Ideas Needed - Plane of Illusions

Do you own Fiendish Codex I? There is a realm called Hollow's Heart, under the Demon Prince Fraz-Urb'luu, which is a realm of illusion overseen by a cadre of rakshasas called the Hollow Rajahs. This might be a source of ideas for you. In particular, the lost Staff of Fraz-Urb'luu is a great artifact that would be very useful to the rakshasas.

To embroil them as fully as possibly in physical lusts and desires. This is existentially their reason for existing, but it serves the practical purpose that people obsessed with material things and sensations are easy to manipulate with illusion magic. People whose lives were not so much externally evil as gluttonous and selfish in this fashion would end up as petitioners in what you have called Samsara.

(Do petitioners reincarnate from there, or do they ever merge with the plane? It might be interesting if Samsara's petitioners all eventually reincarnate after whatever illusory death awaits them at the hands of their masters or the terrors of the plane. Spiritual perfection in union with samsara is practically a contradiction in terms.)

I would certainly suggest that the half-human descendants of rakshasas would be tieflings. Tieflings can vary widely in their physical attributes, though if you like I would suggest that rakshasa tieflings lean toward fur, fangs, better noses, smoky auras, and inverted hands.

Samsara could easily be a place where pure ingredients for illusion-related spells and items could be found, and in fact no doubt has powerful items available for purchase or theft. The trick is isolating any real components from the illusions, of course... and no doubt the salesmen here are some of the best liars in the planes.

Sure, why not. Or tiger versions of hellcats (SRD bezekira).

You know, I really like that idea. The leader rakshasas get power from their petitioners, but the only way to join the leadership caste is to get enough of the other major players to acknowledge you as an authoritative proxy or favored servant of a Dark Master. This might involve offing an old leader, or somehow convincing everyone that a hidden Master is making a play.

So everyone's lying (or self-deluded), but each one thinks they're the only one; even most of the Multiverse believes in the Dark Masters. And there is the strong suggestion, even among the very well-informed bloods that have decided the Dark Masters don't exist, that all the belief going to the existence of the Dark Masters -- well, if it's not creating them, at the very least it may be powering a kind of force that is keeping the whole house of lies from tumbling down, so that publicizing your theory that it's all a load of codswallop might be entirely bad for your health.

The Athar would probably love to take out a setup like that.

""Can anyone suggest a better name for an "Hindu hell"? Naraka? I am resisting this a little as Naraka is a little more of a purgatory/hell dealing out punishments.""

Yeah, and Naraka/Naraku is also Buddhist. Sadly, I don't know enough about Hinduism to help, here.

""I think, in Hindu tradition, most rakshasa live on earth but in remote locations.""
That is correct. It's prettymuch like most of the Greek monsters.

"So everyone's lying (or self-deluded), but each one thinks they're the only one; even most of the Multiverse believes in the Dark Masters. And there is the strong suggestion, even among the very well-informed bloods that have decided the Dark Masters don't exist, that all the belief going to the existence of the Dark Masters -- well, if it's not creating them, at the very least it may be powering a kind of force that is keeping the whole house of lies from tumbling down, so that publicizing your theory that it's all a load of codswallop might be entirely bad for your health.""

Red alert! Red alert!
Perhaps it's just me, but this is starting to sound just a bit too reminiscent of the Yugoloths. (Except that most Yugoloths aren't so self-deluded and the Dark Masters bit. Granted, most of the Yugoloth Princes are too obscure for this subject to come up-- the only ones we know of are the Oinoloth, Malkazid the Fallen, and the General of Gehenna, and we can only be certain of the Oinoloth's and Malkazid's existence unless you count that Dragon article about the Plaguebearers. Also, Malkazid is not a Yugoloth.)

Indrajit was the general of Ravana's armies, and Ravana's eldest son. That was the time of Ravana's greatest power. With Indrajit at the lead, rakshasa legions invaded Swarga itself, the great palace in Limbo where the gods Indra, Vayu, and Agni dwelled, and conquered it, making the gods themselves into their servants.

