Generating new (Lower) Planes: Pondering Ravenloft's Purpose

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The Lesser Evil
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Generating new (Lower) Planes: Pondering Ravenloft's Purpose

Post by The Lesser Evil »

So I've been idly bemusing and pondering a (in all likelihood incorrect) hypothesis about Ravenloft's purpose. What if the purpose of Ravenloft is to sow the seeds of a new set of Lower Planes/hells/abyss/etc.

It sounds crazy, but hear me out. Like Ravenloft's darklords, fiendish lords (demonlords especially) have special links with the layers that correspond to their home domains. A demon lord is significantly more powerful in his home layer of the Abyss, and he often controls the features of his realm in a divinely morphic way. So like domain lords, fiend lords have quite a strong connection with their home realms.

The interpretation of Ravenloft as generating new planes for the next cosmos is also supported by the aversion that outsiders have to Ravenloft's planar structure (and vice versa). Wouldn't it make sense that gods would want to (or would be forced to) keep out if Ravenloft was the budding of a new cosmology? And if creatures directly linked to the cosmology of the dying and current multiverse (i.e. aligned outsiders without the mist subtype) showed up in the new, nascent cosmology that begins with Ravenloft, it would make sense that these aligned outsiders would have reality wrinkles as distortions brought about by strong contact with the cosmology to be displaced.

So if my wild man's guess at Ravenloft's purpose is correct, then the purpose of recruiting darklords for rulership of domains is ultimately to make new the equivalent of new demon lords or other powerful fiendish rulers of a land of the damned sort of place. Who knows, maybe a darklord who manages to exist for long enough could evolve in a demon, evil outsider, or the like.
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