So Veeky Forums, how do you like your demons and demon summoning to be like?

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What kind of nightmares would a demon have?

Being redeemed.

youtube.com/watch?v=VSCKzZAGuRo

I like going traditional.

It's mostly made popular because of the Cthulhu myhots, though.

It's lazy desu. People just use a mass of tentacles as a cop-out for being incomprehensible.

they would probably just call it a dream. but a demons worst fear is to seize to exist so probably something death related

Anyone have medieval art of demons as little furry chimera imps? I always loved those.

Most popculture demons are portrayed as some kind of chimera anyway. The important part is that they look good.

Lesser deities wishing to become more powerful or, failing that, to have fun with mortals.
Their definition of "fun" include mainly making mortals suffer for the demon's sadistic pleasure.

Demon summoning shouldn't just be saying the right incantations from your spellbook and getting a free demon servant. Instead it should be a combination of saying the right magic words and negotiating with, cajoling and intimidating the demon that comes through.

I like my demons being alien things defying natural order and concept of morality itself.

I like their summoning spiced with countless sacrifices, right-in-your-face symbolism and the world bathed in nihilism as a consequence.

Demon summoning should be just that. Actually CONTROLLING it or getting anything useful out of it should be the hard part.

Cont.

Cont.

Summoning an uncontrolled demon for a few minutes is easy.

Summoning the same demon in containment for an extended period of time is simply a matter of research and preparation, maybe a sacrifice or two.

It is getting a demon to do your bidding that's the hard part.
Contracts are reliable and take little arcane talent, but demons don't undersell themselves.
Trapping them in an object isn't all that hard, but almost invariably leads to the demon coming back for vengeance when it finally breaks out.
Actually binding it to your will reliably? Unless you've got a mcguffin, a village full of sacrifices, or a cabal of wizards at your disposal, good fucking luck.

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>How do you like your demons?
Unique and the same as Devils/Fiends, the true distinctions only known to higher ranking diabolists. There are perhaps multiple imps, but only one succubi for a region or city-state. They control and enthrall people to do their bidding, and they bring curses and calamity by merely existing in the material world.

The forces of the Underworld are finite but obscenely powerful, which is why people call them up.

I like the classic Type I to Type IV outsider model because it feels more in-world. "We don't know much but we know it is bigger and tougher than a previously observed type, has similar powers, but not the same weaknesses." It feels more like people trying to figure things out in a terrible situation, while also putting out the importance of knowing names/classifications because all you're working with are Types and descriptions.

>Demon Summoning?
A dark room, with a circle in it, something to burn in the center, and maybe a book. The demon emerges from the smoke and the room seems to grow darker still. The demon speaks to those in the room but does not show itself until a compact is signed, and then only the pure of heart and the fully wicked can see the beast.

But...If one is sinful or weak enough, and the veil is already tattered; someone might hear the whispers of a fiend. Or should the victim move into a place where a summoning was attempted once but not fully closed, then the fiend will try to break the mortal into hosting it.

>I like the classic Type I to Type IV outsider model because it feels more in-world
what?

>passmethecontrollerbro.jpg

In the original D&D, demons were sorted by type unless they were very specific: Type I was a Vrock, Type II was a Hezrou, Type III was Glabrezu, Type IV was Nalfeshnee, then you had a Succubus, Type V for Marilith and Type VI for Balor. Plus Demogorgon and Orcus who were just demon lords.

And that makes sense, to me, from an in-world perspective. You as a player know Demogorgon and Orcus are essentially Satan, and you don't call him out because that's bad. A succubus is a known quantity due to what it is they do. But everything else is very....different.

You've got vulture-men, four-clawed dog people, giant toads, pig-apes with wings, serpentine multi-armed ladies, and what is essentially the Balrog. Classifying them in types helps keep them all united to the idea that they serve the underworld especially given the lack of rhyme or reason to their form.

It feels like something a church exorcist would have written down.

In my setting daemon summoning requires dick sacrifice, the cultist has to chop off his dick and get fucked in the hole by the demon in exchange for his service.

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Sounds like magical realm bullshit.

