Timestamps and Spoilers Below! 0:12 Intro, Become a Member! 0:39 Dragon Magazine 221, Ygorl the Slaadi Lord of Entropy 1:31 Slaadi, Slaadi Lords, Limbo the Plane of Absolute Chaos 3:26 Primus, the Spawning Stone, and the creation of the Slaadi 5:07 Becoming Slaadi Lords 6:56 Ygorl, Shkiv, the Scythe named Death 8:33 Fiend Folio, Stats, and Combat 13:16 Legendary actions, discussion on exhaustion, visuals 16:01 Legends of Ygorl, Perceiving Time in reverse 17:12 Rules over slaadi, Ygorl's Domain 18:48 Lord of Entropy and infecting the Blood War 19:45 Sorel, Skirnex, Ssendam, Rennbuu, Chourst Like, Share, Comment, Subscribe, Hit the Bell Icone, and Join us on the Discord! Love the Lords of Ruin videos, always so much great fuel for big bad guys in the multiverse to pull into your games. Interesting note on the 5e stat-block, Slaadi can only infect humanoids, which makes me wonder if they still are active on the fields of the blood wars with some way to infect Fiends or if they still only target humanoids. Might just be a miss-translation into the current edition.
From your description of anyone by Ygorl touching the scythe Death, I have this image of him indulging a whim in battle and tossing his weapon, "Catch!" Watching some poor idiot disintegrate and calling his scythe back to him. "That never gets old."
I want to say that, as a long time viewer, this really helped me in my game. I never understood the Slaad until now, as I felt they were too constrained by their colors to be chaotic neutral. Hearing how this constraint on their chaos is something most despise is thrilling for their possibilities and Ygorl as a destructive force as well as the folly of forcing Law into a place of pure chaos. Despite being neutral, this explains their hostility at nearly all times. Another great video, and I hope to enjoy many many many more!
I love the slaad lords, especially Ygorl and Rennbuu. The concept that he was born at the end of the universe and he experienced time in reverse was always interesting to me. I even had a Limbo campaign where I speculated that Rennbuu had the slaad gems of the other lords within him, that's why they feared him, but sadly couldn't finish it.
"Ah. You've brought me the Sword. Good.... it will help me take Faerun so much more quickly. You three have turned out to be well worth my effort... You must know by now, you have no hope against me. From inside that gem, I controlled you for years. I chose you three and brought you to me... A warrior who exiled himself in the guilt of his failure. A sorcerer, shunned by his family for being different. A mixed breed who ran away from a home where she never belonged. Three forsaken souls, wandering the world alone. I'm the only one who's ever cared about you..." "... I am Ygrol, the Slaad, Lord of Chaos..." RIP Michael Clark Duncan. You made a pretty forgettable villain in a strictly mediocre game so much cooler than he had any right to be.
I know what you mean. From the viewpoint of humanoids they seem evil. I guess they must have some good intentions that we don't notice? The drow as written by RA Salvatore seem more NE as their hierarchy is orderly and built upon rules followed by all.
Awesome video AJ. I almost forgot about this guy. I only used him once in my campaigns. I planned for it because the new player had a Chaotic Neutral character and he played the alignment in a "let's joke around and annoy everyone because disrupting the game is fun for me" way. So, his character through "random chance" got a Cubic Gate. One of the sides was "Limbo, Ygori's Lair". I planned it with the other players. They were dang near ready to quit the group because he kept showing up for games with that chaotic disrupter character. It was a mid-high level campaign. The next encounter was the party about to face a large force of enemies, The Patriarchy (Think historical crusaders, evil people acting in the name of good). The idea was to sneak around them but we knew what that predictably disruptive guy would do. He jumped out, got their attention, and said "Lost souls! Chaos will cleanse the weak!" He then hit the gate to Ygori's Lair. "Ygori! Help us purify!" Ygori burst through and said "You are lucky! I was BORED!" To say the battle was a chaotic mess is an understatement. I had a bunch of tables that I rolled to see what Ygori and his forces would do. The Chaotic Disrupter guy disintegrated on round 1 but he turned to tiny gnats and their maggots. The patriarchy's forces ended up imploding as they fought mostly what their fallen comrades turned into. The human paladin became a hobgoblin paladin. The gnome thief (scout and trap guy) became a stone giant thief. The wizard's head turned into two heads, he was Neutral Good. His head became bickering heads that are Chaotic Good and Lawful Good. His body gained more girth to accommodate correctly. The half-elf ranger became a sprite ranger... passing the gender-swap save that came with that one just barely. All the plant life in the battlefield became semi-plant semi-Earth element grabbing and throwing tentacles... that grow back after you destroy them. There were pits of "lightning sand" like from The Princess Bride that have a 1 in 6 chance to launch you out a random "lightning sand" pit with enough power to literally be thrown off the battlefield. Ygori got bored and left when he killed the Patriarchy's leaders, taking the Cubic Gate with him saying "Time to put this in front of another fun fool." And then, Chaotic Neutral was never again an alignment picked by that group of players. Here's the odd part. Unlike other battles Mr. Chaotic Disruption was at, everyone was laughing and having fun while he was complaining... the opposite of how the games he attends were like until then. My players thought I planned for the game to be super-fun irony. No, I just wanted to show the idiot how much nothing-but-chaos makes a game suck. It just backfired in a really good way... but I let them think that's how I planned it. Only the gnome wanted to get his body restored and finally got it. The others loved the story twist of their transformations. The disrupter guy, he took over an interesting NPC that was a retired adventurer and pretty much a background character. He played his Chaotic Good alignment more like a reality star diva (years before those existed) but that was a hell of an improvement.
@@AJPickett Thanks. Accidentally nailed it though. I saw it as an entertaining mess until all the other players got all happy about it and thought I did some next-level master-minding. I think what woke him up was being on the receiving end of it and saw what an epic level chaotic neutral would be. Generally speaking, I strongly advise against anyone picking Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, and especially Chaotic Evil. Most people play those just to have an excuse to be the group's disruptive a-hole.
That80sGuy1972 so wait. You wanted to show the chaotic player how not fun chaos is by giving everyone a great time with a being being of pure chaos, but killed the character in the first round? What was there to learn from that though? If anything, that should have encouraged them to do it more, because clearly everyone at the table loved the utter chaos in that fight.
