D&D (2024) D&D Marilith Is Far More Bestial In 2025

The new 2025 Monster Manual has all-new art, and one major change is the depiction of the marilith. Up until now, the marilith has been depicted as a six-armed humanish female from the waist up; while in the 2025 book, the picture is far more bestial in nature.

Not only is the imagery more demonic, it also features the creature in action, simultaneously beheading, stabbing, and entwining its foes with its six arms and snake-like tail.

Left 2025 Marilith / Right 2014 Marilith​

 

[Maxperson]

Oh, that's convenient.

So I just looked and they are basically cambions. So instead of 11 female demon/demon types there are only 10.

Oh, and it is actually the complete opposite of convenient, because if I had remembered, I would not have used them. It was very inconvenient to make that mistake and have you seize on the 1 out of 11 to make your point.

 

[Hussar]

Hang on a tick. Hold on. Wait.

Ok, @Maxperson, I'll buy the idea that a soul is sent to the Abyss and becomes a demon and retains gender. Ok.

So, that means that a male marilith is perfectly posssible. After all, all demons are simply uplifted from lesser to greater forms. Then why are you arguing that mariliths have to be female? After all, it's entirely plausible that a male soul would be uplifted just as often as a female one.

 

[Maxperson]

Are souls alive?

Are they a species

Do souls have a biology? You are reading into the idea that a soul retains it's self after becoming a demon - something that you've added, not something that is spelled out in the lore.

Yes. You can go there to interact with or even kill petitioners. Souls in the outer planes have physical form, breathe, eat, etc. They aren't ghosts. They just have no memory of their former lives.

It's essentially a different state of being, rather than being some non-corporeal entity. As far as I know, unless they get changed into a demon, devil or some other form, they retain the race that they had in life. Whether they can have children or not is not something I know/remember.

I'm not actually reading into it the idea that it retains mortal influences. I'm saying that the biology that we see in demons from 1e to 5e is explained by such an influence. It's not an automatic thing that all of the gender lore and artwork over the editions doesn't actually exist just because they are demons and you feel that they shouldn't have gender.

 

[Maxperson]

Hang on a tick. Hold on. Wait.

Ok, @Maxperson, I'll buy the idea that a soul is sent to the Abyss and becomes a demon and retains gender. Ok.

So, that means that a male marilith is perfectly posssible. After all, all demons are simply uplifted from lesser to greater forms. Then why are you arguing that mariliths have to be female? After all, it's entirely plausible that a male soul would be uplifted just as often as a female one.

Demons from the lore that I've seen, get promoted upwards from being manes. They are changed by the true demons and demon lords into their new statuses and forms. Mariliths have never been male in any lore or pictures until 5.5e.

That said, there is the lore shown a while back that says that demons can shift their genders, so I suppose if a DM wanted male mariliths in his game, that would be an easy way to explain them.

 

[Hussar]

Demons from the lore that I've seen, get promoted upwards from being manes. They are changed by the true demons and demon lords into their new statuses and forms. Mariliths have never been male in any lore or pictures until 5.5e.

That said, there is the lore shown a while back that says that demons can shift their genders, so I suppose if a DM wanted male mariliths in his game, that would be an easy way to explain them.

But, like you just said, demons get promoted up. So, their gender comes from whatever gender they had while mortal. So, it's entirely plausible to have male Mariliths. Now, fair enough, this is the first image we've had of a male marilith. That's groovy. It's just showing what's always been true - demons can be whatever gender.

I'm just basing all of this on what you're telling me. Petitioners become demons after being trapped in the Abyss (for whatever various reasons). They get uplifted by other more powerful demons who need whatever it is they need at the time. Since the gender of the demon is determined by the soul, then it's perfectly reasonable that demons can have a range of genders and thus it's been a mistake in D&D to not depict demons of various genders over the years.

Glad we finally came to an agreement on this.

 

[Maxperson]

But, like you just said, demons get promoted up. So, their gender comes from whatever gender they had while mortal. So, it's entirely plausible to have male Mariliths. Now, fair enough, this is the first image we've had of a male marilith. That's groovy. It's just showing what's always been true - demons can be whatever gender.

