How do you do demons correctly? Should they be tragic fallen angels or just angry monsters?

How do you do demons correctly? Should they be tragic fallen angels or just angry monsters?

I prefer irredeemably evil powerful creatures, which are usually cunning enough to make deals with mortals, which they tend to keep to the letter, but still fucking them and everything they love over.

fallen angels are different from demons, but there are hierarchies in both. the only fallen angel is the devil. the rest are basically the spawn of Satan

I've been playing around a setting where the final battle between angels and demons was stoped by a tactical nuclear device.
after the rapture, the humans droped icbms and tactical nukes on the front lines of the final battle and killed most the leadership of both armies. now earth was just a bunch of demons and angels and creatures from hell and heaven and left over from the apocalypse and the humans that were left behind.

Sneaky, manipulative waifus just waiting to get redeemed by That Good Dick, unless they're extra sneaky and merely pretending
Better redeem them again harder, just to be sure

Demons should be unredeemably evil but they should be concerned with maximizing evil in all aspects of the world rather than just being angry monsters

Dangerous, but not necessarily evil monsters, dominated by extremes of attitude and emotion unfamiliar to humans.

I prefer to avoid the Christian themes of demons.

But they look so cool!

Sure, but what I recall of Christian demonology (which I know very little of) they're less complicated morally; falling into that whole "not of God, therefore absolutely no capacity for good" thing going on, which I don't think is quite the same as Jewish demonology as Solomon had several bound demon servants IIRC.

I tend to have them as just another country. They have different customs and different values.

Always Chaotic Evil

I usually default to having demons be literally composed of evil and people having multiple theories as to their origin some of which are complementary while others are contradictory and all being possible.

Regardless demons in my setting are strange...

that makes no sense considering a third of heaven sided with lucifer, so did all them angels not fall with him or did they just die and vanish?

Old Testament's account of angels. Literally inconceivable to mortals, so they lower themselves to playing puppet with things we understand.

...

Why not both? They're tragic fallen angels whose betrayal/imprisonment turned them into angry monsters.

I prefer interpretations of them as being more human in behavior than any other type of divine or profane entity. This is not a good thing for mortals.

They have their own goals, they lie, cheat and manipulate to achieve those goals, they are selfish beings that only care for themselves.

Insane, otherworldly entities drawn shrieking from the primordial chaos that precedes creation.

It's more like dealing with an autistic, murderous savant than a cackling fiend. The signs of summoning and binding are orderly and precisely geometric designs that cause the entity unimaginable agony just by existing. Depending on the form it took when extruded into our reality, it might crave blood, salt, platinum, or red haired children roasted alive.

>greetings, what's going on in this thread?

A paladin should know the most about demons

Any supernatural being which your religion is not friends with.

Primitive nature spirits? Demons of the woodland.
Angelic beings of light? Demons of fire.
Leather and chain coated torturers? Angels of purification.

>BY ZAKARUM

Yes.

>after the rapture, the humans droped icbms and tactical nukes on the front lines of the final battle and killed most the leadership of both armies.

This is the dumbest thing I've read all day.

I like them cunning but completely inhuman and animalistic. They're just using learned behaviours, there's no thought or any particular reasoning behind what they're doing, they just want your soul. So they dangle shiny things, like wealth, power, desire, before you until you just fall into their open maws. They're anglerfish, luring you in with the promise of something nice. That's literally it.

You meet the Devil one day, a handsome, dark man in a pristine suit who speaks the Queen's English and smiles and shakes your hand. But there's nothing behind his icy blue eyes. There's absolutely nothing. It's a mimic. It's a disguise. It's a lure. It uses highly specific terms and writes paper contracts, but at the end of the day, it's a ravenous animal.

Maybe there's times they're rampaging beasts, for when it can't or doesn't need to lure. Food's right there and it aint scarce, like savannah beasts tucking into a carcass.

Demons in my setting are the ultimate expression of spiritual evil (vampires and dragons make up the physical half), and born from darkness itself. Completely and utterly detached from all matters of the world. Wretched awful things that make up some of the worst threats to the world's safety imaginable. Even the smallest little shadowy sprite vomited forth from some dank, dark corner of a lonely cavern is an awful thing brimming with malevolent intent.

I've always liked demons not necessary being evil but their general personality is very self centred or unsympathetic towards most.

Leaves things more interesting for character development. But I am a big sucker for the anti-hero trope.

Selfish riddlers, happy to con and cheat and lie and subvert expected modes of behaviour and fuck over the players.

Ultimately somewhat cowardly but very powerful regardless.

As far as one of my own settings goes, Demons are indistinguishable from other celestials. Whether something is demonic or angelic is all up to the beholder. Immortal beings from the higher planes just are what they are, from a being embodying decay and disease to another being of the very concept of health and well being.

