Creatures of wickedness that are native to
the Lower Planes, fiends are malevolent, otherwordly entities born from the power of magic and composed entirely of corrupted magical energies feasting on the emotions and fears of all mortal creatures. From their nightmarish fortresses and palaces, these entities watch
the Material Plane with envious eyes, waiting with unblinking patience for their chance to wreak destruction and dismay upon the realm and to feed upon the misery that they have wrought. Most fiends are the servants of dark deities, known as the Primal Fiends, laboring under the leadership of their archdevils and demon princes in their name. Evil priests and mages sometimes summon fiends to the material world to do their bidding. If an evil celestial is a rarity, a good fiend is almost inconceivable. fiends include
demons,
devils, hell hounds, rakshasas, and succubi.
Fiendish Existence
Fiends are unnaturally resilient, able to shrug off blows that would tear another creature asunder. Indeed, a Fiend cannot truly be slain in the mortal sense of the word. Its physical body can be destroyed, true enough, but this merely banishes the fiends' essence into the swirling wellspring of magical energy that lies between the infinite layers of the Realm of Evil. Thus vanquished, the Fiend embarks on the process of creating a new body to inhabit and dreams of vengeance against those that humbled it. Only when a Fiend is slain within the Lower Planes is it truly destroyed, its essence scattering across the Immaterium and its pure winds of magic.
Fiends can only enter the mortal world if sustained by powerful summoning magic, intense concentrations of ambient magic, or if they possess a mortal body. Whilst magic, emotion, and fear within the area lay strong, a Fiend is nigh unstoppable, for it cares naught for the plight of its fellows and fears nothing save the terrible wrath of the Dark Gods themselves. Thus are the battles within the Realm of Evil fought in the name of the Primal Fiends, where magic suffuses every particle of dust and air, ceaseless and interminable things, with victors but slowly determined -- if indeed they are determined at all.
Yet when fiends spill over into the Material Plane, their power waxes and wanes with the magic in the area around them, making them highly unpredictable foes. A Fiendish host can vanish on the cusp of victory, cast back into the Lower Planes as its sustaining magic fades. Conversely, a Devil army can be whittled away to almost nothing, only to come back stronger and fiercer than ever when the emotions and fears they feast on run high. Thus the greatest Fiend incursions are born of sorcerous calamities during times of stress or divisiveness.
In the Northern wastes, where a swirling gateway known as the Abyss spews raw magical evil into the material plane, fiends have free reign to sow terror and malice; little wonder is it then that the mortal inhabitants of these climes have turned to the worship of the Primal Fiends. Yet the mortal world is so suffused by magical energy -- the Winds of Magic so prone to ebb and flow -- that almost any arcane event can prove sufficient to loose fiends upon the world.
Evil Progenitors
Of the many forces which permeate the mortal world, both magical and natural, there are but only four that hold supreme power within the Realm of Evil. Anger, pleasure, despair, and fear are the four great forces that have enthralled the world in their grip. For in a world engulfed in so much war, corruption, and disease, their dark presence and their malign influence are all but inevitable. It is these dark emotions, fears, and thoughts of mortals on the material plane that fuel the Primal Fiends:
Bhaal, the Bloodthirster,
Vesh, She Who Thirsts,
Virule, the Blightfather, and
Raum, the Prince of Darkness. Each Fiend is a splinter broken off of their divine master, a distorted reflection of mortal yearning, a shard of emotion and dark desire gave form and license to destroy. Thus every Fiend reflects something of their divine master's presence, personality, motivations, and methods.
Fiends of Bhaal are muscled and brutal, driven to slaughter and murder, whilst those that serve Raum are tyrannical and devious, shunning direct combat in favor of the deceit and backstabbing that Bhaal so detests as cowardice. Virule fiends are by far the hardiest of their kind, if somewhat moribund in thought and deed, whilst Veshi fiends are lithe and whip-quick, as delicate in form as they are vicious and sadistic in temperament. Fiends of different divine origins rarely work in tandem, preferring to destroy each other in the name of their progenitors than strive towards a common goal. In rare cases, they do unite under a common banner, it takes a rare breed of evil to command rival fiends under an undivided banner of sin.
Smaller fiends can only feed off a very particular emotion or fear, unlike more powerful ones or their progenitors. For example, if
Raum and
Norog feed on "Fear" in a broad sense, a lesser fiend of Raum that tries to do the same can only feed on a particular fear like "Fear of Being Forgotten".
Furthermore, fiends can be separated into two major subspecies: demons and devils. Devils constantly strive to recruit mortals into their ranks by offering them rewards in return for their service, whilst demons generally have no regard for mortal souls and do not solicit them. Not only do demons and devils despise fiends of different origins, but they also hate each other and the tactics they use to gain favor for their masters. Whilst their gods may not care how their spawn carries out their wills, demons and devils embody chaos and order in the darkest senses of the words and view their polar opposites as seeking to undermine their way of destroying the material plane. This malice between subspecies leads to nearly constant warfare and strife between the Fiendish servants of the Primal Fiends, who constantly scheme and battle against one another in an eternal struggle for dominance known as the "Great Dance" that can never be won.
The Ten Kings
The first ten demons and devils formed during
the Calamity by the Primal Fiends came to be known as the Ten Kings. These creatures came to be powerful demon lords and archdevils spawned from the four gods, and are widely known as the strongest of fiend-kind. Each one embodies a core emotion mortals experience, such as joy, fear, or anger, not too disimilar from what the gods they spawned from would feast on themselves. Their subspecies was split down the line with five belonging to demons and five belonging to devils, before being split even further with one on each side belonging to one of the four Primal Fiends and a fifth one that was created through all of their powers.
