The Gaming Den

Hello !

First thread of mine on the Den, long time lurker, ready to be burned and stuff, sensibility mode off, FrankTrollman-levels of "insult" not a problem, yadda yadda, etc.

I'm currently wondering many things concerning the D&D Alignments (mightily stupids, I know), Planes, Outsiders and other stuff. Mainly for use in the Forgotten Realms setting, but I'm
not limited to its canon.

I have read, among other things :

• * The Den's Distinct Upper Planes discussion (mainly concerning the Upper planes and their associated Morality)
  * The The Planes: Not Just Alternate Primes (fuck you Planescape) discussion (which greatly clarified some concepts of Inner and Outer Planes for me)
  * This (non Den) option using motivations for alignments

With all this stuff, I have trouble making a big picture of it, so as I find the Den's atmosphere great for purifying-by-fire any misconception and stupidity ^^ , I humbly bring you my questions !

• 1) How are Outsiders "created" ? Are they former "Prime" souls that became Petitionners, then some other type of Outsiders later on, is there some "artificial" creation process existing, like God-made, or by some kind of machine ? Something else ?
  2) What is the relationship between Gods and Outsiders ? I get it that Gods prefer to live in the Outer Planes because of the Divinely Morphic trait (and being creatures of Belief and Concept themselves, being in the Conceptual planes seems logical), and in the fluff gods seem to have outsiders serving them. But not every Outsider serve a God, right ? So what make one serve a god, and another not ?
  3) What's the extent of the impact of an Outsider's plane of origin on the subtype(s) of an Outsider ? And on its behavior / values ?
  4) Why the fuck are the Angels able to come in all the "Good" flavors, but other "sided" outsiders mainly are 1-flavor-only (ok, some are 2) ? What create them ?
  5) Are the "major brand" of Outsider for each of the 9 "basic" Outer Planes (LB: Archon, NB: Guardinal, CB: Eladrin, CN: Slaad, CE: Demon, NE: Yugoloth, LE: Devil, LN: Modron, N: Rilmani) make any sense in regard to their respective planes ? Are there other brands for the 8 "intermediate" Outer Planes, like the Demodand ?

For the record, I have searched, I'm not asking (only) out of laziness ^^ ...

Manythanks !

For the most part, there are not canonical answers to your questions; user preference are certainly encouraged.

1) The general answer appears to be that outsiders are formed from the plane itself. The concept of 'infinite planes' has problems, and is probably worth dropping completely, as is the concept of an infinite number of outsiders. Prime planes are of fixed dimensions, but there may be a near infinite number of them. Still, if you're focused on the Forgotten Realms and the 'intelligent population' since the beginning of time is less than the total number of outsiders you want in your cosmology, having petitioners as the ONLY source of outsiders just doesn't work. Having a system where high-level characters can convert those levels into Outsider HD would be a decent way to represent some people 'making it'. You might want to allow them to keep any levels in excess of the Outsider HD (ie, a 14th level character could choose to be a Planetar or a Deva with 2 class levels. It's not something that's going to happen a lot, so 'most people don't know' isn't the worst possible answer, but knowing what is possible is important. So, yeah, there is no 'real' answer, but you should pick one.

2) The concept of Gods versus, say, Demon Princes, is fuzzy to say the least. The Forgotten Realms gets off on having lots of deities that get involved in the setting. It is one of my least favorite aspects of that particular setting, so changes to 'distant gods' would certainly have an impact that you might not want. Generally, you want to think of Gods are 'really powerful outsiders' that certain other outsiders are in philosophical agreement with. They contribute to that deities success because they care about the goals that deity espouses. If the plane generates the outsiders and the deity 'controls' the plane, the deity is at least INVOLVED in the creation. You might want to quantify that worship allows the deity to generate these helpers. In the Forgotten Realms, a deity doesn't 'die' if all of the followers disappear; instead they go to sleep in the Astral (if I'm not confusing my settings). Creating outsiders that you can use to push your agenda (and worship) means you are likely to gather more followers and therefore increase the number of allied outsiders. In this model, it could be possible to have outsiders abandon or switch allegiances. Even good deities are in competition for followers to push their agenda. Bear in mind that I'm a proponent of distant gods, but if you want deities that interfere in the campaign, this is a relatively reasonable way of handling it.

