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** spoiler omitted **(Talked about slavery and drow...)EDIT: Spoilering to prevent wall of text syndrome...
** spoiler omitted **...
It's been said that for instances were canon drow would be impossible to remove from the narrative, or where it makes sense, they are likely Ayindilar/cavern elves.
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Well, now that slavery has been abolished, who's going to be responsible for all these emancipated folks? Who's going to pay for their housing, food, etc?
We actually know that -- freed slaves are eligible for state support, conditioned on their consenting to liability for military service. This is what is referred to vaguely elsewhere in the thread as being bound by contract. And expanding the pool of people liable to military service is the whole point of the Emancipation Edict and related laws for the state. Freed slaves who do not consent to liability for military service, by contrast, are not eligible for state support, and must either support themselves by wage labor (presaging the development of urban and rural proletariats), or receive support from relatives or beneficial or mutual-aid societies (some of which would doubtless be Firebrand-affiliated). But to the extent the Emancipation Edict is an anti-Firebrand measure, it exists to take the political wind out of their sails by appearing to concede on a policy plank, while rendering their continued opposition much more esoteric and difficult to propagandize around. Firebrands are noted to be moving their activity into the courts, which is to the state's benefit on two accounts: first, it diverts them from organizing to advocacy, which alienates them from their constituents (see: every social-democratic and Communist party after the 1980s); second, it puts their identities in the system and exposes them to police surveillance.
Creative Director
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** spoiler omitted **(Talked about slavery and drow...)EDIT: Spoilering to prevent wall of text syndrome...
** spoiler omitted **...
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If you're a GM who is having a problem with "Drow existed in our game world, but now they don't and indeed have never existed" one thing I would suggest is that this is a great spot to play around with time shenanigans if that's something you're into.
Like your players might have been to Zirnakaynin when it was full of people, but nowadays nobody lives there at all, and nobody has lived there for possibly thousands of years. This is weird, and thus should be of interest to players and GMs.
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If you're a GM who is having a problem with "Drow existed in our game world, but now they don't and indeed have never existed" one thing I would suggest is that this is a great spot to play around with time shenanigans if that's something you're into.
I'd say just leave them in your game.
It isn't like Hasbro's gonna call the Pinkertons to have them go break up your OGL game.
...or are they???
Lol!
I generally like to follow the official lore, so I'm out of luck there. Although PossibleCabbage's suggestion would make some sense. We'll have to see what James and the other writers have cooked up for us.
It isn't like Hasbro's gonna call the Pinkertons to have them go break up your OGL game.
...or are they???
Lol!
It didn't work out that well for TSR back in the day, IIRC...
I doubt it will work any better for Hasbro.
I'm glad but also confused on how we got here from Velstracs, but... Nidal is cool, I want more fiend deities written up!
It would legitimately be amazing if Paizo could put out like digital-only expanded versions of some lore documents purely for reference. Less Book-like and more of an encyclopedia. I would absolutely lose my mind for a quick-reference Encyclopedia Chelaxia-type deal with just a full alphabetical world of lore.
The Velstracs are lucky they received an expanded write up in City out of Time.
Compare that to the Asura Rana or Rakesha Immortals which have nothing on them.
I'll be honest, I was actually really surprised they didn't get anything in Impossible Lands. It seemed like the perfect place to touch on the new/updated lore for authentic Rakshasa, and I know even less about the Asura.
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I'll be honest, I was actually really surprised they didn't get anything in Impossible Lands. It seemed like the perfect place to touch on the new/updated lore for authentic Rakshasa, and I know even less about the Asura.The Velstracs are lucky they received an expanded write up in City out of Time.
Compare that to the Asura Rana or Rakesha Immortals which have nothing on them.
Both of them are found in in the kingdoms of Vudra. I do agree that having something in the Impossible lands for cults in Jalamaray would have been a nice touch. Just another reason to want a lost omen book in Casmeron.
Asuras are interesting in that they actually used to be the rulers of Hell before Asmodeus and his devils took it over and remade it in their image. They do still have pockets of Hell that they control. Despite the Ranas being powerful enough to grant divine magic, they hate the gods and want to see them and their followers brought lo and destroyed.
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Rakshasa and Asura are in real myth quite similar or intertwined in some ways, to my limited understanding. I admit I know next to nothing about them. I DO know the backwards handed cats are from an episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker.
Asura and Velstracts BOTH being formerly from Hell makes me wonder if a Planer Adventures 2e book would be worth making. LOTS of interesting stuff out there; they could even save room and not touch on the elemental planes since RoE did that very well.
Maybe then we could also get some more lore on Peri and Garuda, the other 'oh right you exist' outsiders.
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Rakshasa and Asura are in real myth quite similar or intertwined in some ways, to my limited understanding. I admit I know next to nothing about them. I DO know the backwards handed cats are from an episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker.
