Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Charles Phipps 08-28-05, 05:54 PM	My summary of the Daelkyr from all that I've read. Some will speculation, some will be repetition.... The first thing to realize about the Lords of Madness is the fact that they are not insane or chaotic. The Lords of Madness are enlightened. They do not act in a purely random fashion but act in accordance to an agendas that are simply arcane to human minds and require a appreciation of the 'beauty' of the works that they perform. The Lords of Dust are monarchs, The Dreaming Dark are politicians, but the Daelkyr are priests and artists. The first thing to understand is that the beauty of the Daelkyr is a very deliberate projection on their part. The earthshakingly awesome beauty of the Daelkyr is part of the illusion they craft for themselves so that mortals will trust them and come to share in their "embraces." The Daelkyr are the gods of the succubi and incubi with those creatures and the Eriynes serving just as a few of the gathers of fresh souls for the artwork of the Daelkyr. If say, a certain Puzzlebox existed on the Eberron that promised of "an unending eternity of pleasure", and it lead to Xoriat....the Daelkyr would not believe such things to be false advertising but a promise of a new era to come. In their own peculiar fashion, the Daelkyr are the only race of power that honestly cares about human beings and the individual. The humans, the elves, the dwarves, and the mammoth amount of unhappiness that permates the various planets and peoples of the universe are things that cause no end of personal agony (and not the good kind) to a Daelkyr. The Daelkyr wish to violate the 'development' of human beings by twisting their flesh, their minds, and their wills not to torture them but to make them into a superior being. To a Daelkyr, the horrifying is something that is merely a matter of perception. They have a peculiar "pseudo-Nietzchian" philosophy that human beings must transcend good and evil, pain and pleasure, and embrace something that is above it all. They are Transhumanists in a world that does not yet fully comprehend Transhumanism or even concieve of the idea. It is not wrong to think of the Daelkyr as creatures from Howard Phillip's Lovecraft, but it is wrong to think of them as the Great Old Ones. It is better to think of them as the god Nyarlathotep and the Deep Ones or Ghouls more. In Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath the man Randolf Carter travels across the universe in search of Earth's gods and finds them beneath him. Nyarlathotep is his ever present guide in this quest and bestows upon him unimaginable power and secrets. At the climax of the story, Randolf Carter is then bestowed the entire collected sum of all information of his soul from it's evolution from a fungus to alien lifeforms. The resulting creature is enlightened and powerful beyond all measure but not remotely human. Nyarlathotep has made a god in his estimation. For the Shadows over Innsmouth, the Deep Ones are immortal and see things of unearthly beauty....trading one's form and human aestetics seems to be almost a no-brainer. The Daelkyr are aware that most entities in the universe are like Plato's Cave dwellers, they do not understand the enlightened and thus are unable to be saved. They thus must force their change upon them or reveal their truths gradually. Cults to the Daelkyr engage in perversions and debased rights as part of the mysteries that elevate a human soul beyond the ideals of their own 'prejudice' and inflict unimaginable transformations or torments as part of the awakening of the soul. The destruction of individuals in the quests for enlightenment or even whole civilizations for the few who will be saved is but part of the heavy price that must be paid. Surprisingly, the Lords of Madness do not necessarily view their servitor races as superior. Illithids, Neogi, Beholders, and the like may all worship them as gods but it is not necessarily true that they are considered as to having become "enlightened" themselves and often are viewed by the Daelkyr as having seriously strayed off the path into their own 'ruts.' A few races are just abandoned completely and left to seek their own fortune in the universe. They have come for the unenlightened anyway so those who are still 'further along the path' rarely warrant much of their attention anyway. The Daelkyr have an incredibly detailed, if unholy by most race's understanding, comprehension of humanity and how they react under stimulus. It is a source of endless fascination to them and if a human falls underneath their caresses, they are just as likely to put him into a house that plays with his sense of memory and emotions as they are to transform him into a living portrait that will allow him to become less fond of the flesh's 'staticness. It is also entirely possible that should their experiments with the human that they have yield interesting results they may let him go, shaken horribly by having his dead wife come back from the grave to torment him, but otherwise unharmed. The Daelkyr loathe the Quori and any attempts to static as blasphemy and quite frankly may be considering some form of retalliation against the race. It's possible that they are part of the reason the Quori (and Kalashatyr) are what they are due to their fondness for change. They consider the Rakahasas' arrogance to likely to be their undoing as well. The Daelkyr honestly have no connection to the Dragon Below and its actual servants in the Rakashasas are far less inclined to cult activity than they are but the Daelkyr find that supporting it's cults and the madness thereof suits their purposes greatly.
