Demon

Demons are malign and destructive creatures native to the Outer Sphere known as the Abyss. They are ferocious, irredeemably evil creatures, and will attack and kill anything for the sheer fun of it, including other demons.

Types

Demons have a natural order of evolution, where each form increases the power and status of the demon in the abyss. As you climb higher on this scale the number of demons of each type decreases. The different forms are entierly different from each other without any resemblence of what the demon started out as. This reflects the everchanging chaos of the Abyss.

• Dretch
• Quasit
• Babau
• Shadow
• Succubus
• Nabasu
• Vrock
• Hezrou
• Glabrezu
• Nalfeshnee
• Marilith
• Balor
• Demon Lord

Demon Lords

The most powerful of the demons are unique creatures with their own individual powers and abilities. These demon lords are known throughout the multiverse, and many cults exist to them on the Material Plane. A demon lord is created when a demon becomes the ruler of an entire layer of the Abyss. These demons are then given a unique and insanely powerful form. The total number of demon lords is beyond knowing. Of the countless powerful demons who rule the various layers of the Abyss, some are better and more widely known and worshiped. The most ubiquitous demon lord, and the only one to have attained full godhood is Lamashtu, the Mother of Monsters.

Nascent Demon Lords

Just below the demon lords are the nascent demon lords: unique demons who have not yet claimed their own Abyssal realm. Like their more powerful brethren, nascent demon lords can grant spells to beings who worship them.

Proto-demons

Creatures that have not yet become fully-fledged demons are known as proto-demons.

History

Demons are, relatively speaking, a young race on planar timescales; as they arise from the interaction of sinful souls with the essence of the Abyss, their existence by necessity postdates the appearance of the first mortals. Originally, mortal souls sent to the Abyss by Pharasma's judgment did not mature into demons. Rather, they manifested as increasingly vast amounts of larvae that piled up and accumulated in great masses and seas of flesh on the rims of the Abyss' rifts. Instead of demons, the Abyss was ruled by its original denizens—the monstrous qlippoth.
True demons arose from the experiments of a now-forgotten daemonic horseman, whose fascination with both larvae and qlippoth led him to gather numerous specimens of each to experiment on in his fortress. His experiments eventually led him to attempt to directly fuse the larvae's sinful mortal essence with the living Abyssal flesh of the qlippoth: this experiment succeeded beyond any expectation, warping and mutating the unfortunate qlippoth subject into the first demon to exist.
This transformation was quickly noticed and adopted by the awareness of the Abyss itself: within moments of the first demon's birth, a chain reaction swept through the Outer Rifts as millions of larvae metamorphosed into demons. In the span of a few heartbeats, an entire species erupted into being from the Abyss' seas of larvae and swiftly became the most populous type of fiends in the Great Beyond. The repercussions of this genesis were significant. The qlippoth, the previous rulers of the Abyss, were hunted to near extinction and forced into hiding in the deepest, most hostile pockets of the Abyss. Hordes of demons quickly swept out of the Abyss, overrunning countless daemon strongholds and besieging the stunned daemons in their own realms within Abaddon. Even the walls of Hell were put to the test as the newborn demonic species piled against its defenses.
While the demons' growth quickly leveled off after its initial explosive start, and the demons were eventually driven away from Hell and Abaddon, the demons retained firm control of the Abyss itself and remain to the present day the most populous and diverse species of fiend in the Outer Planes.

General

Size
Varies
Type
Outsider (Fiend)
CR
Varies
Environment
Abyss
Alignment
Chaotic Evil
Adjective
Demonic

Genetic Descendants

• Babau
• Balor
• Cambion
• Dretch
• Invidiak
• Nabasu
• Nalfeshnee
• Quasit
• Succubi/Incubi

Geographic Distribution

• Abyss

Related Organizations

• The Dark Host