Our Infernal Neighbors

Some time ago, I did some posts about eliminating all the planes and just assuming that there were two fantastic physical states, ethereal and astral, and every otherworldly location was really a physical location, possibly inside a mountain or up in the clouds, populated by ethereal or astral beings who build things out of ethereal or astral matter. And then I rewrote demons, devils and other infernal creatures to simplify them, trim powers, and fit them into this "zero plane" cosmology and a single axis Law/Chaos alignment scheme.

Since I've gotten a few calls for a reprint of this material, it was one of my goals for the free PDF series. And now, it's done: Our Infernal Neighbors: Simple, Alternate Otherworldly Creatures for a Cosmos without Planes. It seemed to take forever, because I did a lot of rewriting and added some material on the Fae as another full infernal variety. And then the formatting and layout took way longer than I'd planned, but I think I'm getting closer to a final look.

I'm  hoping there are few if any typos. I'm pretty sure I caught the spelling errors and grammatical mistakes early on, but I started getting tired near the end.

Progress Update: Infernals

I've been working on the infernals as the next PDF document. I know I had listed that as something like Project #5, but it looked like something I could do quickly, with not as much rewriting or layout hassles  as some of the other projects. I think Ranks of the Undead will be the next one after this, so there's also another factor: a couple sections I wrote for the infernals document will be reusable in Ranks of the Undead, so working on those in sequence should go pretty quickly.

One of the interesting developments has to do with my standard ways of writing monster stats. You may recall that I like doing a header line with a quick appearance/behavior summary in parentheses, like: "Manticore (Fantastic Predatory Beast)" or "Banshee (Vengeful Spirit)". I try to fit in as many as many important details as I can ("Invisible Fiery Sadistic Ursine",) but for things like demons and devils, even my stripped-down versions, there may just be too many of these to be practical.

But then I realized that, since all demons would share some features, all devils would share some features, and so on for each infernal variety, I could have a section header that could define each variety. Like:  "Demonic (Chaotic Hostile Destructive Ethereal Monstrosity)". And each demon could then be like "Bat Demon (Flying Demonic Beast)". Basically, it's a macro. I don't have to repeat the terms  that apply to all Demonic creatures, because the label "Demonic" stands for and expands to the other labels.

One final note: I might change it again, but currently, I'm going with the original name of the series, "Our Infernal  Neighbors", as the name of this PDF.

Our Infernal Neighbors

I've never been happy with demons and other extra-planar creatures in D&D. By the time people started expanding the cosmology and inhabitants of the infernal planes, the "design" principle of "longer list of powers = more interesting monster" had firmly taken hold and it was pretty standard to make a more powerful creature, like a demon, by just adding more and more powers. Eldritch Wizardry lists six powers for Type I demons, eight for Type II, nine for Type III, and so on. Furthermore, several powers shared by all demons are at different strengths for each type, and some of the strengths seem random, jumping from 5' Darkness to 15' Darkness back down to 10' Darkness, to name one example. It's even worse in AD&D; each edition added more and more powers to basic supernaturals.

The problem with this approach is that you have to refer to the demon description not just once, but repeatedly during an encounter; there's no mnemonic sense to it all. Some of it could be easily fixed by consolidating powers (get rid of levitation, for example, because all demons have telekinesis as well, so they can just use that.) Some powers can be consolidated as power themes (use all fire- and darkness-related magic up to level 4.) Other fixes depend on the broad supernatural category (demon, devil, etc.)

Also, I have my own problem. I prefer the simple Law/Chaos alignment split, with alignment as faction instead of behavioral descriptor, plus I prefer the non-planar approach I've described before: "ethereal" and "astral" are states, not planes, and places like Hell or the Abyss are deep in the earth or on another planet. This requires changing some of the details for "extra-planar" creatures, eliminating some types that seem to exist just to fill a conceptual niche (demon vs. daemon vs. demodand, for example.)

I have some ideas on revamped "extra-planar" creatures that I will be posting during the coming week.