Dungeons & Dragons lore!

Pretty much every canon is vague on what the difference between evil gods and archdevils is; Asmodeus, in some settings, is both. I suppose it could be looked at as a hierarchy title, like, the species is Devil, and the title of a god of devils would be archdevil to denote superiority to other kinds of devils.

In practice, it's usually malleable enough that you can do whatever with them and most people won't quibble.

I've largely avoided using evil gods in my own setting. I like my gods a bit more unknowable and inscrutable. My deities are relatively ambivalent and quite passive when it comes to interacting with the Mortal World, which allows Archdevils and Demon Lords to take more active roles as powerful, extraplanar bad guys.

Edited by Xeroop on Mar 16th 2022 at 6:02:43 PM

I invented pantheons for my long-running table, so I sidestepped the problem. I actually almost never use the actual dnd pantheon. I just like making up deities.

Ooh, this is a good question. Because narratively-speaking, what's the difference between a deranged cleric of Erythnul slaughtering a village and a cultist of Yeenoghu doing the same?

The main difference would be that, since D&D uses Clap Your Hands If You Believe, deities need mortals, and if they don't have enough worshipers their powers will wane until they're another petrified husk on the Astral Plane. This means even an evil god's relationship with their mortal worshipers has to be to some degree reciprocal — the god gets to grow stronger from faith, while the mortal gets some tangible benefit, most directly in the form of divine spells granted to the god's proxies on the Material Plane. Even in a society like the drow's, where everyone is more or less held hostage to the whims of a cruel and whimsical spider-bitch, they can at least try to assure themselves that the occasional healing spells cast by Lolth's clergy make up for living in a state of constant paranoia. And also, like real-world religions, D&D's faiths try to tell people how to live good and fulfilling lives, giving mortals structure and solace in a world where a pack of alley cats can slaughter two grown men walking home from the tavern.

Archfiends, in contrast, are embodiments of metaphysical forces that don't really need mortals, and some are happily scheming to destroy them all. Dagon and Pale Night existed before intelligent life arose on the Material Plane, and Zariel and Graz'zt will still exist even if all mortal life is wiped out by some calamity (like Orcus or Juiblex). But mortals are still useful to demon princes and archdevils, either because said archfiends have aspirations of attaining godhood, or simply as agents in the archfiend's schemes, or resources to be tapped — the latter is especially true for devils, who have a whole hierarchy and promotion system built around getting mortals to dedicate their souls to them, willingly or not.

But since archfiends don't need mortals like deities do, and are for the most part using them to fulfill other ambitions, their relationship with their cultists is fundamentally exploitative. If you sell your soul to a devil, that fiend is going to give you as little as possible in exchange, do its best to get you killed before you can potentially repent, and will then subject your immortal soul to unspeakable torments without a second thought. If you join a cult of Baphomet, you might have some fun hunting your neighbors in a maze, but the demon prince isn't under any particular pressure to save your ass when the paladins and inquisitors come after you, and might in fact have a good chortle as you're chased through your own labyrinth.

So that leads to the question: why would any mortal join an archfiend's cult rather than an evil deity's faith?

The answer to that comes from looking at what the gods offer mortals: divine magic and structure. Not everyone who prays to a god is empowered to work miracles in their name, and if there's not a cleric in your area, you might never see divine magic in action. And not everyone may be happy with the sort of society a god lays out. That gives archfiends a place to operate.

Someone who's prayed to Olidammara all their life, but has still suffered misfortune after misfortune without any good luck to counteract it, might be very interested in rumors of the sort of powers at your disposal should you make offerings to the Dark Prince. Someone who grew up being taught about how everyone should live in Pelor's light, but still felt a deviant affinity for mindless oozes, has a strong incentive to join Juiblex's cult. A member of Hextor's clergy, who resents their place in the god of tyranny's pecking order, might secretly begin emulating Asmodeus instead, using scheming and charisma to advance themselves. A wizard who used to venerate Boccob might be receptive to Mephistopheles' offer of power unlike any known to the supposed god of magic.

So, going back to that initial question: that cleric of Erythnul is both the servant of a higher power, as well as someone empowered by that god to do their work on the mortal plane. They were deemed worthy of wielding magic in their name, their actions are intended to increase the god's influence (everyone who isn't massacred is certainly going to know the name Ertynul!), the cleric is valued by their deity, and will be welcomed and rewarded in the afterlife (by joining Erythnul's eternal murder party, but to each their own).

That cultist of Yeenoghu, on the other hand, has been given a power boost by something beyond the Material Plane, and is furthering that entity's ambitions, but is only valuable in the short term, and their soul is probably going to be lost to the Abyss once they die. And the only reason they're following Yeenoghu is because they were too twisted for a proper religion to appeal to them, or for a proper deity to deem them worthy of being granted their power.

In short, if evil gods and their followers are fascist regimes and their loyal footsoldiers, archfiends are more like drug dealers who gave guns to some disturbed/ostracized teens to commit a school shooting as part of a plot to whack a rival dealer, or increase demand for mind-numbing narcotics, or just for funzies.