3) If an outsider is built from the plane itself, a good plane makes outsiders that are literally made of goodness. A lawful evil plane makes outsiders that are literally made of law and evil. Alignments are stupid, but if you use the alignment as a prompt for expected behaviors, you can answer this question.

4) Angels, Demons and Devils are primarily drawn from Judeo-Christian mythology. In the Judeo-Chrstian model, there is ONE God, and therefore his servants are all on the same team. While Demon and Devil typically refer to the same thing in mythology, they have different linguistic roots. You could play a similar game with Angels, using the word 'seraph' as a type of good outsider that does not yet exist, but this type of additional type won't carry the same weight as a word that is commonly used (for better or worse). Slaad and Inevitable suffer from the same lack of cultural history, but if you want more flavors of 'angels' you could certainly do that.

5) I'm not sure I understand your question. I mean, they make a certain amount of sense. If you use a system where outsiders are created from the plane, and you have a Neutral Evil Plane, you could potentially create 'neutral' outsiders and 'evil' outsiders, but you'd expect that most would be 'neutral evil' outsiders. Creating outsiders that don't agree with your agenda is likely to have them abandon your cause. But if there is 'variety' in the outsiders, you could have several alignment factions using the same type. Maybe all Devils are Lawful Evil, but you set all Demons as 'any evil' (with an equivalent of Devils for Neutral Evil and Chaotic Evil). This would allow you to use a wide variety of monsters for 'team evil' and have 'special units' that are exclusive to their alignment. This would parallel the angels as 'any good' compared to the archons that are only lawful good, etc).

Hope that helps...

First of all, the D&D multiverse is not consistent between or within editions or settings or individual writers' output. As such, trying to figure out how things work "in D&D" or even "in Forgotten Realms" is kinda futile. The body of TGD articles taken in entirety and the Tomes are likewise collaborative; also, sometimes they discuss a D&D book and other times they offer revisions.

Thus, without narrowing down your questions to a book or a thread, it makes sense to offer some general considerations/recommendations.

allanlerouge wrote:1) How are Outsiders "created" ? Are they former "Prime" souls that became Petitionners, then some other type of Outsiders later on, is there some "artificial" creation process existing, like God-made, or by some kind of machine ? Something else ?

Outsiders are beings from alignment planes. Once you're dealing with them, you're dealing with alignment, and you should decide how it works in your game; then decide what happens to souls after death.

There's something of a majority opinion that being transformed into a blade of grass warmed by Lathander's light forever is worse than being transformed into a dretch and having to earn your way up (the way it's sometimes flavored). If Cosmic Good and Cosmic Evil are factions unrelated to actual good and evil, this works, and you can play mortals caught between fiendish dog-eat-dog bureaucracy/murderfest and celestial oblivion. If, however, Evil is evil, being opposed to rapemurder as players and characters normally are shouldn't automatically put them on Team Oblivion.

Aesthetically speaking, I am very much opposed to death being in any way beneficial, or continuity of consciousness for celestials and demons. Death is bad. It may come with a nice severance package, but it shouldn't be a powerup, and past lives isn't something I find appealing at all. My preferred version is that a god expends power to specifically retain you as a petitioner when you die as thanks for service (like in Greek mythology some mortals get to live on Olympus), or if you're individually powerful, you can sorta hang around in pocket reality like an unplayable Markov chain twitter bot, but to actually become a Celestial or a Fiend, you need to do it alive. Other souls meld with the plane, and Celestials and Fiends spawn from planar material to feed ephemeral bodies into the planar war machine. Other Outsiders can live there and breed 'normally', even though they might have human intelligence. You can raise hellkittens (cats are already evil IRL) or achaierai chicks. Baby succubi are a nope.

allanlerouge wrote:2) What is the relationship between Gods and Outsiders ? I get it that Gods prefer to live in the Outer Planes because of the Divinely Morphic trait (and being creatures of Belief and Concept themselves, being in the Conceptual planes seems logical), and in the fluff gods seem to have outsiders serving them. But not every Outsider serve a God, right ? So what make one serve a god, and another not ?

