But, other than The Lady of Pain, Asmodeus, The Serpent( who according to some references may in fact be just another name for Asmodeus) and Jazirian (The Couatl God). I cant seem to find any information or even theories on what other being may hold membership to this brotherhood of primal powerhouses.
Does anyone out there know anything more about this group? And if not, do you have any suggestions on who I might include in my version of it?
I don't remember the reference offhand, but the whole Asmodeus/The Serpent story is 2nd edition flavor/fluff, if that matters to you. I haven't read my Fiendish Codex 1 or 2 yet, but I don't think this interpretation survived into 3rd edition.
Really, I think you're free to use whomever you want as uber-deities. I have a class of supra-divine beings in my homebrew cosmology, so I can appreciate the urge to play w/ primal beings.
WOTC is coming out w/ "The Elder Evils" in the next few months, supposedly based on some entities named in the "Lords of Madness" book. This might be of interest to you.
Okay, first canonically Asmodeus/Serpent is wrong. That was originally printed in the 'Guide to Hell' I think and someone ran with it.
The Serpent that talks to Vecna is called Mok'Slyk and is an Ancient Brethren entity that is the personification of Magic.
According to other official sources (Die Vecna Die), the Lady of Pain is also an AB.
The whole Jaz...whatever (I do remember that whole story though) and Asmodeus being one great serpent that divided and fell from whereever has essentially been debunked. If you look back at older editions, that story and its derivatives didn't exist prior to 'Guide to Hell' (a very late 2nd edition book btw). The author took that there was a region called the Serpents Coil in Nessus and extrapolated. Really who knows, this was the time of Wizards takeover and TSR fall. I'm sure some things slipped through continuity-wise.
In FCII, they tossed that story out and went with Asmodeus being a Fallen Angel. Use what you like of course, but I never liked the idea of the super-serpent all powerful creator type being myself.
I don't know how exactly you want to run with this, but Ao, the Overgod of the Forgotten Realms might fall into this category, as well as the Highgod and Chaos from Krynn.
The 1st edition World of Greyhawk boxed set mentions that there are deities even more powerful than the Greater Gods, but that in general they don't bother themselves with gaining worshipers or the things that occupy "lesser" gods, but there isn't much more detail given than that.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Does anyone out there know anything more about this group? And if not, do you have any suggestions on who I might include in my version of it?
A valiant endeavor, but the long and short of this is that no one knows anything about this. The "Ancient Brethren" are kind of an accidental piece of D&D mythology. It's an attempt by individual authors (mostly through second edition) to attempt to quantify unfathomable characters like The Lady of Pain, The Serpent, and others that are purposefully left mysterious (in many cases just to be the writer who said something new and supposedly substantive on these characters).
You'll be able to find out a lot about The Lady of Pain—you can get her gist just by searching online or looking in old Planescape books (which pretty much boils down to: she's mysterious, she has god-like power which she only uses in Sigil, and she don't take kindly to folks messing with her turf)—and Asmodeus in (preferably) the Book of Vile Darkness and Planes of Law (much of the more recent stuff is probably better ignored), but at the end of the day he’s your pointy-bearded, mustache-twirling, contract-writing, answer to The Devil.
The extent of the info on the Serpent is in the Mysteries of D&D article you referred to in Dragon #349.
Jazirian, I think, is in Monster Mythology.
As for their connections as Ancient Brethren, there’s only passing throwaway references to each being members of this "not-really-a-group."
While Yasha does a great job of hitting most of the sources for the Ancient Brethren, none of these can really be considered to be more or less "canon" than any other (and most reek of D&D author one-upmanship). After writing Die, Vecna Die Monte Cook came out and said that "The Serpent" was really just a metaphor for Vecna's insanity--but it turns out that with readers starved for mysteries and details on their favorite characters it's hard for implications like this to be taken at anything other than face value.
So, by-in-large, there is not much in the way of additional information about the Ancient Brethren, and between the sketchy original sources and discussions online, whatever you do turn up likely to be contradictory at best.
All that being said, I'll jump on the Planescape fanboy bandwagon and say that I personally think the idea is pretty cool.
