Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes talks about “oinoloths,” e.g., “Oinoloths bring pestilence wherever they go.” But various (mostly older) sources, including the third-edition Manual of the Planes, refer to “the Oinoloth,” a singular individual, and even give the Oinoloth a name: Anthraxus, a highly apropos name for a lord of disease, though maybe not the most creative. (Also worth noting: The Oinoloth’s seat of power, the Wasting Tower of Khin-Oin, was situated originally in Hades, later in the Blood Rift, which begins in the Abyss and runs across the lower planes to the Nine Hells.)
Fifth-edition D&D seems to dispense with all that. The oinoloth’s listing in Mordenkainen’s refers to this fiend only in the plural and gives it a Challenge Rating of 12—exceeded by ultroloths’ CR 13. This hardly seems like the profile of an arch-ruler of yugoloths. Like the capital-M Minotaur, which D&D turned into a species of lowercase-m minotaurs, it appears that the capital-O Oinoloth has become a species of lowercase-o oinoloths—perhaps descendants of an earlier Oinoloth, although who’d want to produce offspring with an avatar of pestilence is a question probably best left unanswered.
The practical reason for considering this question is that if the oinoloth were a unique being, you’d only ever find one in any given combat encounter. But since fifth-edition oinoloths seem not to be unique, not only is it possible to run into multiple oinoloths at once, at very high levels of play it seems downright probable. (more…)