Gods in D&D and in FR in particular come from various backgrounds. Most of them are definitely not "creatures of Belief and Concept" but anthropomorphic beings with mortal interests and priorities. Specifically FR gods are all real-life-evil. Gods don't prefer to live in the Outer Planes because of the Divinely Morphic trait, gods live there because that's where the D&D writers decided they should live (in the supernatural worlds where souls go), and the morphic thing is a tack-on.

3e Gods also need a massive but easy nerf to cut out the DM fiat bullshit. Pissing off gods without getting no-save-killed, killing gods and taking their place should all be possible. It's what happens in the source material, and the game should support that. If "invent a spell that kills Tordek the Dwarf Fighter with no save, then cast it" is something a god can do as a free action, it's obviously not supported.

Gods are Outer Planes landlords and faction leaders. Outsiders join them out of some personal alignment-colored reasons, but they don't have to.

allanlerouge wrote:3) What's the extent of the impact of an Outsider's plane of origin on the subtype(s) of an Outsider ? And on its behavior / values ?

Outsider types should obviously correspond to the plane of origin. The exact measure of influence on behavior/values is up to you to decide; however: D&D is a roleplaying game about stabbing people in the face and taking their stuff. If you can't stab fiends without feeling guilty about it, that's bad. If you can't talk to fiends, that's also bad.

allanlerouge wrote:4) Why the fuck are the Angels able to come in all the "Good" flavors, but other "sided" outsiders mainly are 1-flavor-only (ok, some are 2) ? What create them ?

Well, the counterpart term to Angels (I prefer Celestials) is "Fiends". Fiends come in all Evil flavors. There are notably fewer flavors of Celestials, because you generally don't interact with them as much, and because there's only one way to do good and that is collaboratively. You want bureaucrats, you want makers, you want revolutionaries, but having them be at odds on a cosmic scale is fucking stupid and not good. There are on the other hand many ways of being a massive self-serving dickhead, and nothing prevents massive self-serving dickheads from rational infighting.

Law and Chaos are not sides to the cosmic conflict. Formians breed like ants and just happen to live in places they find pleasing. Slaad spawn as described. Inevitables and chaos beasts spawn from planar material, although in the case of inevitables the planar material in question might just be giant automated self-reproducing factories.

allanlerouge wrote:5) Are the "major brand" of Outsider for each of the 9 "basic" Outer Planes (LB: Archon, NB: Guardinal, CB: Eladrin, CN: Slaad, CE: Demon, NE: Yugoloth, LE: Devil, LN: Modron, N: Rilmani) make any sense in regard to their respective planes ? Are there other brands for the 8 "intermediate" Outer Planes, like the Demodand ?

Do the 9 "basic" Outer Planes make sense at all? D&D Good is too conceptually small, and it can't carry 7 planes. Fuck, it can't even carry 3. Arcadia, Bytopia, Elysium and Arborea are the same and also fucking boring; they're what your starting village becomes when you've won the game. Really, there are more things to do on the Positive Energy Plane. Beastlands and Ysgard are stupid. One Good plane can be enough. Mount Celestia can just be a Law-infused geographical feature (and they're kind of Lawful Stupid-ish there to preserve planar balance and literal personal integrity, which serves as a source of conflict).
D&D Evil is on the other hand varied, the Lower Planes are all fun, and you don't want to lose any of them (as well as Mechanus and Limbo).

You may simply want to do away with alignment as anything more than a vague background thing that has very little impact on the story or setting. I use the planescape setting, but more for the fact that I like the plane's as settings and environments more than I like the alignment system. Heck, add new planes as you see fit!

deaddmwalking wrote: In the Forgotten Realms, a deity doesn't 'die' if all of the followers disappear; instead they go to sleep in the Astral (if I'm not confusing my settings).

Sometimes. Moander did. Others... uh, got more complicated. And it varied a bit depending on edition and what liberties were being taken with source material (not that Greenwood was consistent or sane in the first place).

