactly how strong they are), not to mention the odd mortal with an aligned subtype (clerics and paladins).

DEMODAND
Demodands are large masses of vaguely bipedal red mud (aka clayfacians).

All demodands are identical for all practical purposes; if you’ve met one demodand, you’ve met them all (aka Anon).

Demodands collectively feed on disappointment, despair, sadness and anger; the usual “at rest” conditions of demodand mentality that lets the Tarterian Collective grow ever more powerful by just wallowing in its prison plane. They do their best to inflict these upon anyone they encounter too and are very successful at it thanks to their mighty mental powers and nigh invulnerable bodies. Every morsel of nourishment acquired by one demodand is absorbed into the whole of Tarterian Collective and makes all of them an infinitesimal bit stronger, making them the greatest danger to the multiverse over the long term (assuming there’ll be a long term that doesn’t include the Abyss swallowing all of existence). New demodands can only be created by torturing Tarterian petitioners long enough to twist their mind.

The Inexorable Tide: demodands are an unstoppable tide of evil; any demodand violently vanquished on another plane melts down to a puddle of red slime that becomes a portal to Tartarus letting two more sludge their way out; trying to fight demodands will only end with drowning in them.

HAG
Hags aka succubi aka incubi aka erinyes are formless piles of mutable evil essence that can take any form it desires, but even they have no way to classify or identify themselves. The power levels of hags can vary wildly but it’s usually too late for the weaker side by the time it becomes obvious, so Hadeans are an unusually calm fiendish race with all the trappings of equality and peacefulness in public (at least until relative strengths are gauged and the strong can dominate and hurt the weak in peace).

Hags are the only exemplars that can feed literally by consuming bodies of others (they can gnaw on parts of themselves too but it does nothing). They’re also the only exemplars that need to feed; hags get hungry and require regular feeding, or they start growing weak as their body consumes its own essence. Hadeans can also feed on revulsion of others, which they often get from taking horrific forms and doing extremely depraved, invasive and painful acts on their victims. Thanks to their unlimited shapeshifting powers, hags are able to go full hentai and especially relish traumatizing mortals as they eat them (because why not double the nutrition value when you can). Hags can breed with any creature capable of reproduction after taking an appropriate shape and produce half-fiendish creatures, new hags are also made the mortal way by other hags (not necessarily in couples), but pregnancy renders hags incapable of shapeshifting until birth so it's quite rare.

Shape of Evil: hags are amorphous piles of evil incarnate; every hag/succubus/incubus/erinyes is able to reshape its body however it pleases and are only limited by their imagination and evil “mass” (not to be confused with physical mass)

DAEMON
Daemons are shell covered hulking insectoids with varying number of limbs and beastlike heads depending on their castes.

Daemons have a fluid but restrictive system of rankings with an impenetrable web of promotions and demotions between the castes, making it impossible to tell just who is a superior to whom (and when). Named for vague similarity of their heads to mortal beasts, the castes of “lesser daemons” are called beetledaemon, mosquitodaemon, wormdaemon, crabdaemon, fishdaemon, frogdaemon, turtledaemon, snakedaemon, birddaemon and crocodiledaemon and the complicated mixture of merits, powers, payments, promises, accomplishments, lies, background checks and philosophical outlooks that qualify each individual to one caste and disqualify from another defies mortal understanding. Mighty castes of arcanadaemons and ultrodaemons are the “greater daemons” above the others and rule Gehenna with a cutthroat efficiency born of endless politicking and backstabbing. Only General of Gehenna stands above it all, the mysterious and unknowable lord of all daemonkind is beyond the petty struggle for dominance and wealth, primarily existing to provide all daemons a fantasy of secretly deposing him and taking his place without anyone else recognizing (it’s not like anyone’s seen his face or heard his voice, could be any daemon under the helm).

Daemons feed on their own greed and ambition, making them grow stronger with the amount of wealth and influence they can accumulate but all rank changes require a lengthy and painful surgery by an arcanadaemon. They’re supremely selfish creatures without any interest in anyone else (outside of their ability to enrich them) but their single minded pursuit of more personal happiness might sometimes cause them to fall (usually to archon or deva) if it starts to outweigh their material greed. New daemons are created to punish existing ones by splitting their soul/essence/power by greater daemons.

