Τell me about the demons in your setting
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ell me about the demons in your setting
Τell me about the demons in your setting
Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
UFOs Are A Psyop Shirt $21.68 |
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They're all chaotic evil
They're exclusively white and male.
would
>Imagine being so weak willed you allow yourself to be posessed.
yours are apparently into feet.
I like the dwarf fortress approach of just having absurd magical animals
They're fairly powerful, but not really well organized and don't seem to have any lofty goals, although they're also very tight lipped about each other or where they come from and never seem to cross each other even accidentally. Sometimes it seems like they genuinely don't know anything about demons even though they are one. Usually if they're free, they're either indulging whatever it is they personally want or gathering power to be able to indulge later. Sometimes their desires seem very evil, other times they're just greedy or lustful or otherwise distasteful. Some have fixed obsessions no matter what, while others are flightly and easily bored if they keep getting what they want. Sometimes what they want is the novelty of what they have not yet had, which is an extremely slippery slope.
They can be outsmarted and forced to serve using magical contracts, and can be reasoned with and bribed when they aren't hostile. If they find a loophole in a contract, they might not immediately take advantage of it, especially if they're getting what they want even while bound. Really depends on the individual.
I like it. Very alien.
They're called Demens (sue me Kojima) and they range from Werewolves, Vampires and such to actual demons who learned to operate modern equipment (see picrel)
>Modern setting
OH NO NO NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
would
>Demons/Devils
After the creation goddess fell into her slumber after painting creation, her uncountable children took up the mantle of gods in their hubris.
One reality-destroying War in Heaven later and mortalkind has banished almost all of them into the abyss between worlds, where they can do little but influence them through dreams, premonitions, and promises.
The distinction between the two is those that seek to possess new bodies with which to experience creation once more, while devils seek to undo their banishment wholesale and return as gods. Demons may inhabit the bodies of cultists, corpses, or monuments to their glory and turn them into corrupted entities, while Devils are essentially alien gods that haunt space and dreams until they can finally frick things up enough to step back into reality in their full, prideful glory.
>Fiends
Stolen wholesale from FF10. Distinct from the above, as they're mortal souls who-- for whatever reason-- cannot return to the cycle of reincarnation or eternal* rest at the creation goddess' side. Once they manifest as a monster they become a permanent problem until you ensure some form of departure for the lost/trapped souls to keep them from reforming.
Unknowable beings of infinite abyss and rage youd sooner get a dwarf to go to an elf's birthday party than you would even speak to one of these nightmares
Mirror races created when the elves attempted (and failed) to separate good from evil. The "good" peoples would then occupy a celestial utopia on the newly created moon. The demons would in turn be trapped in the void left inside the earth by the moon's creation.
Most demons aren't even really bad people these days. Of course nobody is in a hurry to summon your average joe demon, they're usually after the twisted powerful ones.
I'm on night shift in an abandoned parking lot
Frick you and your op image
They're a collective of rogue AI taking the form of nanite clouds that rebelled against their progenitor after it tried to exterminate all human life. Now they're integral to the continued survival of the human remnants and have a random chance to give humans a war form, which are used in high-speed duels to the death across the bombed-out mega-highways that cover the planet itself
Based.
Are people in the world aware that fiends were once mortals, or do they just think they're banishing monsters when they return them to the cycle? Is it just known thanks to the creation goddess, or is there some tale of its revelation? I'm trying to figure out how best to reveal that to players w/out an in-universe info-dump.
