Before D&D, any fantasy game I played would tend to have a somewhat simpler cosmology for "those pure-evil monsters," and they are basically always called Demons. Now, sure, the word Demon is derived from the Greek "daimon," which was kind of a broad term for just any kind of otherworldly spirit, but in modern parlance, a demon typically means a creature that is inherently vicious and evil, and often at a level beyond what one is likely to encounter in one's day-to-day (weirdly, it's also often associated with just being really fast - "speed demon.")
And, in modern parlance, "devil" is, I think, less often used to refer to a class of wicked beings, but more used as "The Devil," referring to Lucifer/Satan, as in the ultimate evil being (though pointedly not a "god of evil," given that Christian doctrine does not allow for the existence of any gods beyond the one).
If you were to ask where demons are from, thus, in Western culture, most people you ask would promptly respond with "hell."
So it's kind of funny that in D&D, that's actually wrong. It's not that Demons aren't inherently evil or that they're from a pleasant place, it's just that "hell" specifically refers to the plane that "devils" are from, and that demons are a separate thing.
It's honestly one of the really cool aspects of D&D lore, and while the two classes of creature are similar, both being "fiends," a creature type that in most fantasy RPGs would be called "demons," (as they are in World of Warcraft,) they have separate identities, somewhat different (though the distinctions are subtle) aesthetics, and even tend to have slightly different mechanical themes, such as how devils are typically immune to Fire damage and sometimes resistant to Cold, while demons are typically always resistant to Fire, Cold, and Lightning. (The Yugoloths, distant thirds in terms of fiendish representation, are arguably more "purely" evil because of their ethical neutrality, all have immunity to acid damage, which is interesting).
It's funny, because in Magic the Gathering, WotC's other big fantasy IP, demons are a more common kind of creature, typically associated with the color Black (the color representing self-interest, ruthlessness, and dangerous bargains) while devils (far rarer) are usually less powerful and focused on reckless mischief and mayhem, and are associated with Red - a decidedly Chaotic identity.
But just as there's no consistent distinction between Wizards and Sorcerers across different fantasy worlds (flawed though the series was, I liked the proposal in Falcon and the Winter Soldier where Bucky suggests that a Wizard is a Sorcerer with a hat, after one of them misidentifies Doctor Strange as a Wizard - though in D&D terms, that's 100% what he should be,) there's also no real consistency on what these two terms actually mean compared with one another.
Still, I suspect that the main reason that someone in D&D's early days, writing the Manual of the Planes or whatever, picked Devils to be the Lawful Evil ones was probably built around the classic trope of the Devil's Bargain. The Faustian deal - in which a person sells their soul to Satan in exchange for worldly power - is a classic trope, and its elements, including contracts and agreements that are honored all-too-literally, is such a profoundly Lawful kind of evil.
And, by making many of these folkloric figures like Mephistopheles and Beelzebub and Dispater and Mammon all grouped together in a Nine Hells that is directly inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, the weird thing is that it kind of leaves the other side of the Fiendish spectrum somewhat less classically defined.
I find it interesting that, in 5th Edition, at least, so much of what outer-planar adventures are presented tend to go to the Nine Hells, and even amongst them, sticking largely to Avernus.
And, yeah, part of that is that the majority of one of the big annual adventure-campaign releases was Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, where levels 5-13 are spent on that first layer of hell.
But, for example, there's a chapter in Vecna: Eve of Ruin that takes you to Avernus as well. Again, Eve of Ruin is also something of a "5E's Greatest Hits" compilation, and in a move I really appreciate, the actual finale of that adventure takes place in Pandemonium.
But while we got Out of the Abyss early on in 5E's lifespan, I don't know: I feel like Demons have gotten sort of short shrift.
Why is that?
The biggest thing, I think, is that because Devils are Lawful, we tend to think of them as smarter.
There are, for certain, dumb lawful characters. But I think that there's a bit of a bias, where if a villain is clever and conniving, operating a complex plot that involves numerous contingencies and subtle elements that are isolated from one another, that they're probably Lawful. Lawfulness is associated with patience and the ability to stick with a plan.
Meanwhile, Chaotic Evil is usually associated with brute force - big scary monsters that break through the wall and just clobber you to death.