@@Aplesedjr Him dying right away was bad luck on his part. And they won because they worked together to beat the chaos, something the guy who died right away never did. He just kept trolling the party using his alignment as an excuse.
After watching this videos I got so inspired that made a whole campaign about the Slaadi/Limbo. My players are about to encounter their finale battle with Ygorl, and the whole campaign has been a blast. I just wanted to thank you for starting me on this journey that I’ll never forget.
Those super old illustrations make me wish I still had those books. I had the whole original set in my father's car when it broke down & he took it to the mechanic. He later decided he couldn't afford to fix the car & abandoned it there & of course refused to get my books & he hated comics, D&D, fantasy books, etc, so I couldn't get new ones. Ahh childhood.
My players just watched this guy tear apart a slaad attempting usurp him. One of them, looking upon his scythe, made the mistake of thinking; 'I just found my new weapon.' We all know how that went...
"Never shoehorn common sense to prop up bad game mechanics" -One of the single most important unwritten rules of D&D, and it's unfortunately an extremely difficult thing to teach. 5e exacerbates this to the point that I never find myself "rules lawyering" but instead, "the rules are idiotic, and therefore we should disregard a great many of them, lawyering". I think that would be one hell of a topic for a video, perhaps a bit revolutionary, but I would not envy you the task.
You can't really teach critical thinking, adaptability, or the ability to discern the spirit of the law. What you can do is push the people with these abilities to realize that utilizing them is an incredible asset. My favorite part of our games is always when I suggest something as a potential result of a game state, then you give this look like "I'm torn between rewarding you for thinking of something clever, and telling you that you're really towing the line of plausibility" and then you roll a die. To me, that moment is the distilled essence of what makes D&D so great, and that magical moment is never experienced by people who just immediately resort to RAW.
Who doesn't modify the stat blocks of monsters, even just a bit though? I change up every single stat block to better match the lore of said character.
I've been renovating my home recently and these lore videos have been talking my mind off the blistering, Texas heat. Thanks man! Keep doing what you're doing!
It’s been a decently long time since last I’ve seen that intro, to the point where I forgot about it for a while. _A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one._
Ygorl first appeared in the 1e fiend folio in August 1981. Just a little History of the game we all love. At least I do anyway. If you said that A.J. I missed it.
My early D&D campaign took a big side quest when the group got tied in with a mad demigod out to kill Ygorl, because HE called himself the Doomlord of Entropy, and there was no room for other Entropy lords in his universe. Forunately for the group, the Doomlord was successful, they survived, and the Doomlord put Ygorls scythe on a plaque on the wall of his trophy room. The Doomlord of Entropy in my game was also the primary demi-god of assassins. The players expected to lose their characters every game, and definitely did not want to do so, these all being advanced long-played characters. so lets just say, it was tense. Fun story.
Some day Ygorl helped create the spawning stone, but by living backwards in time does that mean he helped destroy it from his perspective? Would that make his entropy an act of creating things from his time reversed view?
I have a bit of difficulty seeing how the slaad lords and pandemonium as a whole doesn't count as just straight up chaotic evil, It seems to have very little to push it towards any type of neutrality.
Part of me kind of likes to associate entropy with cosmic Order; eventually energy will become unusable and, in total heat death, the universe will have perfect order.
I'm currently trying to homebrew a pair of Axiomite and Anarchist warlock sublcasses to go with the celestial and fiend subclasses (thus demogorgon for example will be able to offer either the fiendish pact or the anarchist, just as most gods are able to grant multiple cleric subclasses). I have yet to playtest one, but when I do I plan to have a slaad lord as my patron, who gave me the powers so that I might destroy the color purple. Whenever I encounter something purple, I must either destroy it or turn it a different color.
the reason Slaadi are frogs/toads is because no other animal goes through as many changes in life as Frogs/toads. Also,Kek, a egyptian god of primordial darkness is also represented by a frog/toad. In Pathfinder, the Slaadi equvilant are the Proteans, wich are snake like, because the eyptian god of primordial chaos is Apep, the serpent
Point of order your honor... Lobsters have four life stages, while frogs and toads have only three. But I essentially agree with you. I would think a perfect example in movies of a beast of chaos would be the Thing from John Carpenters sci fi horror movies.
@@AJPickett well frogs begins as tadpoles, and goes from vegitarian to carnivores, they have to develop back limbs and front limbs and reconstruct their bodies. Slaadi could also be butterflies, since a catterpiller in the crysalis melts down to a goo of enzynms and form limbs that are put together over a span of months, hell they can even retain memories from their catterpillar state.
Did you know Hermit crabs have 254 Chromosomes? Also the parasitic Lancet liver fluke has probably the most complicated life cycle on the planet (thus far)... I wonder if there is a cool D&D Monster that could be inspired by that?
@@AJPickett there must be. reality is stranger than fiction. I like to think out plausible evolutinary lines for DnD monsters, like how the 1st edition Owlbear looks more like a feathred dinosaur, so now Owlbears should not be some mad wizards experiment but just a feathred dinosaur that the common folk calls Owlbears. Bullettes are terrestrial burrowing crocodylians, ( to me)
@6;47 when AJ says no one know if a Slaadi lord can be destroyed, Drizzt is sitting in the greenroom as the next book is being written saying with deathly calm ‘Wait until they get a load of me’.
Great video, I hadn't heard about the link between Primus and the spawning stone. Ygorl is a pretty poor D&D god, being pure chaos yet manifesting as death. Death is chaotic, I guess, but death doesn't represent the creativity of chaos. The god of chaos _really_ ought to have aspects of art, new life, and freedom that are just as strong as its aspects of destruction. Making the chaos god _just_ yet another remorseless destroyer completely wastes the opportunity here. See White Wolf's Weaver, Wyrm, and Wyld for a better split between order, destruction, and chaos. I love D&D's Great Wheel but Ygorl doesn't live up to entities like Asmodeus or Moradin.
Might be why he lives in isolation deep in the heart of Limbo, confronted with the pointlessness of it all. Perhaps he tried creating things... perhaps he created the multiverse, or is destined to... who knows?
@@AJPickett There's also the tidbit that Ygorl and one of the other slaad lords sabotaged the spawning stone so that they wouldn't have any natural contenders.