Asura and Velstracts BOTH being formerly from Hell makes me wonder if a Planer Adventures 2e book would be worth making. LOTS of interesting stuff out there; they could even save room and not touch on the elemental planes since RoE did that very well.
Maybe then we could also get some more lore on Peri and Garuda, the other 'oh right you exist' outsiders.
I'm pretty sure Gygax picked up that Rakshasa element from Kolchak for the Monster Manual, which is why in the remastered lore we abandoned the backwards hands element for rakshasa—it's an OGLism on a mythological creature that isn't appropriate to use without the OGL (in the same way it's not appropriate to use shadow demons, but it's fine using invidiaks that have nothing to do with shadow themes).
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Rakshasa and Asura are in real myth quite similar or intertwined in some ways, to my limited understanding. I admit I know next to nothing about them. I DO know the backwards handed cats are from an episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker.
Asura and Velstracts BOTH being formerly from Hell makes me wonder if a Planer Adventures 2e book would be worth making. LOTS of interesting stuff out there; they could even save room and not touch on the elemental planes since RoE did that very well.
Maybe then we could also get some more lore on Peri and Garuda, the other 'oh right you exist' outsiders.
A book covering the different planes would be cool, espeically with how things are evolving away from DnD and its particular designs. To tie this back to the vesltrecs, I think such a thing would be great for an exploration of the Netherworld. We also have a couple of ancestries that either come from the Netherworld or are tied there like the Kayals or the Wayalangs, and some nephalim.
I'm pretty sure Gygax picked up that Rakshasa element from Kolchak for the Monster Manual, which is why in the remastered lore we abandoned the backwards hands element for rakshasa—it's an OGLism on a mythological creature that isn't appropriate to use without the OGL (in the same way it's not appropriate to use shadow demons, but it's fine using invidiaks that have nothing to do with shadow themes).Rakshasa and Asura are in real myth quite similar or intertwined in some ways, to my limited understanding. I admit I know next to nothing about them. I DO know the backwards handed cats are from an episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker.
Asura and Velstracts BOTH being formerly from Hell makes me wonder if a Planer Adventures 2e book would be worth making. LOTS of interesting stuff out there; they could even save room and not touch on the elemental planes since RoE did that very well.
Maybe then we could also get some more lore on Peri and Garuda, the other 'oh right you exist' outsiders.
I was wondering about specific fiends and such; clearly barbazu and babau don't seem to have been Pathfinder-friendly post-OGL, but I was surprised pit fiends/Nessari were. What are the criteria that determined what was too strongly DND'd? Daemons also seem mostly untouched; I imagine because they are all but nonexistant in the DNDsphere? I do love them, so I'm glad they stuck around.
Edit: on this note, any suggestions on what to swap the Hamatulatsu-style monks for, name-wise? My wife played one in Hells Vengeance and we were thinking about popping her in as an NPC cameo eventually but I'm not sure what to call her martial art.
A book covering the different planes would be cool, espeically with how things are evolving away from DnD and its particular designs. To tie this back to the vesltrecs, I think such a thing would be great for an exploration of the Netherworld. We also have a couple of ancestries that either come from the Netherworld or are tied there like the Kayals or the Wayalangs, and some nephalim.Rakshasa and Asura are in real myth quite similar or intertwined in some ways, to my limited understanding. I admit I know next to nothing about them. I DO know the backwards handed cats are from an episode of Kolchak: the Night Stalker.
Asura and Velstracts BOTH being formerly from Hell makes me wonder if a Planer Adventures 2e book would be worth making. LOTS of interesting stuff out there; they could even save room and not touch on the elemental planes since RoE did that very well.
Maybe then we could also get some more lore on Peri and Garuda, the other 'oh right you exist' outsiders.
I’d love to get a whole book on the Shadow Realm and Nidal.
Will the Forsaken return? They were given full write ups in Divine Mysteries.
The Demagogues are really interesting I’d like to know more about their relations to other Fiends.
A old ass Kobold Quarterly article mentions that they sent emissaries to Barbtros.
But other then that their interactions to other Demigods and gods are pretty bare.
I presume they consider Zon-Kuthon a kindred spirit and fellow artist of pain.
And he too likes them. Other then that seems they are pretty keep to themselves.
I presume they are aquintices with the Asura Ranas.
I have ALWAYS wondered about Zon-Kuthon and the Velstracs; their aesthetics and areas of focus are SO similar but they seem to have no shared origination. Did ZK base his style on what he found in the Netherworld? Did the Velstracs help shape his appearance? Is it possible Dou-bral become ZK, ended up in Hell and spawned the Velstracs, and then went to the Netherworld before Asmodeus ever rebelled and entered Hell?
I wanna know about their convergent evolution! Maybe the Netherworld just Makes You Like That?
