Previously: Part I
II. Nightstone
The first section of the adventure, which takes place in a village called Nightstone, is meant to be unnecessary to the larger narrative. The authors intend that other books could be "swapped" into the place occupied by this chapter; as long as the protagonists all end up at the fifth level of power, any adventures could work. The usefulness of this section, from the perspective of what comes later, is that the protagonists see that rogue giants are attacking the outposts of civilization, and that they are then steered toward the proper beginning of the narrative. Since the connections to the larger story are so tenuous, your humble critic hopes that he will be forgiven for focusing this section of the essay on a detail that seems, at first, a mere crumb, but that upon close investigation turns out to be a delectable morsel of satire. The detail is as follows:
Destiny Agganor (age 42) is Nightstone's tiefling midwife. [...] Destiny worships Asmodeus but doesn't impose her beliefs on anyone else.
- Storm King's Thunder, p. 31
A "tiefling" is not a generic fantasy type such as a dwarf or an elf; it originated in the worlds of Dungeons and Dragons. The tiefling is a human with some of the features of a cartoon devil: the horns, the tail, the sharp teeth. It is said that this appearance is due to a pact made between a powerful devil and the ancestors of the tieflings. Although this might appear to be a straightforward allegorical representation of the Christian notion of original sin, the allegory is rather more modern: although the tiefling's outward appearance is redolent of hell, the tiefling has no extraordinary predisposition to sin. If tieflings are overrepresented in the ranks of criminals and assassins, this is due entirely to the warping effects of general social prejudice.
To be greeted with stares and whispers, to suffer violence and insult on the street, to see mistrust and fear in every eye: this is the lot of the tiefling. And to twist the knife, tieflings know that this is because a pact generations ago infused the essence of Asmodeus—overlord of the Nine Hells—into their bloodline.
- Player's Handbook, p. 42
In short, the tiefling is the designated subaltern in the typical Dungeons and Dragons setting. The tiefling is, in a sense, the way that Dungeons and Dragons examines the effects of the 1980s "Satanic Panic," during which the wider culture suspected that the role-playing game was an occult dissociative initiation ritual. For the players and readers too young to remember Tom Hanks's Mazes and Monsters, the tiefling might be also be thought of as either "goth" or "intersectional."
What is odd about Destiny Agganor, the tiefling midwife of Nightstone, is her tolerant mode of Asmodeus-worship. In this setting, Asmodeus is the overlord of all devils, and a living symbol of aggression and dominion:
Devils personify tyranny, with a totalitarian society dedicated to the domination of mortal life. [...] Asmodeus, the dark lord of Nessus, strives to subjugate the cosmos to satisfy his thirst for power.
- Monster Manual, p. 66
The Dungeon Master's Guide describes Asmodeus's dominon as "the ultimate plane of law and evil and the epitome of premeditated cruelty." It is self-contradictory to attempt a liberal worship of totalitarianism's essence. It is akin to a being a teetotaling devotee of Dionysus. Real-world historical Satanism is sometimes explained as the only available resistance to hegemonic Christendom; no such explanation is possible here, given the surfeit of deities in this fantasy's cosmology. Nor is ignorance an excuse, in a world where sufficiently motivated adventurers may visit Asmodeus's realm and determine its character for themselves.
Destiny Agganor, therefore, profoundly misunderstands the nature of that which she worships. In a few brief sentences, we find a devastating satire of liberal religion. If one can trace out the throne of European monarchism in the story of the giants and their "ordning," here one finds the altar of pre-modern religion, subtly complicating the apparent "multiculturalism" of the fantasy setting.
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