OK, I’m going WAY off the canonical path with this; but, I came up with a concept for the Grey Wastes, death, and yugoloths that I rather enjoyed so I wanted to share. I realize that this doesn’t coincide with standard material and I’m not trying to push it on anyone. But if you find an idea or two (or the kernel of an idea) that you like, please steal it. I bring this up just to generate new ideas.
The first thing that I had done was to modify the nature of the afterlife a little. Initially, it seemed inappropriate to me that the gods of death (Hades/Pluto, Hel, etc.) were ruling over a plane that was populated with only petitioners of Neutral Evil alignment. To me, it seems like they should have vast legions of souls instead of the 1/17(?) that they would get if everyone went to the plane of their alignment.
I found the solution I wanted in the Egyptian concept of multiple souls (I know many cultures have this). I stripped down the Egyptian system to a person having a soul and a “shadow soul”.
Under my new system when a person dies, his soul and shadow soul are split (probably after going through whatever afterlife judgment is appropriate for that person).
The soul represents the true essence of the person (i.e. his alignment, his devotion, etc.) This soul goes to the plane approriate to the dead person’s beliefs as a petitioner.
The shadow soul represents an attachment to the mortal realm. It immediately goes to the Grey Wastes to live the monotonous dreary life waiting to be commanded by a god of death (e.g. being ordered by Hel to attack the Norse gods on the day of Ragnarok)
This corrects what I saw as a flaw as the gods of death now command the shadow souls of every being that has ever lived! [In my mind, the gods of death are not particularly ambitious or else, they could probably launch some major wars of conquest - I guess there is an upside to the emotional apathy that permeates the plane]
As the shadow soul is the one with the links to the mortal realm (i.e. a shadow of the man he USED to be) and the soul/petitioner is the essense of his being (i.e. the man he IS/WILL BE); the soul/petioner has no memories of his prior life.
So if the PCs want to travel to the Outer Planes to contact a spirit to find out where he hid the MacGuffin before he died, the PCs will need to go to the Grey Wastes, sneak past the yugoloths, avoid the warfare on the upper layer, avoid succumbing to the life-draining effects and bypass the guardian beast (e.g. Cerberus) to reach the realm of the shadow souls so that they can ask the dreary spirit that actuallly does remember something of his past life.
Personally, I liked this as it finally provided a reason for the PCs to go to the Grey Wastes
Then I started thinking about the yugoloths. I couldn’t afford all the PS material so it is possible I missed this; but I never found a clear motivation or goal for the yugoloths. While I think it’s fine for the PCs to never understand the motivations of various groups and factions; as the DM, I like to know them so that I can create cohesive plots and goals for the villains.
In what I read, the yugoloths were cunning and definitely seemed to have some hidden objective for which they manipulated everyone else. But I was damned [no pun intended] if I could figure out what their endgame goal was. [If one of the great gurus on this site want to fill me in on the cannonical answer, I’d be glad to hear it]
I started to think about what the yugoloths could want. I had defined the Grey Wastes as being the plane of death more than the plane of Neutral Evil; so I asked, what would creatures native to the plane of death want? What would give them power?
The gods of death (in my new set-up) had a lock on the shadow souls, so what was there for the yugoloths to do except scavange and trade the larvae of the true petitioners of the plane?
Then it dawned on me, what if the yugoloths could feed on “spiritual” death? We know that typically when a petitioner or planar entity dies, he or she usually comes back in some related form (e.g. a killed devil returns at the bottom of the status ladder as larvae). That “demotion” seems like a loss of energy. Where does that energy go?
While the gods of death were preoccupied with the fates of mortal souls passing on, what if the yugoloths were preoccupied with the “deaths” of souls/petitioners?
What if the death of a soul/petitioner actually gave power to the yugoloths? And what if the power gained was especially strong if the soul/petitioner died while in the Grey Wastes? Then the yugoloths would actually have a motivation to encourage lethal, bloody warfare to be fought on the Grey Wastes.
But how could they accomplish that…hmmm??? Lethal, BLOODy WARfare
Sure they could encourage an attack against the Upper Planes, but then the yugoloths might find themselves the targets of attacks by celestials. Much too risky. Better if they could find two (or more) groups of patsies that they could play off of each other while they officially take the stance of being neutral.
So that’s it in a nutshell. Any opinions? Too far out there? Did I overlook some obvious contradictions? Did I miss out on some cool potential for further plots or ideas?
I dig the idea of the shadow souls. You're right, quite noncanonical, but it makes sense to several religions. For example, Hercules in Greek myth had his divine half go to Olympus, while his mortal half spends eternity in the Elysian fields. Voodoun has the idea of the gros-bon-ange and the petit-bon-ange, which are the higher, afterlife-bound soul and the lower, memory-holding soul, just as you've described here. Giving the gods of death mastery of those hordes of weaker souls seems like a good reason for them to desire the portfolio.
Unless this is a 4e thing I haven't seen, I've never heard of this happening. In 3e, a petitioner killed on their native plane merges with the plane, while a petitioner killed off-plane is utterly destroyed. (I prefer to think of a petitioner dying off-plane as being almost completely eradicated; being almost purely a different alignment, only the sliver of their soul that was still the alignment of the plane where they died gets absorbed; for instance, a Mechanus petitioner killed in Pandemonium would only have the fragment of chaos left in their soul, and a bit of their surviving evil, get absorbed.)
A devil, having been promoted, is a little luckier; while a devil killed on Baator is dead, just like any other petitioner -- its essence merges with the plane (presumably empowering it) -- a devil killed off-plane is banished to Baator and bound there for a century. It's often demoted by its superiors for its failure, but this is not an automatic result of its death. The process is similar for other fiends and celestials which were promoted from petitioners.
How might we rescue the general concept... perhaps the yugoloths have the ability to "skim off" some of the energy from any evil-aligned spells and powers used by the devils and demons while on the Waste, Gehenna, or Carceri, in places where the yugoloths have set up the appropriate energy traps?