Joe Shmoe 741's page

^Oh for the love of...the Oinodaemon--going off what's in the sourcebook itself--doesn't give anybody permission for anything. The Four bound it and feed on it. If it has any power left--any whatsoever--to influence events in Abaddon the book doesn't reference it, and neither do any of the others. If anybody, including Mr. Stewart, meant for it to be able to do anything, it didn't make it into the book. So if we could please stop using him as a solution.

Going through the rest of these point by point.

1) Charon is the River Styx. Correction--Charon might be the River Styx. Or he might be something living in the River Styx. Or he might be exactly what he appears to be. Personally, I like the sentient Styx solution that's offered, but if being the Styx gives him powers beyond those of a typical demon lord they're not mentioned in any of the source material. So again, any advantage we think they give him is conjecture.

2) "Maybe the Horsemen want you to believe they are weak." First of all the books are not written from the perspective of the beings they are about, and I don't know where you got that idea. I've got all three. They aren't written from an in-universe perspective, and even the "excerpts" from the "real book of the damned" are written from the perspective of an author, specifically one of the former Empyreal Lords (Tabris I believe the name is). Secondly, I'll buy that they might want to trick Lamashtu et al, but what you're proposing is that, in order to do that, the book that's supposed to tell me how to use the Horsemen and Abaddon in my campaign, is lying to me. If that was true it would be a very poor writing decision, and I doubt that's what Paizo was going for. Going off of that logic we might as well assume all the sourcebooks are lying to us, and that no information we are given is reliable, or should be treated as useful to the running of a campaign.

3) The "stronger on your home plane" is about the only point raised so far that actually explains anything. Though that of course begs the opposite question, namely why in the hell any of various divinities or semidivinities ever invades another plane. Sort of a losing proposition that.

4) If all the Horsemen are on paar with Nocticula they could indeed take on one deity. Provided that deity brought no allies whatsoever to aid it. I somehow doubt that Lamashtu didn't bring some of her allies along for the ride. Given that excepting Pazuzu (and more recently Nocticula) most of the Abyss is allied to her/avoids challenging her, I'm thinking she's got friends, and unless she's an idiot, some of them will have come along. Also--Lamashtu killed two of the Horsemen. So if they can take on a deity together, they haven't done a great job of it.

5) Actually the fact that the book doesn't say it has been my complaint from the start. If you take what the book says at face value, you are left with decidedly unbalanced scales. Every possible solution to that problem that I've seen proposed here has been based on bending what's presented in one way or another. And that's great. It's all neat ideas, and I plan to use some of them in my game. But it doesn't change the fact that the setting book didn't spell things out and that we're having to try to read between the lines.

As to the specific bit about the other deities helping...Urgathoa and Zyphus, according to all the information on them, go out of their way to avoid conflict with other deities. Urgathoa in particular just wants to be left alone. So if at some point she went to war with Lamashtu on behalf of the daemons, I would think it would be somewhere in the source material. But it's not anywhere--not in the Books of the Damned, not in the various write-ups on Urgathoa, not even in the various write-ups of Lamashtu. So if Paizo intended for her to have allied with the daemons against Lamashtu they never even hint at it.

And "we let you live here so you can defend us" is not in point of fact, unfathomable.

6) "Makes ya wonder just how truly powerful the Horsemen are, if gods need their leave to live on their plane."

It does indeed. And that is again, the problem. The book says two different things. It says that the Horsemen are as powerful as the average demon lord and that the harbingers are equivalent to "only" nascent demon lords or infernal dukes. It also says that the daemons can threaten the very universe itself, fend off attacks from full deities, and force deities to ask their permission before moving into Abaddon. Do you not see how contradictory that is? The whole reason I started this thread was to try and reconcile those two facts. The discussion has been great. There's lots of interesting ideas for how to work around the problem. But what no one has been able to show--including you--is that there wasn't a problem in the first place.

Based off the Books of the Damned themselves, the daemons come off as badly undergunned. Maybe they aren't supposed to. Maybe all the theories proposed here are right on the money. But they still come off that way in the source material.