What do you think about good demons?

A good demon you say? Like a redeemed succubus goddess?

>serving a tyrannical god
>good

It was always like that. Not all creatures that get called demons are evil (well maybe in your forgotten realms canon they are), and notion of fallen angels, also beings that are supposedly pure goodness, is also a thing.

Not real thing in fiction. A demon is a demon for reason. The only way for a demon to be good is eithier it got tired of its life and wants change or it got corropted against its will.

>succubus goddess?
that's fucking retarded

Depends on the setting.

In the base DND settings it does not happen ever, for any reason. Demons are Evil incarnate.

I think if you have a setting with something called a Demon but it is Good, you're simply misusing the term demon and should have put 30 more second of originality into the race and picked a new name too.

This is the best way to do demons that aren't full on Evil. Have Demons that have bizarre agendas and both the power and willingness to help others, but only in so much as it furthers their own goals. That doesn't really make them Good, but opportunistic.

>inb4 redeemed succubus shills posting about their fapbait

Go to bed Lucifer

>In the base DND settings it does not happen ever, for any reason.
Planescape
Ravenloft had a surprising amount of redeemed monsters running around.

Fuck, I was too slow. Your worthless contribution is noted and ignored.

Good is subjective.
Discuss.

Depends on the setting.
If they're made out of doubleevilness and doubleevilness is a thing that can and does exist, then no.
If they're the supermagic dudes that live in the dimension next door that happens to be on fire, and people call them demons because they tend to be giant assholes to the poor magicless schlubs of this dimension, then maybe.
If they're the wayward servants of a completely cocktastic and fedora tipping sendup of YHWH, it's practically expected.

What's your favorite story with a demon, Veeky Forums?

>giving free will
>demanding that they bend the knee
>somehow this is not evil

>giving them knowledge of the world
>somehow this is evil

Demiurge plz

It's just one guy taking the piss out of the concept at this point by reminding those who unironically participated in that garbage of their sins and annoying the fuck out of the rest of Veeky Forums with it.

We're not talking about beings being called demon. We're talking about actual demons. Getting called a demon and being a demon are two different things. People in reality and fantasy rarely get the differences, but hat is either a part of the story or because the people/authors are don't know what they're talking about.

Any demon trying to redeem itself would still acknowledge that it is, in fact, inherently evil. They don't stop being self serving or brutal.

They would strive to be good, to do what's right, but then they wouldn't be demons. They'd be something else.

it's a state of existence supported by actions and thoughts.If they cease to support this way of life they become something else.

There's a section of Too Many Curses that I particularly liked, with a put-upon kobold servant having to deal with a bound demon to get information about something unrelated.
>Demon takes the form of creepy firefly
>Servant asks for a deal for the information
>Demon asks for a single piece of coal
>Servant agrees immediately
>Demon goes wat
>"I'm gonna be honest. I am not fucking smart enough to be doing this, but I'm the only one that can do it at the moment. I have zero chance to get out of this without getting fucked over somehow later, and the only saving grace is that it's going to happen later and not now. I'll deal with the fallout when it comes."

...

the way I figure is that if an angel can turn evil and fall then there's no reason a demon turn good and.... I dunno "rise" I guess?

Granted it's propbaly a hell of a lot rarer since doing evil is easy, retemption is hard yadda yadda.

This is of course assuming a setting where there's a difference between "fallen angels" and "demons". If they are one and the same you probaly wouldn't see "good demons" since they may well just turn back into normal angels in the rare instance one redeems itself.

The problem is that all demons ARE beings called demons. Please actually do your homework for how the abyss doesn't implode from stupid black Kantian infighting if you're going to insist that D&D's demons are the end of the discussion.

.... at first I read that last points on the chaosfag side as "doesn't believe in the lord Asshole"

Never played D&D so I have no idea what your implying.

How about Good as short hand for "Holding values and inhibitions considered positive by the collective cultures and people of the modern West"

>modern West
In other words, utterly chaotic.

Denim is only ever good for jeans and jeans that have been recycled into insulation. In everything else it's evil.

We've long since abandoned absolute monarchy and firm social hierarchies as an ideal of good, and are largely consider promethean archetypes to be an ultimate good.

Do you just fap to 40k shit or something? It's incredibly trite and why I avoid the non-general threads 99% of the time.

That's SMT, not 40k. Warhammer isn't the only setting to feature themes of law vs. chaos.

A good demon is a neutral one.

D&D's demons are specifically made out of concentrated accretions of evil, which is an actual tangible force that makes up the multiverse.
You're saying there's a specific, standardised definition of demon (which incidentally matches the mechanical identity of demons in D&D) and anyone that uses demon in any other way is just being willfully wrong. Pig disgusting.

