Gristly Demodand

Gristly demodands are stout, bat-winged brutes who wield bloody mauls.  Appropriately enough, they serve their fallen titan masters as assassins, executioners, and torturers.  Seemingly made of skin stretched over half-chewed muscle and tissue, gristly demodands’ hides literally split, ooze, and heal as they move about.  Their victims’ skins are usually not so resilient.

The marilith Me’salis was tired of quarreling with the demodands that lurked on the border of her domain.  So the brilliant tactician simply hired the gristly demodand and his tarry demodand followers, hoping to coöpt them through employment.  She has since tired of the disgusting brutes—while they are excellent torturers, their zeal for tormenting demons spills more ichor than secrets—and she wants them out of the tower they’ve occupied.  When mortal adventurers make an incursion into her castle, she allows them to clean out the demodands’ quarters without interference…though what the adventurers find there may aid them against Me’salis herself.

An arcane poem instructs adventurers that they must “spit in the eyes of the gods even as you deny them.”  Successful interpretation of the line indicates that they need to procure the sacrilegious spittle of a gristly demodand.

The executioner known only as the Stitcher is famous for flaying his victims…and worse still, for unashamedly making clothes out of their skin.  When adventurers try to stop him from executing a woman he knows to be innocent (but who was not released thanks to a technicality), they find his malevolence and his years of wearing skin-suits have turned him into a gristly demodand.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 72

Pathfinder Adventure Path #77: Herald of the Ivory Labyrinth has a big article on demodands courtesy of Amanda Hamon.

Speaking of executioners, has anyone read any of Oliver Pötzsch’s A Hangman’s Daughter Tale novels?  I listened to The Werewolf of Bamberg, and if you could get past the unlikeable protagonists it was worth it for the grim inspiration.  His brutish 1600s Germany is excellent fodder for an Ustalav or Ravenloft campaign.

Tarry Demodand

Also known as a farastu, the tarry demodand is “the grunt of the demodand army”—which, as the Bestiary 3 points out, tells you something about the demodands’ might as a whole, if their grunts are CR 13.  Capable of mowing down demons with their twin masterwork short swords, tarry demodands regard most mortals as little threat.  Whether serving as soldiers of the titans (in Pathfinder), as the multiverse’s prison guards (in 3.5’s Great Wheel cosmology), or pursuing their own dark ends, they are agile and inventive threats.

Pyrehenge has been snuffed out.  The famous druid stone circle with its ever-burning flame in the center has been attacked by tarry demodands.  The fiends hope to pillage the secrets of the druids’ green magic so that their race can be even more prolific.  Their faith-stealing strikes are particularly effective against the divine defenders.

The Firenzi Academy teaches a unique style of fencing, combining the two-handed Valyrian saber technique with an approach that favors improvised and other weapons, especially tanglefoot bags.  Only upon gaining their brown sashes do students learn that their fencing style reflects the natural abilities of the true master of the school: a tarry demodand.  Of course, they only learn this as they are being transported to the Abyss for their transformation into fiendish servitors and soldiers.

Betrayed and gassed into insensibility by a devil, adventurers awaken in a cell to the taunting laughter of a toothy, bat-winged beast dripping tar from every pore.  The good news is they are alive.  The bad news, as they will come to discover, is that they are in a prison, caged in a maze with the Planes’ forgotten hostages and misfits—and with a skeleton crew of tarry demodands as their jailors.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 71

The second episode of Welcome to Maryland is up!  Get it here.

Slimy Demodand

Seated midway in power between the shaggy and tarry demodands, slimy demodands are the brutish, frog-faced shock troops and overseers of the demodand legions.  A slimy demodand (aka kelubar) is an acid-clawed and acid fog-casting terror in battle and intimidating and difficult to fool out of it.

The Sacristy of the Morrowdawn is being preyed upon by a fiend or fiends.  Distressingly, the Sacristy’s holy diviners and soothsayers, usually so prescient on such matters, can read no portents nor find anything in their scrying bowls.  The culprit is at least one slimy demodand, possibly a whole slaving party—all of whom are sheltered from divine sight by their heretical souls.

By coincidence, adventurers book passage on the same ship as another famous adventuring party.  This second group’s fame turns out to be the ship’s undoing, as they are prized targets.  Only a few days out of port half the ship’s crew reveals itself to be huecuvas and mohrgs under strong magical disguises.  The faithless undead steer the ship into the maw of a hammerhead-shark-shaped submersible crewed by slimy demodands who intend to sail everyone back to the Abyss.

