What Happens When Demons Die?

Shem has it; Planescape detailed lots of stuff that could happen, depending on the specific place of death and specific type of fiend, but in standard 3.X outsiders that are summoned always return to their plane and outsiders that are called always truly die. The location seems to be irrelevant.
 

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In PlaneScape i know that if a Demon or Devil was killed then it was demoted to a lesser form. Also in PlaneScape one reason there is not full-on war on every plane is that all the powers have somewhat of an agrement.
 

If you don't mind using an older edition, check out the Planescape product Faces of Evil: The Fiends. The book is worth its weight in gold in terms of examining fiendish life cycles, as well as societies, attitudes, etc. 99.9% of the book if fluff, not crunch, and it covered all off the tanar'ri, baatezu, and yugoloths...

...with the exceptions of the yagdoo and the gacholoth. Poor little guys got overlooked entirely!
 

I remember that Errtu the demon (pit demon, I think... or is he a Balor?) anyway, he was slain on the Prime by Drizzt in the Crystal Shard, and they made mention of the fact that he was not dead-dead, but merely banished from returning to the Prime for a century (he is able to get around that loophole later with a little bit of help from Lolth).

As someone else pointed out, though, that was AD&D (not even 2nd Edition), so who knows if that still holds true or not in FR.
 

Important to note that if the creature in question is summoned (rather than called), then it's a generic, average, non-unique individual member of that type, unless your game uses the Summoning Individual Monsters optional rule.

So with a summoned demon, when it dies it just goes poof, discorporates and reforms, ready for use some time later. If the demon in question has been called, then when it dies that's all she wrote - it's plain ol' regular style dead.


As for the Plane Shift and come right back part - check out the spell description. Plane Shift isn't very accurate as for where you end up on the target plane: "Precise accuracy as to a particular arrival location on the intended plane is nigh impossible. From the Material Plane, you can reach any other plane, though you appear 5 to 500 miles (5d%) from your intended destination." So at that point any outsider looking to pop right back into the thick of things would not only have to PS back to the Prime, but then probably Scry on the person they want to get at, then Teleport there before any havoc wreaking can begin.

And frankly, any outsider - demon or otherwise - that can bust out with those kind of resources at the drop of a hat deserves to be able to be very hard to be rid of. But this would be more for dealing with just banishing said outsider and assuming they're dealt with, rather than killing them.


If you wanted some badass demons that you can't kill normally, and otherwise killing them just sends them home for a while to stew, maybe look into cooking up some demonic equivalent of a lich's phylacrity. Takes care of some things rather handily, like not every rank and file demon being that invulnerable (unkillable lemures? bleh), killing them just sending home (body reforms at phylacrity, which is in hell somewhere), and having to kill them on their home plane in order to keep them down for good (gotta destroy their phylacrity, which coincidentally is back home).
 

I also seem to recall that in earlier editions, back when demons still had types, it was only the higher numbered sorts that actually reformed, whereas the weaker ones were simply killed and that was that.

A method I'm more inclined to use, personally. It might be all well and good for a pit fiend to reform, but a bunch of lemures, manes, nupperibo and the like should just be gone when given the axe. The entire reforming thing is something I probably wouldn't extend even to pit fiends; I'd just leave it to those demons who have ascended from being any fiend type and essentially become a unique being (like most archfiends).
 

I'd have to read my books again, but I thought part of it had to do with the method used to travel the planes. Plane hopping methods that involve traveling the Astral Plane involve leaving behind your real body and reconstituting a new body from the substances of any visited plane. Thus if your new body dies, you generally just wake up in you original body.

If you travel physically from place to place, you are then killable no matter where you are, but you have the advantage of not leaving behind the vulnerable empty shell or the telltale silver cord.

I understand that demons and other Outsiders might work under different rules, but I always assumed it was similar to this dichotomy. It's the difference between going there and simply projecting there.
 

Rules as per MMI (1st Edition):

Demons are able to move from their own plane into those of Tarterus, Hades or Pandemonium or roam the astral. However, they cannot enter the material plane without aid (conjuration, gate or by name speaking or similar means)

Than on death it sais:

Demons of type V and above are not actually slain when their material form is killed in combat; their material form being removed from their use, the demon in question is thereby forced back to the plane whence it originally cam, there to remain until a century has passed or until another aids it to go forth again.


Hope that helps somewhat...
 


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