Megha-nada, son of Ravana. When Ravana went against Indra’s forces in Swarga, his son Megha-nada accompanied him, and fought most valiantly. Indra himself was obliged to interfere, when Megha-nada, availing himself of the magical power of becoming invisible, which he had obtained from Siva, bound Indra and carried him off to Lanka. The gods, headed by Brahma, went thither to obtain the release of Indra, and Brahma gave to Megha-nada the name Indra-jit, conqueror of Indra.’

With Indra made into a mere vassal, Ravana was able to make the maruts do his will, killing only those false immortals who displeased him or threatened his schemes. With maruts threatening even the elder cobras who ruled the serpent races, Indrajit was able to convince all snakes to submit to him.

Indrajit was finally slain by the hero Lakshmana on the same day that Ravana ended his incarnation at the hands of Lakshmana's brother Rama. These twin losses were grave for the rakshasa race. The gods freed themselves, the maruts ignored the rakshasas' fiendish commands, and the rakshasa holdings shrank to Lanka and a few lesser cubes surrounding it.

Surviving Indrajit is Garudajit, his son with a naga princess. Garudajit has inherited powers over snakes from both his parents. From his realm in Minauros, he rules many rakshasas, nagas, ophidians, and yuan-ti.

Garudajit is a large (18' tall) rakshasa with a serpent's lower body and three heads: two human heads (one with bestial features, the other with the subtle scales of a yuan-ti pureblood), and one serpentine. He owes fealty to Mammon.

Ravana was the king of the rakshasas, having seized this title from his half-brother Kuvera. He could take almost any form, but typically he is remembered as a gargantuan rakshasa with ten heads, twenty arms, coppery eyes and long, sharp teeth.

For a long time it seemed that Ravana was unstoppable: his domains included many cubes in Acheron, the realm of Swarga in Limbo, and sizable holdings in the Material Plane.

Then Rama came, and his monkey army. They killed both Ravana and Indrajit, his son. Ravana’s treacherous brother Vibhishana took over Ravana’s capital Lanka, and the rakshasa dreams of empire were ended.

Still the rakshasas hope that one day their greatest leader will be reborn. Already a number of rakshasa maharajas claim to be Ravana reincarnate, but they all lie. In truth, Ravana has already been reborn: as Sisupala, a somewhat spoiled but ordinary human prince on the Material Plane. Sisupala has no idea of his previous incarnation, and none but the gods know what has become of Ravana's spirit. If the rakshasas were to find out, they could take steps to transfer the prince's soul into a body more appropriate to rule them.

Sisupala, however, does not want to rule the rakshasas. Though the ferocious spirit of Ravana rages within him, he would much rather settle down with Rukmini, his fiancée. As long as Rukmini lives, he will do everything in his power to avoid the fate the rakshasas desire for him.

Kumbhakara is a brother of Ravana, like him a son of the rakshasi Nikasha and the sage Visravas. Kumbhakara is maharajah of sleep, dreams, and posession. One day every six months, Kumbhakara wakes up, and his powers are weakened. His court exists physically on the same cube as Ak-Yama's, but it extends through a psychic dreamscape within the minds of all who enter.

On Kumbhakara's face of the cube is a field of poppies; in the center of that field is a golden palace. The palace contains Kumbhakara and his sleeping court; all who venture near the cube face sleep as well, such is Kumbhakara's power.

In the dreamscape the palace appears a hundred times bigger, and its boundaries shift and change. There the raja's court is aware and ferocious, and Kumbhakara has ultimate control over the dreaming reality.

Kumbhakara is a fiend of posession and a powerful psion, and all of his servants are as well. Regularly he dispatches minions to the Material Plane in astral form, there to enter the bodies of sleeping mortals and force them to obey his commands.