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I was wondering about specific fiends and such; clearly barbazu and babau don't seem to have been Pathfinder-friendly post-OGL, but I was surprised pit fiends/Nessari were. What are the criteria that determined what was too strongly DND'd? Daemons also seem mostly untouched; I imagine because they are all but nonexistant in the DNDsphere? I do love them, so I'm glad they stuck around.
Edit: on this note, any suggestions on what to swap the Hamatulatsu-style monks for, name-wise? My wife played one in Hells Vengeance and we were thinking about popping her in as an NPC cameo eventually but I'm not sure what to call her martial art.
SO many of the demons and devils and daemons are D&D creatures that we can no longer use in remastered content! In order for us to be able to keep using a fiend, it had to pass the following tests:
1: Mythological bones—If something is from mythology (imp, succubus, rakshasa) we can remaster it, but we make sure it does different thematic things than they did in the 3.5 SRD where we "inherited" them from. In most cases, we'd already taken care of this long ago, but in some (like in the rakshasa) we felt we had to go a little further. How far we felt we had to take it were individually curated choices and preferences from creative directors and the design team.
2: Brand New—If something was a thing we made up 100%, we can remaster it with no issues (omox, contract devil, and astradaemon, for example).
3: No OGL-only Legacy—Creatures who were 100% invented for D&D had to be left behind. This includes vrocks, barbazus, derghodaemons, and a lot more. In some cases, like the pit fiend—the association of that specific name with the level 20 "boss" devil and with fire themes is a combonation that is 100% OGL and thus off-limits. But if we replace that creature with a level 20 devil with a different name (nessari) and a different commonplace name (tyrant devil) and give it other abilities that the pit fiend doesn't already pretty much have, we're good to go.
A huge element of all this is me and others bringing decades of knowledge and experience working with OGL content to make these decisions. Typically, if we weren't super confident, we'd skew toward "rename, rework, and/or replace" as the solution.
Speaking of daemons... they appear untouched because of the three Big Ds, they're the ones who saw the least presence in the 3.5 SRD. Those we did use (and then had to abandon) we picked up because of a loopehole from Necromancer Game's "Tome of Horrors" which brought a HUGE number of non-SRD monsters into the OGL through a "still kinda don't belive it happened" agreement between that company and WotC in the early days, but yeah—daemons were introduced into D&D in an early AD&D adventure ("Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth") and then graduated into the AD&D Monster Manual II. Those ones we can't use anymore, but since there were only a few that we ever used anyway and most of them we made up, that category isn't as impacted as devils or demons are.
As for the Hamatulatsu monks... no remaster suggestions yet, but we'll be dealing with that pretty soon. BUT in your home game? I'd say just keep them named as-is. You can still use the OGL devils and demons in your home game all you want, using the Bestiary 2E rules.
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I have ALWAYS wondered about Zon-Kuthon and the Velstracs; their aesthetics and areas of focus are SO similar but they seem to have no shared origination. Did ZK base his style on what he found in the Netherworld? Did the Velstracs help shape his appearance? Is it possible Dou-bral become ZK, ended up in Hell and spawned the Velstracs, and then went to the Netherworld before Asmodeus ever rebelled and entered Hell?
I invented Zon-Kuthon in the late 90s, inspired by Clive Barker's Hellraiser. Some more notes:
When we lost the licenses for the magazines and started building our own world, among the many things I exported from my homebrew setting was Zon-Kuthon.
When we were working on expanding 1st edition Pathfinder after the game's launch, we decided to expand the "kyton" family of fiends into a larger group, and went ahead and merged them into the fold for Zon-Kuthon, because they all came from the same original inspiration.
We started calling them velstracs in late 1st edition to start distancing ourselves from the chain devil/kyton D&D intellectual property—but everything beyond that one was a creation of us meant to support Zon-Kuthon and to populate the then-called Shadow Plane and now-called Netherworld with monsters that were more interesting than simple shadow monsters.
The whole "Dou-Bral" element came along during 1st edition and was an invention of Sean K Reynolds. The name itself is kind of a silly easter egg: The actor who played the lead cenobite popularly called "Pinhead" in Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" was a man named Doug Bradley, and a shortening of his name to Dou-Bral served as the name of the deity who would later become Zon-Kuthon.
TL;DR Zon-Kuthon came first, and we built the velstracs to support his themes and to populate the Netherworld.
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This is super informative, thank you! That's honestly really cool. Imps being a non-planar-specific fiend was one of my favorite little changes; you can easily still have a 'quasit' in theory due to this, and it gives so much more potential for the little guys too.
And you say you'll be 'dealing with that pretty soon' for the monks formerly known as Hamatulatsu? This seems exciting! Going to file that away in my 'more reasons to get excited for Hellbreakers potentially' section of my brain.Edit: That lore about Dou-Bral's name is so silly and yet so wonderful I do not know how I never caught it. I -love- Hellraiser and I'm almost ashamed of myself for not noticing it.