I'm just basing all of this on what you're telling me. Petitioners become demons after being trapped in the Abyss (for whatever various reasons). They get uplifted by other more powerful demons who need whatever it is they need at the time. Since the gender of the demon is determined by the soul, then it's perfectly reasonable that demons can have a range of genders and thus it's been a mistake in D&D to not depict demons of various genders over the years.

Glad we finally came to an agreement on this.

The default for marilith is female humanoid torso and lower body of a snake. The picture is male, but isn't really even a marilith as it has some sort of bumpy torso and some sort of scaled snakelike body.

As for finally coming to an agreement, I said many, many pages ago that DMs can change them however they wish. I've been talking about the default, not whether or not DMs can have male mariliths in their game or not. Of course they can have male mariliths, or a female Thor, or whatever other changes the DM wants to make.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

There are many types of Demons, at least 20 different types probably more than 30 different types. They come from many disparate origins too, some of them are spiritual expressions of chaos and evil, others are results of the corruption on living beings by the Abyss or powerful demons, or just something that was created by a Demon lord.

They don't have one consistent origin, they're beings of chaos after all.

So there's at least 5 ways to make a Demon:
1. As souls in the afterlife of someone aligned with chaos and evil, starting from larvae or the lowest ranks like Manes, Dretches or Rutterkin who then advanced to higher ranks over the eons.
2. Biologically, Demons can mate with each other and with other beings. Some have sexes like male and female, some aren't either and some happen to be both or something else. While some Demons might be spiritual expressions of malevolence or constructs which may be facsimiles of biological beings with functioning biology, others are much closer to living beings, and are more like the types of biological life that exists on Material Plane except they're the biological life of the Abyss. After there's species like Stench Kow from the Abyss which are related to Cows, and there are some species from the Abyss who are comparable to the Humanoids of the Material Plane.
3. From living beings that have been corrupted by Demons or the Abyss itself. Some Demons have the ability to curse mortals and turn them into Demons.
4. Spawned by the Abyss itself. All outer planes are sentient and have some degree of a consciousness, especially the Abyss with it's malevolent intentions. The plane itself will create Demons.
5. Created by a Demon Lord or some powerful Demon or God. There's Demons like Retrievers which are constructs, Yochlol which Lolth created or special types of undead created by Orcus.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Although sages group demons into types according to their power, the Abyss knows no such categories. Demons are spawned from the stuff of the Abyss in a near-infinite variety of shapes and abilities. The common forms that are familiar to demonologists represent broad trends, but individual demons defy those tendencies. For instance, a vrock might crawl out of an oil slick in the Demonweb Pits with three eyes and vestigial wings. A chasme might appear on the layer of Azzagrat possessing the ability to belch forth clouds of flies.

That sounds like it’s mostly random and it says later they just start changing with time until they become a unique being like a demon lord.

For devils it explicitly doesn’t matter.

To a devil, gender is insignificant. Devils can’t create new life through physical means; a new devil comes into being only when a soul is corrupted or claimed in a bargain, and the gender of the mortal that provided the soul is immaterial. Devils that represent themselves to mortals are likely to adopt an appearance (including an apparent gender) that conforms with what those mortals believe to be true. Gender (and the assumptions that mortals make about it) is just another tool for devils to use to get what they want.

 

[pemerton]

And demons and devils having children with each other?

So does the demon corrupt the devil's soul, or vice versa? Because they can have babies with one another.

From Bastion of Broken Souls, p 4:

The Cathezar . . . is a fiend, but is an outcast among both demons and devils - she is half demon and half devil, spawn of a doubly unholy union.​

This doesn't tell us that the Cathezar was ever a baby. Nor that the "union" from which she was "spawned" was a sexual one in any conventional sense.

 

[pemerton]

And, exactly how were alu-demons/fiends created?

As per the AD&D Monster Manual II (p 36):

Alu-demon (Semi-demon)

. . .

The alu-demons are the offspring of the mating of succubi and humans. They are always female.​

They contrast with the cambion (p 37):

Cambion (Semi-demon)

. . .

When a human female mates with a demon, the offspring is always a cambion male. The general characteristics and abilities of a cambion depend upon its parentage.​

There is then a table and further text that implies that the demon "parent" is either a greater demon or a demon prince, although it's a bit unclear, especially because at different parts of the creature entry "minor" and "major" are both used to describe the same category of cambion.