I have been thinking both states are a success. That when they successfully contact chaos they get a choice. Return to chaos, free of the constraints of the spawning stone or become a leader of their people to aid them in the struggle to reach that same point.
oh lets have some game fun. Bullywug - Dark Mage of Ygorl Sorcerer 18 - Wild Magic Cleric - Death Domain (for that sweet Reaper ability) Warlock - Hexblade bbut kinda fallow what Taking20 did for "the Ultimate Dark Mage Build" video for the spells and whatnot,
Piers Anthony wrote a series of novels called “The Incarnations of Immortality” each one showcasing an iconic “immortal” being, immortal being in quote since it only seems that way in the story and really they are a series of office holders that take office in various ways. In the novel “Bearing an Hourglass” the main character is Father Time. He is passed the hourglass of Time as the subsequent holder becomes a zygote again and died and is always an old man about to die to start out his tenure as Father Time. He then lives backwards through all the years he has already lived through up to the time of his birth and then he too dies and passes the hourglass. It’s an interesting treatment of what it would be like to live backwards and I don’t think I’ve ever seen another. It is different than Igorl in that it is one human life span per officeholder as opposed to from destruction to creation admittedly.
William Jackson oh yeah! I have seen another similar story then. The difference being the Benjamin starts old and grows young. His memory moves with the arrow of time. Father Time lives a full normal human life, as an old man he is given the hourglass then lives every day of his life until his birth in reverse. His memory is always is the direction he is aging. And something about being in the Office of Father Time keeps him from meeting himself or changing his own life by accident (but he can on purpose).
Pretty good vid, but there are more than four Slaad Lords! Wartle was pretty weak and is possibly slain by archons after being beaten by Ygorl, but, hey, and we also know of Bazim-Gorag (who was once a mortal batrachi of primordial Toril) and Norsar the Many, and possibly Urae-Naas, if "she" is not a Demon Lord. Ssendam, Ygorl, Renbuu and Chourst are certainly the top dogs, and likely never were death slaadi to begin with; given that in some corners of the lore, creation of Spawning Stone is attributed to Ssendam and/or Ygorl, they could have predated it, or instead have accended from rarer and more powerful slaadi forms, like gold, white or black.
Used Ygorl stats and made him a Daelkyr lord in Eberron along with the Slaadi as his Underlings. He is the Daelkyr of transmutation. His form in the video game fits the Daelkyr mold!
It’s always fascinating to here about beings that exemplify their plane! Considering how entropic Ygorl is, it makes me wonder what devastation a Lord of something like the negative and positive planes would be
honestly given his nature, seems rather appropriate for him to be comparitively weaker than in past editions as we go into new editions and as more time passes
12:37 Never pick up the weapon of any Demon Lord, Devil, Undead, Aberration or Evil God.....Especially not a Slaadi Death God of Chaos. More importantly how would a group of adventurers even get the weapon out of his hands?
He's going to look into your soul, you instantly know exactly when, and where you will die, because for him, its already happened, you are just an old VCR playing a show he's seen a thousand times already... its called INTIMIDATION daniel :)
Gotta get me that Mordenkainen staff. Man I've really fallen behind on these.... gotta get my viewing back going... these are rookie numbers gotta pump them up! Love the content as always you cheese eating mad lad.
Why does everyone automatically equate deadly=evil... what does that make all those Lawful good player characters who can vaporize monsters with some words and funny gestures and carry glowing sharp-edged 'Splody sticks. Ygorl is mostly indifferent, he prefers to not get involved, he is Neutral. His motives are mysterious, he may act on a whim, he is Chaotic Neutral. :)
Would he see any point to answering, though? He's seen your cult flourish, then dwindle until you are forgotten and feeble, a mere whisper on a forgotten madman's lips, before no one but him is alive to remember your name.
@@flibbernodgets7018 I have to wonder, will Ygorl's past(our future) change depending on any actions he takes to influence other people? Or is it fixed either as actual time or as memories in his mind? with the latter you could surprise him, possibly.
I don't get the slaadi version of chaotic neutral. Players who are CN tend to be selfish but not evil, but I picture an entity of pure chaotic neutrality as something completely random and as likely to help as to harm. However slaadi are described hunting down sentients to infect to make more slaadi which sounds closer to the animalistic evil of a white dragon.
They're CN, are they? They're CE. The trick with Slaads is that they aren't actually natives to Limbo or creatures formed from chaos, becuase anything made up of pure chaos wouldn't be coherent enough to be called a creature. The only reason Slaads exist is because the Spawning Stone injected order into the heart of Limbo, and it's hard to deny that there's not just something *wrong* with that whole scenario. Order placed into the middle of chaos and then abandoned to its own devices, creating chaos-life that shouldn't exist, it's little wonder they're evil.
@@AJPickett The Slaad lords have no real reason to be tied to Faerun. The planar races have been around for longer than the Faerunian pantheon; On Hallowed Ground establishes that the Faerunian pantheon are the new kids in the planes.
I'm finding that people kind of suck at writing neutral creatures. Many of them end up just being evil with a neutral tag stuck on. The slaad & weretiger are prime examples.
The problem here is, I think , the fact that they are extremely chaotic and for an organised society chaos is evil. If a slaad kills someone because of some chaotic impulse, most people won't say :" oh well, can't be helped, they don't kill with intention or malice, don't you know?" .They will think them evil and cruel. They're not, they just don't care
So, basically, without order, there can be no chaos and no order without chaos. It makes sense that an object of order helped create a personification of chaos, with the help of both leaders of chaos and order. Sort of like good and evil, light and dark.
I think "I make DnD videos 'fulltime'..." Is part of what brought me in initially. I thought "This guy knows what he's talking about" but without 'fulltime' it sounds wack
Now I am curious. Are chaos beasts close to what slaadi should be? By fixing them into hierarchical ranks enforced by bullying and giving them forms that need to infect innocents to reproduce did Primus add an element of evil to the plane of chaotic neutrality thus harming the balance in his drive to ensure law?
Gods are truly defined by the fact they act as custodians of aspects of reality, right? Therefore power to manipulate reality isn't limited to them. There could be many beings of power who can do what gods do. But do not have a portfolio and so are not gods. Having a portfolio is what makes a god. Not how powerful they are. As Orcus is infinitely frustrated by.
