Nemesis Devil

Our second two-page spread monster in a row!  And hoo-boy is it a doozy.

There are lots of things claiming to be gods out there.  Some are actual deities.  Others are demon lords, archdevils, or Great Old Ones powerful enough that to mortal worshipper the difference is academic.  (Particularly in Pathfinder, where these beings grant spells and domain powers and everything.  In 3.5 and D&D in general this wasn’t always the case, but that’s too complicated a subject to get into tonight.)

But that still leaves plenty of charlatans, false gods, fallen idols, and upstart spirits powerful enough to demand worship.  If one of these spirits—or even a mortal man—collects enough worshippers, they become something more than themselves and yet far short of the divine.  And Hell waits for them, molding these souls into advodazas, the nemesis devils.

I dig this notion—it really offers a nice combination comeuppance/promotion to all the false prophets and dragon lords and other cult leaders adventurers have to deal with on a regular basis.  (Hell, the first nemesis devil a party faces could easily be the new shape of someone they once vanquished.)  But it’s the trappings and details that really sell this devil.  Enough false divinity to get domain spell-like abilities.  The ability to bestow an infernal mark through which to grant boons and punishments.  Armor made from the devil’s own “fallen idols and ornaments of devotion”?!?  That's killer stuff.  Fighting a devil is one thing, but fighting a devil covered in fake holy symbols, fetishes, and Easter Island statues?  Whose devil-marked cultists have tormented the PCs for months?  And who it turns out the PCs may have already killed once?  That’s a whole different kind of battle.

Dragons are especially prone to becoming nemesis devils.  Unwilling to cede any more souls to the aeries of Hell, the Great Dragon sometimes tasks his rare human followers to root out dragon cults before they spread.  Destroying a dragon-born nemesis devil’s Material Plane form is one of the highest callings of the faith, and permanently killing one in Hell itself may earn an adventurer an apotheosis into dragon form.

Magr Toth’s appetite for idols in his image finally starved his faith to death, as farming, fishing, and even foraging ceased to feed his demand for sculptors, woodcarvers, and laborers.  But the sacrifice of his people only made his demonic form more terrifying.  Not only is his idol armor particularly strong, but he begins every combat by tossing a giant stone moai like a caber right into his opponents.

Sent by Congress to investigate charges that the tornado rail barons are practicing slavery, a band of adventurers returns to the Wild West they’d sworn they’d seen the last of.  What they find is horror and misery just within the letter of the law.  They also discover something else: So many men, dwarves, and hobgoblins have died in the tornado rail’s construction that the surviving workers have begun to regard the train and its network of wind spires as a kind of angry deity.  Worse yet, some even begin praying to the rail…and Hell itself is listening.  At the ceremony celebrating the erection of Utah’s final wind spire, the lead ventimotive explodes, revealing the metallic form of the nemesis devil who has been answering all the suffering workers’ prayers.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 4 54–55

The Daily Planescape beat me to the advodaza—check it out here.