Indeed, Out of the Abyss ends with a giant Kaiju-fight in Menzobaranzan between various Demon Lords.
I think, though, that this suggests that we might want to reconsider how we think about Chaos in D&D.
Matt Colville, years ago, made the argument that Wakanda, from the Marvel universe, is a Chaotic Good society (well, at least Chaotic. I can't remember what he thought about their isolationism). He argued that, if this society has a ritual in which anyone can challenge the Black Panther for the throne of Wakanda, and that only by a feat of combat can the current office holder retain their position, that that's chaotic - a lawful system would not allow such an enormous transfer of power to be left up to whether the King is having a good day, physically.
The argument here is that the existence of rules and traditions doesn't inherently push things into Law and away from Chaos. It's deeper and more complex than that.
And I think that's important to note if you want to use Demons in a more interesting way. Yes, a demon can be a scary, physical threat, but I think that you can get more complex and nuanced plots out of them.
Between Demogorgon, Baphomet, and Yeenoghu, a lot of our headlining demon lords are very much about instinct and brute strength. But I think we also need to consider two others here: Grazz't and Fraz-Urb'luu.
Both use very different means to further their chaotic evil ends.
Fraz-Urb'luu lies. He is really good at lying. In a manner that eerily echoes Tharizdun, which is traditionally a god but also maybe an eldritch abomination that also happens to be in the Abyss (and is often credited with creating it,) old Fraz often has cults among mortals who don't even realize he's what they're worshipping, drawing on their devotion when they think they're serving some other entity. (While I could never imagine them revealing this canonically, I do kind of like the idea of using Fraz-Urb'luu himself as a false identity for the most profoundly apocalyptic, destructive god in the D&D cosmos.)
Fraz thus feels like he should be able to out-manipulate even some of the Dukes of Hell, sabotaging their efforts to gather souls and power. We all love seeing arrogant and cruel tyrants being brought low, so I think having some plot in which the eons-long plots of a figure like Mammon getting utterly undone could be a very satisfying thing for the party to witness and even take part in - but it might be proportionately just as horrifying as it was satisfying when it's revealed that Fraz-Urb'luu has now usurped all that power for a potentially even more catastrophic end.
Grazz't is also kind of fascinating, because he seems to have the seductive aspect of devils. Indeed, there's some lore implications that he used to be a devil, and just as Zariel fell from good to evil (and at least when I did Descent into Avernus, she was redeemed - but I don't think this was considered canonical given she's still the Duke of Avernus in BG3) Grazz't may have fallen (or slid?) from Lawful to Chaotic.
Grazz't is the demon lord who will welcome you to his magnificent palace of Argentum in his three layers of the Abyss. But why? What does he want to do? Why does he seduce?
And that, I think, might get to the crux of what I'm even talking about:
How do we play these two most iconic fiend categories differently?
Generally speaking, Devils are always trying to bargain for people's souls. This, then, drives them toward greater civility and a false air of benevolence.
Demons don't bargain for souls. But they do still need them just as much as devils, I think, because in both cases, souls taken back to their home plane can be made into new fiends of the plane's type. Sure, demons all hate one another. But devils hate one another as well. That's just what it means to be an evil fiend. I think the contrast is that devils find it very satisfying when they can secure a soul given to them via a deal, for them to smugly say "well, you knew what you were getting into!" A demon, I think, has no preference for the means by which they get souls.
But then, do we hit that same problem? If they don't have a preference, that means less of a hook for them, personality-wise?
It's tough, because I think we need to be careful not to ascribe any fundamental evilness to one and not the other. Devils and Demons ought to be equally evil. The civility of Devils is a facade, of course. I was actually discussing this with one of my friends, talking about how I find it an interesting question as to whether the planes are a circle or a square.
To explain: If they're a square, then all the planes from the Nine Hells to the Abyss are equally evil, with these two being the bottom two corners of the square. If it's a circle, though, these two are actually less evil because of their dedication to Law and Chaos, respectively, and Gehenna, Hades, and Carceri are actually more evil (with Hades being the absolute worst).
My friend said she thought Lawful Evil was more evil. But I think that might reflect her own tendencies toward Chaos, and perhaps just a real-world anti-authoritarian attitude rather than trying to design these fantasy creatures around the alignment system (though this means I think she'd be a lot of fun in a Planescape campaign, which is all about the "well, in my opinion your model of the moral and ethical cosmos if wrong for the following reasons, etc.")
