Demons: Motivations

Everything alive on the material plane has an energy or soul fire. Some call in mana, some call it arcane power, some call it the Breath of Creation. Whatever you call it, it suffuses through everything in the world - rocks, trees, clouds, soil, birdsong, tides, you name it, it's overflowing with the stuff. Most living beings don't recognise this because they're constantly surrounded by it. It's like the air you breathe - you're only really aware of it when there's too much of it or when you're in danger of running out.

This is the same energy that magic-users learn to channel. It is, for all intents and purposes, limitless, but most magic-users can only channel so much of it before they risk breaking down the barriers between their life force and the life force around them; as a sorcerer grows in power, their capacity for this energy grows, and so they are able to command more arcane power without the danger of a fatal magical overload.

There are beings, on other planes of existence, that feed on this energy. Their method of feeding is usually what separates them into semi-distinct categories. These categories are neither complete nor wholly reliable; the chaotic nature of these beings means that placing them into well-defined castes is often an exercise in futility.

Bone Demon

Although they are usually more than a match for a skilled human combatant, bone demons are relatively cowardly, preferring to approach their opponents when numbers and circumstances are firmly in their own favour. Bone demons are torturers and tormenters, feeding on life energy through pain and grievous injury. They will spend days inflicting agonising procedures on their victims before flaying them and draping the skins over their distended bodies like a tattered, bloody cloak.

Every victim that a bone demon tortures to death allows the bone demon to grow more spurs, spines, and sharp ridges on its body. The oldest and most successful are roiling, shivering masses of bone, horn, and keratin.

Defiler Demon

The pious hermit, the dedicated soldier, the steadfast lover; these are the targets of the defiler demon. Defilers are especially powerful demons that require their victims to significantly change, abandon, or reverse their ethics before they can devour their soul fire.

As their methods require a great deal of time and manipulation, defilers often act as patrons to other intelligent creatures, using agents and proxies to slowly change their victim's environment until their values are called into question. A defiler's allies, however, will often find their own behaviour changing subtly over time until they cannot remember the reason they sought out a demonic pact to begin with; defilers always have more than one "project" running at any given time, and those who considered themselves the demon's agents eventually become its victims too.

Interestingly, defilers not only corrupt the faithful and the resolute, but also seek to redeem the damned and reform the condemned. Demons do not share the same concepts of morality as most civilised people, and a defiler only cares that its victim's values are abandoned, not if those values benefit others or not.

In extreme cases, a defiler's plotting has caused a chain reaction of abandoned ethics or ideals, causing an entire community to become vulnerable to the demon's attacks.

Devourer Demon

Also known as frog demons, thanks to their wide mouths, bulging eyes, and warty skin. Devourer demons are lazy, obnoxious, and demanding. They enjoy keeping terrified slaves as a nearby source of labour and sustenance. They draw life energy from intelligent creatures simply by devouring them whole, swallowing their victims into their rocky, crushing stomachs. They prefer their victims to struggle during the process, but not to the point where there is a possibility that their meal might actually get free.

Devourers are amongst the mosk likely demons to make bargains with intelligent creatures, often promising great power in return for a cult of devoted worshippers or a steady stream of victims. As with any other demon, however, their promises are usually empty or lacking in true substance.

Devourers grow larger and larger with every victim they devour, mutating unpredictably as they grow so that the most successful devourer demons look almost nothing alike, sharing only a few fundamental similarities.

Fury Demon

The furies are hideous, swarming horrors that crawl and fly in boiling crowds, searching for anything that might make easy prey. They attack with innumerable teeth and claws, ripping and tearing at their victims. Of all the entities listed here, they are the simplest, drawing life force from living things simply by invoking panicked terror and then shredding a target to bloody ribbons.

A swarm of fury demons has a strange hive mind, and can almost be considered a single creature. New furies emerge from the bodies of their victims as the swarm tears at them, swelling the swarm until, mercifully, it turns on itself and the furies begin destroying one-another. At the end of this frenzied bloodbath, a lone fury demon will emerge victorious and skitter away to begin anew.

Ice Demon

Cruel hunters, ice demons pursue their quarry for hours, days, sometimes longer, before cornering them and confronting them with certain death. The ice demon's intent is to have their prey so weakened by their ordeals that they surrender to their fate. The stronger the quarry at the beginning of the hunt, the greater the fall, and the sweeter the demon's crop when it is finally harvested.

They are called ice demons because they prefer uninhabited stretches of wilderness as their hunting grounds, places where the environment will make life as hard for their prey as possible, compounding the growing sense of helplessness that develops as the demon closes on its prey. Stories of these hideous creatures stalking haunted glaciers or ice fields seem particularly troubling, although their are stories of similar demons chasing their prey through the desert or on the open, featureless ocean.

Ice demons gain more and more control of their environment the more victims they successfully hunt. Those that escape their native plane and settle elsewhere become masters of haunted glaciers, treacherous reefs, and unegotiable tundra.

Seducer Demon

Also known as succubi, stories about these demons are often wildly exaggerated. The easiest way for a succubus to draw on the life force of a living creature is if that creature is experiencing an extreme emotional outburst or climax: overwhelming joy, murderous rage, mindless hatred, relentless sorrow, soul-crushing despair, or heedless lust. When an intelligent creature is going through one of these extreme emotional experiences, they essentially let their guard down and the demon can drain them of life energy until the victim is nothing more than a dried husk.

Naturally, the stories that people cling onto are the ones about an unearthly-beautiful demon floating through a bedroom window at night, but these are no more or less common than the seducer's other methods. Having sex doesn't actually help the succubus at all, but seducing someone does - it will tempt its quarry to their extent for lust, before tricking them into a secluded meeting place...

This means that phlegmatic people are sometimes easier targets for the seducer than more labile targets. If a hedonist is constantly having the time of their life, it might be hard to top that with an experience that will cause them to lower their defences and allow the seducer to attack them.

After draining their victims, a seducer demon can then steal that person's likeness and transform their appearance to resemble them. A veteran succubus might have dozens of forms to choose from when infiltrating a new community or settlement.

Shadow Demon

Also known as serpent demons, due in no small part to their legless, scaly bodies, and cold, reptilian eyes. Shadow demons are only partly corporeal, and are able to possess other creatures in order to whisper in their ear, so to speak, and influence their actions.

Shadow demons are hateful creatures that press their victims to betray their friends, allies, and loved ones. Then, gloating in victory, it violently devours the heart of the creature it was possessing and goes on a bloody rampage.

Each heart so devoured adds to the size and bulk of a shadow demon; the oldest, most cunning of their number are huge specimens capable of wrapping their dark, scaly bodies around entire castles, crushing the masonry within its coils.