There are plenty of sources to tell you more about pit fiends, in particular F. Wesley Schneider’s Princes
of Darkness for Pathfinder and Tyrants
of the Nine Hells by Robin D. Laws and Robert J. Schwalb for 3.5. And that doesn’t even touch the years
of Manuals of the Planes and
Planescape supplements.
Instead, I want to talk to you about the psychology of pit fiends. Imagine this: After being incarnated as
a devil—sometimes as low as a base lemure or even one of the damned, you have
risen through the ranks of devilkind.
Along the way you have had to endure and overcome (not to mention simply
survive) gruesome tortures, deadly environments, appalling overseers,
backstabbing peers, duplicitous underlings, and perhaps even the summons of
impudent mortal fleshlings. Even
the act of promotion is a torment—an excruciating metamorphosis that changes
your very morphology, character, and outlook, and which takes you out of the
action (and thus out of influence and power) for up to centuries.
Yet finally, you’ve made it. You are a pit fiend.
You are on top. A
master. The master.
Only. Only
you’re not.
Your underlings want to stand where you do, just as you once
envied and aimed for your superiors.
So watch your back. And you
still must follow orders and earn influence—from more experienced pit fiend
generals and ambassadors, the various infernal dukes (and Whore Queens and the
malebranche, in Golarion’s Hell), and of course the Lords of the Nine
themselves, some of whom now know you by name. So don’t screw up.
You have reached the pinnacle, only to discover another
mountain. You’re like the
valedictorian who got into an Ivy League (or better) school only to find a
college of people smarter than her.
You’re the newly minted CEO now being judged by far more successful
peers, the NYSE, and The Wall Street
Journal. You have spent
centuries, even millennia, fighting to discover that the princess is definitely in another castle, and that
castle belongs to a god: Asmodeus.
And there is no escaping the game. Solars and ghaele paragons would hunt you down. Gods would spurn you. Hell itself—the actual plane—would not
let you leave, literally forming rocky fists to hold you down and strip you of
your status. Not that you would
leave if you could. Outsiders can
change their habits, tactics, and allegiances, but almost never their
alignments and desires.
You are truly damned.
And you hate or despise literally everything
in existence.
Now imagine some mortal tries to summon you, or interfere
with your carefully laid, piano-string-taut plans that you have spent centuries
tuning.
Damn right you would come down on him like a ton of Dis’s
cobblestones.
From his guise as a
humble vizier, a pit fiend has guided the Blessed Empire of Quirinus for
close to three hundred years—founding five cities in the process. When plague breaks out in Karis, a
tsunami swallows Port Royale, and locusts beset Memsin, a disgraced centaur
sage posits that these three destroyed cities form three points on a pentagram. In a rare overreaction, the pit fiend
tries to have the centaur silenced, tipping off adventurers that he may be on
to something. And there are two
cities as yet unmolested…
A pit fiend is
among the guests at a banquet for the Titan of Memory, as are a solar, an
intelligent shoggoth, a half-dragon nephilim, several oni, an aeon, and a night
hag transmuter (who also caters).
An axiomite has brought an adventuring party as bodyguards, and cannot
explain why the pit fiend welcomes them as old friends.
The pit fiend Legulos
has attained the station of duke.
As part of his transformation, he trades hellfire for soulice, grows two
more heads (one to watch the first and one to spy on the second), and builds a
palace of ice. His portfolio is
false inquisitions, and he has a special torment planned for a mortal inquisitor
who eluded him in the past.
—Pathfinder Bestiary
80–81
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