And then you add in the Time of Troubles bullshit where some gods died. Which results in the high supergod:
a) letting their murderers replace them (Cyric for Bhaal, Bane, Mask and Lleira, though he later lost one or more of those portfolios). And some of that was just weird. Cyric was nowhere near Bane when he died (as I recall) and Mask was the fucking sword Cyric killed Bhaal with, until he realized it and broke the sword.

b) letting random people replace them. Midnight turned Mystra made some sense (given the generally shittiness of the plot), but Kelemvor was basically a tag-along and got stuck with Myrkul's job for the lulz.

b) letting them die, then resurrecting them: Torm, because he was 'fulfilling his nature' or some shit. Bane didn't get rezzed, despite equally pursuing his nature as a the god of tyranny, and being 10x more interesting than Cyric

But then you get into weird, weird shit. The original goddess of the realms split into Shar (greater) and fucking Selune (demi or lesser, I forget), goddess of the fucking moon, who have some weird rivalry, rather than Shar (night) and Lathander (day)

Myrkul, Bhaal, and... wossname (another evil dude who formed the last bit of an evil trinity, might have been Bane) all died during the time of troubles, and were replaced by mortals because reasons.... but they were all originally mortals who had killed and/or replaced the original gods of murder, death and whatever in the first place. Though the original god of death wasn't killed, and stuck around as Myrkul's butler/manservant for reasons.

Midnight turned Mystra is actually the third Mystra, because goddesses of magic just get ganked a lot in the FR, despite being the deity with the most backups and precautions (Magisters, the Seven Sisters, and incarnates invested with her power like Elminster and so on).

So the question of what happens to gods in the Realms is really whatever the fuck the writers want, with serial ganking going on. But fuck you if you don't worship a god when you die.

allanlerouge wrote:How are Outsiders "created" ?

When a Mommy Outsider and a Daddy Outsider love each other very much, they wait for sparks of sentience to become embedded in spontaneously-generated vortex nodes. These nodes calcify and grow in accordance with the physical and ethical principles of the local plane and contamination from external sources.

Outsiders aren't souls arising from the Prime Material after death. Quite the opposite. Sentients are extraplanar natives who were contaminated by incompatible ethical influences to the point they could no longer persist in their original planes, and so are repeatedly reborn in the nexus of contradictions commonly called the "Prime Material Plane".

Hello all !

• * Okay, first of all I am not using Alignment in my games, for reasons explained by reading them and being on the Den.
  * However, as alignment has been one of the base components of the original Outer Planes, I want to learn as much as possible on the "logic(s)" and workings on the Planes and their inhabitants as per the fluff, and try to use that to create my own version of all that, with the aim being Inner Consistency, and workability.
  * Currently, my Outsiders represent concepts, Gods are defined by their Dogma, good / evil / chaos / law all are relative to one's morality and beliefs and thus unworthy of higher status, and I sort of make do. But I want to craft something better ...
  * I know I'll have to decide myself in the end, but here and now I'm looking for coherent pieces of data from official fluff & crunch (even if contradictory taken as a whole). Interesting personal views are welcome, but I won't discuss them much for the moment.

---------------------------------------------
Now, my answers :

@deaddmwalking :

• * I am not sold on the finite / infinite nature of the Planes.
  * High-level character "conversion" to Outsider is a fine idea, but as it makes them gaining Alignment subtypes, and changing almost their whole person, I'm wondering : shouldn't that destroy part of their psyche and memories ?
  * Worship = creation of helping outsider is a nice option. Is there a threshold that one has to pass to be offered such a deal ?

