We’ve only just spend a whole lot of time looking at demons, and now we’re going to spend a whole lot of time looking at devils. If you’re new to D&D in general, you might be wondering what’s the difference between the two types of monster. Don’t the words “demon” and “devil” mean the same thing? Out here in the real world they pretty much do, but D&D has a long and storied tradition of making every synonym of a word into an entirely different monster.

To understand what 4e devils are like, and what makes them different from demons, I must tell you another story about the World Axis, the cosmology of D&D 4th Edition. This time, it’s about the Astral Sea that exists “above” the world.

Just like the Elemental Chaos combined all the separate elemental planes into one glorious mess, so does the Astral Sea combine all the former non-elemental outer planes into a single whole. The old astral plane, which used to be a featureless gray void, is now a literal sea, and if you look into its silvery depths you can see the light of the stars in the world’s firmament. By sailing the Astral Sea you can reach the domains of the gods, which work both like islands and like worlds in themselves.

Now, there was this one god who had a very powerful exarch named Asmodeus. The god was pretty nice all in all, but Asmodeus kept thinking that he was too nice. “Why”, thought Asmodeus, “if I was the big boss here I could do a much better job. Streamline our processes, leverage our synergies, cut away the fat”. And so Asmodeus built himself an army out of similarly dissatisfied servants of this god, and any other astral entity who wanted a piece of the action.

You might be thinking hey, I heard this one before, and you’d be right. The difference between the classic Lucifer story and this one, is that here the rebellion was successful, since the god in question wasn’t omnipotent. He was still powerful, however. His dying curse twisted the rebel’s bodies into forms that exposed their inner wickedness. The rebellious angels and exarchs became devils. The domain of the dead god twisted into itself and became the Nine Hells. Devils don’t belong in the cosmology the way angels or even evil gods do. Devils are wrong.

Still, devils are a lot more “human-ish” in appearance than demons. Most look like exaggerated versions of tieflings, though technically it’s the tieflings who look like dilluted versions of devils. Even those devils with a more monstrous aspect still have a basically humanoid body plan, which is not a guarantee with demons. Infernal society is militaristic and fiercely competitive, with individual status being determined by a combination of official rank and one’s skill at acquiring mortal souls. In other words, devils compete for promotions by trying to impress their managers with their outstanding productivity.

Anyway, that “acquiring mortal souls” bit is a big part of the reason for why devils are wrong. Lots of people here in the real world say that when you’re evil in live you go to Hell after death, but that’s not how it works in the World Axis. Evil people who die here likely go to the realm of the evil god whose credo more closely matches their ethics. To get souls, devils have to go out and steal them. Each soul stolen by Hell diminishes the power of the gods, and adds to that of the devils. The general idea seem to be that removing enough souls from the hands of the gods will weaken then and allow devils to take over.

So even evil gods would have cause to oppose devils, though it turns out several of them (Bane, Gruumsh, Tiamat, Torog and Vecna) are on more or less friendly terms with Hell because they struck deals with Asmodeus in the distant past. Either they believe themselves safe, or think they can outsmart Asmodeus when it’s time for the backstabbing. What actually happens when that time comes is left as an exercise for the GM. Asmodeus is pretty smart, but so are Vecna and Tiamat.

Devils have all kinds of uses for souls, from playthings to currency to raw material for their mightiest inventions and magics. Their methods of acquisition are many, with the most popular ones being infernal bargains and other types of trickery. Given all of the above I imagine they don’t necessarily try to make you become evil, just to sign the contract.

However, violence is not off the table as a means of soul acquisition. This puts a new spin on “kill them and take their stuff”. When devils fight, they do so in a distinctly different way from demons, and their stats bear this out. Demons are elites more often than not, and tend to fight as mobs of individuals with their assorted sharp appendages. In contrast to this, even higher-level devils are usually regulars, fight with well-crafted weapons, and rely a lot more on teamwork and training.

Asmodeus, now a god, rules all devils from Nessus, the deepest of the Nine Hells. Each of his exarchs rules one of the other eight layers, and while they’re a little less popular than the demon lords, their names are still classics: Mammon, Belial, Belzebub, and so on.

I’m not sure these archdevils are statted in any of the monster books; these entries are for their less powerful underlings. We’ll see them starting next post, using the same order I did with demons: we’ll look at the devils from the MM, and their MV counterparts when they appear. This time it appears that all of the devils that made it into the MV also exist on the MM.

All of the devils here seem to have two names. One is just an adjective followed by the word “Devil”, the other something more exotic sounding. Since they’re listed in the Monster Manual’s table of contents by their more prosaic names, I’ll use those as titles, but I’ll also mention the fancier name in each article.