Demon

A demon is a chaotically aligned Fiend from the Lower Planes, most typically from The Abyss, Gehenna, or Pandemonium.
Demons strive to bring destruction, discord, and mayhem wherever they go. Their enemies are not only the Celestial Courts and Humanoids, but also the Devils, whom they despise for their commitment to law and order. However, demons are not just mindless instruments of violence and destruction. Rather, they are under the command of Demon Lords capable of harnessing their pure destructive power into progress towards their goals. The Blood Wars are a constant extraplanar battle between the demons and the devils that is primarily fought in Gehenna, though it often spills over into Hades and the Nine Hells. The longer that a demon can survive the Blood Wars, the greater the power and sentience they gain.
All demons begin as larva, spawned from the wet and wretched banks of the River Styx as a feeble and unthinking mass of hungry, grublike flesh. These pathetic sluglike creatures are usually little more than food for the devils (or for more powerful demons) at the front lines of the Blood Wars. If a larva manages to kill a low-ranking devil or a weak mortal with its feeble jaws, however, it can ascend into one of the more powerful types of demons. The goal of a demon is to collect as many souls or other spirits as possible; absorbing the life force of another being grants a demon a reserve of strength that it can use to perform powerful feats, or to grow into something deadlier and more capable of capturing spirits.
Demons can only be truly killed on the plane from which they originated. A demon killed on any other plane will be sent to its home plane to slowly regenerate from a larva, though it will do so much more quickly than a freshly-formed larva might.

Encompassed species

• Gnoll