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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Jacobs" data-source="post: 2854786" data-attributes="member: 23937">Bringing up the advancement rules for demons (such as those 60-HD balors) is an excellent reason NOT to peg down the demon lords at static CR or power levels. Although I'd assume that 60-HD balors are rare, the Monster Manual infers that they do exist, so it makes sense that the demon lords should be beyond such monsters. This is, in my view, an argument that demon lords shouldn't have stat blocks at all.Also; what makes a good demon lord stat block in one campaign fails in another. In the Forgotten Realms, there are numerous NPCs and mosnters with Epic CR scores; in this campaign, it makes sense to have the demon lords be around CR 30 or higher. In Eberron, where there aren't as many high or epic-level creatures running around (yet), demon lords at the CRs listed in Fiendish Codex might be the way to go. In Greyhawk, they should probably fall somewhere between these two extremes. We could have included stats for all three power levels for all 14 demon lords, but that would have taken up a LOT more room. Since space was such an issue in this book, we had to choose which version of a demon lord's stats to present.Essentially, demon lords have an infinite advancement. If there are 60 Hit Die balors in your campaign world and you want the demon lords to be able to push them around, by all means advance them all by 60 hit dice as well (which basically increases their CR scores by 60 as well, although at this point the concept of CR kind of becomes meaningless, I think).For those who wish to place demon lords on the same footing as deities (which makes a LOT of sense, as they do control vast, often infinite, regions of the multiverse), I recomend that you use the stat blocks in Chapter Three of the Fiendish Codex as powerful aspects or avatars of the demon lord in question. This way, you can even have your PCs encounter multiple aspects of a demon lord at once. Leave the actual demon lords themselves as creatures that mortals cannot hope to face in combat and survive.No matter how you want to use demon lords in your campaign, remember that the sections about each demon lord's appearance, personality, goals, and tactics should be useful to you; this information exists apart from their stats. And of course, Chapter Five of the book gives you a LOT more information about many of them as well (in the context of the various Abyssal layers they control).In any event, fans of the Adventure Paths we've been doing in Dungeon who are nervous about how the demon lords will be handled in the latter adventures in Savage Tide (our third Adventure Path, scheduled to start in issue #139) needn't worry about demon lords being used simply as monsters to fight (or even being creatures you can defeat).</blockquote>

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