Does anyone else hate the concept of "types of demons" in DND? These are beings of chaos and evil...

>These are beings of chaos and evil, from essentially the second most mutable place in the planes except from Limbo, but they're able to be easily catagorized?

I think Hordes of the Abyss from 3.5 explained that demons are from mortal ideas of chaotic evil. So demons can still be categorized by mortals to some extent but there are a lot of different kinds and variations. One thing to keep in mind is that morality is often objective in D&D in the sense that one can measure how evil or chaotic something is, like taking a temperature.

Meanwhile, things like ancient demons like the obyrith or beings from the Far Realms are difficult to categorize because they are more 'primeval' or not based on mortal morality.

In my homebrew setting, demons and devils exist in the same infinitely layered hell where chaotic and lawful fiends compete with each other over mortal souls through various means. They're colloquially just called infernals.

The abyss concept was turned into a more world of warcraft outland-esque purgatory realm made of various shattered and forgotten remnants of prototype worlds made by the gods where countless outsider beings, fallen angels, elementals, and what have you exist side by side in mixed rule and turmoil.

One upon a fucking time proxies for the Great Old ones and the Outer Gods showed up to tear the universe a new asshole, but fucking Ursula from the little mermaid, showed up, beat up a giant bug that had no place being there and made a giant spider with a wolfs head commander of the fucked up hell armies that resided there, and then they decided that the current crop of abominations was 2 eldritch 2 handle and didn't breed fast enough so after Orcus when he was alive killed everyone on his native plane with a level 100 Dweomer and some bullshit thanks to his multiclass in wizard and Cleric Levels, and older edition rules, they noticed souls coming down to the Abyss.

After this occurred, the fat whore got her floating brain monster demon fleshcrafters to fuck around with these souls, and they made a new breed of demon, but the first one made looked like an OC Donut Steel, so they through it into the Abyss's equivalent of Jurrassic park and forgot about it

So with a bit more of template stacking, min maxing, and other stuff, the Tanari'ri were born. And in addition, the Pale Night had sex with Nyralathotep and made Graz'zt.

So the Tumblrwhale of the abyss rallied her Anarchist nutjob proxied freakshows against the universe because the fucking mortals kept letting them in, as at the time, all of existence has the temperance and personality of Kender, as consequences as a concept did not exist, and her bitchboy spidermonkey led the parade.

Anyhow, they pissed off the !notelves, and some elementals and the gods, and got their asses kicked, but not before making some real estate from dead god bodies and stolen bits of planes, Tumblr went to her hugbox and spidermonkey went to jail. Due to natural selection and the fact that the proxy Lovecraftdon'tsue guys were obviously better than their creations, most of them got killed off, and The Tanari'ri ruled in their place, mostly.

During this period Fat Fuck Orcus, now a broken-ass Demon lord was fighting with the guy who can be summed up as BBEG's BBC for the who wants to be the next spidermonkey contest, but then the fucking OC Donut steel in Worsethanhell's Jurrassic park shows up AFTER IMMENSE EXPANSION OF DONG HEAVY WEIGHT LIFTING, AND DINOSAUR WRESTLAN and proceeds to kill 21+ of their kind, take the spidermonkey title and tell them to fuck off as it spanks them with it's tentapod mandrils, they fight this guy, but to be honest only Orcus holds a candle to him, but Fat Fuck Orcus is too lazy to really give a fuck and is too busy being ignorant of the fact he has a higher CR than Demonspam monkey's 32+ CR when correctly calculated.

Also at some point, after hell got in place and consequences were invented, some Devil did some Metal Gear solid shit and killed a really Kickass Demon lord, becoming a Lesser deity or Demigod, and it was really cool, but the Assman told him to leave because he did it better than the assman, and the assman doesn't like that shit.

So anyway, Monkey Trouble is in charge, but is barely because the two hemisphere of his brain are two separate entities, and they're always fighting, except when they're not, and for some reason it never ocurred to him he could just fleshcraft himself back togther or some shit, and this is a plot point in numerous dungeon magazine adventures and stuff.

He's also really fukin brutal, everything he does is metal.

Anyhow, as it is, Obrityhs are really just Cosmic Horrors operating under Evil as a modus operandi to end the Universe in it's current state, and Tanari'ri are closer to a pet project to reach this goal faster, but as time goes on things are going completely off the rails.

