Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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It has always seemed problematic to me that the good gods reward you for being good - and the evil gods reward you for being evil.
It doesn't work that way. Evil mortals know well enough to not trust other evil mortals, it's only a matter of time until they betray you. And you don't get to be an evil god because you just happen to love evil to the max. You become an evil god because you fit the domain. If you're ... Onitayo, the Demon God of the Raging Sea - you sink ships. Seamen say prayers and give offerings to not be sunk. But it's not like you have a secret priesthood of evil ship-sinkers working for you. It's your domain, you are the Raging Sea - you can sink your own ships.
And also, if you're evil, that doesn't mean you get a pat on the head for other, bigger evil things.
So, it's all wrong. If you're evil, and you die, you go to hell, and your reward is to be punished - poetically - forever. If you sank ships, perhaps thinking Onitayo would be clapping in his hands with maniacal glee, you're in for a rude awakening. Your hell will be drowning.
But it gets better. So you're drowning, all the time, for all eternity. But over time, you change. Slowly, minutely, you change, and eventually you become something else, whatever lowest and least being exists on your chosen plane of punishment. And you get to do something awful, such as fight in the blood war. Mind you, you're still drowning. Inside whatever body you now inhabit, your soul is still in the water, just below the surface, out or air, fighting desperately to get your head above water, and draw a breath that will never, ever come.
Also, of course, you're in the blood war, and since you're the most miserable creature ever, you die. Over, and over and over again.
And given enough time, you will be 'rewarded'. You will go through a period of more advanced punishment - maybe even more drowning, but this time you're dragged down and down deeper into the dark by suckered tentacles ... but maybe something entirely else, some worst fear you always had.
At the end of your trial, you will emerge as something only vaguely less wretched, and be cast back into the war, to fight, and kill, and die. And always, through everything, the tiny spark of light that you can move up. You can improve your lot, ease your suffering. So you struggle, on and on through infinity, and for every 'advancement', it really gets worse - even more torture, but always the promise that .... just a bit more, step by step, you're approaching some sort of relief.
Until maybe, one day, infinity behind you, having drunk down an ocean of pain ... you reach the top. You are a Lord, and a whole plane obeys your every whim, and you finally realise that you've been tricked. You finally feel the suffering of everyone in your domain - and even so, the position is limited: You will be cast down and start over. But if you inflict enough suffering, you may earn a reprive, a delay of your inevitable demotion to least again. But it's never enough, it's just another form of punishment, and you're cast from the pinnacle of power to start again. But this time it'll be different.
All of this to discourage the idea that .. 'mwahahaha, I can be as evil as I want, for I shall be rewarded in the afterlife'.
In this model, I have Imps be the second highest level in the hierarchy - you go from Pit Fiend or whatever to a wretched, miserable Imp, and have to stay that way for gods only know how long, before you are 'promoted' to Demon Lord.
Sidenote: I don't differentiate. Devil, demon, slaad, makes no difference to me. So when I say hell, or demon, or whatever - it's all just lower planes, punishment.
Second sidenote: You can escape further punishment if you actually see what's going on, and don't participate. It's your own folly that's keeping you there.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
On your sidenote. Oh but it does matter. A Devil is Lawful, despite its quest for personal power. Word is bond and contracts are enforced to the letter. They may be evil bastards who write contracts that are so complex and twisted that you never see the screw job coming, but they will also uphold their side of the contract because not doing so is punished. Some contracts specify that the evil doer skips the larvae stages and goes straight to some demon stage - A Illrigger for instance. But a contract is always made to look like "I shall be rewarded" or "I will be powerful and immortal so I never have to pay up". Devils also try very hard to convince souls on the Fugue Plane, regardless of how they lived their lives or who they worshipped, that signing a contract and going to Baator is the way to go. And they seem to do a pretty good job of it. But yes, Soul shell to Lemure to Larvae to minor demon is a path of horror, pain, and punishment for most souls in Hell.