If demons in my setting can be good, it's going to either be the ambiguous kind or I'll simply use setting terminology to define "demon" as any kind of creature summoned or originally from another plane. Basically just put them under the umbrella of something more like "Daedra."

In that regard, anything that looks angelic might still be a "demon" under that wide umbrella, as are elementals and extra planar creatures. Demon-Hunters now have a much broader swathe of things they're against; a no tolerance stance against anything from or associated with other planes like the Vigilants of Stendarr.

Otherwise, those entities might have their own concerns with the mortal realm, be it an exploitative, cruelly entertaining, or antagonistic interest or a benevolent, benign, or ambivalent interest in the plane or its denizens.

Of course in this sense we're still defining "demons" in a much larger brush stroke than red satyrs with horns and pointy sticks, bat wings, and an affinity for album cover aesthetics.

No I said they were being willfully OR ignorantly. Get your shit straight.

Still looking for your definition of "Demon" in "Cold Hard Interpretations Of Fictional Fucking Concepts", and not having much luck because the book and demons to base a standardised definition on are both completely nonexistent.

I like them.

They aren't uncommon IRL, either.

In Christianity, Satan was originally (not as in before the fall, but in the earlier books of the Bible) God's prosecuting attorney. He was doing his job. Not evil.

In some forms of Gnosticism, God is the Demiurge (and considered varying degrees of evil) and Satan wants to save us.

In some forms of Satanism, obviously demons are benevolent and wanting us to make the best of ourselves.

Key of Solomon has been mentioned.

As a general rule, demons are often teachers who spread the whole scale of benevolent-to-malevolent in various magical systems IRL.

I don't absolute evil, especially when applied to an entire race or class of beings. It's lazy and boring.

Is a blissful paradise that knows no good or evil truly so much worse than a world full of pain and suffering, which knows evil all too well? Only a prideful fool would say that.

If only the Chaos Slave were to give up a little bit of his pride, to be willing to bow down to a being other than himself, he would inherit paradise. But instead, the Chaos Slave proclaims himself sovereign, beholden to none other than himself. In so doing, he bars himself from the gates of heaven. It is his choice not enter paradise, not paradise's choice to keep him out. In this respect, he is bound to his fate far more tightly than anyone on the side of law, because he has chosen to bind himself, and not, of his own free will, to allow himself to be bound.

Man that is some fucked up and twisted logic.

Just call them "daemons" and point vaguely at Greek mythology if people complain about them not solely being mindless dicks.

Yes, demons are evil spirits who intend misfortune and malignant chaos upon the world. No, there is no single book pointing to this being a definitive fact.

Why? Until people thought it would be interesting to overthrow the trope in a misguided effort to be original it never came up!

>Literally ignoring the problem of evil and who created the world full of pain and suffering in the first place
And before you try to pull the free will defence, it was dumb when Augustine tried to blame humanity's free will for natural disasters and there's a reason why most commenters before just tried to pretend Epicurius never said anything instead.

40k sort of ruined that. You're better off citing the Book of Solomon.

You mean the knowledge of good and evil. Along with the ability to commit evil?

Sure. Thanks for that one Satan. Sure had a lot of fun with that.

So here's another question:
Do you prefer tragic demons, gleeful demons, punchcard evil demons, anarchic demons, or some other sort?

>"because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it'
This was literally said about Milton by one of his oldest commentors. The christian devil as a demonized promethean figure isn't a new concept.

>Gnosticism

Let's not go that heresy here.

I like teacher demons. Mostly reviled because what they teach most people don't want widely known and because their prices are high and the people willing to pay them are scary.

But it's my favorite heresy!

>heresy
If you want a hivemind, r/christianity is that way

Meh, fuck 40k. If someone is one of those fuckers who needs everything to be exactly like 40k I don't want to play with them.

I mean for why they do what they do. Are they just sort of hanging out the next dimension over collating their libraries when they're not teaching people how to shoot flesh-eating centipedes out of their fingers, are they competing for the "Got A Mortal To Do Something Really Fucking Stupid" prize, are they autistically building really cool model trains out of souls, or what?

[posts fedora.jpg while breathing heavily through nose]

>I don't absolute evil, especially when applied to an entire race or class of beings. It's lazy and boring.

I can agree with these sentiments, though they work differently for different tones of settings. Having an all-consuming evil can be compelling in some senses, and an absolute good might be neat if done right as well, but fleshing out motivations or even just leaving them ambiguous if it's ultimately irrelevant can be just as compelling.

You could liken that opaque ambiguousness to a vantablack box with no lid. You can determine its dimensions if you observe it enough, even shapes or hidden protrusions if you observe it from just the right angle, but you can never determine its contents or if it even has contents. And whatever might actually be inside will probably never live up to its compelling mystery.

