How do you guys deal with Demons?

How do you guys deal with Demons?

What are they really? Where do they come from? Is there a sort of Hell or Abyss in your settings, and what's it like there?

I like Exalted's take on demons the most. They're weird, fucked up alien beings with personality disorders, who live inside a set of bigger, even more fucked up alien beings with worse personality disorders. They're not inherently evil, but they are dangerous to mortals. Blue and orange morality, in other words.

they are the immaterial manifestation of mankind collective sapience. People "summon" them to ask questions or ask for favors. which is terrible since people tend to be very selfish.

>I want power
You now have power but not everyone agrees with you.
>I will make them.
cool, but can you trust them now?
>I will kill everyone i don't trust then.
And now most people don't trust you or now idolize you power, what you actually say doesn't matter to anyone, since power is the only standard now.
>Fuck you demon.

And i try to not make everything super arbitrary. sometimes players and npc think they got the best deal since they cant see the ramifications of their actions or shit will hit the fan much after they are long gone. But as with everything the main thing to me is to use magic, demons and etc as a means to tell a fantastic story about human things and not as a means of control like in the whole of the modern fantasy storytelling

Denons are a very specific type of a immortal race that represents the absolute worst of the mortal races.

In the immaterial/mental(still working on names here) there spawned by a number of different ways. Main one being that all the once upon dying, a evil soul would then be in the afterlife and be constantly stalked and hunted by vengeful souls and spirits of the ones they wronged in the living.

Once all the vengeful souls/spirits captured the one that wronged them, they than began to torture it as a form of payback for all the years of suffering and longing they have had to endured in the afterlife.

After God knows how long of being ethereally mutilated. If the tortured soul somehow survived. It would forever be changed into a form completely unknown and alien to itself. No longer would the soul know happiness, no longer would it know sadness, or even any coherent thought. It would only know uncontrollable wrath and hatred for all that lives.

Daimons/Daemons are a wide variety of quasi-immortal spirits that act as agents and means between the mortal and divine realms as described in ancient greek mythology.

They're actually various semi-sentients left over from a crashing colony ship's AIs that act as possessing spirits and advisers to mortals and spies for the various Titans and God-AIs that rule the city states.

A soul weighted down by evil and untethered to the physical world sinks to the bottom of the spiritual plain, where the hands of hell reach and scrape through looking for whatever they may find. When a victim is found they swarm it and dig their claws in so they can drag it to hell. When the soul hits the barrier between the two realms it's torn apart, and each piece will grow into a demon by the time it lands in the depths of the underworld. Some more strong willed individuals can stay largely intact through the process, and become powerful archfiends that retain a twisted sense of who they were in life. The real tragedy is that this isn't limited to just evil people. It can also happen to the soul of someone who dies in a tainted area, or anyone who spends enough time around sources or individuals of great evil. This means that many of the strongest and most vile demons were once great heroes that dedicated their lives to fighting wickedness.

When the creator made the worlds, there were a lot of leftover prototypes and trial runs, most missing some vital feature of complete worlds, and he dumped them into the Void. Later, when the angels selected souls after death based on their virtue or sinfulness, the evil ones were cast out into the Void as well. Being so weighed down with corruption, they fell into pits in the unfinished places together and eventually, over ages pressed together in agony and degradation and repeated cycles of being torn apart by wrath or melted by acidic sloth and cowardice or cyclically consumed by greed and lust, the strongest pieces of what were once the strongest souls were able to focus on the beings who had sent them to their terrible existence, and were able to pull themselves into shape and claw their way out of the soul pits by the power of sheer hatred. The colonized the wrecks of the incomplete worlds and called them Hells, and built kingdoms of indulgence held together only by one goal: complete and utter vengeance upon Heaven.

Or at least in one setting I've been building. Trying to go for a "completely evil but also still kinda sympathetic" angle.

I really like demons, aesthetically and as characters (not playable ones usually, I mean as NPCs, bad guys, etc.)

I don't like my demons being 'pure' evil but making them just misunderstood or neutral is kind of bad too. They need to be bad in some way, even if its unintentional, to justify their bad reputations.

In my setting anyway, all mortals are given punishments and pleasures for their deeds and behaviors in life. Yes, even if you were a good person you'll probably have a decade or so of community service to make up for your occasional rudeness, white lies, etc. Many souls after they die fear such punishments regardless and flee, and these become demons.

Well, that depends. There are two types of demons.

The first are Iblis's Folk, When the gods were forced to leave Illitheralis in order to shield mortals from the rage and grief of Sun, they ordered their servants, the djinn, to safeguard mankind in their stead. All the djinn agreed, except for Sun's folk, led by mighty Iblis - as the Djinn of the greatest god, they were proud, and their master no longer bound them. It is Iblis's folk who torment mortals with the desert heat that drives a man man, who set aflame testaments to mortal greatness in order to humble them, and who bedevil mankind in all ways.

But Iblis's folk are merely proud and spiteful, not evil. They can be bargained with, and a few brave souls have earned the service or even love of an efreet.

Evil enters the world only where the Void seeps through the firmament, where the Vault of Heaven established by Sun and Earth withers in their absence. These creatures are true demons, spirits of endless hunger that sate themselves first on the souls of man. They make ghuls of mortals, fiendish hungry creatures wearing the skins of those they have devoured from the inside out, subsisting on grave-flesh until they can lure the unsuspecting and crush the life from them with inhuman strength, devour their flesh with sharp fangs.

Those are the true demons of Illitheralis.

>Daimons