The Slaadi are literally Pepe the Frog as a Race, and there's even a Frog god that favours Mankind and is the god of Bigotry in Greyhawk. Green Slaad are made from dead Wizards, and the thing that makes them is a giant inert cosmic computer monitor, per Kekian Hieroglyphics, and Wojak is Ptah of the Egyptian patheon. One of their dudes was in the Game Demon Stone after becoming BLACKED and becoming a humanoid dude instead of this freaky Warpshit skelton scythe frog dude he was.

Yugoloths are the same race that Skeletor from the original He-man is. They're basically the lower planes equivalent of Channers, they sell themselves for the war between the Abyss and the Nine Hells, also have stock of spoopy Ancient Baatorians that are basically like, what a Skinwalker to a Human is to a Devil, and the really fucking hate being summoned to do anything, but they merged a Cacodemon with a Beholder and it was cool as fuck this one time, It's basically Acoloyte of the Skin but for yugoloths. They're closer to traditional half-man half animal demons to note, and love fucking with everyone.

The Devils are Devils, except they're idiots in a pyramid scheme waiting to get fucked by their boss, who have the most exploitable reproduction system in the universe that it's a miracle a cabal of wizards hasn't shown up to graft their foetus-grenade-testicles to other people to make their own Outsider species.

wait is nyarlthotep a legit thing in modern dnd now?

Are you aware that Cthulhu was statted in 1E?

I was, but I thought it was just one of those mayn things statted and given little to no lore.
I mean that was what 40 years ago?

Read Graz'zts Article in Dragon Magazine, and ESPECIALLY Lords of madness. There's been this long term Lovecraft Subtext going on in D&D which ammounts to them having a half-working Elder Sign, Ao working for Yog-Sothoth, Obrityhs being Proxies for Lovecraftian enties, a Dragon magazine article all on their references they've made, Tharizdun killing everyone and shedding his divinity to become a Great Old One, You, the player in Neverwinter Nigths 2 becoming one, and a shitload more such as the Mooncalf article in D&D, Pre-4e Far Realm, the Aboleth's and the idea that Illithid are a third race made by Elder Things.

Also, they statted Cthulhu once and put the 3.5 example iconic characters against it once.

Annd here's one article.

This always bothered me about Chaos in Warhammer. They're supposed to be these horrific protean entities but their daemons fall into two dozen neat categories.

wait Ao works for yog-sothoth?
I mean there was that one bit in a novel were he talks to this entity of light that was his boss but thats Yog?
So i'm guessing this lovecraft subtext has finally boiled over?
I mean I knew of some of the stuff like the far realm but that could just be like anything lovecraftian but they actually are bringing them in head on now?
Were is it mentioned yog is Ao's boss?
How did the iconics go?

Basically, the deities are psionic fission-spawn born from the Astral Sea after Yog-Sothoth got ejected from the native cosmos due to the Aboleth's allegedly fucking up and their humanoid slaves/thralls somehow triggering this massive event horizon accident- presumably by an elder-sign, (now cerulean sign which is something that can only ward the like of aberrations) but the other thing keeping him, and by extension all his kin out is the fact that Alignment is now an objective force. To explain that a bit better, all of that Nihlistic based on nature and inevitablity stuff that comes with lovecraft's brew of storytelling is denied outright, so it cannot exist in that area.

This is also a meta-level explanation for the time TSR got slapped on the hand for using Lovecraft's stuff during the course of time where Call of Cthulhu wnd other licensed products that were running C&D'd D&D for using them in their works in a Dragon magazine article and that one book I'm not 100% on right now, resulting in the current state of affairs existing as they are.

The idea is, is that for the Dark Tapestry (I know that using that is a Pathfinder term for the lovecraftian pantheon, but it works) to be present in D&D, Everything has to go, and Nyralathotep was evidently working towards it through incredible subtle subtext and memetic bullshit that only autists could hope to notice.

Anyhow, a good chunk of existing lovecraftian servitor species that were not ejected in this grand abortion remained, though lost their original sense of identity or otherwise, core aspects of their being got split, downsized or depowered through various means.

Elder Evil was the in-universe result of multitudes of beings hitting the same existential level as those of the Dark Tapestry, but because the native space and cumulative reality doesn't accept them, it drives them bonkers if they weren't that way already via basically being so CE it's almost about to break.

Infact, a good chunk of the first deities were batshit insane before mortal worship, and later transformation, personalization, subversion and control they issued amongst this fucked up cosmos later resulted in the majority of settings people run around in today.

Now Tharizdun? You know how gods have salient abilities that let them know, experience feel, or more or less datamine the shit out of something relating to them?

