Hi folks,
I think I asked, or tried to ask, this question a few years ago, but asked it in a way that made no sense. I hope nobody minds if I ask again, hopefully this time I won't make myself sound so dumb..
OK, Exemplars. I'm not entirely clear on the idea but what I've gathered is that each Outer Plane has one particular Outsider race that personifies its alignment, and which can arise spontaneously out of the plane itself.
Some of these races are well-known. The ones I think are Exemplars are:
Outlands - Rilmani
Limbo - Slaadi
Abyss - Tanar'ri
Carceri - Gehreleths
Grey Waste - Yugoloths
Baator - Baatezu (formerly the Baatorians?)
Mechanus - Modrons
Mount Celestia - Archons
Elysium - Guardinals
Arborea - Eladrins
But that leaves some gaps:
Ysgard - ?
Beastlands - ? some kind of animal spirits?
Bytopia - ?
Arcadia - ? formians?
Acheron - ?
Gehenna - ?
Pandemonium - ?
Am I wrong about all planes having Exemplars, do these planes not have Exemplars at all? Or are they comparatively minor races that aren't well known?
There seems to be a pattern -- the "full" alignment planes have Exemplars, but the "in-between" alignment planes don't, except the Gehreleths. Are they just a fluke, an aberration thought up by Apomps? Is Carceri the only "in-between" plane that has Exemplars? Or are the 'leths not actually Exemplars?
If they don't have Exemplars (other than Carceri) do you suppose, as more and more belief is poured into them over the eons, that these planes will eventually develop or evolve defined Exemplars of their own? Maybe, in the eons of the development of the Outer Planes, the nine "cardinal" planes were the first to appear, and the more "in-between" ones developed later, as refinements and shades of alignments, as more and more dead folks came in over the eons, and more and more belief happened.
What attracts me to Planescape is that there is substance and feeling to the setting, not just a bunch of monsters to kill.
Yeah, pretty much. There are races that dwell in the in-between planes, but they're not usually considered "exemplars." Gehreleths exemplify Carceri in many ways, but they aren't really considered "exemplars" - although they are fiends.
That's very possible. It's thought that originally there were only five planes (Law, Chaos, Neutrality, Evil, and Good), and five became nine as Chaos and Law blended with Good and Evil, and nine became seventeen as the planes blended further. Maybe one day there will be more than seventeen outer planes as the gradients become finer still.