A Demon is Chaotic. Today it might smile, tomorrow it might snarl. Its word is meaningless and breaking its word is praised. Its all about power and power includes the joy of tormenting those weaker. Leading a warband from the Abyss into Baator is a great way for a demon to gain power, even if the whole warband is destroyed. They are just mortal souls after all.
The sunken cost fallacy and being shortsighted are literally the traits of some of the most famous villains in fiction. If you are a rotten bastard who slaughters villages and devour the flesh of humans, you know you are going to hell or the abyss, so why not make a deal with a devil or demon to gain further power in your mortal life? You now have the ability to summon monsters to further your cause, crush heroes before your feet and rule with an iron fist.
An evil god is no different, imagine you are a god of cannibals, every other god, wicked or just, wants to turn you into paste. If you decided to go on a flesh eating adventure, other gods would send paladins, clerics and celestials to slay you. Now what if you discover a cannibalistic warlord, you have a potential proxy to use for a smidge of your power, strong enough to do your bidding, weak enough to be tossed aside if need be.
Both sides think they are using one another, they know they would kill each other if they wanted to, but they don’t. If the warlord is loyal to the god, maybe they will be treated with some kindness and turned into a powerful fiend when they die, so that they are always serving. If the warlord isn’t, then the god sacrifices the warlord to further their goals while the warlord tries to escape with more power than they started with.
I'm well aware of the differences. And what I've described above - a very systematic, scripted grinding down of the poor souls unfortunate enough to make it into this particular hell is more devilish, and I could easily write up another better suited for a demonic scenario. It's not really important whether it's one or the other, and it's not really important if it's this one or some other version. What matters to me is that there is absolutely no upside to hell. It's not the evil reward for an evil life. It's unconditional eternal punishment. Because it's hell. Not Evil Inc.
Nothing in the lower planes is ever any sort of reward for anything. But the victim - who leads the warband in your example - may well have been tricked, yet again, to think there's a reward.
I don't do gods in that way.
In principle I disagree with you foundationally. Your hell is a conditional thing. If you're bad you go to hell, but if you're worse, you may get rewarded. I go for no such thing. If you're bad, you will be punished, and it's never going to stop. But never mind that.
I do gods differently. There will only ever be a god if there's worship. If you worship cannibalism, if enough people consider that divine, or do it as an act of prayer or devotion, then sure - there might be a god of cannibals. Conversely, I don't have one, any more than I have a god of murder, or madness. I have gods of heart, and harvest, or the storm and the sea, of love and fertility ... and so on. Ideals or ideas or forces that are likely to generate some sort of congregation.
So say there's a god of the Great Road. Travellers on the Great Road may pray for safety, good speed, and so on. Luck on their travels. And if they're good, they may be rewarded in the afterlife, and if they loved to travel, maybe their heaven is some sort of eternal journey. And if they're bad, and they go to hell, maybe their hell is also endless travel, harried at every step, starving, in pain, struggling to reach some end that will only make matters worse.
But then, when I GM, evil people never consider themselves to be evil (or close to never, maybe). They feel that 'I'm the only one capable of making the hard decisions necessary to keep this nation together' - or something to that effect. They will think that the end justifies the means. They will feel that the end is fair and just, even when it clearly isn't.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I mean, if you decide to double down and think you'll be rewarded, there’s the 9/10 chance it ends in horrible failure, as can be seen in most stories. Evil people will reward other evil people if they benefit from it, it’s inevitable that the corrupt will protect the others (even if only for their own hide) by obscuring justice. Meaning it’s up to the selfless to prevent horrible monsters from evading their punishment and to prevent further harm to be committed upon the innocent.
I mean .. sure, but - for my money, I think the more likely outcome is that evil people will reward other evil people if they feel they can exploit them.