Yeah, Tharizdun could more or less constantly hooked up to anyone remotely insane in the cosmos. He was on some Bloodborne levels of *insight. Then the Elves fucking opened up the Far Realm, and well, he figured out more than what his own already broken head was full of.

The Aboleth are the only species that have a remote idea of what the fuck happened, but they never speak of it, namely due to the fact that Aboleths all have Genetic Memory, and there's basically a massive Mandella/Butterfly effect going on, and they can't explain it, but they still venerate and rever the Great Old One's and Outer Gods, but have since lost the memory of their true names (Which are significant unto themselves) and Worship them as Elder Evil by proxy names instead.

Also, the deities were born on the Astral, sea- So where the hell did the Overdeity sent by a Master who is both Cruel and Warm come from? There's also Vestiges, notably souls that fall out of traditional afterlife systems in place across the Multiverse that can be summoned.

Look up Otiax the Gate (Lesser Yog-sothoth, it's passage even quotes the likeness from one of it's summonings and is a trojan horse to try to get someone to open up the far realm by influencing your behaviour when near locked doors) The Elf who was a Paladin and Blackguard (Broke the alignment system and got ejected out of the universe) And this one fucking Vestige which is literally Some Star spawn shit.

Were are you getting this from?
This seems like some huge setting lore.
So basically he got kicked out of the lovecraft reality or the dnd reality?

If you actually read the entry, it specifically states that there are amny mutations, changes, and altered forms of demons in the Demon entry, meanign the Gm is free to change, twist, describe, and alter the abilities of any demon you run into. the types of demons are based on the various sins and evils they do, so the 'categorization' is mre a resultt of what humans souls are like when they form demons, but they don't have to be how they are descitbed in the books at all.

But if you don't bother reading, you wouldn't know that.

As for Graz'zt? His Mother is the Pale Night, an Obrityh. Said Obrityh has an incomprehensible form that reality refuse to accept hidden underneath her robes that is save or die and if you save your mind erases what you saw of her. She's the Nameless Mist, which by Tabletop Anne Rice post Lovecraft terms is the Thing that made Nyralathotep. So anyhow, Nyralatotep, under it's Elder Evil name (See Lords of Madness) Get's this booty call from her and fucks her, and then when the Pale Night Comes to term he Vag rips the universe so hard from the explosive delivery it allows these things called Psuedonatural creatures to exist which are literally Cosmic horrors summoned into the forms of rudimentary creatures native to the D&D-verse AND a number of Demon Lords, Including Graz'zt who has extra digits. So Graz'zt is literally the Inbred son of Nyralathotep fucking it's own mother. But this get's even sicker, because The Pale Night did all of this shit during the instability in the Abyss where Demon Lords were fighting for the Title of Prince of Demons to produce a potential candidate, and her idea was the FUCK the winner.

So that's some Nth dimensional eldritch incest going on here.

Now, then, the reason why Psudeonatural creatures are important, is because of the Far Realm, a Plane (doubtful) contacted by a bunch of elves that thought it'd be a good idea to group craft a portal to planes non-rudimentary to what you can find in D&D's bizzarro admixture of planes, reality and such. They effectively went LIGHTYEARS beyond that and reached the Far realm, a Cosmic ever shifting space onion full-o Aberrations and dice rolls so complex it's better to just TPK in less than 3 turns passing there. Elder Evil like to hang out here, via astral projection (Noted in the Ecology of the Kaorti article) and the thing about pseudeonatural creatures is that they're equal exhanges for summons of a particular nature. The reason why this is important is because Alienists, which are spellcasters that fuck up their shit to study the far Realm, connect their summons to this place which give them lesser Pseudonatural familiars and summons as a class ability.

Wanna know why this is actually the most dangerous thing ever? What do you think would happen if an Alienist was summoning the Demon Lord Dagon with it's "special ability"? Yeah, gratz, you just broke your sanity and the alignment system in one swift action!

Were you getting this info? is this recent? I have not heard any of this besides on Veeky Forums.

The chaotic nature of demons comes from the fact that they are promoted or demoted (/eaten) based on their personal strength and the whims of their master, whereas devils are promoted and demoted based on social structure

Cool as it may be, he's just making it all up.

Thought so, would be great if it was true.

This desu. And just because a monster manual presents the monsters a certain way doesn't mean a gm can just take the stats of say a frog demon and re-skin it in game as a, I dunno, mud demon. The abilities would mechanically stay the same, but the description would be different.

Couple that tactic with never outright telling the players what a creature is, instead just describing what they see, and the PCs will be able to suspend disbelief.