Gehennan Greed: daemons can, in fact, take it with them; every daemon can absorb magical powers from items so spends most of their material wealth and effort on acquiring powerful items to consume, permanently gaining a large number of inherent spells and hidden abilities that can stack with magical items used externally (if they ever put anything on instead of just eating or trading it).

DEVIL
Devils are red skinned humanoids with leathery wings, horns and tails.

Devil ranks and stations are defined per their ancient constitution Pact Primeval, each with its own duties, rights and powers inherent to it, all system is designed to fight the Abyss in some capacity. Least: only lemure (mindless reserves). Lesser: imp (mortal corruptor), spinagon (scout/messenger), barbazu (footsoldier), bueroza (sergeant), kython (blacksmith), falxugon (soul dealer), excruciarch (torturer). Greater: osyluth (intelligence), amnizu (quartermaster), orthon (elite legionaire), abishai (air force), malebranche (siege engine), hamatula (bodyguard), narzugon (knight), gelugon (artillery), cornugon (general). All devils above cornugons are called archdevils and each one is unique with his or her own definition in Pact Primeval (that gets rewritten for their successor in case of annihilation or great failure meriting demotion). Archdukes Bel, Dispater, Mammon, Belial, Levistus, Baalphegor, Baalzebul, Mephistopheles and Dominus Infernus Asmodeus are at the top of Infernal Hierarchy.

Devilkind feeds on obedience and loyalty but not individually like other exemplars. Each devil’s utmost best efforts to serve their superiors feed Infernal Hierarchy itself and devils get promoted (rewarded by more personal and organizational power inherent to the new rank) in return for their slavish servitude but the total increase in devilish power only helps the top guy (Inferno is pyramid scheme, ofc). He does occasionally grant more evil and law essences to Archdukes to empower them (who might give something extra to their favored underlings, and them to their own underlings [but the chances of such trickledown reaching anywhere below archdevils is practically nonexistant]). Any time a devil is promoted he or she picks the most competent and obedient underling to fill his/her place, who will pick their own most competent and obedient underling for their old rank, going all the way down to a promising lemure getting promoted into sentience. Every promotion requires copious amounts of liquid pain (Mammbrosia), necessitating the massive excruciatoriums where it’s distilled from tortured souls of the damned. Devils are extremely dedicated and selfless, which sometimes causes them to fall (usually to archon or kami). A new lemure spawns only when an existing devil falls or is annihilated.

Infernal Obedience: devils just follow orders; clear orders from their direct superior grants massive boosts of competence and efficiency to a devil on whatever they were ordered to do (but only one task at a time)

RAKSHASA
Rakshasi are tiger headed big humanoids with striped fur and inverted hands.

Black furred rakshasi are physically powerful fiends that dedicate themselves to arts of war, white furred rakshasi are mighty sorcerers with mastery over most types of magic, red furred rakshasi are expert manipulators/spies/infiltrators focused on shapeshifting and masterminding. Most skilled ones of any type rise to the top and start calling themselves rajas, ruling over as many of their fellows as they can subdue, trick, bribe or blackmail, but rakshasi have no ranks, types or any defined hierarchy.

Rakshasi feed on manipulation of others and grow more strong, smart and dishonest the more they lie, betray and mislead. They’re lazy by nature, wanting nothing more than lounge about eternally as others slave away for their comfort, but the ones that grow too greedy and start working especially hard to feed might find themselves fallen (almost always to daemon). New rakshasi are never created, making them the least numerous of exemplars.

Oppressive Fundament: rakshasi are uniquely suited to being terrible tyrants; every rakshasa has a cornucopia of versatile powers including shapeshifting, illusion weaving, thought reading, flight, invisibility, charm, semi immunity to physical+magical harm and cursing

For the record, I doubt I'll get any substantial ideas and recommendations from the thread but you never know. Think the only brand new info here is on slaadi (Ssendam was disqualified on account of terminal silly) and angels (e: whom I have just renamed from asura as my first retcon). Technically einherjar too but I'm sure everyone could've guessed what they'd have ended up as.

[khadgar567]

Is there a way mortals cam summon amnizu as servants? And its to bad succubi and incubi pact with ugly cannibal hags. Its kinda shame how the sexy have fallen.