>D&D
Tenari are born in the Womb of Oblivion and 99% of them are no more intelligent than animals generally although they can be immensely huge and powerful physically. The 1% that do become intelligent are the most dangerous and can command some of the lesser Demons. They are not strictly beholden to the Will of the Chaos Queen but all of them innately desire the same destruction of reason and meaning and want to return existence to formlessness because it causes them pain to have form
>Homebrew sci-fi/Horror setting
Intelligent Wraiths that were once the soul/memory of a person. They are not bound by the locations they were formed in and can interact with the psychic internet to varying degrees to draw in victims
Demons are the "rabble" of Hell. Where the Devils, angels of cruel fates, rule over the damned nation as nobility, demons are the peasants, warlords and horrors stalking the infernal depths. Imps are the most common, ranging from winged red goblins to humans with horns or other fiendish features. Succubi and incubi are emotional vampires, with the distinction between them having more to do with hunting methods and prey selection than being male or female, useless concepts for spirits of such cruel manipulations. Finally there are the Fiends, true monsters ranging from hivemind swarms of flayed bats to a house sized hound made of screaming souls fused into its fungal flesh to balrogs and other outright monsters.
Outside the mortal world there's a (cliché, I know) Void. It's totally empty, except for a few beings called Silent Sisters, that have been trapped there since almost the dawn of time. They constantly try to get into the actual world by tricking people into performing rituals powered by mass-murder, but only one has ever done it in recorded history.
That one is trying to pull the mortal world into the Void, and mainly does it by "blessing" her most ardent followers with inhumanly powerful bodies so they can kill as many people as possible and infiltrate human society to destabilize it.
That pic puts me in need of a name for an eldritch god of touchdowns
Before creation, when there was naught but souls swirling within the black nothing, the first dichotomy was born. Certain souls, powerful and shining a golden light, sought to grow even more powerful by subjugating other, lesser souls, an ethereal white. Among the white souls were those who fought their rulers, wishing themselves to rule. They harnessed the blackness around them to contain other white souls, devouring them and the blackness which held them, changing their hue to deep obsidian.
The first dichotomy is between the golden and black souls, which are now identified as 'law' and 'chaos'. The golden souls fought back the chaos of the black souls, but without any means of destroying a soul, they were banished to another realm, deep below, the abyss. The golden souls became the gods, white their mortal creations, and black the demons.
Demons now are mindless, chaotic beings. Most of them are little more than beasts who know nothing other than the hunt of mortal souls. Some of them, however, have the memory of the first war, and of the gods who trapped them in their noxious prison plane. These veteran demons are the rare few who have survived eons among their revenous brethren, and are beyond power, rivaling the strength of their divine enemies, yet bound to the abyss and their desire to devour.
These original demons are the first inhabitants of the abyss, and were the only ones to dwell there for a long time. That is, until humans emerged from parts unknown, and changed the structure of devotion. Their new forms of worship could create new gods, but their new fears bred new demons as well. This new breed of demon is nowhere near as powerful as the original, but terrifying all the same. They can be classified into seven broad groups, based upon the seven deadly sins. This is because originality is hard
I really don't use demons as a DM, nothing against them. I very rarely might use a devil, as per the original Monster Manual. I prefer classic dungeon monsters (orcs, slimes, dragons, etc.) or traditional horror monsters (vampires, werewolves, ghouls, etc.) or a combination of the two.
infectious parasitic meme-based lifeforms that inhabit the noosphere. only visible by analyzing society-scale patterns of human behavior. luckily they usually render their host ideologies/cultures unfit for replication across greater humanity so they usually burn out before they spread too far
requires Foundation level egregoric control to fight against the more competent ones that don't render their population self-destructive
tldr: being a splatterpunk is contagious
They're not necessarily evil, though some of them are and they are all diametrically opposed to the angels in the setting. Demons represent egocentric virtues like wealth, strength, and conquest whereas angels represent allocentric virtues like charity and kindness. One monarchy claims to have the divine favour of an angel and demon simultaneously. The creator of the universe created both the angels and the demons because without them humanity had no higher purpose and didn't accomplish anything. Demons can more or less appear in any form, though some are known to appear frequently in a particular form.
Also all of this may or may not actually be true and only some members of a few major factions believe it completely. Most of the reported activity of demons can be attributed to highly unlikely but still entirely possible natural phenomena.
this one is cool
I also like this one
That thing is fricked.
