Domain Rules

[Omegonthesane]

Hell having terrible fertility is incompatible with D&D where the evil planes are meant to be a legitimate power source and not a place of desolation and punishment. Indeed I'm pretty sure some of the layers of the abyss are meant to be evil jungles and shit.

[merxa]

It would make more sense if Hell was stratified, where the maggot pits are highly fertile so become the common feed for slaves, but more delicious options, be they slave markets as live stock, rare pupae that takes centuries to mature, soul fonts etc are significantly rarer or expensive to maintain / develop so only the upper caste can reliably access these goods.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

The souls of the damned are probably incredibly nutrient-rich. And ethically grown in Hell, too!

[Whatever]

What you need is for Demons or Devils to come into existence ex nihilo, at rates that vastly exceed even the most optimal carrying capacities for their territory.

In a world where there's not enough food and always more and more mouths, you get to have as many evil-on-evil conflicts as you want (a staple of the genre) while still maintaining the means and motive for evil invasions everywhere that you actually care about. And no one is going to invade them back, because then you go from endless spontaneous demons mostly killing each other to mostly killing you, and that's not a war you can win.

[deaddmwalking]

What you need is for Demons or Devils to come into existence ex nihilo, at rates that vastly exceed even the most optimal carrying capacities for their territory.

Infinite planes and infinite demons are bad for all kinds of reasons.

Controlling an evil domain should allow you to recruit an army of demons at a pace that is similar to what other domains provide. If the fluff indicates that many demons spawn into a hellpit where only a few manage to extricate themselves, that may be fitting, but that's fluff.

Most of the stories you want to tell are not 'there's a vast army of demons that take over worlds and yours is next' - it's more along the lines of 'there's an army of demons waiting to invade and we need to make sure nobody invites them in/weakens our defenses before they get in'.

In a worst case scenario where hell invades, cobbling together a unified army of the prime should be an option to avoid annihilation.

[Whipstitch]

Infinite planes and infinite demons are bad for all kinds of reasons.

This. I think for the stories that we'd want to tell what you would actually want is some rules for running bad neighbor factions that still have to worry about carrying capacity but can terraform hexes and use bizarro world values when determining how productive real estate is. That way you end up with demons and giants or whatever that mostly lay low for entire mortal generations but when things get crowded they tear down your city and erect a volcano or plunge the area into a new ice age.

[Thaluikhain]

In a world where there's not enough food and always more and more mouths, you get to have as many evil-on-evil conflicts as you want (a staple of the genre) while still maintaining the means and motive for evil invasions everywhere that you actually care about. And no one is going to invade them back, because then you go from endless spontaneous demons mostly killing each other to mostly killing you, and that's not a war you can win.

In some fluff, that's why WHFB's Skaven are like that, they have a sudden population explosion every do often and have to fight to get new resources or die.

That's only a few steps away from saying that demons aren't necessarily that evil, they are just forced to attack others due to socio-economic factors.

[Whatever]

What you need is for Demons or Devils to come into existence ex nihilo, at rates that vastly exceed even the most optimal carrying capacities for their territory.

Infinite planes and infinite demons are bad for all kinds of reasons.

That's why I proposed endless demons. It's only infinite given infinite time. The pace of production can be similar to what you get elsewhere, especially if the basic food production value of their territory is close to zero. Then you have a demon army that "costs" zero resources to produce new troops, but requires resources you simply don't have in order to grow beyond your production rate.

The demon army is always a thousand strong, because if you kill this thousand, there'll be another thousand soon. But there will never be two thousand, because there's not enough food to go around. There's never a "vast army" of demons, just an endless supply.

And demons should be kill on sight for the same kinds of reasons Mind Flayers are, otherwise they turn into Darkest Elves. Make demons eat people's souls or something, that's why it's a problem that they have an incentive to invade. We want players to conquer hexes, so "invades territory" should be something you can choose to do without being on Team Evil.

[Username17]

There's just no option to rule abyssal kingdoms and also have peach farms.

I can certainly see the argument for Hades having pomegranates.

The final check for all of this is that you always make planar transportation methods expensive. Or else Celestia becomes the bread basket of the universe, where everyone owns one hex they use to produce all their food.