My understanding is that a God is a being that gains form and power from its worshipers, and will die without them. A Power is something that has similar or greater abilities to a god, but is more self sustaining. Powers also tend to exist as single instances on one plane of existence, whereas gods can exist in multiple forms in multiple places at once.
@@AlmightyDoubleHelix the gods existed, theoretically, before worshipers. They were beings of thought. So yes, they gain sustenence from worshipers. But they do not entirely fade even if they have no followers or are killed. Even primordials can be worshipped and gain power from it. What truly sets gods apart from the greater powers is their portfolios. You either have one or you don't. Orcus tried to gain one to be a god of death but failed and stayed simply one of the most powerful demon lords. Even so he has demonstrated not only can you kill a god but that he himself can. But the fact he is a threat to them is reciprocated: they are equal threats to him. And he has no real allies of equal power to rely on. His fellow demon lords would betray him as soon as it was convenient.
I really am starting to resist introduction bias. In the case of YGorl my introduction to Ygorl was the D&D Video Game 🎮 authored by RA Salvatore: “Demon Stone.” The Slaad Lord that I encountered in that game voiced by Michael Clark Duncan just doesn’t match the lore I just listened to... Oh well 😔 just right it off as the nature of Chaos.
YGorl is the antithema of glory.it is vainglory failure. To combat YGorl is debasement/to loose. That is YGORLs very nature. To beat this Salad is to burn ones character and books, to never play again, to be outside of memory. Wins YGorl counts include every failed attempt by a lawful entity to control a chaotic entity. That is to say... YGorl is a game of cards you must play, can't win and rarely break even when playing. This is the nature of Entropy. You loose.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over time. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy. Ygorl is more powerful at "the beginning." That's stated, clear as day. How do we conflate these two, seemingly opposing statements? The very beginning of Realmspace must have been in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. If that's true, then then Realmspace may be chonologically cyclical. The beginning is similar to the end (and vice versa). Disclaimer: this is hypothetical and just guesswork, based on opinion and may be completely wrong. Take it as DM inspiration, not gospel.
@@draxthemsklonst That would make sense, but if entropy was cyclical in that way, Ygorl's power would never change. After all, every day past the creation of reality from entropic oblivion is a day closer to the end of reality in entropic oblivion. He's never truly any closer or any further from it.
Did you know that the television show called “Touched By An Angel” has a prequel television show called “Touched By Ygorl”? Also the FoodTuber “The Foodie Beauty” is a huge(quite literally) YGorl Stan.
Ygorl speaks fluent gibberish, let the rest of the Slaadi out to kill the rest of the last survivors of the Dawn War, and got his tail handed to him by Pandora when she trapped him in a cage.
Timestamps and Spoilers Below!
0:12 Intro, Become a Member!
0:39 Dragon Magazine 221, Ygorl the Slaadi Lord of Entropy
1:31 Slaadi, Slaadi Lords, Limbo the Plane of Absolute Chaos
3:26 Primus, the Spawning Stone, and the creation of the Slaadi
5:07 Becoming Slaadi Lords
6:56 Ygorl, Shkiv, the Scythe named Death
8:33 Fiend Folio, Stats, and Combat
13:16 Legendary actions, discussion on exhaustion, visuals
16:01 Legends of Ygorl, Perceiving Time in reverse
17:12 Rules over slaadi, Ygorl's Domain
18:48 Lord of Entropy and infecting the Blood War
19:45 Sorel, Skirnex, Ssendam, Rennbuu, Chourst
Like, Share, Comment, Subscribe, Hit the Bell Icone, and Join us on the Discord!
Love the Lords of Ruin videos, always so much great fuel for big bad guys in the multiverse to pull into your games. Interesting note on the 5e stat-block, Slaadi can only infect humanoids, which makes me wonder if they still are active on the fields of the blood wars with some way to infect Fiends or if they still only target humanoids. Might just be a miss-translation into the current edition.
@Jeffrey Hezekiah yup, have been watching on InstaFlixxer for months myself :D
@Jeffrey Hezekiah yea, I've been using instaflixxer for since december myself :D
Do you know the name of the song in this vid?
From your description of anyone by Ygorl touching the scythe Death, I have this image of him indulging a whim in battle and tossing his weapon, "Catch!" Watching some poor idiot disintegrate and calling his scythe back to him. "That never gets old."
I want to hear more about the dragon Shkiv there's got to be some story about how he wound up in limbo and friend to this Slaad Lord
I'm just trying to imagine fighting Ygorl + an ancient dragon
I want to say that, as a long time viewer, this really helped me in my game. I never understood the Slaad until now, as I felt they were too constrained by their colors to be chaotic neutral.
Hearing how this constraint on their chaos is something most despise is thrilling for their possibilities and Ygorl as a destructive force as well as the folly of forcing Law into a place of pure chaos. Despite being neutral, this explains their hostility at nearly all times.
Another great video, and I hope to enjoy many many many more!
I love the slaad lords, especially Ygorl and Rennbuu. The concept that he was born at the end of the universe and he experienced time in reverse was always interesting to me. I even had a Limbo campaign where I speculated that Rennbuu had the slaad gems of the other lords within him, that's why they feared him, but sadly couldn't finish it.
He must have one hell of a metal album.
"Ah. You've brought me the Sword. Good.... it will help me take Faerun so much more quickly. You three have turned out to be well worth my effort...
You must know by now, you have no hope against me. From inside that gem, I controlled you for years. I chose you three and brought you to me... A warrior who exiled himself in the guilt of his failure. A sorcerer, shunned by his family for being different. A mixed breed who ran away from a home where she never belonged. Three forsaken souls, wandering the world alone. I'm the only one who's ever cared about you..."
"... I am Ygrol, the Slaad, Lord of Chaos..."
RIP Michael Clark Duncan. You made a pretty forgettable villain in a strictly mediocre game so much cooler than he had any right to be.
So they combined our notions of Time and Death as anthropomorphic concepts and made them into a Slaad Lord? Sounds neat.
Explode a bag of holding in his maw, full of magic mushrooms. Will that make it the 'Lord of Entrippy'?
Maybe I don’t know what chaotic neutral is but slaad often seem chaotic evil every time their behavior and culture is described
Seriously.
@@yesmansam6686 Fucking hell even their reproduction is fucked up parasitoid Alien shit. I don't know how they're considered anything but evil.
