Fiends in Your Games

[Voadam]

I use monsters from a lot of sources and there are plenty of contradictory legends and theories about them in game.

I stick with pretty standard alignment/plane splits with many outsiders being basically alignment elementals.

However they can rebel and change. There is a Hezrou who turned lawful neutral who became a party ally, and there are plenty of corrupted angels and celestials. Note the Hezrou still is composed of elemental evil and detects accordingly, just over the course of millenia he drifted his alignment to law and was aided in that by being separated from the abyss and lower planes for thousands of years. It was pretty funny when the party later came across a more standard hezrou and were intensely shocked at the violent random evil death and destruction he inflicted.

There is no division between gods and demon lords IMC except on an individual personal power scale, any of them can be worshipped by clerics and have spellcasting cults. The rumors that fiend lords must pact with evil gods to sponsor spellcasting cults is false god propaganda designed to draw power hungry followers to the "true" source of power. In truth neither are necessary for tapping divine power IMC, although their followers and established religions believe they are.

Fiendish politics has become a bigger and bigger theme in our campaign as the party gets more powerful and continues to hunt down supernatural evil.

Currently they are dealing with an unsealed demon cult, but there are diabolic machinations on the horizons that will eventually take center stage.

 

[Shemeska]

Yugoloths rock my socks

3e Planescape game with the 3-fold split among the fiends (and the Gehreleths being the 4th all out in the cold).

I'm pretty blatant in my treatment of fiends as being manifestations of an abstract alignment, I don't water them down in the slightest and my players have had some agonized and bittersweet dealings with them that involved players crying OOC.

I've dove headlong into fiendish politics and powerstruggles (primarily among the Yugoloths, but also with the Baatezu) and I've also gone into the past history of the lower planes where there's unanswered questions, conflicting legends, etc. Loosely associated with the campaign I've been writing fiction to flesh out the 13 Baernaloths of The Demented, the first 3 of whom can be found here , here , and finally here

 

[Eremite]

Fiends don't play a large part in my games frankly because they are so badly designed.

These creatures are supposed to be the epitome of raw evil but their randomly assigned special abilities and qualities don't seem to reflect what they're supposed to be.

No effort has been made in the design of these creatures. Frex, what is a balor? Um, this great flaming thing that was finally officially made immune to fire in 3.5E. Its chief foe is the pit fiend... which is unfortunately immune to fire thus negating one of the balor's principal damage-causing abilities.

Why are tanar'ri immune to lightning? Um, no idea. I think it was the only energy type left and one of the races had to have it. Hmmm, if tanar'ri are immune to electricity and baatezu have no resistance or immunity to it, wouldn't the principal tanar'ri types have an electricity-based attack to assist them in the Blood War?

Of course, I could go on and on about this but the point I am trying to make is that there is a lot of room for a third-party designer to step in and redesign the fiends so that they are better suited to their roles and better suited to the all-consuming Blood War.