Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Surprise me for once?

Reading Paizo's Book of the Damned and mining it for ideas has been many things: interesting and fun, mildly disappointing that they didn't do OGL-versions of all the classic demon lords, and sometimes... a long and hard slog.

Why is there a demon lord of every goddamned thing? Do we really need special entries for:

divs? (what the deuce IS a div anyway?)
scorpions?
traps?
apes?
locusts?
werewolves?
ghouls?
giants?
hags?
aberrations?
trolls?
gargoyles?
troglodytes?
vampires?

This is a just really fucking bloated. I can't exactly put my finger on why this bothers me so much - perhaps an example will serve.

Playing Skyrim: Dawnguard a while back, Serana (the vampire NPC) tells you about how she became undead. Apparently a terrible ritual in the name of the daedra lord Molag Bal transformed her whole family into vampires thousands of years ago. This was cool, because nobody ever told me "Molag Bal's domain of influence includes: vampires." He is described as the lord of enslavement and brutality which makes sense, but isn't blindingly obvious. It was surprising and told me something new about the world.


This should be scarier

Conversely, imagine finding a castle of vampires in Pathfinder. What terrible demon master do they revere?? Well duh, it's Zura. You knew that already. The vampires have a vampiric master who wants to do vampire-type stuff. 

Why even bother? We've learned nothing new about them. It would be exactly the same if Zura didn't even exist.

I want to see intelligent monsters signing up with Arioch or Moander or Demogorgon or even good old Orcus, whatever! Not their "designated infernal union rep." Spare me.

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