Names of Demon Lords?

[Iris]

Yeah. A demoness who was not evil came and said something I don't wanna spoil to others here.

I think everyone knows that this topic is full of spoilers by now. But the demoness doesn’t say a lot; it is the story text that actually matters in this particular case, and the character in charge of providing it since E3S4 (Outpost of Hell/Gateway) is someone else.

Spoiler:

Namely, Argan.

Anyway, I had a longer answer prepared before I decided to switch the focus of my previous on-topic post, so here it goes.

So, I would make the hierarchy in Inferno described by a sage like this (intentionally, some less important facts were confused):

These monsters we face are demons. They are not very numerous right now, so they are disguised as normal people...

I thought I would note here a few things about shapeshifter demons and demons in general.

Spoiler:

Shapeshifter demons do exist as a species and they are “exceedingly rare” compared to the rest of the population of Urvatha/Inferno, according to their unit type description, which also mentions:

Once known for their remarkably peaceful nature, it was this trait that led to their near-extinction in Inferno following Uria’s rise to power. More powerful and bellicose demon lords have slaughtered or enslaved their kind over time, occasionally using them as specialized assassins. Their androgynous appearance, flexible attributes, and unusual resistance to physical damage have allowed them to survive by blending with other lifeforms—rumored to even include Irdyan creatures, civilized or otherwise—at the cost of bloodline purity and their continuance as a species.

They are not the only demon species who can disguise themselves as other creatures, but only these shapeshifters can physically and permanently do so (if they so desire).

Also note that this is a clear indication that the demons inhabiting Inferno aren’t all inherently evil. It’s just that pacifists rarely thrive there, especially under second!Uria’s unprecedented rule. For that matter, second!Uria is the first leader to unite all the demon races on Inferno, mostly by abusing her power (which is supposed to be used for good and passive purposes) to subjugate all the Demon Lords. All of them. Except the likes of Elorran and Ergea, of course, but even Ergea has had to play under Uria’s rules to get to the point of having a chance to ruin her plans.

The various races of ‘demons’ in Urvatha/Inferno are not too different from Irdyans in that they are neither inherently evil nor inherently good, two concepts that seem prevalent around Wesnoth campaigns which really bothers me to no end — especially since IftU was written in such a way it screams “all demons EVIL” when that was never absolutely intended on my part. God, I really hate my old writing.

Of course, their situation is rather special in that they were not ‘created’ to live together on a single world and they were taken there in a hurry for reasons known to nobody but one deceased Guardian, two Guardians erased from existence, and one Avatar of the Union. All that unstated history afterwards had a lot of biological, sociological, technological, and political implications over the course of the Second Cycle. And of course, their lives are not tied to any sentient being in particular to a different extent than the lives of say, Irdyan humans.

A group of ten demons was originally created by Yarae the Arcane Lord, as arbiters in a lengthy war between light and darkness. After some time, Yarae decided to use his power for evil purposes, and the demons became evil.

Spoiler:

Eh, one version. This sounds closer to the IftU S9 (The Library) version of the story. I’ll just say that the AtS E3S4.2 (Gateway)/E3S5 (Pass of Sorrows) version presented by Argan himself is far more accurate since it was gathered from far more reliable sources, and leave it at that. Inaccurate versions of this and other stories are supposed to be pretty common.

Also, Zhangor is actually older (sans magic-and-mutilation-induced stasis) than the Second Cycle incarnation of Uria. I’ll put it like this:

• first!Uria (or good!Uria if you prefer) was born during the First Cycle and was erased from existence by the process that started the Second Cycle.
• Zhangor was born long before the events leading to Irdya’s Fall during the Second Cycle (a.k.a. second artificial sun/moon/whatever crashing on the Great Continent). He was governing the Shapeshifters in Urvatha at the same time he ruled over Wesmere in Irdya before his defeat at the hands of Argan and Elynia.
• second!Uria (evil!Uria) was born less than 20 years before Argan ‘disappears’ following the end of the last War of Wesmere. She subsequently finds Argan in Urvatha and stuff happens that will be explained later in AtS E3.