Kumbhakara twists the dreams of mortals, stealing from them the refuge of sleep and filling their minds with his own thoughts and warriors, creating an army of sleepers not permitted to wake with which the rakshasa lord hopes to conquer the realms of men, recreating the rakshasa empire that died with Ravana.

Kumbhakara's only weakness is that every six months he must spend one day awake, and on that day his whole court wakes as well. All his posessing minions must return to their own bodies and Kumbhakara must begin again, finding new mortal bodies to use as pawns if his pawns are compromised during the day of cursed wakefulness, shifting his pieces into a new configuration, moving toward his goal from new angles. Some periods he moves closer; occasionally he must sacrifice his pawns and move a step back, but he believes he is moving inexorably toward his goal of ultimate conquest.

Kuvera is Ravana's half-brother, once maharajah of all rakshasas, now the self-proclaimed Rajah of Wealth.

Since the creation of the rakshasa race they had ruled themselves from the Waters of Creation in Acheron, wealthy and powerful beyond dreams, unassailable in their fortress-city of Lanka, a city created by the god Tvashtri himself at their commission . It was Visravas, a powerful and cunning Brahmin sage - Visravas son of Pulastya son, it was said, of Brahma himself - who hatched a plan to steal Lanka from the rakshasas, and steal the rakshasas as well from the caste that had ruled them for so many eons.

The mere rumor of Vishnu's coming was enough to disturb the rakshasas; they feared the great Preserver who had been the enemy of their plots and schemes since the dawn of time, and the dawn, noon, and dusk before that. The rakshasa warriors were soon at alert, but more was needed - Visravas needed to provide them with evidence. This he soon did: one day the rakshasas discovered a mace near the city gates, a mace recognizable as Vishnu's. The following day a rakshasi woman found a conch shell within the city itself, sending waves of terror throughout the populace. The day after that, a stylized wheel was discovered, carved to resemble the rays of the sun. The day after that, a lotus, and after that a jewel that shone like the sun itself. At that point the rakshasas evacuated Lanka en masse, and Visravas and his wife Idavida strove into the city unhindered. Visravas installed himself at the throne of the rakshasa maharaja and melded it to the considerable spiritual powers he posessed as a Brahmin sage descended from Brahma himself. When the rakshasas began to creep back, Visravas was unstoppable; the power of Lanka had become his own power, the soul of the rakshasa race and guardianship over the Waters of Creation had become one with his own soul, and the fiends were forced to bow to his will.

Visrava was mainly concerned with introducing the order, rituals, and discipline of the Vedas to the benighted heathens the rakshasas had become. He taught them the proper sacrifices and rites to honor the Vedic gods and divided their society into castes, the better that each rakshasa should know his or her place. He restructured their military and created the ministries which would rule over various aspects of rakshasa life from then on, and he taught them of reincarnation and the quest for transcendence beyond the wheel of karma.

Eventually, after ruling the rakshasas for millennia, Visrava stepped down from his throne, beginning a life of ascetic contemplation to prepare for his next life. His son Kuvera inherited the throne of Lanka.

Kuvera was a very different sort of ruler than his father had been. He had lived in Lanka among the rakshasas his entire life, and the power of the city had warped and changed him, made him both more and less than human. Where Visrava was primarily concerned with order, Kuvera was more interested in the wealth the rakshasas could provide. He sent his legions to the mortal world, where his father had not permitted them to go in centuries, to steal and raid and conquer the nations of humanity. He insisted all the wealth of the multiverse was his by right as lord of the rakshasas; sometimes he rode at the head of his armies in a flying chariot forged by Tvashtri, and beleagered mortals learned to think of Kuvera as the lord of all evil.

Meanwhile, the older rakshasa lords had not given up the hope of reclaiming their power. When Visrava ruled he had seemed incorruptable, but when he stepped down this seemed to them to be an act of weakness, a sign that even the seemingly immortal sage had at last grown old. They met in secret and discussed how they might exploit this.