Adventurers run up debt in an exotic planar port, stranding themselves.  (Actually, the debts are fraudulent, but the local magistrates don’t care and have the magical means to block the party’s easy egress.)  Their debts are bought by a flame-winged peri, who (when not blind drunk mourning fallen friends and her own sins) seeks to take out a demodand outpost too near the border of Elysium.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 70

Since I’m writing this in the future of 6/1/14 rather than the present of 9/4/13—I don't normally like to confess that I’m scribing one of my entries so long after the fact, but in this case its unavoidable—I can tell you that Pathfinder Adventure Path #77: Herald of the Ivory Labyrinth features Amanda Hamon’s “Ecology of the Demodand,” which looks at the demodands and their relationship to the thanatotic titans.  The article also introduces a new demodand variety, the stringy demodand, to take over many of the slaving duties from their slimy kin.

Of course, while normally I’m an unabashed Pathfinder/Golarion fan, I make an exception for demodands—serving life-creating titans in the Abyss is cool and all, but I prefer my demodands pulling shifts as wardens of the Tarterian Depths of Carceri.

Edit: As mentioned above, this post is a revision.  Original entry: Two 12-hour days (okay, a 13 and an 11; what are you, my mom?) have me wiped out.  I’ll tackle the slimy demodand when I have more juice.  And to my Jewish readers: L’shanah tovah!

Shaggy Demodand

It’s our first demodand!  Are you excited?  I’m excited.

First of all, these are monsters with some history.  They date back to the 1e Monster Manual II—likely owing their name to Jack Vance’s deodands.  In 2e they were relabeled as gehreleths (a fact, by the way, that I did not know until prepping this entry—I’d wondered what happened to those guys!) and (I presume) got much more attention thanks to the Planescape setting.  Demodands/gehreleths were the wardens of the prison plane, the Tarterian Depths of Carceri—resentful guards just as trapped as the prisoners they minded.  In 3.0/3.5, the returned to the name demodands in the Fiend Folio and, best of all, they had (spoilers—katerinasfire: earmuffs) a huge role in the first Dungeon Adventure Path, Shackled City.

In Pathfinder the focus has shifted.  Instead of jailors, now demodands are oozy failed creations courtesy of the thanatotic titans.  They are symbols of an aborted universe that might have been, an alternate belief system undermining the forces of both good and evil.  (Note especially the faith-stealing strike and heretical soul abilities.)  They are also symbols of the tenacity of life, but life gone horribly wrong—of rutting in the dark, of spawning, of young marinating in their parents’ putrefaction.  (Of course, if you still love demodands as wardens, that works, too.)

Shaggy demodands (also known as shator demodands) are the most powerful of the described demodands—nearly as mighty as the titans themselves.  This means they might be their titan masters’ right hands, generals of terrifying Abyssal armies…or eager to foment their own plans throughout the multiverse.  After all, the titans rebelled against the gods.  How long before the demodands get similar ideas…?

After being weakened in a battle with a fiendish umbral dragon, an Elysian titan is captured by a shaggy demodand.  The demodand begins siphoning off portions of the Elysian titan’s power to grant spells to his vile cultists, who revel in their newfound, god-untainted powers causing mayhem throughout the city.

A shaggy demodand known only as the Cestus runs a gladiatorial arena in the seventh layer of Absalom.  He specializes in pitting celestials and other outsiders against exotic mortals armed with weapons that cause their divine opponents the greatest pain.

Dr. Parotoidus is a shaggy demodand who runs the Placitorium, an asylum known throughout the Planes for its extreme treatments of hopeless mental cases.  Only the doctor’s signature—or his death—can release a patient once they’ve been admitted into his care.  Except even that is not enough—the shaggy demodand is not actually the institution’s head, but its first patient.  The real heads, a brother and sister pair of tengus and a sentient spell of imprisonment, have built up the asylum to create an outlet for the demodand’s aberrant and reality-threatening desires.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 69

3.0/3.5 fans, demodands are a great excuse to whip out the Book of Vile Darkness.  Not only are the Book’s vile spells and exotic poisons fantastic in the toad-like hands of the demodands, but the divine-spell-stealing ur-priest prestige class would be perfect for representing a demodand-worshipping cult leader.

Syringesin is back!  I was worried we’d lost him.  And vanadies rightly points out that the shae feature in the module The Midnight Mirror.  (Of course, I love TMM for the positively ruthless lurkers in light…)