So if the monster manual doesn't make the demons sound 'chaotic' enough then mix it up yourself.

Shame though, as he did refrence a few things like how pale night may have been impregnated by a 'a cosmic entity of a thousand names and crawling chaos,'

As for sources-
Fiendish Codex 1 - Hordes of the Abyss (3.5)
Lords of Madness (3.5)
Illithiad 2e
Multiple Underdark.pdfs relating to Aboleth and Illithid cities
Looking through Monster books for notable creatures that take a little too much from certain course materials (2e-3.5)
Neverwinter Nights 2 mask of the Betrayer Campaign Chaotic Evil Ending
Tome of Magic - And extensions in Web Enhancements
Dragon Magazine 324#
Mordenkainen having a fucking Silver Key
Dragon 359 - Demonomicon of Iggwilv, Apocyrtha
Elder Evil
Fiend Folio
1e- Deities and Demigods, (name in relation to where Yog-Sothoth resided in the D&D cosmos before ejection via C&D order, and the name used to describe the Elder things noted in that book, and how it was referenced in the two instances of the Sargon prophecies later in 2e and 3.5, Illithiad and Lords of Madness)
Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume II (Savan Aboleth, provides much better information next to it's conversions to PrC in 3.5)
Dragon magazin #131 - Ecology of the Aboleth, only partially relevant in relation to the Grand Aboleth Now by 3.5 known as the 'Eldest' the Aboleth's own racial paragon equivalent of Cthulhu that sleeps atop it's oldest city, Abolet hsociety is handled by Savants as of 3.5 now.
Dragon Magazine #12 Saltwater Aboleth (Should be in Lords of Madness, there were Aboleth Variants if I recall)
Dragoon Magazine 267# in relation to Far-Realm Esque Underdark adventures (Prior to 3.5 namely using the term Far-Realm, reference to it were usually termed "From beyond, or The outside" respectively)

I agree with this completely and cherry-pick Demons from third-party supplements, pretending they are all unique entities, or the servants of a specific Demon Prince.

Someone should screen grab all of this.

DMG281 - Illithid Names
DMG308 - Illithid Symbionts
DMG313 - Illithid & Behold PrC + abilities and other stuff
DMG337 - Lords of Dust (Namely the fucking Keeper of Secrers which is literally a 40k KOS)
DMG340 Mooncalves and their nondescript deity AKA (We run out of ideas for provided !notLovecraft content, here's a DM discretion species for this purpose that in now way resembles one of Cthylla's apperances )
DMG342 - Flying Illithid heads
DMG358 Ecology of the Kaorti (Far Realm Ex-Elves that accidentally became aberrations looking upon an Elder Evil)
DMG360 Graz'zt's creation per Nyralathotep
DMG361 Details for Tharizdun's Elder Evil herald, Shogarathot,
DMG362 Black Cysts, expansion on 361
DMG363 Fucking Elder Evil Vestige
DMG373 Origin of the Sharn, Great Old One Tharizdun
DMG294 Only existing Image of Tharizdun, reminiscent of his the Forgottem Temple of Tharizdun cover art-pre Floating prison imprisonment where he literally constantly tears himself apart talking to himself until he's a amorphous muddy blob of entropy similar to his black cysts
DMG330 - 3.5's Far Realm Article, such as mentioning the fucking Elves did it, may or may not be synonymous with Elder Evils-Father Lymics summoning
Myriad Planes cosmogoly looking similar to summoned Yog-sothoth composition per Necromonicon ritual, but is probably a coincidence
Manual of the Planes & Planar Handbook
Plane of Elemental Blood (Outer plane depicted in a web Enhancement, possibly related to Aboleth Progenitor, might have something to do with the Blood War's cost of sacrifice or is a plane on the fritz similar to the demiPlane of Nightmares and the demiplane of dreams getting fucked by the Far Realm per DMG330) (Was not expanded on, unless the Blood Magus PrC holds some relation)
DMG349 Dagon's fucking D&D Article
D&D 3.5 adventure - Thunder Below's Ubothar
Astromundi Chronicles (Illithad and Lords of madness) Reference use of 1e's Elder things and note the same names used.

Exemplars of Evil - Captain Gnash (literally trying to Find R'lyeh)
Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk - Aboleth Brain dissected.
There's also, next to Lords of Madness's Lovecraftian entity translation for their D&D Elder Evil names chart for a shitload more they added by 4e, next to a number of other entities found in FR.

The Places to look are stuff in the Underdark as those books have Aboleths, and Far Realm stuff, Planar books making note for the term "The Outside" around 1e-2e for Far-Realm stuff, Astrology and star reading stuff, and the Modules for Tharizdun.