In one of my two primary settings, demons are pretty much just Rakdos themed monsters.

I enjoy both aesthetics.

I like it where demons aren't particularly evil, any more than any other group who failed their coup miserably and got chucked into the shittiest penal colony ever would be.

But they hate humans, more than anything else. Humans were made in God's image, yes? So every time a demon sees a human, it reminds them of every indignity and loss they've ever suffered as a result of the Rebellion in Heaven. So when a human summons them or tries to contact them for a favor, they can get a bit vindictive, the same way you wouldn't be too friendly towards anyone sharing the same face as the person you hate the most.

What's a bit of deception, soul devouring, or a tempting deal that turns sour in the end compared to an eternity living in Hell?

In my setting they're incarnations of chaos and insanity.

While there are no hell or abyss and they have only one supreme ruler who's a "Joker-like" kind of BBEG, they feed on fear and disturbance, often causing mayhem unless being controlled by someone with a purpose, usualy a servant/cultist of said BBEG.

>Solomon had several bound demon servants IIRC.

tbf that was much more a sign of Solomons favored status in the eyes of God, in that he alone was sanctioned by God to control demons for his own purposes.

Not gonna lie, I'd still cuddle that.

Fuck that. Horror movie demons are retarded.

kek

>red haired children roasted alive
delicious snacks

Biblically speaking, demons are the angels who sided with Satan,, were defeated by the angels that remained loyal to God (kind of a given, when a created being tries to rebel against an omnipotent creator), were judged and sentenced to hell. They currently have limited influence on earth, but after Judgment Day they'll be sent to hell along with human unbelievers.

But "demon" and similar terms have been used by various religions to mean different things, and that's not even getting into how modern writers have used them. So if that poster wants to make a world where immortal, spiritual creatures can be stopped by conventional human weaponry following the rapture (itself a non-Biblical concept, assuming he's using the popular definition of it as a millenialist concept), then that's up to him.

Oh, angry monsters, definitely. I don't like angsty bullshit species in my fantasy settings. My demons are mostly developed from 3.5 and 4E fluff. Formless void outside of reality proper "noticed" the Formed cosmos when gods started to form. So that was about when it began trying (well, as much as not-exactly-sentient expressions of entropy can actually try) to dissolve the cosmos. This led to the formation of the Abyss, which is conscious in some sense, to destroy the various tethers holding the cosmos together. The Abyss spawned the demon lords, and then spawned endless hordes of demons, in order to do so.

A massive war ensued, which was a near-extinction event for life on the focal world in the setting's Material plane, mostly because the gods started off by trying to just conscript mortals (who died in droves as a result) before one had the bright idea to create the first celestials as footsoldiers. The gods then had the bright idea to empower a one as an independent commander, gave it the ability to empower its own lieutenants, and gave it a massive army to contain the demon threat. These celestials slowly metamorphosed into devils and are stuck in an endless, grinding war against the demons, giving everyone else breathing room.They aren't happy about being the designated meatshields, as a note.

Demons themselves are creatures of entropy. They don't create, they don't usually plan very far ahead, and they don't care about buying souls. A demonic horde is less a coherent army than a bunch of minor and lesser demons all going in one direction to the same collection of enemies, with a handful of greater demons leading the charge. Strategically, they're utterly outmatched, and mostly dangerous to their main enemies (devils and angels) because they vastly outnumber them in any engagement. While many demons are optimized for certain roles, that just means that they instinctively gravitate towards doing those things. So they're a bit like Tyranids.

Corrupting influences, imagined or manifested.

Personally demonss should be super duper scary ghosts that do super fucky things. Like set plants on fire or make demands.

Angels are way more interesting, right? Like the higher tiers with morals and perhaps forms incomprehensible to humans.

Like a form that could be considered a mangeled ring of body parts and 3 faces, a form that scares a person into righteousness.

Demons are spirits that lead one astray from their goals, morals, ethics, ideals, principles, etc. If your PCs have none of these things then there is no tempting them away from what is right to them. If you cannot tempt your PCs then nothing you do with your demons will resonate.

Demons are outsiders that slip into our world from magic portals embedded in the planet's mantle. You can summon them yourselves as well but they're not interested in much more than looting and killing.

Why not both?

Selfish beings who want more power than the gods.
And seize power... They did.

yea, i like the Ars Magica way of demons, it's weird and interesting because it's so archaic and 'authentic'

the Lovecraftian/Warhammery way of Shadow of the Demon Lord is cool too when it comes to more general fantasy

and Demon: The Descent's way is much more preferable to me in that setting/genre than Fallen's

Tragic fallen angels is for devils. Demons are the unending hordes of the abyss.

Demons spread death and misery because they feed off of it. Anger doesn't enter into their motivations unless someone really pisses them off.