Thus Spake Zaraholden/OnFaFL

You know what made First and Forsaken Lion good when he was first introduced?

He was the most martially powerful of the Deathlords, with this gigantic ghost army and all kinds of scary personal prowess and was just generally Your Worst Deathlord Nightmare.

And he didn't care one iota about Creation.

Not one little bit. His ambition was to take the Legion Sanguinary and conquer the Underworld. That's what got him in dutch with the Neverborn—ignoring their orders and conquering Stygia, because that's what he wanted to do, relive his glory days down among the dead. He's sulky and recalcitrant and puts basically no effort toward messing with Creation.

This is brilliant. He's exactly what a Deathlord shouldn't be (something that semi-obviates the need for Abyssals), except that he's not a resource for Creation games, he's there as a main antagonist for Underworld-centered games.

But then a bunch of people ignored how the character was supposed to be and couldn't help themselves from using him as a generic villain spinning all kinds of plans to MENACE CREATION until, late 2e, here we are, he's just Mask of Winters 2: Mask Harder.

What about FaFL? FaFL has been hideously misused to the injury of the game line as a whole. That's what.

(To be fair, 1e Abyssals didn't really help by making the Lion and Eye and Seven Despairs the only two Deathlords in the South, with E7D being completely ass-useless, leaving a lot of people in the position of going "well, I need something Deathlord-y, and uh...")