Neither incarnation of Uria has the effective power to create life directly, but it is part of their unexploited potential as Guardians of Life. They have done a lot of stuff with Life in a more indirect fashion, though; in particular, first!Uria’s role in giving life a new chance to thrive through the Second Cycle, and second!Uria’s role in destroying a lot of life in Urvatha and Irdya, as well as inciting its creation and perversion through scavenged technology (Shaxthals, Shaxthals everywhere) as well as more direct means (alluded to during gameplay in E3S5 (Pass of Sorrows).

And just like other guardians or lifeforms artificially created from guardians, they both have a built-in unlimited power source in flagrant violation of the law of conservation of energy at an arguably tangential cost; hence second!Uria has not utilized this power to anywhere near its full potential yet. The first incarnation of Merthiaal (a.k.a.Yechnagoth) as explained in E1S7 (The Search for the Past) and E3S5 (Pass of Sorrows) exemplifies a more extreme case better, whereas the first Guardian of Water and second!Uria display milder attributes of the same disease.

This is a lot of information and I could really go for paragraphs and paragraphs, but that’s what the rest of AtS E3 will be for, really; although I generally feel more comfortable using and abusing the flow of the campaign narrative to deliver information in a more orderly and riddle-y fashion than a bland forum post.

You can choose to do whatever you wish with this information. I’m not going to enforce a minimum degree of obfuscation, although I personally find backstory more enjoyable when it requires some careful reading and thought to piece together, which is why AtS deviates from IftU in that sense. In fact, I don’t intend to enforce any degree of compliance to my canon either, because I have my own plans for it and they may turn out to be entirely orthogonal to whatever people had in mind. Not to mention that it’s deliberately incompatible with mainline at this point.

[Dugi]

Because this is actually a spoiler to events I plan to write in my campaign, I will place it into a spoiler.

Spoiler:

The demons around are not supposed to be shapeshifters, just disguised to look quite like humans, even in the alpha it says that 'sometimes, if you look properly, you can see that some of them have horns'. And there is not necessarily numerous anyway, they are just infiltrating the society, when they form an army, a dozen of them is quite a problem because they are terribly strong (level 5+, it is said that Uria is powering them up, and that without her power, they won't be stronger than common people of Irdya).

It was also said in the unpublished alpha that 'although the demons are incredibly evil, they are not inherently evil', and some comments about Uria's rule that subjugated them all and made them become evil. It is supposed to happen millennia after IftU/AtS, so Uria could have taken control of almost the entire Inferno, and many sources could have been altered and confused from then.

Basically, the important thing is that there is a huge part of Inferno, where the evil demons live, and that countless spells of summoning demons have taken their toll on the barrier between Inferno and Irdya, and it started to crack, allowing demons to march continually into Irdya, without external help. The player has to come to the portal and close it. The other information is not as relevant, as the good demons are not going to save anybody, and important knowledge is not very known because there are no demons or demon-like things on the side of good (like Argan or Elynia in AtS).

The problem is that I want to add another chapter later, that would consist of walking Inferno (because the crack had to be closed from inside, and somebody had to enter Inferno to close the it), and I needed to know the names of important powers there, so I first though it would be Uria, Yechnagoth, Zhangor and some other things... Now I think that everything there would simply serve Uria, (those who are not so evil were banned from entering the places where Uria rules, by magical means, and also preferred to clear the way when a war was coming), and they would not tell much about their past to avoid clashes (because villains are not supposed to tell their own partially wrongly), just what will they do to the corpses and souls of the heroes after killing them.

[Iris]

I needed to know the names of important powers there

I would definitely advise making up new names. A lot can happen in such a long time, and the Demon Lords succession system works on a “you kill it, you bought it” basis for most races. Their natural lifespans are also supposed to vary wildly owing to the vastly dissimilar backgrounds of their First Cycle forefathers — I could see the more human-like demons living for a hundred years at most, Ixthala imps and the so far unnamed serpent ‘god’ worshipers might not live more than thirty in average, whereas stormkind, shapeshifters, and other faerie-derived races may be ridiculously long-lived.

Again, guardians:

Guardians are immortal in that they cannot die of old age, but there is plenty of evidence that they can be killed, and there is even some precedent about Guardian-like constructs—such as the Gatekeepers—being killable by non-Guardians. The general method is known and it has actually occurred onscreen.

[Dugi]

I would definitely advise making up new names...

Okay, this should make many things much easier.