Rechan 08-28-05, 06:15 PM	Imagine you had found some clay. This was very special clay, for it had thoughts and feelings inside of its blocky exterior. "I am fat." "I am stupid." I am ugly." "I am weak." These thoughts permiated throughout the clay, and even in the pieces that it was not there, the likelihood of pain and suffering is there, waiting. And you have the power. The power to stop that pain and suffering. How do you do it? You take the clay and mold it. You sculpt it into something that the clay can shine through and appreciate, that is above its original state. The clay will be happy and rejuvinated, and you have made something beautiful out of the misfortune. That is the Daelkyr in a nutshell, at least in what Charles is putting out. They are artists and comforters who see Humanity at its current state as unfortunate and in a habitual, emotional and psychological rut. Where our philosophers say "shed who you think you are and be who you are", the Daelkry say "I can make who you are what you are". At least, what they see you as. A scary thought is that the abberations that take form could have been what was inside mortals to begin with. To expose the alienness of the deepest, darkest parts of the being manifested into flesh.
Charles Phipps 08-28-05, 06:18 PM	My scariest thought is the fact that when all is said and done and your average Joe Human is transformed into a Jabba the hutt like thing with multiple tentacles that can be used for all sorts of perversities, by the time the Daelkyr are through with him, his words will be "Thank you so very much!"
zambuka 08-28-05, 09:18 PM	The first thing to realize about the Lords of Madness is the fact that they are not insane or chaotic. The Lords of Madness are enlightened. They do not act in a purely random fashion but act in accordance to an agendas that are simply arcane to human minds and require a appreciation of the 'beauty' of the works that they perform. The Lords of Dust are monarchs, The Dreaming Dark are politicians, but the Daelkyr are priests and artists. By the Host... someone who actually understands and is sharing that understanding.. good job and well written.
Gnome_Dragon_Disciple 08-28-05, 09:44 PM	Very intriguing, although it does create an interresting wrinkle in how I run the Daelkyr in my campaign. It used to be the case that the Daelkyr were the knowing servants of Quori in my campaign... Creatures attempting to create something morestrange than that created in the strangest of mortal dreams, dreams that would not be dreamt until millenia after their creation. Now... Now I'm thinking that although the Daelkyr in my campaign were in fact created by Quori, they are not the servants of the Quori (not intentionally, that is). With the Daelkyr being a force of change in its most extreme, it will not be long before the Inspired lords use them as illustrations of what comes of change. Humans have five fingers on each hand and five toes on each foot, and there shouldn't be tentacles or eye stalks thrown in just because. Perversion, insanity, and aberration! To halt change is to deny to one's self the bliss of what is, and the way things have been.
Charles Phipps 08-28-05, 10:03 PM	Fascinating Gnome disciple. The Daelkyr being the "Bad example" group. Those always backfire in my mind since there's always X group that sees what they see as cool though. I still find it amusing that Full Metal Jacket is shown to Marines with pride. I gave Rechan in AOLIM an interesting quote I'd thought I'd share. "The Daelkyr wake up in the morning and go...How will I help the world today? Oh look, there's a depressed farmer worried about his responsibilities. I know, I'll free him of them." *proceeds to kill his family*
Charles Phipps 08-29-05, 02:45 AM	My biggest question about the Daelkyr in this point is what exactly, with these motivations, ARE their plots likely to be?
Thramzorean 08-29-05, 10:54 AM	My biggest question about the Daelkyr in this point is what exactly, with these motivations, ARE their plots likely to be? To reshape the universe in their own image - other races see this as practised world destruction - the Daelkyr's artform is 'let's make things better'.
UnkemptSage 08-29-05, 02:09 PM	This is definitely a scary way to look at the Daelkyr. I could foresee them manipulating cults to kidnap people, and bring them back to turn them into willing subjects, and possibly perform experiments on them. I also get ideas that the Daelkyr would be brilliant at convincing people to do things they normally wouldn't. I shudder to think of the possibilities.
Gnome_Dragon_Disciple 08-30-05, 12:50 AM	They'd work fairly well with a Radiant Idol cult, too... Yessss.... *drywashes hands and contemplates a Radiant Idol with illithid grafts*
Mike Czaplinski 08-31-05, 08:53 AM	In the campaign I'm trying to put together, the main villain is a Daelkyr who was imprisoned by 'her' own kind. Her crime? Being insane. Her insanity? She disliked and distrusted flesh, as it is weak and too easily malleable. She wanted to breathe the spark of life (and her own consciousness) into inanimate matter. To punish her, her essence was bound into a HUGE khyber shard somewhere underneath the Mror Holds. Over the millenia, she has corrupted dwarves into duergar as her servants (rather than illithids or beholders), and has recently come to discover the existance of the Warforged, so she is VERY interested in obtaining access to a creation forge.... Just running it past y'all for comment. MikeC