You definitely don't want to be in the situation where celestial wheat production is so large that hey can undersell local production by dumping grain into Halfling markets, devastating the local economy and forcing everyone into poorly paid industrial work like America exploiting a developing economy.

The line on that would be caravanning food from Celestia to the mortal world costing a gold piece or more per month once you've paid the merchants. That way even if Celestia is giving the food away for free it isn't under selling locally sourced buckwheat flour. For Planar Metropolises like Sigil or Finality, I would accept either or both of "living on a portal nexus makes importing extraplanar food much cheaper" and "the cost of living in planar metropoles is very high and it costs like 2 or 3 copper to get a beer on the streets of the City of Brass."

In any case, agriculture can substitute some amount of cash crops and they can upcycle to more expensive foods like meat. But even so, there's a limit to how many Koku there is demand for. That's irrelevant for Fertility 1 or 2 regions, because the rural population itself could cover the demand for its own agriculture products. But at Fertility 20 you're actually depending on a pretty significant urban population to provide the demand for any farm. A hex given over to farms or plantations is supporting a large amount of non-farmers.

This means that if Celestia is all Fertility 20+, most of it is going to be unfarmed. There's no market for additional golden goose eggs, so additional high quality farmland is simply left as idyllic wilderness. On the flip side, if the infernal realms have a few hexes of insane magical fertility where they mine maggots from the vermin hills or whatever, that can still cover the food needs of Dis (over a million inhabitants) on less than 5 such hexes. The rest of the infernal realm can be gray dust and obsidian shards.

There is in short no practical difference between hexes you don't farm because you've run out of urban demand for agricultural products and hexes you don't farm because they are literally burning wastelands.

Edit: Realized that I had written 50 instead of 5. An arable hex has 20,000 acres in it, and at Fertility 20+ it's making almost half a million Koku. With the Maggot Mines, the Meat Forest, the Blood Lake, and the Eye Stalks, massive cities in Hell don't need massive areas given over to farming. Indeed, assuming that Dis has the population density of Phladelphia (350,000 people per hex), it might literally take up as many hexes with urban development as it does with food production. Which leaves a lot of hexes in the domain to be barren wasteland.

-Username17

[Iduno]

There's just no option to rule abyssal kingdoms and also have peach farms.

I can certainly see the argument for Hades having pomegranates.

Or importing them/conquering places that have them. Not being able to grow their own food while having a large army seems like a good justification for a group wanting to invade. The same as the heavens having abundance and not really getting involved in conflicts.

[Dean]

Also Hades is supposed to be mostly nice. It’s much closer to heaven than hell. It’s a judeo-Christian anachronism to make Hades hell-like.

My basic premise is that “ruling in hell” is understood to also be shitty in some way. Even if you’re the most powerful person in an awful place you still shouldn’t be able to escape that place, metaphorically. That is why all the inhabitants keep trying to escape it literally.

I will say though I understand and agree with the premise to make both heaven and hell wayyyyyyy more earth like. It would make them less supernatural but that’s a good reason to have locations in them. Most of heaven can just be really nice earth with one location being the weird giant steel cube of Gehenna

[Chamomile]

Also Hades is supposed to be mostly nice. It’s much closer to heaven than hell. It’s a judeo-Christian anachronism to make Hades hell-like.

Achilles doesn't seem too thrilled with the place in the Odyssey:

O shining Odysseus, never try to console me for dying.
I would rather follow the plow as thrall to another
man, one with no land allotted to him and not much to live on,
than be a king over all the perished dead.

The myths aren't long on details as to why people keep trying to leave Hades, but it definitely sucks to be there, despite a lack of any particular torment with only a handful of exceptions for people who pissed off Hades (the god) personally. Depicting Hades as a mostly-reasonable government doing the best it can in a place of terribly limited resources would be pretty in keeping with how Greek myths depict it.

Barely related question of causation: Are the lower planes blasted wastelands because demons and devils are pillaging dictatorships who have used up all the resources, or are fiends created ex nihilo by the same evil miasma that causes the terrain to be blasted wastelands, or what?