So: how do we characterize them?
Well, first off, I think that the "faux-affable" devil is a fine trope, but one that we maybe see more than we need to. Devils come in many shapes and sizes, and a Bone Devil, Ice Devil, a Pit Fiend, etc., are all really nasty. A bargain need not be made only with the offer of a reward: it could be with the threat of a punishment should one refuse the offer.
I think there's a lot of arguments to be made as to whether tyranny itself, even is inherently lawful. I mean, a lot of the world's worst authoritarian/totalitarian regimes often had such institutional incompetence that much of the suffering was caused by disorganization and arbitrariness. I suppose you could make the argument that regimes that were institutional in nature, like the post-Stalin USSR, or the post-Mao/pre-Xi PRC, were truly Lawful, while regimes that only lasted as long as one charismatic leader, such the reigns of Franco or Amin, were more Chaotic. (And let's leave things there before we get a bunch of propaganda bots coming after me.)
See, I think that a Devil probably wants to trick mortals into bad deals and suffering, but I also think they probably relish the chance to unleash some direct cruelty.
So, again, what about Demons? Well, I think that it's not that they're necessarily more direct - I think instead that they want to see the house of cards collapse.
On a fundamental level, perhaps what we can say the difference is between what Devils and Demons want is that Devils want to build an inescapable cage. They want to make real what O'Brien describes to Winston: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face - forever." To a devil, this is the ultimate goal: totalitarian dystopia in which no soul can ever feel free again.
Demons, however, want to tear things down: to bring about ruin. Generally, they're characterized as wanting to destroy all of reality, though this isn't universal: Orcus, for example, wants to be the only sentient thing left and rule over a cosmos of soulless undead. In fact, they kind of actually want what O'Brien describes as well - only they don't want that boot to be in a uniform. They want it to be their own boot, and that human face to be one that died long ago.
So: where does this all bring us?
Devils wish to build institutions. Demons want to tear them down.
But a devil will build an institution to destroy freedom - in the material world, they'll encourage the creation of aristocratic systems that shuffle the poor and lower classes into worse and more painful constraints.
A demon will look to a healthy, functioning society and try to pull at its foundations. Again: this need not be accomplished solely through big horned monsters rampaging and murdering. A demon can be subtle.
Maybe a demon possesses a righteous knight and starts committing murders with the knight's body. The killings themselves aren't the goal - or at least not the primary goal - but instead, it's because they know that the people who respected this knight's order will now start to think that there's some corruption within said order. Perhaps there is! Perhaps there's some (non-demonic) corruption, like embezzlement or something, that a high-ranking knight had once committed. Maybe the Grandmaster initially planned to air this all in the public, to apologize, strip the offending knight of their membership, and return all the donations they had received that year in penance for this breach. But the demon, in the guise of a concerned citizen, convinced the Grandmaster that the peoples' faith in the institution was too important for the word to get out.
The affair is dealt with quietly, and all seems to have returned to normal for about a decade, but then, not long after this other (secretly possessed) knight goes around like a serial killer, the secret about this earlier corruption also comes to light. Just as the Grandmaster is trying to warn the local populace and teach them how to ward their homes against the influence of this supernatural menace, the scandal's revelation leads new rumors to spread: like that the "superstitious" wards that the knights are distributing are just a placebo at best, and maybe are being magically used to spy on the people instead.
The fury and anger over the protective authorities being unwilling to actually take any real steps to protect the people and instead just rob them leads to riots and violence.
And if the heroic adventurers who come to town and discover the presence of a manipulative demon actually catch the thing, can they be really sure that its capture isn't just a further part of the plan? They stop the killings, sure, but now there are questions of why the knights couldn't do so, and can they be sure that the demon's actually gone? What if it secretly possessed one of those adventurers?
Distrust and paranoia lead to chaos, and that demon has left a community that might never be able to trust each other again.
Just as a devil will create an institution that you shouldn't trust, a demon might convince you not to trust an institution you need to. And, again, not to be too contemporary in my references: that can create a whole lot of suffering.
Exactly what any fiend wants.
No comments:
Post a Comment