#just think those sorta vibes fit better in animated visuals but what do i know!!

[violentlydefending]

hey can anyone tell me why they made a saint seiya movie and also why they made it live-action

[balioc]

Talkin’ About Outsiders

Riffing on my recent post:

If you wanted to keep something like the traditional D&D Great Wheel cosmology, and you wanted all the planes on the Wheel and all the various alignment-oriented races of outsiders to be cool and thematic and not-shoehorned-in, what would it look like?  Let’s give it a shot.  Maybe this will be useful someday, if I ever run a planar-savvy D&D campaign.  Or if you do.

Guiding Principles:

* All groups of outsiders should feel narratively resonant.  Players should have an intuitive sense of what they’re about, what role they would play in heroic fantasy stories, etc.  We want to avoid “oh yeah, those guys over in that corner, because of course there have to be some guys over in that corner.”

* Outsiders should feel otherworldly and mystical, like the spirits they are, not like Another Race of Monsters that’s been jammed into a planar role by fiat. 

* Outsiders should strongly reflect their associated alignment, but, like, in a cool way. 

I’m also going to be working with my own personal gut-level sense of how the alignment grid “should” work on a cosmic scale, which suggests that the “corner planes” -- LG, CG, LE, and CE -- are going to be the strongest, most magical, most populated, etc.  In a metaphysical sense, a strong good/evil commitment and a strong law/chaos commitment reinforce each other rather than diluting each other.  In a demographic sense, while in fact the plurality of mortals are TN due to vacillation or apathy, most noteworthy mortals with plane-defining levels of soul power have corner alignments.  In a pragmatic storycrafting sense, three of those four corners are way cooler and better-developed than anything else on the Wheel, so we should probably run with that.  The upshot is that the NG, NE, LN, and CN outsiders can and should be constructed such that they just have less impact on the universe overall.  The in-betweeny planes...well, they’re afterthoughts, we’ll get to them (briefly) but can ignore them for now.

OK.  Diving in:

Chaotic evil demons from the Abyss and lawful evil devils from Hell are being kept, more or less intact.  They’ve gotten more attention than any other planar races, by like an order of magnitude; they’ve got lots of existing lore and monster-design that people know and love; it would be a crime to throw that stuff away.  Fluff should probably try to present them with a somewhat more-philosophical, less-Flanderizing spin than they usually get.  The conceptual heart of demon-ness isn’t “graaaargh kill smash consume defile” (even if that is a popular instantiation), it’s something like “literally nothing matters except my desire and my vision.”  Similarly, devils would benefit from a little less “we’re all legalistic treacherous assholes” (even if many of them are) and a little more “the order of the universe is legitimate, the infernal hierarchy is legitimate, we follow the rules but we play to win.”  But fundamentally these are the creatures you know and love, don’t fix what ain’t broke. 

Neutral evil yugoloths can stay, too, more or less.  They’ve gotten a fair amount of good monster design too, and they’re popular, although I confess that I have no idea why.  A race of fiendish mercenaries who manipulate and prolong the Blood War?  Sure, why not?  I do want to give them a bit more character, though, and not the inexplicable apocalypse-obsessed death-spirit thing from Pathfinder.  Rather: as I understand it, neutral evil as an alignment is mostly about pure selfishness.  It’s not hard to capture the idea of “selfishness” in spiritual cosmic form -- that’s the gaki, the hungry ghost.  Yugoloths should be driven by intense insatiable cravings, presumably with each kind having a different general category of craving.  This will do a lot to define their politics internal and external, the means of treating with them, etc.  (Also, to be clear, “daemon” as an importantly-separate thing from “demon” is very silly and I have no truck with it.)

The collective term for demons, devils, and yugoloths is of course “fiends.”

The lawful neutral outsider race has already been covered in my previous post: that’s the fae.  Inhumanly perfect spirits obsessed with rules, oaths, codes-of-honor, etc.  Dangerous, and certainly not benevolent, but also not inimical to the flourishing of mortals in the way that fiends are.  Hard to understand, as all outsiders must on some level be, but probably easier to deal with than any other spirits if you know the right codes and protocols.  Probably we play down the “capricious nature spirit” thing and play up the bit where they have courts, monarchs, diplomatic ties to Heaven and Hell, etc.