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--This is super informative, thank you! That's honestly really cool. Imps being a non-planar-specific fiend was one of my favorite little changes; you can easily still have a 'quasit' in theory due to this, and it gives so much more potential for the little guys too.
And you say you'll be 'dealing with that pretty soon' for the monks formerly known as Hamatulatsu? This seems exciting! Going to file that away in my 'more reasons to get excited for Hellbreakers potentially' section of my brain.Edit: That lore about Dou-Bral's name is so silly and yet so wonderful I do not know how I never caught it. I -love- Hellraiser and I'm almost ashamed of myself for not noticing it.
Well... home brew games can have quasits. We can't in print, becuase as far as I can tell "quasit" is a nonsense word invented by Gygax. But he also had a pretty impressive vocabulary and a lot of what seemed to be nonsense words were in fact just obscure words he dug up and used for a monster name.
And yeah... that sort of easter egg is the best sort—the one that doesn't draw attention to itself. But the fact that it's silly and thus kinda undermines the serious of a deity like Zon-Kuthon kinda bugs me, which is why I have such a strong reticence toward allowing easter eggs into print... but now and then they happen (and sometimes I do them myself, even though I should know better).
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A discussion of why the Satanic Panic happened is beyond the scope of this thread. If the question is legit and honest, I recommend checking the Wikipedia page and then following up from there on any number of excellent documentaries and books on the topic.
SO many of the demons and devils and daemons are D&D creatures that we can no longer use in remastered content! In order for us to be able to keep using a fiend, it had to pass the following tests:
1: Mythological bones—If something is from mythology (imp, succubus, rakshasa) we can remaster it, but we make sure it does different thematic things than they did in the 3.5 SRD where we "inherited" them from. In most cases, we'd already taken care of this long ago, but in some (like in the rakshasa) we felt we had to go a little further. How far we felt we had to take it were individually curated choices and preferences from creative directors and the design team.
2: Brand New—If something was a thing we made up 100%, we can remaster it with no issues (omox, contract devil, and astradaemon, for example).
3: No OGL-only Legacy—Creatures who were 100% invented for D&D had to be left behind. This includes vrocks, barbazus, derghodaemons, and a lot more. In some cases, like the pit fiend—the association of that specific name with the level 20 "boss" devil and with fire themes is a combonation that is 100% OGL and thus off-limits. But if we replace that creature with a level 20 devil with a different name (nessari) and a different commonplace name (tyrant devil) and give it other abilities that the pit fiend doesn't already pretty much have, we're good to go.
A huge element of all this is me and others bringing decades of knowledge and experience working with OGL content to make these decisions. Typically, if we weren't super confident, we'd skew toward "rename, rework, and/or replace" as the solution.
So... Would the Babau be returning to Pathfinder, perhaps remastered as something thematically similar to D&D's but not a demon per se?
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So... Would the Babau be returning to Pathfinder, perhaps remastered as something thematically similar to D&D's but not a demon per se?SO many of the demons and devils and daemons are D&D creatures that we can no longer use in remastered content! In order for us to be able to keep using a fiend, it had to pass the following tests:
1: Mythological bones—If something is from mythology (imp, succubus, rakshasa) we can remaster it, but we make sure it does different thematic things than they did in the 3.5 SRD where we "inherited" them from. In most cases, we'd already taken care of this long ago, but in some (like in the rakshasa) we felt we had to go a little further. How far we felt we had to take it were individually curated choices and preferences from creative directors and the design team.
2: Brand New—If something was a thing we made up 100%, we can remaster it with no issues (omox, contract devil, and astradaemon, for example).
3: No OGL-only Legacy—Creatures who were 100% invented for D&D had to be left behind. This includes vrocks, barbazus, derghodaemons, and a lot more. In some cases, like the pit fiend—the association of that specific name with the level 20 "boss" devil and with fire themes is a combonation that is 100% OGL and thus off-limits. But if we replace that creature with a level 20 devil with a different name (nessari) and a different commonplace name (tyrant devil) and give it other abilities that the pit fiend doesn't already pretty much have, we're good to go.
A huge element of all this is me and others bringing decades of knowledge and experience working with OGL content to make these decisions. Typically, if we weren't super confident, we'd skew toward "rename, rework, and/or replace" as the solution.
We'll probably be doing some sort of "blood demon" or "assassin demon" at some point, yes, but it won't look like a babau, nor will it be called a babau. It won't BE a babau. It will MAYBE be the same level, but not necessarily. We're already doing some of this in the bestiary in the Spore War Adventure Path for other demon concepts... but not a lower level one like the blood demon since this is a high level campaign.