Demonology 101
October 24th, 2011
Abandon all hope, ye who read this article. Well, perhaps not all hope. It’s probably quite safe, really. We’ve taken steps to ensure that. But still, it’s not exactly the safest time to be hanging around, as this is the beginning of Demon Week, which, of course, means that we’ve got the old summoning circles all fired up, and there’s likely going to be some really abyssal folks walking these corridors for the next week or so. I guess what I’m getting at here is that we’re pretty confident that the runes of power will hold and the demons won’t go on a horribly grisly killing spree, but I’m not making any promises. If you don’t want to go toe-to-toe with an escaped balor, now might be a good time to head for the exit.
Now that you’ve had your fair warning, we can move onto the business of the day, which is, of course, demons. You may remember that some time ago, for Devil Week, I wrote a guest article for Grave Plots with DM tips for using devils in your game. Devil Week, as it turns out, may have been a bit of a mistake, as anyone who’s learned the first thing about fiends knows that demons and devils have a bit of a rivalry going, and ever since then, we’ve heard no end of it from the abyssal forces.
When it was just dretches and quasits delivering the threats, it was funny. When they upgraded to succubi, we considered looking for other ways to upset them, just to see if they’d send another messenger. But when I arrived at the office the other day to find a glabrezu surrounded by broken furniture and the limbs of various zombie guards, I got the message. So, let’s talk about how a DM can go about making the demons in his campaign a little more demonic. Below are a few things to keep in mind about what demons mean in D&D, and how you can go about highlighting their “better” side.
1 - Demons Represent Chaos
Everyone knows that demons are forces of evil. If you know anything about fiends, though, you know that they also represent chaos. What I think a lot of people forget is that they represent these forces equally. Well, to be honest, I think that most DMs fail to take this into account entirely, because the distinction that devils are lawful evil and demons are chaotic evil is something of an invention of Dungeons and Dragons, and most people are perfectly happy to consider demons and devils interchangeable, and have balors and glabrezus making pacts and contracts for people’s souls. That’s fine, if that’s what you want to do, but it only obscures the difference between demons and devils, and, just like the previous article about devils, my goal here is going to be to help highlight those differences.
If anything, I think that demons are evil in part because they are chaotic. They’re almost like children: they have virtually no self-control. A demon might be walking down the street (metaphorically speaking), and see something that piques its interest. It thinks “Golly gee! It sure would be great to rape/loot/pillage/defile that!” and then, because it doesn’t have any self-control, that’s exactly what it does. Obviously there’s more to it than that (generally speaking, a lot of rage; demons are very angry people), and I don’t mean to imply that demons aren’t properly evil. After all, there’s definitely a large part of them that’s thinking up all those horrible ways to defile things, and so on. But ultimately, the key thing to remember is that demons are driven by instincts. This means that they make mistakes, and rash decisions, and, generally speaking, aren’t all that patient.
This chaos, though, infuses their very nature, or at least their plane. There are limitless layers to the abyss, and each one (in theory) is different. Some of them are wildly different, with layers of pure acid, or endless falling in a black void, or all kinds of nastiness. The abyss is a place of great variance, and, in theory, there are infinite numbers of demons crawling out of its many spawning pits. Because of the nature of the game, though, the demons themselves are fairly uniform: no one (that I’m aware of, at least) has yet made a “random demon stat-block generator,” and, even if they have, it probably doesn’t make demons that are very fun to fight.
As a DM, though, you can very easily make a few quick tweaks on each demon you throw against the party. The easiest way to do this, in many respects, is to change its appearance, or other non-mechanical things. Give the next marilith you use a spider’s head, or give that vrock scales and change its arms to tentacles. Make your next succubus have a third eye in her forehead. On top of that, though, it’s quite easy to make a few quick adjustments to the monster’s stat-block, as well. Swap around which energies it’s immune to, which ones it’s resistant to, and which ones it has no protection from. Change its claw attacks to one big bite attack. Swap out a few of its spell-like abilities. They don’t need to be big changes, just enough so that each demon feels unique, rather than the rank-and-file that devils use for their armies.
2 - Demons are Untrustworthy
Okay, yes, a very good argument can be made that this falls under the admittedly broad heading of “demons represent chaos,” as the reason that demons are untrustworthy is, largely speaking, that they don’t really bother to stick by any pacts that they make. Demons, as I explained above, do whatever the hell they want, as long as they can get away with it. Even if a demon is making a bargain in good faith, and has no intentions to double-cross the other person (which might happen, depending on the agreement), that doesn’t mean that he still won’t double-cross the person if the opportunity arises, later. Always get your payment up-front from a demon, and have a contingency plan in place in case he decides he’d rather just roast you alive and gnaw your bones, or what have you.