[[WARNING: LARGELY UNFOUNDED RAMBLING D&D NERD DIGRESSION]]
In my personal interpretation of "The Ancient Brethren" I've always kind of thought of them as the prototypical deities, formed by the fledgling multiverse to give form to its still chaotic architecture. (The plane-sized monstrosities, the draeden, might have been a first aborted attempt at this.) They would be “deities” of fundamental ideas: Evil, Good, Magic, etc, which were just beginning to take shape as concepts in the primordial ethers. It's likely these deities had far greater power than modern deities and set about tasks unfathomable in the current multiverse. As there were as of yet no mortals, they had no need for faith or religion and set about applying the first laws of balance to their new reality and gelling the concepts they and others would come to embody (before you have a god of luck, someone had better have thought up "luck" as a concept, etc). In the end, Ancient Brethren of concepts that never "took" faded away or were subsumed by others. Some might have even become the skeletons upon which Outer Planes were "founded" (I could very easily see the Beastlands being formed upon the "body" of the Ancient Brethren of wildness or savagery [or something], while the Ancient Brethren of loss might have become The Gray Wastes).
Regardless, over an unfathomably long period these first deities did their work and by in large passed on. As mortals came into being upon the countless worlds of the Material Plane and came up with their own innumerable gods and beliefs, it’s possible that the essences of some of the Ancient Brethren gave the spark of life to such fledgling pantheons. For example, as on separate worlds beings like Anubis, Hades, Myrkul, Morrigan, Mictlantecuhtli, Hel, Yama, (etc, etc, etc) were imagined by the fledgling religions of mortals, the Ancient Brethren of Death disperses his being/spark/essence to give life to these stories and conceptual personifications, making them true deities (of lesser power to the now effectively dead Ancient Brethren) and propagating the idea he embodies in beliefs throughout the multiverse.
But, if we are to take all four of the proposed "Ancient Brethren" (Asmodeus, Jazirian, The Serpent/Mok'Slyk, and the Lady of Pain) as survivors of this impossible past, the archetypical nature of what they embody makes an argument for why they would in fact be the least likely to have survived. In the case of Jazirian and Asmodeus especially—since nearly every belief system as a protagonist god and an antagonist god—wouldn’t Jazirian and Asmodeus have split their essences the most?
Well, there are two possible answers for this in my mind (or one answer that has two facets).
First, these ur-gods simply decided they didn't want to split up into thousands of younger gods. If Jazirian decided to fill the Multiverse with weak, fledgling gods of good, if Asmodeus decided not to do the same he could easily sweep in and destroy the new deities like a snake in an eagle's nest, potentially destroying all trace of good as a concept in the multiverse. (This leads to the question of how gods of good and evil came to form, though, which is perhaps better answered by the next possibility or a combination of both.)
The other idea is that as these surviving Ancient Brethren embody such archetypical and fundamental beliefs/concepts that they've merely been sustained through the ages. Good, Evil, Magic (Neutrality [?], but we'll get to the Lady of Pain later), these fundamentals are largely unchanged as concepts from the earliest days of the Multiverse and as such their primal embodiments have lingered on. Essentially, these are among the strongest ideas in the Multiverse, granting their respective Ancient Brethren incredible tenaciousness (or visa versa) and possibly the ability to offshoot bits of their essences to bring life to other younger deities with similar concerns. As part of their longevity, though, these Ancient Brethrens likely learned the subtlety with which they act today. Their kindred ur-gods who used their greater powers over lesser deities or who tried to forge deific empires would have all been brought to ruin through the countless millennia as younger gods, mortals, and their own brethren dissented and quashed them. Thus, only the most subtle, elusive, and/or entrenched have lasted to the current age, accounting for the rarity of these powerful deific survivors.
Thus, we see incredibly powerful players with lives unfathomable long compared to even today's deities, acting on the scale of eons and with goals likely to change the face of the Multiverse, but at the same time so slow and subtle that others rarely notice. Think of it like geologic forces raising a mountain. You don't see it from year to year, even from generation to generation, but time elapse through the millennia and you'll see the gradual creation of something dramatic and massive.
Thus, Asmodeus subtly steers his fellow archdevils and the Blood War while seeming to just sit in Nessus. The Serpent whispers to a single mortal, and over the course of centuries gains the ear of a firebrand god (who possibly reworked the Multiverse in a way those whispers led him to). And Jazirian... does... whatever... he... does.