A princess of their kind, a daughter of one of the ancient noble rakshasa families named Nikasha, was introduced to Visrava. Their meetings, at first, seemed coincidental and casual, and Visrava thought nothing of it. As time went by, Visrava began to see Nikasha more and more, and the exquisite spells and glamour she wrapped around herself began to affect even the puissant sage, who had forgotten the pleasures of a young woman long ago. When thoughts of Nikasha began to make it impossible for him to meditate, Visrava decided he must have her, if only to banish her from his mind. The two met in secret, and although Visrava did not at the time know it, many children were conceived.

This, of course, was the purpose the rakshasas had intended that Nikasha accomplish. It was necessary, they decided, to join the blood of Visrava, which the old sage had bonded irrevocably to Lanka itself, with their own blood, so that they could rule through the resulting half-breed offspring. The children of Visrava and Nikasha - Kumbhakara, Ravana, Vibhishana, Shurpanaka, Bibhishan, and Khara - six children, a whole litter of potential claimants to the throne, were raised by the rakshasas in secret, and when they had grown to adulthood the strongest of them, Ravana, led the rakshasas in a revolt against his half-brother the king, and Kuvera, Visrava, their supporters and confidantes, even the queen mother Idavida were driven from the city. Ravana was left the unquestioned master of the rakshasa race, and his own epic conquests had just begun.

Although Kuvera could not withstand the onslaughts of his half-brother, he was far from powerless without his throne. Blinded by greed and hubris as he was, he was the son of Visrava, clever and determined with divine power running through his veins, and he soon had a new kingdom, Alaka, among the highest mountains of the Gray Waste.

In Alaka, Kuvera attracted exiled rakshasas and other spirits and fiends, using slaves to mine the buried wealth of the Glooms and other planes too. Alaka soon became almost as wealthy as Lanka had been, if not more so. He is now king of the merchant rakshasas, and a lord of the Planar Trade Consortium. Besides the tremendous amount of precious minerals at his disposal, he buys and sells souls, and has many horse-headed oni servants who play sweet music in imitation of the minstrels of Swarga, where Indra rules. Many yugoloths are at his court at all times, particularly arcanaloths seeking to make deals with him on behalf of their tanar’ri and baatezu clients, though he will at times deal with both tanar’ri and baatezu directly. His palace contains that rarest of luxuries in the lower planes, a beautiful garden known as Chaitraratha that manages to remain green and lush in the middle of the Gray Waste. Kuvera is dwarfish in appearance - some associate him with the dwarven god Abbathor, even claiming they are the same entity (which is possible, though dwarves deny it). He is also represented as a pitch-black rakshasa covered in jewelry and sitting cross-legged on his throne or on a white lion.

Kuvera has many wives: Yakshi, Charvi, an asura woman of the danava tribe exiled to the Elemental Plane of Water, and Rambha, who Kuvera sent to seduce and spy on his half-brother Ravana in attempt to copy the trick the rakshasas had used to depose him. He has three sons; his daughter is Minakshi, who used illusions to cover her deformed appearance and eventually went to Acheron to found a kingdom of her own. Kuvera is also said to have five hundred children with the rakshasa lady Hariti, maharani of plague; these children form the ruling caste of Alaka, ranking below his other children and his Prime Minister but above all other citizens. Kuvera’s prime minister is named Manibhadra, a grim old rakshasa sorcerer who made too many enemies among the rakshasas of Lanka to ever go back to them. He has two fearsome rakshasa bodyguards, a male and female who accompany him at all times.

The new realm is called Alaka; he is king of the merchant rakshasas, and a lord of the Planar Trade Consortium. Wives: Yakshi, Charvi, a danava, and Rambha, who is also Ravana's mistress and who was sent to seduce him. He has three sons and a daughter, Minakshi the fish-eyed, who has three breasts.