>In Christianity, Satan was originally (not as in before the fall, but in the earlier books of the Bible) God's prosecuting attorney.
That's Judaism's interpretation. Christianity's interpretation of the Devil connects him to the Edenic serpent, whom God was not at all happy with. God cursed the serpent and prophesied that a son of Eve would defeat the serpent utterly. The Serpent is interpreted as the Devil, and the son of Eve God mentioned is interpreted as Christ. No matter who the serpent really is, it's clear that he wasn't God's prosecuting attorney.

I like either tragic demons or anarchic demons. Punchcard evil usually seems like an artificial attempt at originality, and moustache-twirling villains are never very interesting. Although I can see the "gleeful demon" being interesting if combined with the tragic demon -- a demon who puts on a guise of "HAHAHAHAH I LOVE BEING EVIL" to hide the anguish that comes from the knowledge that he'll never be a good guy again. This is one interpretation of Paradise Lost's Satan.

Ah, sorry. In general, I like the idea that demons have something they desire (not souls, that's kind of trite), and humans are the easiest way to get it. It's as much a part of their nature as eating food is for us, or drinking.

In my own setting, it would depend on the type of spirit.

I played another game where I really liked the interpretation. Each demon had its own thing, and that's what you paid it with. Low ranking demons might want rotted meat, or secrets, or even obscure and interesting scents for payment. Higher ranking ones might want things like pleasant memories (which you lose) or dreams or beauty (stealing it from people you offer, or offer your own).

I suppose tragic. I want to shy away from the label because this knee-jerk goth poetry image I get but I really favor demons who aren't puppy kicking evil or evil by nature but just bitter because they refused to bend the knee to anyone but God even when God told them to. So they were made to be loyal and they were punished for being too loyal. Now they're free like man and hate every second of it.

I loathe purely evil races as a concept, so they're okay in my book.

I like them more amoral and alien, and when they bother interacting with mortals it should be to encourage passions of all sort with little regard for earthly consequences and for their own personal agenda, or due to some emotion of their own.

"Demon" is often used to refer to evil spirits. You can have a spirit stop/start being evil and he would stop/start being a demon accordingly.

>The problem is that all demons ARE beings called demons
But that's ridiculous. Men are called demons for their evil. If they stop being evil or aren't in the first place, they're not demons. Other creatures are called demons, out of fear or superstition, but that's still a misnomer, and they aren't demons.

If a LITERAL DEMON, fire and brimstone embodiment of evil becomes good, they're no longer a demon either. In the D&D sense, they become some other sort of planar outsider to fit their new alignment. Demons are VERY SPECIFICALLY Chaotic Evil. If they somehow develop a lawful nature while retaining their evil, they stop being a demon and become a devil. So no, Good Demons do not exist, and the only Demons who do good are ones who are forced or tricked into it. If a Demon would redeem himself and become Good, he would no longer be a demon.

Demons don't really have to be a race in that sense though. The other thing is if you program a machine to kill indiscriminately it will always follow its instructions. Maybe it can talk a little bit but there's no more going on under the hood than there is with Cleverbot. Now just replace machine with constructed beings or crafted spirits and an all evil "race" works.

What about that non-evil demon from Planescape: Torment? What happens if you use a Helm of Opposite Alignment on one?

...

why not just use an angel

Some belive that that was part of the rewrite in the middle ages to vilify the druids

I like the psychology angle, demons represent the Id and angels the super ego, both offer worth while aspects and are needed to be a complete person but being of only one aspect leaves one incomplete, while people tend to view angels as more good for their reliability, many can be too cold and distant and while demons are usually too careless to be called good many have impulses that lead to heroics

Sort if the order chaos thing played more resonably

If a Demon becomes good, it is no longer a demon, but something else. Maybe a mortal, maybe an angel, but certainly not a demon.

I don't mind the concept - if mortals can have such levels of variation in alignment, why not demons and other supernatural things - but the problem is calling them demons. I don't think you could run 'good demons' by a group with a straight face, or them sounding like special snowflake demons who were totally oppressed but are still good inside.

In most cosmologies the thing with mortals running the spectrum is because the mortal realm is the eye of the storm. The influences of whatever powers-that-be and forces of the cosmos influence the material plane.

Demons/angels/etc. don't have near the variation of mortals because they are often the distilled forms of mortal morality. Demons are evil because that is what makes them demons. If it is good it isn't a demon it's something else.

Spirits have universally been used to represent the extremes of human morality and ethics. They are the embodiment of impulse, vice, and virtue; sometimes alien in how extreme.

If you portray them as having a moral sliding scale fine, you do you. But giving them human morals and ethics just makes them another mortal race just with superpowers and undermines the reason these spirits existed in folklore.