I have quite a few demons serving as patrons for clerics, antipaladins, and warlocks.

In my campaign, these "lesser patrons" are acting as middle men for gods who don't care too much about direct worship. All devils can draw on the power of Asmodeus (who gets a cut of all the prayer) to supply their spells, all demons can draw on the Elder Elemental Evil (who doesn't even notice), and so on.

So Archdemons and demons can't actually grant anything of the sort but its convenient for them to do the leg work for their associates.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Mar 16th 2022 at 9:35:44 AM

@Charles Phipps

The way I do it, archdevils and demon lords are gods. Gods, by the definition I use in my setting, are powerful outsiders that gained such standing among their numbers so as to undergo apotheosis.

Archfey, archangels, elder elementals, particularly powerful enough slaad or modrons, etc, all underwent apotheosis and are gods and still are there previous type as well.

Yeah, I try and draw a difference between gods and archdemons for ironically the same reasons.

If a archdemon ticks you off, you CAN go to their home plane and kill them. They are, in their own way, only human.

A god can also crush them like an insect.

Gods?

Well, with a god you're just fucked.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Mar 19th 2022 at 9:28:37 AM

I do have things floating around that are beyond merely being powerful outsiders, more akin to primordial titans:

Tharizdun & Rovagug, whom only the truly mad worship, Gaia, the will of the world itself and want druids get their power from, Autochthon, a source of technological inspiration and forgetfulness both as it dips in and out of the Far Realm, the Raven Queen & Groetus, living incarnate functions of reality, Bahamut, Tiamat & Io, flesh and blood but god-like immortal creatures that slumber beneath the world.

If you happen to catch their ire, yeah, you're fucked, but it's quite rare for anyone to catch their attention at all, let alone earn their wrath. They're so far removed from the world save their very narrow functions that they usually don't pay attention unless someone messes around with those function. People tend not to pray to them or, at least, not with any realistic expectation that they'll ever show up personally to answer the collected will of their cults.

Ironically, in 3.5 especially, gods tended to lose to any given party that was strong enough to think they could fight them. Some of them were even pretty terribly optimized.

There's a kind of funny thing about Avatars in 2nd Edition. They didn't want players going to their home planes and killing them like they did after Deities and Demigods. However, the gods in Second Edition had avatars that were like 40th level and so ridiculously overpowered that there was no point in even thinking they could ever be challenged.

I think deities should be invincible in their home plane ("Stats: X" like Mutants and Masterminds) and only beatable via Macguffin and have Avatars that can be reasonably slain.

I think D&D lore fans will enjoy this list I made.

http://unitedfederationofcharles.blogspot.com/2022/04/101-lore-tidbits-from-my-game.html

Why I oughta make a similar list.

I'd love to read it!

:)

https://booknest.eu/reviews/charles/2396-dangerousgames

A bit lore-sideways, I just did a book review of a nonfiction write up of the Eighties Satanic Panic about D&D.

So... weird question spun out from the general D&D thread. Warlocks who make deals may end up paying for it by exchanging their soul for power, or just money and magic items or collectibles etc. The notion came up that a good aligned character would probably make a deal with a devil with payment as money to keep their soul safe. Ok, not sure the celestial bureaucracy is going to give a pass on infernal deals if it wasn't for their soul, but the thought occurred to me.

In the D&D cosmologies, would there be an incentive for an evil character not to sell their soul? As I understand it, warlocks making a deal with their soul as payment come back as demons or devils in service of their patron after death, which is probably already a leg up from going to the afterlife as a random evildoer to be tormented for all eternity. It actually seems to make more sense to contract, unless you're unlucky or incompetent enough to anger your patron while serving them.

To my understanding there's no guarantee that serving a fiend as a warlock will give you a leg up in the afterlife. There's plenty of fiendish servants to go around on the Lower Planes, so you might just end up being tortured for the fiend's amusement for all eternity.

So by offering your soul to a fiend you make sure you will be spending your afterlife in the Lower Planes, but there's no guarantee you'll be spending it in a position of power (unless you made a deal with a devil which specified your afterlife career (and said agreement wasn't worded in a way that can be turned against you)).

Yeah, this is a pitfall that a lot of fiendish cultists fall into, the good old Original Position Fallacy. They pledge themselves to infernal powers under the assumption that surely, because the they're so cunning and powerful and whatnot, or have a special relationship with their patron, they'll be fast-tracked up the demonic or devilish hierarchy until they're enjoying their afterlife as a mighty balor or pit fiend, able to pursue their mortal ambitions in an immortal form. Unfortunately, the common fate for mortal souls is undergoing Death of Personality after intensive torture that reduces them to a lemure or manes. There are just enough rare exceptions to this rule (as the DM dictates) for it to help tempt future generations of cultists into selling their souls.

If it seems unfair that a devil cultist who knowingly pledged themselves to fiends and a commoner who adopted the alignment of their Lawful Evil society without really thinking about it both end up sharing the same fate in Baator, that's probably the point.