I know what you mean. From the viewpoint of humanoids they seem evil. I guess they must have some good intentions that we don't notice?
The drow as written by RA Salvatore seem more NE as their hierarchy is orderly and built upon rules followed by all.
Awesome video AJ. I almost forgot about this guy. I only used him once in my campaigns. I planned for it because the new player had a Chaotic Neutral character and he played the alignment in a "let's joke around and annoy everyone because disrupting the game is fun for me" way. So, his character through "random chance" got a Cubic Gate. One of the sides was "Limbo, Ygori's Lair". I planned it with the other players. They were dang near ready to quit the group because he kept showing up for games with that chaotic disrupter character. It was a mid-high level campaign. The next encounter was the party about to face a large force of enemies, The Patriarchy (Think historical crusaders, evil people acting in the name of good). The idea was to sneak around them but we knew what that predictably disruptive guy would do. He jumped out, got their attention, and said "Lost souls! Chaos will cleanse the weak!" He then hit the gate to Ygori's Lair. "Ygori! Help us purify!" Ygori burst through and said "You are lucky! I was BORED!" To say the battle was a chaotic mess is an understatement. I had a bunch of tables that I rolled to see what Ygori and his forces would do. The Chaotic Disrupter guy disintegrated on round 1 but he turned to tiny gnats and their maggots. The patriarchy's forces ended up imploding as they fought mostly what their fallen comrades turned into. The human paladin became a hobgoblin paladin. The gnome thief (scout and trap guy) became a stone giant thief. The wizard's head turned into two heads, he was Neutral Good. His head became bickering heads that are Chaotic Good and Lawful Good. His body gained more girth to accommodate correctly. The half-elf ranger became a sprite ranger... passing the gender-swap save that came with that one just barely. All the plant life in the battlefield became semi-plant semi-Earth element grabbing and throwing tentacles... that grow back after you destroy them. There were pits of "lightning sand" like from The Princess Bride that have a 1 in 6 chance to launch you out a random "lightning sand" pit with enough power to literally be thrown off the battlefield. Ygori got bored and left when he killed the Patriarchy's leaders, taking the Cubic Gate with him saying "Time to put this in front of another fun fool."
And then, Chaotic Neutral was never again an alignment picked by that group of players. Here's the odd part. Unlike other battles Mr. Chaotic Disruption was at, everyone was laughing and having fun while he was complaining... the opposite of how the games he attends were like until then. My players thought I planned for the game to be super-fun irony. No, I just wanted to show the idiot how much nothing-but-chaos makes a game suck. It just backfired in a really good way... but I let them think that's how I planned it. Only the gnome wanted to get his body restored and finally got it. The others loved the story twist of their transformations. The disrupter guy, he took over an interesting NPC that was a retired adventurer and pretty much a background character. He played his Chaotic Good alignment more like a reality star diva (years before those existed) but that was a hell of an improvement.
Certainly one of the hardest personality types to handle at the table, I think you nailed it that time.
@@AJPickett Thanks. Accidentally nailed it though. I saw it as an entertaining mess until all the other players got all happy about it and thought I did some next-level master-minding. I think what woke him up was being on the receiving end of it and saw what an epic level chaotic neutral would be. Generally speaking, I strongly advise against anyone picking Lawful Good, Chaotic Neutral, and especially Chaotic Evil. Most people play those just to have an excuse to be the group's disruptive a-hole.
That80sGuy1972 so wait. You wanted to show the chaotic player how not fun chaos is by giving everyone a great time with a being being of pure chaos, but killed the character in the first round? What was there to learn from that though? If anything, that should have encouraged them to do it more, because clearly everyone at the table loved the utter chaos in that fight.
@@Aplesedjr Him dying right away was bad luck on his part. And they won because they worked together to beat the chaos, something the guy who died right away never did. He just kept trolling the party using his alignment as an excuse.
The way they portrayed death in castlevania gives big vibs
This dude needs a hug he out dose many demon lords when it comes to creepy although I do like it
After watching this videos I got so inspired that made a whole campaign about the Slaadi/Limbo. My players are about to encounter their finale battle with Ygorl, and the whole campaign has been a blast. I just wanted to thank you for starting me on this journey that I’ll never forget.
That is awesome Nick! Thank you 🙂
@@AJPickett oh wow! Any tips on running the encounter?
@@nickroden4292 email me the characters involved, the basics of their last few encounters and how you plan on them meeting Ygorl. ad4emperor@gmail.com
Those super old illustrations make me wish I still had those books. I had the whole original set in my father's car when it broke down & he took it to the mechanic. He later decided he couldn't afford to fix the car & abandoned it there & of course refused to get my books & he hated comics, D&D, fantasy books, etc, so I couldn't get new ones. Ahh childhood.
One must imagine Ygorl happy.
E-Girl, the most dangerous creature.
My players just watched this guy tear apart a slaad attempting usurp him. One of them, looking upon his scythe, made the mistake of thinking; 'I just found my new weapon.'
We all know how that went...
Legendary resistence.
Player: i hit you.
Monster: No
Player: I ruled a nat 20!
Monster: No
"Never shoehorn common sense to prop up bad game mechanics" -One of the single most important unwritten rules of D&D, and it's unfortunately an extremely difficult thing to teach. 5e exacerbates this to the point that I never find myself "rules lawyering" but instead, "the rules are idiotic, and therefore we should disregard a great many of them, lawyering". I think that would be one hell of a topic for a video, perhaps a bit revolutionary, but I would not envy you the task.
"Best of the Worst, 5th edition rules that Won't Survive to 6th edition" sort of thing?
@@AJPickett That would be a delight to see!
You can't really teach critical thinking, adaptability, or the ability to discern the spirit of the law. What you can do is push the people with these abilities to realize that utilizing them is an incredible asset.
My favorite part of our games is always when I suggest something as a potential result of a game state, then you give this look like "I'm torn between rewarding you for thinking of something clever, and telling you that you're really towing the line of plausibility" and then you roll a die. To me, that moment is the distilled essence of what makes D&D so great, and that magical moment is never experienced by people who just immediately resort to RAW.
Who doesn't modify the stat blocks of monsters, even just a bit though? I change up every single stat block to better match the lore of said character.
Gotta be pretty badass if you can get a Brass dragon to be like, "Well, you're clearly pretty evil, but. . . Sure! Why not?"