@Starmaker :

• * A God expanding power to maintain someone as a petitioner is an interesting concept. Most of the souls would then meld with the plane, serving to bring it more "power", spawning new Outsiders (ephemeral bodies to feed into the planar war machine ... I really dig this !). However, it'd have deep effects on the Forgotten Realms afterlife.
  * On the outsiders breeding naturally : the "major brands" (Demon / Devil / Modron / etc. ) do not (except with non outsiders), but the other ones do (celestial creatures and the like, Couatl, etc.), right ?
  * The "creatures of Belief and Concept" thing comes from this discussion . It's not fluff, so I shouldn't have mentioned it.
  * However, an anthropomorphic being can also be a "creature of Belief and Concept". Isn't that what an Outsider is ? And even with mortal interests and priorities, their godhood can mean they are more than mere (im)mortals.
  * Gods living on the outer planes because of writers may be true, but as it doesn't offer any useful data, I don't care ^^ (thanks for the input though).
  * I'm all for nerfing DM fiat & shit, but :
  • * Gods are, by the fact of being an intrinsic part of the setting, already in DM fiat territory, no ?
    * Honestly, if a CR 40+ creature really wants you dead, and have a "line of effect" to your ass, you are (be it by using epic-level spell with DCs you cant' match, crushing you to a pasta, or calling in one of his über-servants). Except if you're also in the very-high CRs, which is stupid on its own.
    * If a deity cannot use her control over a part of reality to smite a mortal into death with no save, what does it say about said deity's control over reality ? Even if she cannot do so in the Prime (granting you a save, maybe ?), she should be able to in her home plane, no ? If not, well ... your deities aren't deities, but powerful outsiders with titles - which is a thing, but not in the FR.
  * If you use alignment, stabbing a fiend is probably not guilt-worthy. But I do not, and depending on what differentiate Fiends and Celestials in the ends, stabbing fiends could create guilt ...
  * Lack of variety for Celestials stemming from lack of potential interaction ? Seems legit. However, as I've removed Alignment from my games, the "there's only one way to do good and that is collaboratively" reason doesn't work anymore. And I want Celestials to be self-serving dickheads as readily as Fiends ^^ ...
  * It's a sad thing that the "Good" Outer Planes are so lacking, but that's a problem I'll have to wrestle with, as I plan for them to be conceptually different. And preferably non-stupid too ...

@Wiseman : I already do without alignment, but I want my outsiders and planes to still have some internal / behavioral logic, not just "alternate primes".

@Voss : I agree, deity's death is a shitfest of inconsistency & writer bias. I have some ideas to put some logic in this shit, but that's not (yet) the subject of the discussion. Thanks for the input however !

@Occluded Sun : Your personal interpretation is duly noted. It's not fitting for the Forgotten Realms setting that I use however.

---------------------------------------------
Decisions taken (feel free to discuss) :

• * Petitioners are not the only source of Outsiders. There should be also those born "naturally" (celestial animales, etc.), and those spawned by the plane.
  * There is continuity of consciousness, from mortal to soul to Petitioner to Outsider. However, barring fast evolution, there should be a fading of the "alive" memories in a petitioner : the more you exist on the outer plane, the fewer your old memories are, replaced by the new ones, until there's only the core being.
  * "Gods are Outer Planes landlords and faction leaders. Outsiders join them out of some personal alignment-colored reasons, but they don't have to." (by Starmaker). It's a philosophical and/or practical alliance, without intrinsic certainty. Outsiders aren't forced to do the god's bidding, and things can change.
  * Angels are now god-created servants, all the gods can create them (whatever original alignment), they begin with a morality and mindset perfectly aligned with the god's desire (maybe a forced loyalty, but I'd like the possibility of rebellion / treason), and they should get a new name.
  * Demon replaced by Tanar’ri, Devil by Baatezu and Angel ... is undecided (Seraph, Obadiah, Obahid, Abbadu, or Angel to surprise the players with an Angel of Lolth ^^).

New questions :

• * Should a person be transformed into a (or gain the subtype of a) "concept-subtyped" outsider (good /evil / demon / devil / etc.), how harmful would it be to the mind, memories, and ego (if close or far from said subtype) ?
  * Why are Law and Chaos not sides to the cosmic conflict ? Too much Juceo-Christian roots, lack of imagination, other reasons ?
  * Are the Inner & Outer Planes the same for ALL the Material Planes (Abeir, Toril, Oerth, Krynn, Earth, Dark Sun, etc.) ? If true, then there should be a fuckload of gods in there, if not, then there really isn't a great Cosmic Conflict, just an infinity of little Cosmic Skirmishes, yes ?

Editing done, if it's too long, I can put stuff in spoiler tags.