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Originally posted by MandarinB

Spoilers ahead for the 5e adventure Out of the Abyss, as well as the Rage of Demons storyline for Adventurer's League. You have been warned.

So, in the adventure module OotA, the Underdark is thrown into an abyssal crisis after the Spider Queen manipulates Gromph Baenre into doing the 'Dark Heart Ritual'. As a result of this spell, several demon lords appear in the Underdark, with some appearing in regions like the Darklake and the Labyrinth, while Demogorgon himself appeared in Menzoberranzan. To my understanding this plot is based off the events of the book Archmage, putting the adventure's start around 1487 DR.

In the Second Act of the adventure, the party is given a chance to scry on the Demon Lords, allowing them to see the main antagonists of the adventure in different points in time. The most interesting entry is Lolth's, as it partly reveals her plan in having Gromph drag the most powerful demon lords into the Material Plane. Between this scrying entry and the Loose Threads section in the module's final chapter, it is revealed that the Spider Queen's plan was to distract all her abyssal rivals with the mortal world, giving her time to lay thousands of eggs. Her plan was to replace her rivals with a new generation of demon lords, loyal to herself.

While the module definitely expects the adventuring party to defeat the demon lords on the Material Plane before the Lolth can begin her aggressive expansion into other abyssal layers, I really want come up with some identities for these new children of the Spider Queen. I imagine the newly-hatched demons would fight one another until eight of them remained. I say eight because the demon lords officially drawn in by Gromph's ritual are eight in number (Baphomet, Demogorgon, Fraz-Urb'luu, Graz'zt, Juiblex, Orcus, Zuggtmoy), even if I have added the likes of Kostchiechie and Pazuzu to their number.

So, keeping in mind the year (1487 DR), what do you think Lolth's attempt to supplant the other demon lords looks like? Would it even have a chance of completing what she wishes?

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Originally posted by sleyvas

Sounds a lot like the plotline of the novel series where she supposedly broke herself into multiple aspects already.

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Originally posted by questing gm

In the 3.x version of Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, there are some high-leveled loyal servants of Lolth from across the multiverse, not quite as powerful as demon princes/lords, but I could imagine them being delegated to take over each of the demon lords' layer of the Abyss.

A quicker, lazier method I can think of creating Lolth's demonic progeny and demon lord heir is to spider-ize every demon lord (e.g., a two-headed spider, a spider-ooze, a horned spider, a shapeshifting spider, a drow seductress, etc.)

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Originally posted by MandarinB

I'd be interested in looking into that novel series, if you have the name of it. It might give me some inspiration on what to do with the would-be demon lords.

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Originally posted by Irennan

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Originally posted by MandarinB

I'd be interested in looking into that novel series, if you have the name of it. It might give me some inspiration on what to do with the would-be demon lords.

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War of the Spider Queen. It doesn't detail anything about the aspects, though. In the series, she just goes silent and splits in a bunch of unspecified spiders that eat each other offscreen. She also moves her realm away from the Abyss in the process, and has a group of priestesses travel to her realm and compete to become her face (aka being eaten and becoming her face through that).

At the end, she somehow becomes a greater deity by: 1)expending power to move her realm away from the Abyss 2)performing autocannibalism 3)losing hundreds of thousands of followers (whole cities either destroyed or lost). The story uses a cop out as an explanation: "it's chaos, duh".

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Originally posted by Irennan

War of the Spider Queen. It doesn't detail anything about the aspects, though. In the series, she just goes silent and splits in a bunch of unspecified spiders that eat each other offscreen. She also moves her realm away from the Abyss in the process, and has a group of priestesses travel to her realm and compete to become her face (aka being eaten and becoming her face through that).

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[i]Originally posted by Wooly Report[i]

...And this is a large part of why I can't stand that series and rarely pass up the opportunity to enumerate the reasons. (There are other reasons, but they're not relevant to this discussion)

I'd not look to the series for inspiration, even setting aside my dislike of it -- there's just not much to work with there, given the desired goal.