Ak-Yama was an ak-chazar rakshasa, a master of undeath. Now he is a maharajah, a prince of his kind, and he has progressed so far from his original caste without reincarnation, something unthinkable by most of his race. Ak-Yama belongs to a heretical sect of rakshasas who believe that advancement from one caste to another is possible within a single lifetime, something that doesn't endear him to his fellows, but what did he care? He was an ak-chazar anyway, a speaker to the dead. Despite their power, they are considered untouchable by other rakshasas anyway - something to use, but not something to associate with. What did he have to lose?

Ak-Yama owes his puissance to his four wives, each of the Great Ghul race. The great ghuls were once of a minor race of geniekind - either the jann or some now-extinct offshoot - before they were all corrupted by the curse of the hungry dead, becoming in their devious, fallen ways personifications of necromancy. It was to these corrupt creatures that the ak-chazar rakshasa descended. In exchange for feeding each of his brides one of his limbs - the two arms and two legs he had at the time - they taught him secrets of necromantic power that even he, an adept of a caste that has specialized in the study of the magic of death since the beginning of time, had not known existed.

Ak-Yama is now festooned with undead grafts, which have more than replaced his missing limbs. He has also grafted on several new heads, including the head of a great ghul, a dark naga, and a shoosuva - a sort of undead hyena - stolen from the Abyssal lord Yeenoghu. Ak-Yama is the master of his new heads, although they have intelligence of their own, and secrets they keep from him.

Ak-Yama must occasionally spar with demons sent by Yeenoghu to harry him, but Yeenoghu's own feud with Baphomet takes precedence in the demon lord's eyes.

Many ak-chazar have come to serve Ak-Yama, reveling in the idea that he was once of their kind, though the ghuls have not chosen another to teach since then and Ak-Yama holds his secrets close. He also has many rakshasa sorcerers, naztharune, and warriors in his armies, though by far the bulk of his troops are undead.

Although his tutilage among the Great Ghuls caused his alignment to shift to Chaos, Ak-Chazar still rules from Acheron, on a cube filled with plague-wasted jungle foliage. The other faces of his cube are ruled by other maharajahs, with whom he has reached a tenuous peace. Still he is strongly considering a move to the negative inner planes, where he hopes he can continue his rise to greater power unfettered by the ambitions of his fellow maharajahs.

Mayadevi was a powerful maharani, a rakshasa princess. Her specialty was illusion, something rakshasas are already experts in by nature. Her glamours, though, were really something to see, or would have been had they ever been obvious enough that those around her even noticed they were there. Mayadevi was too much of a professional for that.

She was born with the name Minakshi, daughter of Kuvera, who had once ruled all of the rakshasas as one people. Too ambitious to remain in her father's new court in Gehenna, she led an army into Acheron and appeared to destroy utterly a city on a cube of there. This, of course, was an illusion. In reality she took over the cube, still under the appearance of ruins, and made its inhabitants her thralls without their knowledge. Only a secret cabal of rakshasa illusionists is aware of the city's true state; they manipulate the perceptions of the city from behind their sorcerous masks.

Shukracharya is the power behind the throne of the Asura and Rakshasa: in all the myths, he's the wise man they go to for advice about what to do. Because he's a maharishi [read: ascetic superpower that could readily compete with most deities] the devas can't act against him directly--he has mojo that would spell their doom even if they killed him. He therefore survives even as the straightforward tyrants, like Ravana, rise and fall.

Pustalya is a lesser known quantity--myths mentions that he founded the rakshasa race and that he, too, was a powerful sage. I've actually come to view him as a being that has drifted away from Mechanus but wants to prove by object lesson that his ideas are viable. Rakshasa development is like a twisted mirror of Nietschze's master-slave morality: in their mindset, physical, mental, and magical superiority justify their rule and their arbitration of morals.

rakshasas torment and trick people in the hope that their Dark Masters let them go free from the world of Samsara.

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