*quake announcer voice* DEMONS



I acquired the 1992 ADND supplement Demons in the following way: my friend Brian Taylor took a photograph of a shelf packed with tabletop books and posted it to a discord, and I saw the word “demons” on a spine and enthusiastically posted the word DEMONS multiple times (echolalically saying it out loud in my room in a quake announcer voice at the same time, but that part wasn’t posted). Brian was kind enough to take my goofass response as a reason to offer to grab it for me, and on the strength of echolalia plus some sick art on the cover of the thing I was delighted to accept. Thank you Brian you’re rad as hell.

Demons is a supplement published in 1992 by Mayfair Games as part of the Role Aids line, evidently the first one. Prior to this I have seen a few Role Aids objects on shelves but have never personally interacted with them. I was interested to learn via a wikipedia blurb (attributed to Shannon Appelcline) that this was timed just after ADND’s expunging of demons and devils from its text — an interesting historical context.

The physical object is a nice little card stock folder containing two books (one a game master’s guide, one a diagetic handout of a book on demonology edited by a highly critical wizard hoping for a new breakthrough), a set of statblock sheets hole punched to fit a standard binder with a thicker cardstock divider to make finding it easy to find (featuring the same sick Larry Elmore art of a dragon-demon as the outside of the whole folder, who the stat sheets inform me is Dorndigaffe, Arch Duke of Torments), and a folding map-poster of Infernus, the demon realm of this supplement, art by Joe DeValasco – this poster is sick as hell and I am definitely putting it up on my walls.




The Game Master’s Book reveals that the author of the work is Mike Nystul, whose work I am largely unfamiliar with. It opens with a long discussion of the cosmology of the demons as they are presented here: a dedication to hierarchy and organization of sin, with careful notation of which figures in the courts are scheming against who. This is followed up by a cosmic history of creation (very Silmarillion-esque in how it positions pantheistic figures reenacting very christian conceptions of creation). Demons are tolerated by other supernatural and divine entities because their temptations serve as a sorting mechanism of good and evil mortals. Notably the book calls this a “vague history” and exhorts the making of ones own notes in the material by plugging in more specific names from your own setting to concepts like “gods of law” – its a cute exhortation but I am left feeling that it is much more narrow than the breadth of cosmology I actually practically game with. Especially notable is the writing of binary and misogynistic gender into the cosmology: the human male is said to be created in the forty first eon of creation, with the human female following in the forty second.

A highlight for me is the idea that all demon armies have 100,000 members at all times, very strictly. That’s fun to play with.

Included too are instructions on interpreting the statblocks and deploy them in play. Most of this is pretty simple relitigation of adnd stats and levels and numbers but the personality section stands out for the prose feeling uneven. Demons are divided into various Personality Types (listed on their sheets, more to say on this later) and each gets a quote and a blurb. I’m not super compelled by the simplicity of these divisions but some work just fine, the Craven demon for example sounding compellingly pathetic. The Seductive and (especially) Bestial demons however have blurbs that sound a little like nonspecific social media hornyposts, the latter in particular having the energy of that one gif of a skinny white guy in a poorly fitting suit whipping his bed with a belt that goes around tumblr sometimes.

Really gamable stuff starts to creep in soon after this. A series of what I found to be fairly rote adventure hooks lead into first two ADND classes, the Slayer and Thaumaturge, which as I don’t play ADND specifically I don’t have huge thoughts on but don’t find over compelling. Next up is a pretty utilitarian spell section consisting largely of summoning and banishing various entities of various levels of power who appear in the stat blocks. These are not immediately exciting but feel definitely useful, I imagine I would mark this page and return to it often when using this. The magic items are all pretty meaty, and there are several here I might steal, even the one that is nakedly a lament configuration is a pretty cute take on that which could save me having to write my own if I need something of the sort.

Sandwiched in here are three “Archmagics” which are spells that are whole quests unto themselves. I like these as an idea a lot. One of them being “genocide” is necessarily thorny and feels ill conceived in how it takes that word (“all members of a species get trapped in an extradimensional prison” is an idea you could play ball with just fine but I think the weight of real genocide current and historical weighs on my mind in such a way I would not call this and that the same thing). More productively thorny to me is the idea that “lesser apocalypse” destroys an “identifiable division of territory. If one lord rules an entire world, this single spell can destroy it.” To my suspicious-of-legalism mind, legalistic magic is an opportunity to play fun tricks.

Following a description of the plane of Infernus is an adventure featuring a city that is secretly a vast monument/sigil/summoning circle. The fairly linear nature of the adventure doesn’t inspire me much but the actual city-to-sigil map correspondence is pretty great and I might find a use for it.

The diagetic handout has the impressive title of The Infernicum Mallemancia, or The Greater Blade of Virtue, an exploration, by Silvinus Andrellus of the Order of the Red Comet, Duke High of Numorea. It is ornate and overwrought in a way that works for me in a handout, and heavily annotated in red by a critical thaumaturge identified as “Z.” It mostly gives the same information as the gamemasters guide but in voicier prose with more vagueness/inconsistency as befitting the work of mad sorcerers — interesting to note that it generally matches up with the statblocks in defining what any given demon answers queries on, but sometimes rephrases more vaguely what is involved: “truthfully answers queries about the environment” in the stats being “queries about the earth” in the handout. I wish the font was easier to read but the GM book having most of the same info helps with this.



I have left unsaid that this is pulling heavily from Goetic Demonology but this is a good time to acknowledge that, both in the names of various (though not all) demons involved, conception of them as basically having the shape of christian heresies, and use of sigils that represent each, present in the Infernicum and on a reference sheet among the statblocks. These sigils really might be the treasure trove of the object: I have been on a real “diagetic magical knowledge” kick since running Wolves Upon The Coast, and sigils being extant in the world is a great tool for that. Actual instruction for sigil use is absent, but having the reference material for their images is useful. The part of me always interested in running Grant Morrison styled modern occult conspiracy is delighted to have this tool on hand now. The ability to place treasures of knowledge recognizable to those in the know is always good lever to have ion hand, I think.



The stat blocks themselves come with, in addition to the stats, delightful illustrations (Decarabria, pictured below, being my favorite) of the various freaks described and notes on mannerism and what queries the entities involved do and don’t answer truthfully when invoked. My familiarity with Goetic Demonology is pretty small and pop culturally inflected but I do note that the depictions of the entities whose names I recognize from my dabbling are not the same as the depictions I have seen before. Both light reading on occultism and various furry artists interested in such occultism have depicted Amdusias/Amdosias as a horse guy for example, and the guy in here is notably not a horse guy. Disparities between art and some details of the statblock also make me wonder if there was a procedural element to the writing and description of these figures. I also find the roleplaying notes and inqueries to totally eclipse the much flatter personality entry in the statblock in usefulness.



While I am not nostalgic for the content of these objects, damn do I like the form factor of this thing more than burdensome hard covers. Makes me very interested in looking into the possibility and costs of producing a similarly shaped object as of today.