For the most part, this is something that you’ll just have to work into your roleplaying whenever the PCs take the time to talk to demons (which may not be very often, as demons tend to be the type to kill first, defile later, and never really ask questions). There is one popular demon-related trope, however (which also conveniently applies to devils, and allows you to make a nice contrast), which is that of summoning them up in magic circles and forcing them to do your bidding. There are a number of spells which can summon demons, but for this purpose, we’re looking more at planar binding and planar ally than at, say, summon monster VI, in part because summon monster VI has a lot less potential to be game-breaking, but mostly because it’s only spells like planar binding or planar ally that are designed with the idea that the player will have to be actually brokering a bargain with the summoned fiend.
If your PCs decide to summon a demon through one of those methods, first, be sure to give them a couple of opportunities to be reminded that demons can’t be trusted. Maybe read off a few lines of flavor text from the summoning book that they’re using, which state that “suche fiends are wickedde and vile, and will attempte to deceive the summoner at e’ery turn,” or something to that effect. Then, let them summon up the demon. Depending on how cunning it is, it might agree right away to whatever they demand, in that too-good-to-be-true way that should warn your PCs that it probably doesn’t mean it. If it’s cleverer, it will put on a good show of resistance, then eventually agree to something that sounds reasonable. If it’s terribly thick, it might resist quite a bit, but eventually give in with the intention of actually fulfilling the agreement. Either way, as soon as it realizes that there’s nothing to stop it from turning on your party and slaughtering them (which, if it was lying, is immediately upon being released from the circle) it attempts to do so. If your party was smart, and had the muscle or magic to enforce the agreement, they’re just out a spell slot. If not…well, either way, they’ll be sure to put careful thought into their next fiend-summoning. Along similar lines, demons summoned purely for information (and never released from the summoning circle) may very well lie, if they can get away with it.
3 - Demons are not Team Players
This applies to both large-scale plots and schemes, such as various demon princes plotting against one another and using the PCs as cat’s paws (which is certainly within the character of demons: don’t let my talk about a lack of self-control lead you to believe that demons, especially the successful ones who run entire planes of the abyss, aren’t capable of plotting and scheming), and also to things of far smaller scale, like, say, localized combat tactics.
In fact, when you get right down to it, the fact of the matter is that unless you, or one of your players, is going well out of the way to make things different from how they normally are, it’s unlikely that your players will do that much chatting with demons. As I said above, with demons, it tends to go straight to the killing. That doesn’t always have to be the case, of course: demons that are notably weaker than the PCs will certainly grovel and beg the PCs to be spared, if put in a corner, because that’s what they’d do if they got cornered by a larger demon, and the principle is basically the same. Similarly, a demon notably more powerful than the PCs (or, at least, who thinks he’s notably more powerful than they are) may take the time to gloat megalomaniacally about how he’s going to kill them, going into graphic and morbid detail, and possibly also talking about how he is an ancient being of immense power, and they are but mortal insects, and so on and so forth. Most of the time, though, unless you’re running an odd campaign (like Planescape, say), or are actively looking to have the PCs roleplay with demons, it’s likely that most encounters with them will be strictly bloodbaths.
This last tip, then, is more advice for how to run those strictly-combat encounters than it is roleplay advice, though, after a fashion, it’s both. Remember that demons do what they want, when they want, and how they want. They don’t really think much about the feelings or wants of other people, which means that they don’t tend to make very good teams. With the possible exception of vrocks (who obviously have to work together well enough to do their dance), most demons should approach combat as though they were fighting on their own, with any other demons being a nice bonus, but not something that they actually, you know, pay attention to or work with.
For that matter, most demons aren’t terribly concerned with tactics, either. This isn’t to say that they’re dumb: that’s hardly fair. But they enjoy the raw carnage of fighting, and are usually too busy enjoying themselves to think about things like economy of action, or getting the higher ground. Really, most of the time, a demon is only going to be fighting things that are notably weaker than itself, anyway, so it doesn’t typically bother to consider that sort of thing. Demons powerful enough to have spell-like abilities should probably have a pretty good idea of when to use them and when not to, but the average demon isn’t going to be too concerned about getting advantageous positions, or flanking the enemy, or any of the finer points of fighting. With demons, it’s mostly a matter of point, rend.
So, that’s it for this week’s Dark Designs. Be sure to stick around for the rest of Demon Week, as it’s certain to be exciting, so long as you can stand the heat. Be sure to join me next week, when I’ll be discussing monster mechanics. In the meantime, let loose your inner demon. Well, on second thought, maybe not.