>implying those aren't refreshing at this point

>summoning mechanics
like a cooking recipe , mostly involving a dead human body as a base component that needs certain requirements such as "died in a fire" , a bunch of alchemist stuff and a seal that may take a lot of forms (often a mask or a sculpture embeded inside).
then , prepare a shrine in order to channel enough energy to summon this thing.
>summoning narratively
lots of foul smells , very annoying and unnatural sounds. instead of smoke and fire obscuring everything, i like to describe it like a reversing and simultanous progressing of a rotting process until the spirit has aligned with the materials and starts to manifest normaly.
>the demons itself
while grunt-tier and chaotic demons basicly are all about chimeras, looking like twisted and weirdly shaped humans or just being covered in fire, thorns and everything that looks uncomfortable to touch, the actually clever and powerful ones take more elegant forms and appear like angels or majestetic animals such as dragons and pheonixes.
i like both types that are either on the "set fire, eat babies" or "make contracts, eat babies, become a saint" side.

Naw, they are pretty shit. I'm glad to see them fade away.

well, first you have to consider if you want to die.

All of the (known) texts on summoning rituals have either been damaged by time (important parts missing) or their contents changed by a monotheistic religion of the past, who attempted to stamp out magic.

roughly 60-80% of the time, the book is charred, missing pages, large bloodstains, et cetera.

the rest of the time, the book is in good repair, but the spells misfire or do nothing.

After that it's a toss-up between a successful summon of your intended target, or a successful summon of something/ someone else.
>Your summon was off its mark. a vital component was missing, you forgot a gesture, whatever. Your summoning circle has not summoned Ulquait the demon merchant with a a thousand bargains (who has a fondness for games of chance and will pay handsomely for chess sets, dice, playing cards, et cetera) instead your circle has targeted a Hellwasp hive.

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In my works there's effectively two types of demons.

Type A is pretty easy to summon, as the church just uses "Demon" as a blanket term for anything supernatural they don't understand and view as dangerous. Most Type A demons are just tricksters wanting a laugh and maybe a quick buck, so if given the right incentive they'll agree to most things the summoner wants. Accidentally summoning Type A demons happen pretty often, but less than a lot of people would think.

Type B demons, sometimes called Devils, are actual malevolent entities. Summoning them is pretty difficult, with a couple exceptions, and usually summoning them is the magical equivalent of a tactical nuke. You send in someone who doesn't mind dying, evacuate anything you don't want wrecked, and then let the thing loose. Then, if your lucky, whatever's binding it to the material plane will run out of juice before it can go anywhere. Never hurts to have a couple wizards and a demonologist on standby just in case it figures out how to extend it's time limit though.

The only major exception to summoning Devils, both in difficulty and keeping them bound to the material plane, is Lesser Devils. These are effectively my work's Tieflings, who are normal people that either got corrupted by arcane bullshit, went full edgelord by "giving into the hate", or got possessed by something nasty. They have the powers of Devils, but are still mostly human. Or elf, dwarf, whatever the fuck they used to be. These guys are scary, but anyone with half decent magic sense can tell when one's in town so at worst they're usually bonus bosses for my players rather than a serious antagonist.

>Demons
Basically a cross between Horror-movie ghosts, Shadowmen, and Nazgul. Being more spirit than flesh is a bonus.

>Summoning
Many ways, most including calling out a name, dropping some blood, and using circles. This doesn't actually work, but if a Demon hears its name and thinks you're interesting enough to make a deal with, he might show up.

>inb4 Christopher Marlowe's "Faust"

What the fuck am I listening too? Pretty good.

I always did demon summonings as more sacrifice based.
Like unless it was some sort of greater demon, it couldn't take form in the material plane and needed a host body.

So your aspiring warlocks and summoners would go kidnap people and cycle through them to try and pull the demon into the body.

If the body wasn't a perfect match, bad things would happen. Always resulting in the host death.

If successful, the host body would usually become some sort of malformed entity of flesh and gnarly shit.

The summoning itself usually involved random reagents, blood, altars and spells that were at one point instructed to mortals for the sole purpose of manifesting their demons friends.

I like various interpretations.

