1) How long were/are the Fiends banished for? 1 year, 66 years?
2) Would planetouched, but not pure fiends such as tieflings or cambions be affected?
Let me know what ya think...
Someone once explained to me something where it essentially meant that it was difficult for a fiend to get to the prime material and stay there. Permanent gates were needed for any sort of great numbers to come through, and they weren't exactly easy to create.
Then of course along came the Blood War. Some people hate it but I think it's a great incentive for fiends not to bother with the prime considering it's too much effort diverted away from the blood war.
I don't know about the planetouhed question. I hope somebody else can shed light on that question.
Also, re: plane touched, the spell Dismissal sends one extraplanar being back to its "proper plane". If the Crook is basically a really powerful dismissal device and the plane touched is native to Oerth then it would not work right? Also it did not banish elementals and the like so that might be another angle...hmmm....
If the Crook is basically a really powerful dismissal device and the plane touched is native to Oerth then it would not work right?
Thats exactly why Iuz is still here, being a cambion. If a tiefling was born here on Oerth than the same rule would apply, that being would be native to the Prime Material. I don't have the Manual of the Planes 3ed. but thats always been the reasoning behind Iuz still being on Oerth.
IMHO, involving so many fiends in the Greyhawk Wars and allowing them to remain on Oerth afterwards was perhaps the one single mistake of Carl Sargent.
It's obvious that the Flight of Fiends induced by the Crook of Rao is a deux ex machina used by later authors to "wipe the board clean" so to speak. I can't fault them either, as it really needed to be done.
The WGR4, WGR5 and (the unpublished) WGR6 accessories explain that so many fiends managed to get on the Prime Material Plane due to a) new gates being opened, b) powerful artefacts of evil being used, and c) pacts between Demon/Devil Lords and powerful mortals.
I remember asking myself at the time the same question that must have haunted many DMs: why didn't the gods of Good do anything to help?!?
Apparently, the answer is twofold. First, the gods are bound by their pact of non-intervention. Iuz being a "Prime Material Plane deity", he is within his right to do as he pleases. Second, the gods of Good don't want to see the Prime turn into a battleground between Outsiders.
That's all well and good if you're ready to buy the first explanation, but if you think about it a bit more you'll conclude this theory is flawed.
First of all, the gods depend on their worshippers for power. The more followers a god loses, the less powerful he becomes. If too many mortals are wiped out by demons/devils and the rest are forced to worship evil gods, it would spell disaster for the Good deities.
Second, refusing to involve oneself when so much raw Evil has already been summoned to the Prime is akin to closing your eyes while your house is on fire, hoping that - somehow - all will be well when you open them again. A coward's attitude at best.
Third, saying that the gods of Good already acted by allowing their clerics and paladins to have spells and special abilities is pure hogwash. The good guys already had those powers available before the war and so did the bad guys. Where is the balance in this
If the Greyhawk gods had an IQ above 10, they would have either ordered the Evil Outsiders to leave asap, or would have sent their own Good armies to teach them a lesson.
In the end, this would have ended in a stalemate and all the Outsiders would have gone home anyway. Proof? Look at the ending of the Sea of Death (Gord the Rogue) novel by G. Gygax himself. Bad guys go summon-crazy, soon Powers of Good start sending their own followers and, in the end, they are all forced to depart before Reality itself is blown apart.
Oh, sure, they could have destroyed one Prime plane among many but to what gain? A world full of potentially Evil beings is much more useful as resource for the Blood War. Fiend Lords aren't dumb.
As to why some fiends manage to remain on the Prime after the Crook is used, that's a mystery. Certainly, some are "native" Outsiders. Others may have enough arcane/divine power to resist the pull of the Crook. The fiend-sage of Rel Astra would be a prime example of the latter.
What's to prevent the bad guys from summoning fiends again? A mystery too. Perhaps, as some suggested, the banishment prevents fiends to return for some time. Perhaps the bad guys no longer have the resources to summon so many fiends again (at least for now..). Perhaps the gods of Evil themselves took a hand in the matter. After all, they have as much to lose if their own worshippers end up as canon fodders for fiends in the Blood War
Some of the other fiends are just so powerful they didn't get banished.
I'm also not sure how long they are banished for. It's possible that Iuz simply has to regate them all in - which just takes time and effort.
Stuart
Originally posted by Jag Arin
Hmm...100 years. When did the Molydeus Fiend Sage appear? Shouldn't he have been sent packing?
My friend who co-DMs with me and I thought the manifestation of outsiders devised for the Wars was superfulous. We considered two options. First, we thought about grafting in swarms of Solars, Planetars and Astral Devas to at least represent, if not balance out the otherworldy forces of woe. Second, we thought about reducing the fiendish elements of the forces of woe to high-level clerics, simply rewriting the evil outsiders out of our table-top campaign. We decided on the latter - and the need for a Crook of Rao to clean up the mess was eliminated.