But Ygorl is chaotic neutral.
@@draxthemsklonst Ah, That makes more sense. NVM then
I've been renovating my home recently and these lore videos have been talking my mind off the blistering, Texas heat. Thanks man! Keep doing what you're doing!
It’s been a decently long time since last I’ve seen that intro, to the point where I forgot about it for a while.
_A surprise to be sure, but a welcome one._
When AJ is complaining about how underpowered the super-death-murder-frog is. You know you fucked up.
4:20 GOGO SLAADI RANGERS!
Ygorl first appeared in the 1e fiend folio in August 1981. Just a little History of the game we all love. At least I do anyway. If you said that A.J. I missed it.
Thanks Jesse :)
"You cannot grasp the true nature of Ygorl's attack!"
Please....please do a video on the Lord of Colors. I love all the Slaadi Lords and this was a great video but nothing would make my day more
Could you do Bazim-Gorag next? His lore is surprisingly deep and I can't seem to find how he rose to power as a primordial.
My early D&D campaign took a big side quest when the group got tied in with a mad demigod out to kill Ygorl, because HE called himself the Doomlord of Entropy, and there was no room for other Entropy lords in his universe. Forunately for the group, the Doomlord was successful, they survived, and the Doomlord put Ygorls scythe on a plaque on the wall of his trophy room. The Doomlord of Entropy in my game was also the primary demi-god of assassins. The players expected to lose their characters every game, and definitely did not want to do so, these all being advanced long-played characters. so lets just say, it was tense. Fun story.
Some day Ygorl helped create the spawning stone, but by living backwards in time does that mean he helped destroy it from his perspective? Would that make his entropy an act of creating things from his time reversed view?
Thanks for another great video AJ! I’ve been looking forward to more lore about limbo for a while now.
Just finished the “Starlight Enclave” by R.A. Salvatore. The Ending was EPIC!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Just finished that myself..pretty badass...been researching all I can about the Slaads now. LoL 🐸🕷️🕸️
I have a bit of difficulty seeing how the slaad lords and pandemonium as a whole doesn't count as just straight up chaotic evil, It seems to have very little to push it towards any type of neutrality.
Look at it this way.
Demon: KILL CRUSH MAIN DESTROY.
Slaad: PALINDROME RUTABAGA TURQUOISE BOOGER.
Teleporting him to mechanus would probably be the equivalent to teleporting a person to hell
Part of me kind of likes to associate entropy with cosmic Order; eventually energy will become unusable and, in total heat death, the universe will have perfect order.
I'm currently trying to homebrew a pair of Axiomite and Anarchist warlock sublcasses to go with the celestial and fiend subclasses (thus demogorgon for example will be able to offer either the fiendish pact or the anarchist, just as most gods are able to grant multiple cleric subclasses). I have yet to playtest one, but when I do I plan to have a slaad lord as my patron, who gave me the powers so that I might destroy the color purple. Whenever I encounter something purple, I must either destroy it or turn it a different color.
Time Wights sound like perfect minions for Ygorl
Hey Brett! It's ygorl Stacey calling from my new Swatchphone™! 🙋🤳
Ages backwards? In countless eons deathe is born and the universe ends. In the begining death dies and lofe begins.
Amazing
Hey, it's Ygorl Jasmine!
the reason Slaadi are frogs/toads is because no other animal goes through as many changes in life as Frogs/toads. Also,Kek, a egyptian god of primordial darkness is also represented by a frog/toad.
In Pathfinder, the Slaadi equvilant are the Proteans, wich are snake like, because the eyptian god of primordial chaos is Apep, the serpent
Point of order your honor... Lobsters have four life stages, while frogs and toads have only three. But I essentially agree with you. I would think a perfect example in movies of a beast of chaos would be the Thing from John Carpenters sci fi horror movies.
@@AJPickett well frogs begins as tadpoles, and goes from vegitarian to carnivores, they have to develop back limbs and front limbs and reconstruct their bodies.
Slaadi could also be butterflies, since a catterpiller in the crysalis melts down to a goo of enzynms and form limbs that are put together over a span of months, hell they can even retain memories from their catterpillar state.
Did you know Hermit crabs have 254 Chromosomes? Also the parasitic Lancet liver fluke has probably the most complicated life cycle on the planet (thus far)... I wonder if there is a cool D&D Monster that could be inspired by that?
@@AJPickett there must be. reality is stranger than fiction. I like to think out plausible evolutinary lines for DnD monsters, like how the 1st edition Owlbear looks more like a feathred dinosaur, so now Owlbears should not be some mad wizards experiment but just a feathred dinosaur that the common folk calls Owlbears. Bullettes are terrestrial burrowing crocodylians, ( to me)
@6;47 when AJ says no one know if a Slaadi lord can be destroyed, Drizzt is sitting in the greenroom as the next book is being written saying with deathly calm ‘Wait until they get a load of me’.
Great video, I hadn't heard about the link between Primus and the spawning stone.
Ygorl is a pretty poor D&D god, being pure chaos yet manifesting as death. Death is chaotic, I guess, but death doesn't represent the creativity of chaos. The god of chaos _really_ ought to have aspects of art, new life, and freedom that are just as strong as its aspects of destruction. Making the chaos god _just_ yet another remorseless destroyer completely wastes the opportunity here. See White Wolf's Weaver, Wyrm, and Wyld for a better split between order, destruction, and chaos. I love D&D's Great Wheel but Ygorl doesn't live up to entities like Asmodeus or Moradin.
Might be why he lives in isolation deep in the heart of Limbo, confronted with the pointlessness of it all. Perhaps he tried creating things... perhaps he created the multiverse, or is destined to... who knows?
Ygorl is a only representative of a single aspect of chaos. He never achieved formlessness and is locked in the form of chaos as destruction.
@@temmy9 100% excellent answer
@@AJPickett There's also the tidbit that Ygorl and one of the other slaad lords sabotaged the spawning stone so that they wouldn't have any natural contenders.
I have been thinking both states are a success. That when they successfully contact chaos they get a choice. Return to chaos, free of the constraints of the spawning stone or become a leader of their people to aid them in the struggle to reach that same point.
The 1 touch per turn sounds like a magical charge is created once per turn to me, similar to how Dragon breath recharges, but reliably
oh lets have some game fun.