Ars Goetian I am rather fond of in particular.
But generally, I don't like the categorizing and typecasting the demons.
Giving them a hierarchy is cool, though.

For summoning, nothing that you can just snap fingers and force to work.
Rituals. Binding, and coercing them to do your bidding. Demons worth of shit are rather intelligent too, and seek to fuck over the summoner through contract.

In current setting I am working though, they are psychic parasites of though who go Freddy Kruger on you. Mostly because I had demon-like inhabitants in the afterlife already, so I was figuring something funny.

I rather like demons to be a predatory spirit that is not part of any hierarchy or system.

As for the summoning; I rather prefer the idea that a demon is not that hard to summon, but containing it and controlling it is the hard part. Although, summoning the more powerful ones would take a lot more knowledge, skill and effort.

I dont think demons have genders.

"Fuck, I had that dream where I went christmas shopping with the Pope again."

guildwars was great

God, in the form of Mr Rogers, forgiving them for turning from him, but still being disappointed that they weren't living up to his expectations of them.

He still loves them just the way they are.

>So Veeky Forums, how do you like your demons and demon summoning to be like?
I like my demons ACTUALLY EVIL, because after seeing so much waifu this and husbando that and monstergirl this and Drizzt that and the Twilightification of most of the bestiary, it's nice to for once have a creature that is evil, evil, end of story evil.

Do not try to make friends with a demon. It is an immortal malevolence with centuries of experience in manipulating people, and it will use you to hurt everything you love.

And if you're so stupid as to try to make a deal with it, and at some point invoke "but our contract says", it will laugh as it kills you slowly and painfully, mocking you for thinking it was ever going to abide by anything short of a divine geas, savoring the memory of how you cut your finger to sign in blood to no effect. And then, despite the fact that it tore up and violated the contract where you sold your soul, you go to hell *anyway*. Because what damns you isn't the contract itself; what damns you is *being the sort of person who would sign*.

And of course it's intelligent enough to cite the need for secrecy in demonology, and thus get you alone when it betrays you to minimize the number of people who learn that soul contracts aren't worth the paper they're written on.

And they're intelligent, planning malevolences. If you try to get clever and, say, summon up two of them and have them bid for your soul as xkcd suggests, they will both bid downwards. Your move, clever dick, you're damned anyway. Again, it's not the sale which damns you. The sale is void from the start; damnation comes from being the sort of person who summons demons to bid for your soul.

>So Veeky Forums, how do you like your demons..
entities of a totally grey morality where any action may be sensible and within reason

lawyers of an exquisite degree.

they take shapes that suit them, snatch bodies with permission, bodies can be made for them to inhabit.

>and demon summoning to be like?
variable to setting, with some recurrent things.

prime numbers of things, such as repetitions, walked circuits of the summoning space, participants, symbolic objects, etc.

summoning signs, such as pentacles, sigils, hexagrams, runes, symbols of power, etc.

musicality, such as bells, summoning songs, chants, drums, etc.

I normally like going the warhammer route (at least that's where I know it from) where demons were formed from the thoughts and emotions of all sentient beings. Because of that, they tend to be somewhat based on the creatures of the mortal plane (i.e. Human/animal based)

I think the way my DM ran summoning demons once was interesting. The mortal realm is like demon Disneyland. They're superpowered compared to their state back in hell, and they can go slaughter to their hearts content without much fear of their boss stopping them since the boss doesn't give a shit as long as you're not killing his slaves. But if a demon can't pay the soul tax to enter freely, they can barter their servitude to a denizen of the mortal plane for a period of time.

Which makes summoning a demon a sort of bartering game As they write up a contract. The demon wants the most amount of freedom so they can enjoy their vacation and fuck about, and the mortal wants the most amount of control over the demon.

>5spooke7me
I'm going to have to look up more of his stuff

Being chased by beings that are unimaginably monstrous, the sorts of creatures that devour archangels for fun and could permanently expunge Lovecraftian horrors with a wave of their (hand?)

I never understood why Heaven/Hell/Limbo is the end. If there's life after death, shouldn't there also be a life after the afterlife? Imagine the things that live in those frightful worlds.