We have a special case in that of the Lady of Pain. While she's been called an Ancient Brethren, no one knows what her powers are, she doesn't act like any sort of deity (and actively discourages her worship), and she sure as hell isn't talking. She just squats in Sigil and keeps every other god, unopposed ideology, and reality-warping entity out. So, she seems like the Ancient Brethren with a job. Who knows what she might once have or still does embody (travel, portals, pain, protection, neutrality?), now she's the one who guards the foundation of the multiverse and makes sure that none of her siblings or their upstart godlings mess with it. This conceit requires you to believe that Sigil—being at the heart of the heart of the Outer Planes—is the center for belief in the multiverse (as the Outer Planes are realms of concepts, ideas, and beliefs) and might hold the power to affect changes upon those ideas' influence over the larger cosmology. Simply, in this idea Sigil is the keystone upon which the entire Great Wheel cosmology is founded. Should one being exert their will over Sigil, they could affect that keystone, reordering the Multiverse as they saw fit, potentially altering its laws to suit them (see Die, Vecna Die) or even destroy it. Thus, the Lady of Pain acts to keep the status quo. She's one of the few creatures in the multiverse with the power to do it and the dispassion to not do it herself. She's the multiverse's autopilot, and woe to anyone who tries to take the wheel. What her reasoning for taking on this task might is one of the multiverse's big mysteries, but thankfully someone's doing it.
So, in short, my thinking is that the Ancient Brethren are the children of the Multiverse, survivors of its first “pantheon,” and ancestors of modern deities. Those few who have survived to today work on a scale nearly invisible to the current gods and completely unknown to mortals. Only the Lady of Pain is active on an “everyday” level, and that’s because she guards Sigil, the keystone of the multiverse, against tampering.
Phew! So that's largely my tirade from being a Planescape goob for way too long. Again, as with pretty much anything related to the Ancient Brethren, none of this is "canon," but if you think it's cool or that any part might work in your game, feel free to run with it! In a way, I kind of think of the Ancient Brethren like the Great Old Ones: unfathomably old with designs beyond our ken, though they meddle every once in a while.
Again, though. Don't try chasing written facts about these guys. None are particularly reputable and can only lead to pages of "Well, X atrocious adventure said this," countered by "But Y sketchy throw-away reference said this." Do what works for your cosmology and make it your own! Have fun (And thanks for letting me ramble)!
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Wes, that was quite the post. It sounds like you and I got hit by the same nerd gamma rays, b/c I've played w/ primal beings for a long time. I just adopted names/beings from other sources and pulled them into my own cosmology/cosmogony. Like you described, these beings represented big concepts more than anything, and in my version, were the 1st aware beings springing from the primal chaos that preceded the multiverse.
Kwll (Chaos) & Rhynn (Law) I took both as names and figures from Moorcock; Gaia (Life) & Mistriss Death (Death) I took from Greek mythology and Marvel comics, respectively; I've been too lazy to change the names; and Solaris (Good--but the name is horrible) & Lucifer (Evil) are a combo of my own creation and the obvious. These 6 primal beings are, to coin a Neil Gaiman phrase and idea, "The Endless" (though those few old and powerful enough to know of them have other names for them).
There was a time in mythic history when the 6 became 8, and then a 9th was elevated; and all of them represented the known alignments. But 2 of these 3 worked constantly against the goals of the others, and were finally destroyed. To preserve the Cosmic Balance, the 9th was stripped of power and put back in a similar role.
I also have a small group of supra-divine beings appointed by The Endless for certain sensitive tasks. These include The Lady of Pain in Sigil; Ptah (formerly of the Egyptian pantheon), Watcher of The Outlands; and Anubis (also formerly of the Egyptian pantheon), Watcher of the Astral Plane. Though Anubis was recently demoted and slain by The Endless when he foolishly teamed w/ Acererak to overthrow Mistriss Death (from ideas in 2nd ed. "Return to the Tomb of Horrors").
I obviously use the Great Wheel, but have it surrounded by The Far Realm. There I have a primal being so powerful and dangerous to the multiverse that it was banished by the rest of the Endless. Well, sort of. This being, Oblivion we'll call it, arose when only the 1st 4 of the Endless were sentient, and represented Entropy. It was too powerful to destroy, but the 4 managed to segment it's body/mind/soul. The body is trapped in the Great Spire at the center of the Outlands--which explains why the Endless have said even the gods are powerless in the area--and closely watched over by The Lady of Pain up in Sigil; the soul was bound into the realm of Mistriss Death in the Negative Energy plane; and the mind was hurled into The Far Realm, where it schemes to this day to reunite w/ its other parts.
Actually, there's updates on that too, but at this point, I'm at risk of losing the 2 people bored enough to have read this far :)
So, to the OP, there is no real canon when it comes to this stuff. Take names you find, references you come across, and just make it up. It's your world (literally) so let your imagination run wild...