Bullywug - Dark Mage of Ygorl
Sorcerer 18 - Wild Magic
Cleric - Death Domain (for that sweet Reaper ability)
Warlock - Hexblade
bbut kinda fallow what Taking20 did for "the Ultimate Dark Mage Build" video for the spells and whatnot,
Piers Anthony wrote a series of novels called “The Incarnations of Immortality” each one showcasing an iconic “immortal” being, immortal being in quote since it only seems that way in the story and really they are a series of office holders that take office in various ways. In the novel “Bearing an Hourglass” the main character is Father Time. He is passed the hourglass of Time as the subsequent holder becomes a zygote again and died and is always an old man about to die to start out his tenure as Father Time. He then lives backwards through all the years he has already lived through up to the time of his birth and then he too dies and passes the hourglass.
It’s an interesting treatment of what it would be like to live backwards and I don’t think I’ve ever seen another. It is different than Igorl in that it is one human life span per officeholder as opposed to from destruction to creation admittedly.
Kind of like the Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride, a concept I have used a few times in my D&D campaigns.
Ted Sweet like the Curious Case of Benjamin Button.
William Jackson oh yeah! I have seen another similar story then. The difference being the Benjamin starts old and grows young. His memory moves with the arrow of time.
Father Time lives a full normal human life, as an old man he is given the hourglass then lives every day of his life until his birth in reverse. His memory is always is the direction he is aging. And something about being in the Office of Father Time keeps him from meeting himself or changing his own life by accident (but he can on purpose).
AJ Pickett I only know the Dread Pirate Roberts from Pirate Bay. What story is he from?
Pretty good vid, but there are more than four Slaad Lords! Wartle was pretty weak and is possibly slain by archons after being beaten by Ygorl, but, hey, and we also know of Bazim-Gorag (who was once a mortal batrachi of primordial Toril) and Norsar the Many, and possibly Urae-Naas, if "she" is not a Demon Lord. Ssendam, Ygorl, Renbuu and Chourst are certainly the top dogs, and likely never were death slaadi to begin with; given that in some corners of the lore, creation of Spawning Stone is attributed to Ssendam and/or Ygorl, they could have predated it, or instead have accended from rarer and more powerful slaadi forms, like gold, white or black.
*takes notes for future remastered Slaad video*.... go on.
Used Ygorl stats and made him a Daelkyr lord in Eberron along with the Slaadi as his Underlings. He is the Daelkyr of transmutation. His form in the video game fits the Daelkyr mold!
And suddenly house-cleaning is made a bit less boring.
Ygorl is my favorite Slaad Lord. Rennbuu is interesting and Norsar has potential to wipe the room. Ygorl is my favorite by far though. Thank you!!!
Slads need a real solid uplift. Conceptually.
It’s always fascinating to here about beings that exemplify their plane! Considering how entropic Ygorl is, it makes me wonder what devastation a Lord of something like the negative and positive planes would be
19:44 except perhaps the mind flayers
He can’t fly without his mount?... WHAT ABOUT HIS WINGS
honestly given his nature, seems rather appropriate for him to be comparitively weaker than in past editions as we go into new editions and as more time passes
Never heard of him, I'm intrigued.
What with the Blood War going on, the Demons and Devils get a lot of focus.
12:37 Never pick up the weapon of any Demon Lord, Devil, Undead, Aberration or Evil God.....Especially not a Slaadi Death God of Chaos. More importantly how would a group of adventurers even get the weapon out of his hands?
Extract from the lurid green Soap Ooze.
He’s the big bad in the new Drizzt book
A scythe wielding animated skeleton with charisma of 26...i mean the fucks he gonna say? Like a rotting corpse laying on the rizz?
He's going to look into your soul, you instantly know exactly when, and where you will die, because for him, its already happened, you are just an old VCR playing a show he's seen a thousand times already... its called INTIMIDATION daniel :)
Classic example of peaking in high school
Gotta get me that Mordenkainen staff. Man I've really fallen behind on these.... gotta get my viewing back going... these are rookie numbers gotta pump them up! Love the content as always you cheese eating mad lad.
Why does chaotic neutral cause ygorl to be so...evil? I get that he's all about entropy, but that doesn't translate to death
Why does everyone automatically equate deadly=evil... what does that make all those Lawful good player characters who can vaporize monsters with some words and funny gestures and carry glowing sharp-edged 'Splody sticks. Ygorl is mostly indifferent, he prefers to not get involved, he is Neutral. His motives are mysterious, he may act on a whim, he is Chaotic Neutral. :)
As a new born god at the start of the universe. This is the guy you need to get answers from.
Would he see any point to answering, though? He's seen your cult flourish, then dwindle until you are forgotten and feeble, a mere whisper on a forgotten madman's lips, before no one but him is alive to remember your name.
@@flibbernodgets7018 I have to wonder, will Ygorl's past(our future) change depending on any actions he takes to influence other people? Or is it fixed either as actual time or as memories in his mind? with the latter you could surprise him, possibly.
I don't get the slaadi version of chaotic neutral. Players who are CN tend to be selfish but not evil, but I picture an entity of pure chaotic neutrality as something completely random and as likely to help as to harm. However slaadi are described hunting down sentients to infect to make more slaadi which sounds closer to the animalistic evil of a white dragon.
They're CN, are they? They're CE.
The trick with Slaads is that they aren't actually natives to Limbo or creatures formed from chaos, becuase anything made up of pure chaos wouldn't be coherent enough to be called a creature. The only reason Slaads exist is because the Spawning Stone injected order into the heart of Limbo, and it's hard to deny that there's not just something *wrong* with that whole scenario.
Order placed into the middle of chaos and then abandoned to its own devices, creating chaos-life that shouldn't exist, it's little wonder they're evil.
Was Ygorl was one of the beings that came from Shar and Selune's disagreement/fight over giving Chauntea warmth?
War
Disease
Murder
Death
I think I have some reading to do on that subject.
@@AJPickett The Slaad lords have no real reason to be tied to Faerun. The planar races have been around for longer than the Faerunian pantheon; On Hallowed Ground establishes that the Faerunian pantheon are the new kids in the planes.
I'm finding that people kind of suck at writing neutral creatures. Many of them end up just being evil with a neutral tag stuck on. The slaad & weretiger are prime examples.