Me, if I was going to run with the "mah babies will beat up greater demons!" idea, I'd make those babies something unique. Maybe a cross between a glabrezu and a drider, swapping out some of the standard demon abilities for spidery versions. And give them a way to power up by cocooning and eating demons, to stick with the spider motif -- maybe they gain hit dice this way, with a chance of gaining one of the dinner's powers.

They'd have to be fast-growing, too, because I can't see those demon lords staying away from home for long, especially with the ridiculous plot of a single wizard being duped into simultaneously summoning multiple entities, each of which should be very taxing by itself. (Honestly, I think that even Gromph would struggle to summon any one of them -- you don't rise that high in the infernal hierarchy without gaining a lot of power, and that level of power should insulate them from even noticing most summoning attempts. Plus, most powerful fiends don't want to be summoned to the Prime, and will actively take steps to prevent it, like making sure their true names aren't written down anywhere.)

Unless there's something to block them (which should be beyond mortal doing, unless we're descending deep into cheese territory), then those demon lords are going to be wanting to head home as quickly as they can -- they don't like the Prime and the longer they're away from home, the more their various rivals can work against them.

Those rivals are another issue. Unless Lolth is taking them out, they're going to be doing whatever they can to take advantage of the situation -- like throwing their own rivals to the spider-babies and then killing whoever survives.

Unless Lolth's plan was to flood the planes with her babies, basically supplanting everything there, it's pretty much doomed to failure. Too much of an infernal hierarchy to ascend and too little time to do it.

Lastly, even if she could somehow pull all of this off... What would keep those new demondriders loyal to her? The idea is that they would seize the power of someone that can challenge minor deities, and yet remain loyal to her -- someone who fosters chaos, disloyalty, and backstabbing, even within families.

There is just so much wrong with the overall idea; I don't see a way to pull it off -- not as described.

If she worked on them one demon lord at a time, supplanting lesser rivals with her offspring and then letting them work their way up, it might work... Might. It'd take a long time -- millennia, maybe, and even then, it still rests in large part on someone who clawed their way to the top not noticing someone else trying to do the same. It's not something I'd bank on.

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Originally posted by sleyvas

You've read more on Out of the Abyss than me for certain, so perhaps this won't work, BUT .... just to throw out an idea and see how it can be spun after my initial thoughts.

Yes the War of the Spider Queen novels is what I meant, and YES the ending was less than clear and had issues. However, at its core is one concept. She had an abyssal layer that she controlled. She COPIED that abyssal layer (with some changes I believe) and created a new plane. In order to do this, she seemingly had to leave that plane. What if the reason she wanted these other demon lord's planes emptied of their lords was NOT to take them over. What if she wanted to "copy" them as new layers tied to her own plane (kind of like how Asmodeus supposedly created nine hells)? Maybe its easier to "copy" a plane and make minor changes than it is to create a plane "whole cloth". Maybe she intended to put her eight aspects each in charge of one of these new planes. I know at one point in the past couple years of game time (1480 to 1485) she was also attempting to make a "demonweave" involving having drow find magic items and sacrifice them to her. Maybe this was just a shell game to cover the gathering of power to do this copying of some portions of the abyss?

That being said, how many demon lords were cast out that ruled whole layers? Some of them may have been cast out just to prevent THEM subsuming other layers in the abyss in the absence of the normal rulers of those layers.... or to give a LOT of other layers for even less powerful demon lords places to try and invade. In essence, create mass chaos so that she could copy ONE other plane. Bear in mind that her own copying of the demonweb pits took 7 months (dates gained from FR wiki entry for silence of Lolth https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Silence_of_Lolth ). Maybe even she was copying her OWN demonweb pits again (after all.... who says you can only copy something once).

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Originally posted by MandarinB

So, keeping in mind the year (1487 DR), what do you think Lolth's attempt to supplant the other demon lords looks like? Would it even have a chance of completing what she wishes?

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