Angazhan as demon-lord King Kong

I've made reference to this a few times.  Here's the actual full story.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?363192-Does-Tiamat-existsin-Golarion

And I'll quote the relevant parts.

From Ezequielramone: I have been reading Inner Sea Gods and in the Dragon's deities section says that Apsu and Tiamat created the gods that created other races. 

but I haven't seen something else about Tiamat, she doesn't have an entry in the list of gods neither. 

Is this a mistake or something? I am missing something?

From Voadam: She exists. 

They use the basically Babylonian version of her with Apsu and Dahak but they don't want to cross over into D&D 5 head IP of WotC. They used her in the beginning of the setting but have consciously decided to de-emphasize her and so only these occasional references are made and she is not considered a major part of the world at current unlike other gods. Originally I think they wanted her left open for you to add in WotC version if you wanted or Babylonian and have her be a minor presence but more recently the trend has been to not mention her at all for the most part and have Golarion be more its own thing.

From me: They've done similar things with other mythical public domain figures that are common in D&D and have a very specific D&D incarnation/interpretation that is not public domain--but which they can't help but refer to obliquely here and there regardless: Orcus and Demogorgon.

From James Jacobs: For entities like Demogorgon, Tiamat, Orcus, Pazuzu, Baphomet, and all the rest... if there are actual open d20 game statistics for the characters as they have classically been represented in D&D, then yes, we generally did bring those characters into Golarion (and thus into Pathfinder). 

Many of these were made available to open gaming via the first Tome of Horrors—that's why you see us and others using Orcus as a fat goat-headed demon man with a death-dealing wand, or Pazuzu as a demon with control over avian creatures, or Baphomet having links to minotaurs. 

For others, like Graz'zt, we can't use them at all because there are no open rules for them and they have no real-world mythological basis. 

Then there are other long-standing D&D characters (particularly Demogorgon and Tiamat) who ARE from real-world mythology, and thus their names CAN be used in non-D&D products... but their specific D&D incarnations (a two-headed demon with tentacle arms or a five headed dragon) are not open content. If we were to use Tiamat or Demogorgon in a more robust way, we would have to completely build a new design for them—either one based on mythology (which, in Demogorgon's case, wouldn't work since he's only a name—he was never really an actually physically-described entity until the name was picked up for the early RPG as far as I can tell) or one that we made up completely from scratch. 

Doing so would officially "overwrite" these characters' long-standing traditions and history and use and appearance in the game... and I wasn't interested in doing that. I wanted to preserve those names and thus those characters for gamers to use in Pathifnder or Golarion games as they see fit—and so you'll see the names mentioned VERY rarely in our products, but never in the context of rules or descriptions. Neither do they have big roles to play in Golarion—Tiamat's role is taken by Dahak, while Demogorgon's is taken by Lamashtu. 

It's a pretty simple matter for you to replace Dahak with Tiamat or Lamashtu with Demogorgon in your home version of Golarion, or alternately to drop those two in side-by-side as they exist in your game already, and we didn't do much more with those names in order to allow gamers to do so for their home games.
Hope that clears things up!

From me: Huh. I always saw Anghazhan as the Golarion-Demogorgon... although there are also obvious ties to Lamashtu as well. 

Interesting.

From James Jacobs: There's parts of [Demogorgon] in Anghazan, for sure, as well as some of Ilsidahur (a much more obscure D&D demon lord), but that's mostly coincidental. I created Angazhan originally as a character in the background of one of our early minis products — "Throne of the Gorilla King," knowing that we were going to need some proper nouns of our own in the future. The original concept for Angazhan was basically "What if King Kong were a demon lord?" 

Lamashtu pretty much took over Demogorgon's role as the "boss" (such as it is) of the Abyss, and along with it the rule over all demonkind, but I didn't want to just photocopy Demogorgon in place, so she ended up very much becoming her own creature. Which left us with the shocking lack of a dinosaur/jungle associated demon lord. Angazhan was the right choice for those. So... more or less coincidence, I guess. 

As I mentioned above, I've tried to avoid a super obvious full-on "replacement" Demogorgon, because in my mind, he DOES exist in Golarion's Great Beyond. He just doesn't have many irons in the fire there—he's got most of his attention turned toward Greyhawk and the (Dungeon revised verson of) Isle of Dread! ;-)

Then, responding to a different part of the discussion; me and Jacobs once again:

From me: Actually, Graz'zt is very much like folkloric figures Krampus, Zwarte Piet, the Black Man of the Woods (of Salem witch trial infamy), Old Scratch and others. And Erik Mona's Armies of the Abyss introduced him (sorta) as a "familiar" demon lord with the modified name of... Vaz'zht or something similar. 

I agree that it's not quite as cut and dried as Orcus, but you could get there by remixing various existing OGC and public domain folklore, although granted it wouldn't be exactly the same. It would be as close as you were able to get to the D&D versions of Dagon or Malcanthet, though.

From James Jacobs: That's certainly true about Graz'zt... he draws upon a LOT of those types of traditions... but so do a lot of other demons. There's no "Graz'zt" in mythology, nor any ebon-skinned six-fingered wavy-bladed-bastard-swording mythological figure out there that he's specifically based upon, and so we can't and don't touch him. We've got our own characters who fill this role, of course, with Socothbenoth being the primary one. 

Orcus is, in fact, entirely open content in his classic D&D incarnation thanks to the Tome of Horrors. We've not done much with him in Golarion mostly out of respect for the fact that he's shown up as a major player a LOT in various D&D books AND in various Necromancer Games/Frog God books, and more. Put another way... Orcus has had plenty of time in the spotlight. Since he IS open content, we do have him in Golarion and he did get an entry in "Book of the Damned 2," though. We might do more with him some day, but I personally kinda scratched my own Orcus itch with Savage Tide. 

Dagon is also in Pathfinder already, and his incarnation is relatively close to the version I helped build for D&D. Dagon's the perfect storm in a lot of ways... he had open stats in in Tome of Horrors, an established real-world mythology, AND was a significant character in the public domain from Lovecraft's stories. He's probably the MOST "open" of the various demon lords as a result. 

Malcanthet, on the other hand, was pretty much created entirely by myself and Rob Kuntz for D&D. She does draw upon a lot of the classic succubus/Lilith type tropes, but that specific incarnation of the trope is off limits. Nocticula is the Malcanthet figure of Golarion, although she's got a lot more assassin and shadow stuff than Malcanthet did.

From Voadam: I thought they had not OGC'd their versions of the familiar D&D demon lords but you are right. 

Here is what Book of Fiends released as OGC on their demon lords: 

the name, info block and obedience of each demon prince in Chapter 3 

Here is the material from Book of Fiends chapter 3 on Vaz'zht:
Vaz’zht 

Areas of Concern: Nobility, espionage 

Domains: Chaos, Eloquence, Evil, Subterfuge 

Favored Weapon: Bastard sword 

Obedience: To regain spells, a thaumaturge in service to the Ebony Lord Vaz’zht must cut a small slice bisecting the front of his tongue. He then allows his mouth to fill with blood while thinking about how to eliminate one person who poses a political threat to him. Once his mouth is bursting with liquid, he yells out the name of the enemy in an ejaculation of sound and blood. 

political bastard swording ebon lord, just missing the six fingers.

I've certainly used plenty of Chernabog, my alt-Graz'zt (who really owes at least as much to the Black Pharaoh incarnation of Nyarlathotep as to anything Gygax created, mixed with various other black devil folklore stuff) but I have to admit, I really have a soft spot for the D&D versions of Demogorgon and Orcus.  Those were really quite well done.  Strokes of real genius.