Depending on how powerful/influential the demon is, the rites to summon it become more and more dangerous.

For instance, if you wanted to call a demon prince or something like that, the stakes are raised.

Imagine having to read a huge tome with a thousand pages, each word written in a dead language. Pronounce even a single word wrong, stutter even once, and you instantly die.

When in the flesh I like them to have obvious symbolic physical aspects like an idol. Fuck subtility.

>subtility

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The Vincent Price sample? The whole album is on youtube. It's great.

subtlety isn't a hard word to spell

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Fuck you Kanaxai you giant asshole

deer antlers are okay though right?

The evilest of BBEGs. Things that have thoughts that like that of the first of the authors of the Book of Vile Darkness.

If you can have a delayed trigger to summon it, you could use the summoning like a time bomb. Except instead of exploding the victims have to deal with a demon.

>demons
non-existent since forever and an age ago, now the role of the denizens of hell are taken up by devils, merely mischievous entities but not outright malevolent like their predecessors were.

I imagine the people who made and buy this music are the same one's who have flying spaghetti monster bumper stickers.

It absolutely cannot end well for the summoner.

Ever.

Sometimes it doesn't even end well for the demon.

is that done by the dude who did covers for a bunch of ligotti books

Kanaxai was fun and made me rich.

What if the summoner is another demon?

I like them bestial and rapey.
Summoning is very rapey.

Kek

That's the point, occultism gotta be disturbing, otherwise it's just wizardry with edgy theme

Gimme a lifestone.

I like my demons purged

Occultism doesn't have to be disturbing at all. Most of occultism is just stuff that's not accepted by the major world religions and their branches.

40k meme, please go.

I'd rather save the otherworldly tentacle thing for eldritch Lovecraft shit from outside of the known planes... the dark in between worlds or wherever those things come from?

Imo even tho demons are kinda elemental forces of negative or malevolent force, they're still pretty based upon feelings or concepts of humanoids or consciousnesses in the material world, and thus have more "familiar" shapes. Ofc demons can be fucked up and look quite otherworldly, but I think much less so than world-eating horrors from beyond the void: Monstrous, but not mindwarpingly alien.

I would say that there is room for octopus demons in a Japanese setting.

Holy shit, is this legit? This is beautifully batshit, a marvellous medley of oddball octopuses. An untapped treasure trove of memery, for sure.

I don't know what's going on in this picture but it's kinda erotic.
I wonder what he's writing.

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he's a questmaster

It'd be funny if in an MMO there was this monk or priest quest giver who saw sexy demons everywhere but actually just had an overactive imagination.

I think there was something similar in dragon's crown.

Dragon's Crown had surprisingly nice flavour text for the quests.

This. Then again any demon can look great as long as their look doesn´t clash with the setting they inhabit. Will try to dump some demon pics, avoiding Cthulhu and 40k ones. As much as i like those it´s nice to see some other ones occasionally.

A representation of your anxieties perhaps?

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I'd like to play in a Bartimaeus inspired setting at some point. You have daemons of different classifcations, the name giving one of the Quadrology is a Djinni. Other classes are Afrits and Marids. There are also demons that are outside (either too weak or too strong) to be classified.
Summoning is pretty standard actually. You Research the demons name, draw a banishing circle or however you want to call it and carefully recite an incantation. Then you hope you haven't made a mistake and do your best to not make one from here on. And negotiate.
And demons can do pretty much the same the other way round if they get a hold of your birth name.
And besides summoning there is no magic in the setting. All magic of the setting revolves around summoning (with maybe one exception: I don't remember how Golems work in the setting).

Damn, I need to reread the books.

A personal favorite. Demons should be luring mortals with promises of friendship and sympathy as often as wealth and earthly pleasures.

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reminds me of my absolute favorite portrayal of demons/devils, from Nobilis;
they are all-loving, but they love wicked and corrupt things the most because only they are there to give those things love, so they have a weird insanity where they will always be there to help you (especially at your worst) but they will also corrupt and twist you unless you explicitly tell them not to because they just can't understand evil or wrongness in -anything-

I like the idea of demons preying on children by acting as imaginary friends.