There's another angle, too - if you're ambitious enough a warlock to traffic with fiends for the sake of power, would you rather pledge your soul to a fiend to become their eternal servant, or try and get that power in a way that lets you retain your independence?

Of course, devils are smart enough to realize that as well, which is why they came up with the Pact Insidious (to contrast with the Pact Certain, in which a mortal blatantly sells their soul). In these deals, a fiend will offer their service in exchange for acts that subtly nudge the mortal's soul toward a Lawful Evil alignment, offering additional incentives for continued LE behavior. So a mortal who thinks they're clever for not selling their soul to a devil instead damns themselves with their actions in life, and the fiend who wrote the contract gets the credit all the same.

So, lore from my D&D homebrew: Asmodeus Is A Loser

The title of Devil King is a supernatural mantle spawned out of Hell itself and given to whomsoever can overthrow the last one, Klingon Promotion style, and grants the bearer power over the very plane itself

So, long, long, long time ago, during a long forgotten age, the current Devil King of the time, Asmodeus, decided he would make himself the Devil King forevermore and somehow imbued his form, personality and identity into the mantle of the Devil King

Therefore, whomsoever become the new King Of Devils after overthrowing Asmodeus shall become Asmodeus

Now this worked perfectly the first three or four times Asmodeus was overthrown and, even to this day, it's still kinda working but there's a caveat and that caveat is that entropy is a bitch

Asmodeus's identity has been wearing thin, stretched out over the aeons and recycled across reincarnation after reincarnation

At this point in the modern age, Asmodeus is basically a screaming skin-suit worn by whomsoever sits upon the Throne Of Hell

One bit of Godbound lore I like, which I actually found at random on the Deal with the Devil page, is that there's a devil court that occasionally lets a mortal get off scot-free based on whatever clever loophole they "found", thus making overconfident mortals think "that could be me!" and making people more likely to take the deal.

Thanks, that all makes more sense. Just a series of lies, misdirection, ocasional truths and legal traps to make evildoers fall into the clutches of infernal forces and being no better off than if they'd steered clear away. Now I have the image of some cultist making a pact with clauses of getting a cushy reincarnation as a high ranking demon in their lord's service doing "the highest duties". But in the lower planes, "higher" is worse and now they have an eternity of shoveling shit (or an equivalent) ahead of them.

I mean, if someone had pledged their soul to Baalzebul when he was still under his "sewage-oozing slug monster" curse, then yeah, even being "favored" with palace duty with the Lord of the Seventh would have involved a lot of shoveling.

Devils in particular probably get off on giving mortals exactly what they asked for, but not what they wanted. Mephistopheles offers access to cutting-edge arcane laboratories where the damned soul will join an expert team of magical researchers - they end up working in Cania's equivalent of those Chinese cellphone factories with suicide nets beneath the windows. Mammon promises that his cultists will be surrounded by luxury and more wealth than they can imagine - they spend eternity guarding his treasure vaults, unable to spend a copper piece of it, while their own quarters are a cot in a cheap barracks slowly sinking into Minauros' muck. And so forth.

That's not a bad strategy, letting a few souls escape to make it easier to lure in more to compensate, and one that 5E Glasya would probably favor. Though I imagine the devils are sweating the whole time they're forced to pretend that some gormless Material Plane creature could possibly best them in rule-fu.

I just assume they approach it the same way casino managers approach the occasional big win at the tables.

I imagine that people pledged to Baalzebul might at a glance come across like worshipers of Nurgle in Warhammer Fantasy and 40K, all gross and rottening. Except that unlike Chaos cultists, these poor sods would be suffering and not view their current state as a "blessing".

For what it's worth, in a lot of medieval-era stories involving faustian bargains, mortals actually do best The Devil in Rule Fu. So having a mortal actually manage to trick and outsmart a Fiend isn't necessarily off-brand. In fact, I believe one book suggests it as a backstory for a Warlock.

Actually could be a good character idea: A Warlock who's a great lawyer-possibly not even an Amoral Attorney-who managed to swindle a fiend out of vast magical powers for little in return.

Of course, it could still be a pyrrhic victory: He got what he wanted, but now there's a powerful fiend out there with a personal vendetta against him.

Warlock with a Fiend patron intrigued me because there's all sorts of dynamics you can come up with, and I personally like the idea of a battle of wits between Warlock and devil.

Like let's say you're Warlock is a bored but still kindhearted noble who lacks the skill to excel in other martial arts, so he strikes a bargain with Mammon or at least one of his middlemen, that he will deliver him several dragon hoards worth of gold in exchange for infernal power. Said noble intends to gain cash by adventuring and becoming a hero, but of course, Mammon being the archdevil of greed also wants to destabilize economies so even if the Warlock DOES manage to pay the fee, the amount of money disappearing into hell would certainly cause economic damage since said Warlock wouldn't spend it in the material plane.

So my Warlock and Mammon trying to outwit each other becomes a part of the story.

Edited by RedHunter543 on Jun 3rd 2022 at 3:58:59 PM