I forgot the DMG article For Tharizdun's whack-ass Crystal space prison, and I need some stuff on the Demiplane of Nightmare, the Demiplane of Dreams stuff is here, and it relates to DMG330 for the Far Realm. Ravenloft also has an Elder Evil responsible for making the fucked up fey there, and they've the Far off Plane of Gothic Earth which has the Red Death, also an Elder Evil, (To note this setting also has a Beholder worshipped on a troupical island there too.)

We've also the Old Ones, from NWN1, and the Yuan-ti and that FR Serpent creator race (Children of Yig, anyone?)

Also, read some Lovecraft, not all of the pieces come together without the context his works provide. I.E the Reason why Ghaunadaur doesn't make any sense in terms of it's actions and it's Dogma, noted through reading it in his more detailed 2e stuff- such as his rites of sacrifice and the like, next to his use of Giant slugs.

There's also Half-farspawn and the like of Half-farspawn beholders presented in a Web Enhancement.

Also, the Aboleth basically admit to being made by fission, their Blood Mother *May* Be Shub-Niggurath, but I've been looking for a notable article in Greyhawk which basically states they're another servitor species from Ry'leh which explains a fuckload, the Skum, glyphs, association with Arcane and Psionic, Maddening cities, Evolutionary slumbering racial paragon, and a bunch of other stuff.

Then there's a notable score of Eldritch shit in the Epic Level Handbook.

It's an idea that literally goes back centuries. Monks were making their own autism-fueled monster manuals long before D&D.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesser_Key_of_Solomon

Here's a start.

Additionally, BBEG BBC in D&D Means Big Bad Evil Graz'zts Big Black Cock. Because he is literally Interracial incarnate, Inbred, Intended to fuck his own mother, Sired a Demigod in a dysfunctional abusive relationship with a woman who has a large collection of half of the infinity of the Abysss Penis sizes and Hook up Magical PDA Apps ready to blackmail everyone down there as much as Vecna's Mother did in her day, who also once "entertained" A fucking deity down there for 20+ years without word from anyone and her alleged "kidnapping" who is quite fine when you rescue her even.

Also, the Bug Ruler is still alive, just stuck into the Pillar of Nosgoth being an angry little centipede that can't do shit about fuck.

Additionally, he is the only D&D character to have a Cock-Armour slot, his Thralls have massive booty, and he's sometimes drawn highly anime, though not shown here, it is the only way of explaining why he's even contending with a massive sometimes Ram, sometimes Pig-Boar Ram and Monkey Trouble at all.

Additionally, someone should totally shill out enough Money for Incase to draw a Smut comic of Iggwilv summoning Graz'zt back in the day. It's right up her alley.

It's nice that you've paid a lot of attention to the deeper Great Wheel lore of 2e/3.X with all the obscurer lore about vaati and aboleths being the first creatures, but you're basically cherry-picking everything that KINDA sounds Lovecraftian to support a fanon point about the Far Realm.

pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Nyarlathotep
Yes. In fact, in the recent PF Adventure Path Strange Aeons, you can go to the amalgam of stolen cities called Carcosa which has parts of 1900s Paris and such, and try to stop his incursion onto Golarion.

Pic related, this both Nyarlathotep and not Nyarlathotep.

>Pathfinder is D&D
Yeah right.

Considering it was an attempt to make 3.5 better but not be 4e, yeah it kind of is in a way D&D. Hell, its been referenced on Veeky Forums for years as 3.pf, combining 3.5 and PF. Some of 3.5 can be fitted into PF with little to no adjustment, though there are things which do need quite a bit.

Just look at the marketing too.

>Does anyone else hate the concept of "types of demons" in DND?
Yes, which is why I made the demons into "devils" and my "demons" are like lovecraftian nightmare things

so, glabrezu and co are now "devils" to me, being LE

regular D&D devils are forgettable and kinda forced, so I don't care about dropping them

>If demons worked as you described, the Monster Manual would just say "Lol, make something up", which is a lot more work for the DM.
But everybody loves the 2e tiefling random features table. Why not apply that to demons?

It has been, though.

Silly user, everybody knows 4e was terrible and had no good ideas

Can't sell books and books of demon stats and lore if you don't categorise them.

I think the explanation in 3.5 was "The abyss recognizes this type of demon as being one that does it's job well, so it likes to spit them out more than random ass bullshit"

It's a whole pile of 4E stuff mixed into a headcanon.