The problem here is, I think , the fact that they are extremely chaotic and for an organised society chaos is evil. If a slaad kills someone because of some chaotic impulse, most people won't say :" oh well, can't be helped, they don't kill with intention or malice, don't you know?" .They will think them evil and cruel. They're not, they just don't care
So, basically, without order, there can be no chaos and no order without chaos. It makes sense that an object of order helped create a personification of chaos, with the help of both leaders of chaos and order. Sort of like good and evil, light and dark.
I know it wasn't the first but I can't hear song of creation without the Music of the Ainor from the Silmarillion coming to mind
I think "I make DnD videos 'fulltime'..." Is part of what brought me in initially. I thought "This guy knows what he's talking about" but without 'fulltime' it sounds wack
I really oughta join at this point 😂😂😅
The underlying theme of this video... is going Back in Time (hence the old intro)
The scythe used to be save or die and no rules to say you can't pick it up.
Slaad have some interesting parallels to Grung. I wonder if there's a connection?
Now I am curious.
Are chaos beasts close to what slaadi should be?
By fixing them into hierarchical ranks enforced by bullying and giving them forms that need to infect innocents to reproduce did Primus add an element of evil to the plane of chaotic neutrality thus harming the balance in his drive to ensure law?
Gods are truly defined by the fact they act as custodians of aspects of reality, right? Therefore power to manipulate reality isn't limited to them. There could be many beings of power who can do what gods do. But do not have a portfolio and so are not gods. Having a portfolio is what makes a god. Not how powerful they are. As Orcus is infinitely frustrated by.
My understanding is that a God is a being that gains form and power from its worshipers, and will die without them.
A Power is something that has similar or greater abilities to a god, but is more self sustaining. Powers also tend to exist as single instances on one plane of existence, whereas gods can exist in multiple forms in multiple places at once.
@@AlmightyDoubleHelix the gods existed, theoretically, before worshipers. They were beings of thought. So yes, they gain sustenence from worshipers. But they do not entirely fade even if they have no followers or are killed. Even primordials can be worshipped and gain power from it. What truly sets gods apart from the greater powers is their portfolios. You either have one or you don't. Orcus tried to gain one to be a god of death but failed and stayed simply one of the most powerful demon lords. Even so he has demonstrated not only can you kill a god but that he himself can. But the fact he is a threat to them is reciprocated: they are equal threats to him. And he has no real allies of equal power to rely on. His fellow demon lords would betray him as soon as it was convenient.
Why are the evil characters so awesome? Lol
Superman was boring until he punched a hole the the joker.
Because all the awesome good characters are run by the players.
@@Taylor1989s Wait... he did what?!
@@AJPickett In the Injustice game story, that is the start of Superman's fall into villainy.
Ygorl isn't evil, per se, but rather he's pure chaos.
Hey it's me, Ya Gorl
Good gumbo. Restaurant quality lemonade!
Four 🍊 chicken simulation Milligan
awww yisss ygorl stat chatting
You mention the Song of Creation. Any relation to the "Words of Creation" or Primeval?
Well, yeah, it's all related.
sooooooooooooo, he's the Thanos of DnD.
Raistlins hourglass eyes = The curse if Ygorl vision? Maybe 😁
While I remember Ygorl in the AD&D Fiend Folio, I wondered why he and Ssendam were so unlike other Slaadi. Now I know...
I await to learn of the song of creation
Awesome content
This^
Still my favorite intro!
I really am starting to resist introduction bias. In the case of YGorl my introduction to Ygorl was the D&D Video Game 🎮 authored by RA Salvatore: “Demon Stone.” The Slaad Lord that I encountered in that game voiced by Michael Clark Duncan just doesn’t match the lore I just listened to... Oh well 😔 just right it off as the nature of Chaos.
good video AJ
8:36 I'm sorry, but does that guy have a monk for a right leg? What am I looking at here?
That art could well have been inspired from something that happened in a game, so, I am loathe to speculate.. great picture of Ygorl though.
He's being shoved back with an open-palm strike.
Why are the creatures of limbo so evil?
There should be a life slaadi, who evolves into a creativity lord.
*evil creativity*
I always thought of them as more crazy than evil.
YGorl is the antithema of glory.it is vainglory failure. To combat YGorl is debasement/to loose. That is YGORLs very nature. To beat this Salad is to burn ones character and books, to never play again, to be outside of memory. Wins YGorl counts include every failed attempt by a lawful entity to control a chaotic entity. That is to say... YGorl is a game of cards you must play, can't win and rarely break even when playing. This is the nature of Entropy. You loose.
All true, also, you need to fire your language translator.
Aren't black and white slaad a thing?
I think they are usually named after what their nature is, like "void slaad".
@@AJPickett ok cool I've also heard of a mud slaad
Isnt about time to do an episode on the other slaad lord? The nutty one?
Seriously. I saw this video, decided to make Ygorl my BBEG, only to realize there’s next to no other resources for any Slaadi Lords.
Could Ygorl and Primus be the same being? Different sides of the same coin, both required for balance in the universe.
To be honest, I'm not even entirely sure what Primus is.
Hold on hold on, doesn't entropy INCREASE as time passes? Shouldn't he be weakest at the beginning of the universe?
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over time.
Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy.
Ygorl is more powerful at "the beginning." That's stated, clear as day. How do we conflate these two, seemingly opposing statements?
The very beginning of Realmspace must have been in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
If that's true, then then Realmspace may be chonologically cyclical. The beginning is similar to the end (and vice versa).
Disclaimer: this is hypothetical and just guesswork, based on opinion and may be completely wrong. Take it as DM inspiration, not gospel.
@@draxthemsklonst That would make sense, but if entropy was cyclical in that way, Ygorl's power would never change.
After all, every day past the creation of reality from entropic oblivion is a day closer to the end of reality in entropic oblivion. He's never truly any closer or any further from it.
I hear some ygorls sell premium snapchats.
reminds me of Overlord anime
Did you know that the television show called “Touched By An Angel” has a prequel television show called “Touched By Ygorl”?
Also the FoodTuber “The Foodie Beauty” is a huge(quite literally) YGorl Stan.
Ygorl speaks fluent gibberish, let the rest of the Slaadi out to kill the rest of the last survivors of the Dawn War, and got his tail handed to him by Pandora when she trapped him in a cage.
Woof, what a trip