Or any number of other social and mental mechanisms. There's definitely some reduction going on here, me boiling down complex things to simple things.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I think a sort of twisted "reward" system might actually make sense and be in place. let's say you're Orcus, and this one cultist of yours has been murdering a whole lot of people and then zombifying them in your name. it's not that you have ever or will ever care about insipid single century life spanned flesh sacks, but this guy is useful, and gosh dangit when that insipid single century life spanned flesh sack dies, as it inevitably will, he won't be around doing that thing you like anymore. So he dies, and now he's in the abyss as some demon, who's dying in their own personal hell over and over for eternity. you think you might promote him, but but you know what? if he moves up too fast he might overthrow you someday, so maybe let's let him stew for a few hundred years before you go and make him one of your unholy servants. Break his will to live before he gets any ambitions or anything wild like that. Maybe you'll even torture him a little extra just to get your own personal hell off your mind, even just for a little bit.
In the end, the cultist got the exact reward he wanted. To serve under the demon lord Orcus for the rest of eternity. The lower planes are place where no joy can ever exist, unfortunately for him, so his eternal reward is certainly muddied by the eternal torment he feels inside.
Lord Vecna likes his mortal souls with a side of earl grey tea and blackberry jam.
I've seen empires thousands of years old fall by his side.
You may call me Jeeves or Butler, whatever suits your fancy.
Sure ... that's one way of looking at it.
To me, it's not about that. Orcus isn't a part of my cosmology, but if he was, he wouldn't be trying to ... make more undead, or whatever. The Blood War isn't about fighting, or winning, or about Team Chaos having any sort of beef with Team Order. The Blood War is the engine that drives the punishment train.
And it's all karmic. The destructive ambitions, drives and urges of evil people is what keeps them in hell, and as long as they remain captive of themselves, they also remain in hell.
There's definitely flavor things I miss by my approach. But you gotta admit, there's an internal logic to it. Right?
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
The actual hell is not the realm of Lucifer or Satan, but just another realm of God.
The demons you reference either wander the earth, or are bound in chains in outer darkness. Some of them probably even play D&D.
The real Hell is run by angels of the Most High, and Satan has no power there.
☕️
That's Gnosticism, not D&D.
As far as the "reward" for being evil goes, here's what it is: when you die, your soul is given a thorough dunking in the Styx to destroy everything about you that was unique and transformed into a larvae, which is a six-foot long maggot with a human face. Then it's painfully molded into a lemure, manes, or other bottom-tier fiend, depending on which Lower Plane it wound up on, at which point it's abused by all the fiends that are higher ranking than it. It's really not a reward at all. There's a reason so many evil characters end up voluntarily seeking out alternatives like undeath.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
"Be a vampire, or a ghost, or an immortal with a paint-by-the-numbers portrait in the rec room. Hell, even a brain-in-a-jar in a pinch. Anything to avoid the Big Fire Below."
Xykon, Epic Lich from The Order of the Stick
Which is the other side to "why be evil when you're cognizant of the existence of the Lower Planes as more than just something those haughty jerks in robes go on about"; you think you can beat the system. There was the guy in Witcher 3 who made a deal with basically the Devil that he'd be immortal until someone the Devil sent fulfilled 3 tasks for him. He then gave anyone sent his way impossible tasks until the Devil found someone with the chops to see it all through with a bits of advice and other help with the tasks, and there was even a final clause that the soul collecting could only happen while standing on the moon. Shockingly, it turns out that in the end the Devil cheats better than he did, though. And once they've got your soul, beings who are only interested in getting the power that provides aren't going to view your agency as a feature, ergo all the variations on the same theme once you arrive in their hands.
Also, from another very RPG based webcomic:
"Wait, if I did Evil and you guys here are Evil, then shouldn't you be showering me with rewards and concubines, etc.?"
"This is Hell, we're big on irony here."
Sometimes a person might actually get a reward, but fiends only do this often enough to make people think that there's actually a chance it could happen to them. And most of the time that's really evil gods rather than the fiends who reward a worshiper for doing something especially impressive in their name. And even then, the "reward" is often something that's objectively rather terrible.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.