I think a fair comparison is the Dragonlance setting as described in Chronicles. The overwhelming numbers of the chromatic dragons was matched, balanced, if you will, by the return of the metalic dragons and their lance-bearers. It is a lot more plausible and definitely explained better, so people don't have to wonder...
First of all, the gods depend on their worshippers for power. The more followers a god loses, the less powerful he becomes. If too many mortals are wiped out by demons/devils and the rest are forced to worship evil gods, it would spell disaster for the Good deities.
this is not nessecarily true of greyhawk where the gods are not directly linked to thier worshipers as they are in the FR... in the 83 boxed set it is said that "in general, the greater gods are too far removed from humanity, and while they are worshiped, few people hold them as patrons". it is used as the reason that mostly lesser gods are discribed in the Guide to the World of Greyhawk.
the Guide says this of Boccob: "Whether or not any worship or serve him seems of no importance to him."
However, as Carl Sargent said, the GH Wars were just a prelude to the real war. There's no reason why when the inevitable 2nd war comes in your campaign all hell and heaven can break loose. Maybe the good guys were keeping their celestials in reserve for the one final war?
Stuart
Originally posted by Greyson
I think a fair comparison is the Dragonlance setting as described in Chronicles. The overwhelming numbers of the chromatic dragons was matched, balanced, if you will, by the return of the metalic dragons and their lance-bearers. It is a lot more plausible and definitely explained better, so people don't have to wonder...
I appreciate and have played in Dragonlance for several years, but Greyhawk is not the black & white (& red), good vs. evil, no moral ambiguity world of Krynn. Sometimes Greyhawk, like the real world, is imbalanced, and imbalance breeds adventure.
And even in the "no-shades" world of Krynn, the chromatic dragons & evil clerics were running around conquering the world for a few years before the good guys showed up, not much unlike what happened in Greyhawk before the Crook was used.
Also you could take the view that the forces of good would not stoop to petty war, but work in other ways beyond the reckonking of mortals to help keep a balance.
Halber
This would explain the fiend-sage...he simply returned with someone or came by a means other than summoning. Also if a planetouched being (tiefling) came thru a color pool or something then he/she could stay just as if he/she was native to the Prime.
Originally posted by Jag Arin
This would explain the fiend-sage...he simply returned with someone or came by a means other than summoning. Also if a planetouched being (tiefling) came thru a color pool or something then he/she could stay just as if he/she was native to the Prime.
The Fiendsage was never banished, he was able to ward himself against the Crooks magic after examining it. As for planetouched, a tiefling is the descendant of a half-fiend, but they are considered native outsiders, the PMP is their home plane. It's impossible to banish them back home when they're already there.
My own opinion about the duration of the "banishment"/why more fiends haven't been summoned is mostly because of 2 things. 1. Immediately following the flight of the fiends Rauxes was sacked and Ivid V couldn't summon them back because he was "dead". 2. Immediately following the flight of the fiends, Furyondy made its gambit to reclaim its lands losting during the GH wars, and at this time Iuz's military infrastructure is crushed because his generals and commanders have all up and disappeared on him. It seemed to me that having been driven back and having to lick his wounds is what kept Iuz from summoning fiends back en masse.
I don't see the "banishment" as literally physically barring the fiends from returning, so much as simply driving them back to their native plane. It's difficult for a fiend to get to the PMP without being summoned, and it took years even for Ivid V and Iuz to summon as many infernal troops as they did. It's just logical that with the main means of summoning fiends gone or reduced, you'd have much fewer fiends. That's my 2cp anyway.
Originally posted by cwslyclgh
this is not nessecarily true of greyhawk where the gods are not directly linked to their worshipers as they are in the FR... in the 83 boxed set it is said that "in general, the greater gods are too far removed from humanity, and while they are worshiped, few people hold them as patrons". it is used as the reason that mostly lesser gods are discribed in the Guide to the World of Greyhawk.
the Guide says this of Boccob: "Whether or not any worship or serve him seems of no importance to him."
This is very true, and I appreciate the fact I am not the only one around who thinks GH isn't FR.
That said, I also believe that new rules replace or update old ones. In 83, Planescape didn't exist yet. Since then, that setting (even if it went down the drain too in the end) broke new ground by trying to develop coherent explanations about how things work not only for FR but for all the other settings as well.
Thus, I based my comment on material published in Planescape, mainly the A Guide to the Astral Plane accessory.
That said, I am aware that those particular rules about gods dying if they lose enough worshippers are based on the FR example (aka Time of Troubles )