The chaotic neutral race should be...well, something better than the slaadi, that’s for sure.  “They’re infinitely variable and unpredictable, except that they’re all magic frogs who speak in word salad.”  Gee.  Useful for storytelling, that.  I don’t have any super-brilliant ideas here (and am open to suggestions), but I have what I believe to be a good-enough idea: genies.  Proud, wild, tempestuous spirits who treasure their own freedom and dignity above all else.  Binding them can be a road to great power, since they’ll do pretty much anything to escape, but it’s also unbelievably risky.  You can make up some cute lore about their anarchic ad-hoc anything-goes society. 

I’d like to use “angels” as the collective term for good-aligned outsiders, the equivalent of “fiends.”  We could go with “celestials,” I guess, but it’s awkward that the LG plane specifically is (sometimes) called Celestia, and really “angels” has a connotative punch like nothing else. 

Lawful good gets archons.  Yay archons.  Tiered choirs, divine armies, holy holy holy, the whole shebang.  The fluff for these guys could stand to be fleshed out some -- as far as I know it hasn’t been touched since the 3.5e Book of Exalted Deeds, and that version was kinda lame -- but there’s like infinite amounts of Christian angelology lore on which to draw, so I’m not worried.

Neutral good needs something better than guardinals, since “benevolent animal dudes” really had no spiritual resonance at all.  Fortunately we can do some conceptual repurposing here. I think we can just grab the beings that D&D currently calls “angels,” start calling them all “devas” -- even the planetars and solars, which I guess become “planetary devas” and “solar devas” -- and stick them all in NG.  No one really uses them as all-purpose divine servants anyway, as far as I can tell.  They are beings of pure benevolence, protectors and guardians and healers, etc. etc.  Possibly we call the NG plane “Celestia,” to fit with the celestial-objects theme of the devas, and just go with “Heaven” for the LG plane.

And then we come to chaotic good, which is definitely the hardest row to hoe.  CG has a very important spot on the Great Wheel, the CG outsiders need to have something akin to the narrative power of the demons and devils and archons, and...I just don’t think there’s any pre-existing thing that fits the bill.  “Chaotic good” is not the kind of idea that has been traditionally associated with mighty spiritual mysteries, which is probably why all the existing CG outsider races suck so much.  (Seriously, as far as I can tell, it’s always either “we’re elf knights who fight for freedom! but, like, planar!” or “uh, we’re spirits of art and beauty, I guess, sorta?”) We’re going to have to develop these guys from scratch. 

Rather than trying to come up with an “archetypically CG outlook” or something, I think it would make sense to start with an image of their world and society.  This is a good, lovely, beneficent version of the Abyss.  This is a place of tremendous diversity, where outsider lords carve out their own domains according to their own idiosyncratic specifications.  Which means you have, like, a million conflicting little paradises each defined by its own vision.  (But not, like, at war, the way demon lords always are, we’re all very Good here.  Just...different from each other.)  It probably adds up to a sort of hipster’s-vision-of-the-big-city vibe.  You imagine a race of cosmic Manic Pixie Dream Girls, essentially, always flowing into and out of each other’s circles, descending to the Prime Material Plane in order to experience delights / inspire greatness / find adoring mortal fans who will validate their coolness. 

I think it would be a mistake to give these guys a single strong visual theme, the way that the guardinals are “animal people” and the eladrin are “pretty elves.”  They’re a menagerie of weird-but-beautiful monsters, the way that demons are a menagerie of weird-but-ugly monsters.  The race needs a name, but right now I don’t have a good one.

For true neutral outsiders, I think we can just go with elementals and call it a day.  They’re mindless!  They do as they’re commanded, unless they don’t, in which case they have incredibly simplistic urges like “burn” or “flow!” 

The in-between planes -- y’know, Gehenna, the Beastlands, Acheron, etc. -- are cool, in some vague theoretical sense, and I don’t think we should scrap them entirely.  But I also think it’s a mistake to try and give them their own full-fledged native outsider races, to pretend that they’re going to have the same depth of inherent character as the main eight outer planes, etc.  Instead, I suspect it’s best to use them as divine domains.  Because they don’t have powerful native outsider races, they’ve all been taken over by gods.  Exactly which gods live on which ones is a matter of your particular setting’s theology, but it makes a lot of intuitive sense to say “these are the places where you’d expect to find gods by default, a god who lives on one of the main eight planes is doing something kinda weird and probably has a close relationship with the local outsiders.”