>That thing is fricked
Right, because I'm gonna frick it
Demons are actually the same kind of being as angels and spirits, we just give them different names based on whether we are scared of them or not. The beings in question are not meaningfully different from each other.
Demons are extremely, EXTREMELY dangerous because they have vast magical power and are willing to do pretty much anything you ask of them so long as you give them something in return. thats *something* in return, equal value plays no part here. The fact that a trade was made is more important to the demon than whether the trade was fair.
Which this means is that a lot of amatuer demonologists trade away their soul to one specific task, meanwhile you could just as easily ask to be given all of the powers of a high level wizard for half a blueberry pie and the demon would think that was a good trade too. Human souls are nowhere near as special or as in-demand as a lot of humans seem to believe.
What makes demons dangerous is how EASY summoning and bargaining with a demon is, and their complete and total lack of ethics. Yes, you can sacrifice a goat to save your dying wife. But you could also do the same ritual and ask to kill everyone else in the kingdom with a plague and thats all the same as far as the demon is concerned. They *don't care* about our world, their deals with humanity are entirely transaction and they take for granted that whatever we ask for makes sense to us.
This is why demon summoning is so forbidden, if people know how easy it was and how effective it is everyone would be doing it and it would be total fricking chaos.
They might ask you for a life stone.
They appear like an accretion disc about an event horizon. Specifically because complex things take longer to unravel into the void a nacreous lump of soulstuff as simpler things like physical properties fade. Similar to but distinct from goblins
, while those vermin are the unreal aping reality demons are reality's last gasp before vanishing forever. Also a demon's equivalent self-realisation involves understanding that their continued existence depends on destroying everyone else around them rather than becoming low-key crazy humans.
This is the reason they're thought of as malign. Once they're more than a dementia-chatbot hungry ghost any moral demons flee for the depths where deprivation will starve them out of existence (the void is less mobile without accretion), sapient demons who walk the world are mostly amoral buttholes or worse still delusional ones.
Nice. The question becomes what is it about transactions that's inherently valuable and where do the scruples which differentiate angels/spirits arise from?
Reminds me of the usual Indo-European "dickish tricksters who happened to win" take on the divine.
I like the inscrutability, the Bartimaeus trilogy's lot were similar once they adapted to our reality's pain with perpetual summons. Very much capable of kinstrife though.
>Nice. The question becomes what is it about transactions that's inherently valuable and where do the scruples which differentiate angels/spirits arise from?
I like to think that these beings want things from our world as what are basically souvenir. They are valuable to the demon because they are something from our world, a plane of existence that is (to them) far away and hard to reach. The mortal world is just as exotic to them as whatever weird higher dimension they are from is to us. So being given something to take back with them is inherently desirable.
As for scruples, Im not sure which is better: Angels are no better than demons, they are just specific beings that have a reputation for being summoned for 'good' reasons from the POV of whoever it was that wrote down accounts of them, or they are 'demons' that have been taught about the mortal world in their previous visits here and actually come to understand that there are some things that are good and some things thats are evil. So essentially the same thing as demons but more polite because they are trying to follow local customs and they have no sense of nuance. The angel considers this moral code to be absolute because thats what it was TOLD that moral code was, and it has no reason to doubt or introspect on the subject.
Demons are all pedantic bureaucrats. Hell is 9 circles of office space where demons deal with paper work covering sins, degeneracy, and finances for all eternity. The moment you step in hell you're forced to become an intern as it's the only way you're going to get access to the break rooms which give the slightest reprieve from the constant torment.
The paperwork isn't normal either. It's living and hateful. You will encounter words that burn, invoke magic, and walk upon the paper. The process of shredding paper is a pitched battle in itself. The further down in the offices you go the more aggressive and powerful it gets. Demons are incredibly powerful pencil pushers as well after dealing with such filing systems. Even in the second circle their contracts have minimized fine print that can only be seen with true vision.