[Username17]

Barely related question of causation: Are the lower planes blasted wastelands because demons and devils are pillaging dictatorships who have used up all the resources, or are fiends created ex nihilo by the same evil miasma that causes the terrain to be blasted wastelands, or what?

While I'm not a fan of the Great Wheel specifically, I think there are significant benefits in having multiple infernal worlds. There is room for Efreeti to come from an evil burning world and Gelugons to come from a different but still horrible frozen hellscape. While the blood war is pretty dumb and AD&D's effort to explain how Hellcats are Lawful causes me physical pain, there is plenty of room for there to be multiple infernal realms that run by different rules. Kitchen Sinking can be a thing.

So yes, you can have barren worlds where you need to do significant capital improvements to get wastes up to a fertility of 1 and most of the population is subsistence farming or hunter-gathering as nomads. And also yes, you can have worlds where the sources of food are magical and you have mostly urban populations in decadent urban dystopias full of depravity. And both of those can be infernal worlds with various examples of fiends living in them.

-Username17

[Whatever]

An important reason to have fiends pop into existence fully formed is that "baby fiends" aren't something you want to have to address.

[Username17]

An important reason to have fiends pop into existence fully formed is that "baby fiends" aren't something you want to have to address.

I don't want to talk about half-fiend shambling mounds, but I think some amount of Cambions and Tieflings is important and desirable. As such, you are going to have baby fiends, and having some fiends pop fully formed out of spawning pits is fine but does not make that issue go away.

Whether or not a Pit Fiend ever spent any time as a Baby Fiend it's just absolutely unavoidably true that a Cambion or Alu definitely did. It's pretty central to the concept.

-Username17

[Whatever]

That's a good point. But Cambions and Tieflings are not "always evil". There's the whole thing where their internal nature is in conflict, they're tortured souls, Darkest Elves (tm), etc etc etc. So there's no moral dilemma when they're babies: you don't kill them because they're not moral agents yet, and once they become such they do not automatically join Team Evil.

Pit Fiends and all other true demons are enemies that you can kill without qualms, even in their first moments of existence, because you know their means and ends are always evil. That's the point of having them in the setting, as opposed to using Oni or Asuras or something.

[Grek]

The flip side of Heaven being lush and bountiful while Hell is barren and miserable is that the policy actions for [Good] realms (like Heaven) require that you have the farmer oppression slider set very low, while the policy actions for [Evil] realms (like Hell) allow you set the farmer oppression slider to levels that are not physically possible for mortal farmers. If you're working the land with the souls of the damned, you can work them to death and then some. And that means that Hell can make up for Heaven's fertility bonuses by getting an equivalently huge taxation bonus.

[Username17]

Regardless of how inherently evil (or not) any particular creature is, in the Domain game you are going to be killing bad guys that aren't inherently evil. Further, you're mostly going to be conquering rather than exterminating. This means that you'll normally want to reserve mass executions for the leadership of team evil, at which point it doesn't really matter whether they were redeemable at the age of 7 or not.

So the Heroes of Might and Magic thing where you capture an Inferno Town and then you can recruit Inferno troops means that we're pretty much stuck with a model where it is plausible to have ethical demon armies. The player characters aren't destroying Hell, they are conquering Hell. And then they have to deal with their own Infernal Bureaucracy and such.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Infernal Bureaucracy

That term is redundant. You can just call it bureaucracy.

[Thaluikhain]

While I'm not a fan of the Great Wheel specifically, I think there are significant benefits in having multiple infernal worlds. There is room for Efreeti to come from an evil burning world and Gelugons to come from a different but still horrible frozen hellscape. While the blood war is pretty dumb and AD&D's effort to explain how Hellcats are Lawful causes me physical pain, there is plenty of room for there to be multiple infernal realms that run by different rules. Kitchen Sinking can be a thing.

While it makes sense to have different evil realms, is there any advantage to having a bunch of different, single biome evil worlds?

Couldn't you have one evil world with the same physical geography with the mortal world, and you can walk from the evil burning places to the evil frozen places?

[Dean]

While it makes sense to have different evil realms, is there any advantage to having a bunch of different, single biome evil worlds?

