Welcome back, caleb. You have been missed. [img]smile.gif[/img]
Wedin, this is kind of long, but you wanted detail, so I'll try and be as detailed as I can.
The Blood War is a savage quest for annihilation that ravages the Lower Planes. At its essence it is a ideological battle of evil against evil, with the lawful, organized devils fighting the countless hordes of demons, but the way evil turns upon itself, demon-against-demon and devil-against-devil battles often happen. Working for either, and often both, sides, are the neutral evil yugoloths of Gehenna and Hades, playing one side off the other and making jink in the process.
On the Nine Hells' side, the Dark Eight are the generals of the Blood War operation - they are right at the top of the tree in the military structure of the Hells. These eight mighty pit fiends are: Baalzephon, Corin, Dagos, Furcas, Pearza, Zapan, Zaebos, and Zimmimar. They are inferior only to the Lords of the Nine (the nine arch-devils that each rule a layer of Hell) and all answer to Asmodeus, the Dark Lord of Nessus and King of Hell. The Lords of the Nine don't get involved in the Blood War that much - they tend to involve themselves in more domestic schemes against each other. The main troops that are involved in the Blood War are mainly abishai, barbazu and hamatulas, with elite companies being composed of cornugons. Gelugons are mainly held in reserve on the eighth layer of Hell, Cania, to defend the gate into Nessus, the lowest level, against a demonic attack should it penetrate that far.
The demons are much less organized. They just fight, using their infinite numbers and their savagery. Much of the responsibility for planning Blood War offensives rest with the balors and mariliths that act as generals and tacticians - not that this happens often. The main troops are comprised of bar-igura and babau demons, with elite troops being composed of vrock demons, commanded by glabrezu.
Occasionally celestials will enter the Blood War when they are directly affected - companies of agathinon, astral devas and planetars will raid Blood War battlefields on Avernus (the first layer of the Nine Hells), the Plain of Infinite Portals (the first layer of the Abyss), or Oinos (the first gloom of Hades), slaying demon and devil alike. But by and large the aasimon, archons, eladrin and guardinals of the Upper Planes are satisfied to sit back and watch evil fight evil - as long as the fiends stay out of Elysium, Mount Celestia, Arborea and the rest of the Upper Planes and confine themselves to slaughtering each other in their own hellholes.
Nobody even knows what the exact goals of the war are. Genocide's the best guess - the tanar'ri and baatezu'll fight each other until there's none left. Nobody knows for sure how the war started, and nobody cares, really.
As long as there are fiends, they'll fight each other in a contest in which no quarter is given or asked. On those planes and layers most directly affected that I mentioned above, great seige engines rumble across the battle-plains like mobile mountains, attended by a surging sea of fiends and mercenaries. When two armies clash under hellish suns, the very landscape is split with the terrible energies of war unleashed. The surface of the Gray Waste of Hades is a gigantic wasteland due to millenia of heavy fighting.
So to summarize, if the Blood War doesn't involve you, it's best to stay out of it.
[ 04-14-2002, 12:37 PM: Message edited by: Memnoch ]