But lots of religions and folklore have fairly neutral spirits, like djinn, and apparently there was a lot of lore about demons you could summon for all sorts of knowledge. They may be one set thing, never going from one alignment to another, but they're not necessarily only good or evil.

The trouble is still in defining a demon, though. Malevolence of thought? You expect me to believe other outsiders don't have malevolent thoughts? Malevolence of action? Mere repetition of malevolence?
Yet you also always see specifically demon wards, or specifically demons banding together and the like.

Are you saying Milton painted demons as being good? No, he pointed out that they were flawed, destructive beings.

Miltons' work is good because it shows they are complex creatures, not good ones.

What if I pull a "Lady Amaltea"?
And if a Demon is no LONGER evil, and stops being a "demon" by definition, does it's "species" change? or you would go to the high heavens and see an a red horned angel giving you a friendly wave?

i think most people itt have the same idea, that a demon is a fundamental force of evil/disorder (or at the very least is the embodiment of one of two polar opposite fundamental forces of good/evil)

so yeah "good" demons dont really make sense, unless you fluffed demons out in your setting to be sapient and capable of rebellion, then it makes sense (ie lucifer was an angel and then he wasnt)

are you asking if we think they're cool, or fit in a setting? that depends on the setting but it could be really cool if you played them off as an enigmatic character like some sort of patron to the PCs with hard to pin intentions

A stupid misuse of a word.
What you're essentially doing is taking a word with a definite meaning, one that is established throughout humanity and various cultures, and calling something else because you feel like it.

Dæmon is closer to what you want, but spirit is more preferable.

Your only excuse for this reaction is not knowing the ample amounts of literature about Paradise Lost since it was published and the controversy it caused even at the time for what some people saw as a positive portrayal compared to a god with ultimately no redeeming qualities.

Define what a demon is.

People keep saying that Evil, Good, Law, and Chaos are fundamental forces.

Wrong. They are subjective forces.

Evil Good, Law, Chaos, are manifested by the consciousness of mortals of the Material Plane. Belief and thought is what shapes the Outer Planes and those entities within them.

Alignment is something subjective, the Outer Planes and it's denizens are expressions of these things.

A Demon by the terms of D&D is an entity from the Lower Plane or the Abyss.

Please tell me the names of these edgy pieces of literature.

The word demon was adopted by many cultures as a word for evil creatures, yes, but previously the word dæmon simply referred to a spirit, with not indication as to its level of benevolence. There were prefixes for that. an agathodæmon, for instance, was a good spirit.

Actually, I can't remember where it was stated, but races and such that were listed as Always X, meant that only about 5% of the total population of said race were of a different alignment, and races with Mostly(?) X, meant that only about 20% were of a different alignment.

You mean angels?

I don't know what that entails

Well, if we use ancient greek meaning of daemons as basically spirits that can do both good and evil, then yes, it's true by definition. If we use christian demons, than better not.

That's what fiends want you to believe.

PALADINS! THERE'S A FUCKING DEMON IN DISGUISE HERE!

That's all it is. A thing from the Outer Plane of the Abyss. The Abyss is a place of collected evil and chaos, a plane of infinite layers ruled by the most powerful of their kind, the Demon Princes, though other entities also have domains here, like Lolth the goddess of the Drow.

No, it's fairly clear that's how it works out.

Well, then you argued yourself against the wall here. If all entities believe that good and evil is objective, it's objective.

Daemons should be morally neutral in any non-Abrahamic or non-Abrahamic-inspired set of faiths.

Just make them work like youkai, fae, and other animist spirits: powerful, unpredictable, best avoided just to be safe.

No. wrong. It's subjective.

It's not a thing beyond that makes evil. It not not something OBjective. You can't pour a glass of Evil.

Evil and Good are creations of mortals/people. As are gods. All of these exist in the Outer Planes, expressions of consciousness that congeal into planes themselves. The entities within them are born from the ideas and associations mortals make with these. IF every mortal thought bunnies were pure evil, the Lower Planes would be replete with bunnies.

Nice headcanon, m8.

You mean D&D canon?

So is it only the knowledge of an evil act that makes the act evil?

Was Adam clubbing animals to death for fun but god was okay with it because he didn't know better?

What would a redeemed demon look like Veeky Forums?

If murdering people because of their faith is "good" (why else would the church do it).

And demons are "evil" (Same church says so.)

...

I'll explain.

The Outer Planes work on belief. Straight from the 5e DMG.

"(The Planes) They're not simply other worlds, but dimensions formed and governed by spiritual elemental principles"
"The Outer Planes are realms of spirituality and thought"
"It is much a state of being and of mind as it is a physical location"
"The rest of the multiverse is defined in relation to the Material Plane"