Couldn't you have one evil world with the same physical geography with the mortal world, and you can walk from the evil burning places to the evil frozen places?

Multiple similar planes, hellish or otherwise, seem to me to be an enormous waste of conceptual space but Frank thinks it's mandatory for Asmodeus and Demogorgon to rule separate planes rather than continents or what have you to maintain the kitchen sink aesthetic. I disagree that this benefit is worth the cost but we already talked about that so won't rehash it. Regarding this thread the only important thing is that the planes, however many you have, deliver appropriately thematic hellish or celestial rulership.

Getting hell right also seems much more important. There's a real history for going and waging war in hell or becoming a lord there. There's very little canon for waging a hex crawl through heaven.

[Username17]

I actually do think that, for example, Cocytos and Phlegethon can be on the same world. Indeed, any particular pair of fiendish locations you care to name could be on the same world. Very few of the described infernal features are particularly large. Orcus' desert full of Undead horrors doesn't need an infinite plane, it doesn't even need a continent on a planet in a plane. It can just be a domain somewhere with a few hundred (or thousand) hexes of terrifying wasteland. If Orcus' desert is 1000 kilometers across, that's plenty forbidding, and that's still just two thirds the size of the Gobi - it doesn't need an Abyssal Plane dedicated to it.

That said, there is value in having multiple worlds you can visit and having those worlds be different. Sometimes the adventures you're having are Sliders or Star Wars or Star Trek, and going to a new world is something that you do in order to put punctuation on your scene changes.

So does there need to be any great celestial or physical distance between Dis and Minauros? Absolutely not. Conceptually Dis is just the biggest city the player characters have ever seen, and that can fit in a couple of hexes. Minauros is just a real big swamp, but that could just be a mid sized domain where most of the hexes are swamp. But while no particular pair you name needs to be on different worlds, some pairings should be on different worlds. Yomi and Tartarus could be on the same planet, but they don't have to be and you do want to have multiple infernal planets so having Yomi and Tartarus on different worlds isn't unreasonable.

If you wanted to have D&D's Pandemonium or Acheron, those would be good examples of things that should be different worlds. Because the gravity works differently, and that seems a lot harder to explain as a thing that happens when you walk from one county to the next.

Anyway, on the evilitude of Fiends. There are going to be evil governments and they are going to have Orc soldiers. But they are also going to have Human soldiers and when you conquer them you are going to have Human and Orc soldiers from there as well. To the extent that Imps or Fire Demons or whatever are a thing you get from having a polity in your domain, they are going to show up on Team Good just like the Orcs and Humans do.

But there are also troops that get bought with Karma. Once you defeat the Lich King there are no more Festivals dedicated to Orcus and all further Karma goes towards non-evil pantheons. So whatever Fiendish forces get purchased with Orcus or Hextor Karma can just go ahead and be genuinely always evil. They will never show up on Team Good because Team Good will never have any Orcus Karma to spend.

Whether Balors that show up for great champions of Orcus were spawned already evil or were born as a Quasit and trained long and hard in the great halls of Orcus to match combat prowess and moral depravity is unimportant. Either explanation is fine, because the functional result is that they don't show up at all except to join domains on Team Monster that generate Orcus Karma that the Team Player Domain does not generate and will continue to not generate even after they have invaded and conquered the land with the Cathedral to Orcus in it.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

Also note that planes don't have to be infinite in size. If you want a plane to include just a single 20 mile wide flat planet, you can do that.

[Username17]

Getting hell right also seems much more important. There's a real history for going and waging war in hell or becoming a lord there. There's very little canon for waging a hex crawl through heaven.

I'm up for the occasional Disgaea, but I would agree that 'conquering Hell' is a much more important to model than 'conquering Heaven.' Heck, even in Disgaea you don't invade Heaven until after you've conquered Hell. Invading Heaven is like a bonus boss.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

Could also have an array of baby Hell planes which are so comparatively easy to travel through due to a preponderance of portal gates that it has many of the properties of a single hell world, without having to play nice together geographically. Even if Cocytus and Dis are different maps, that doesn't have to mean you cannot travel from one to the other along the Styx or similar.