So The PC's have come across an imprisoned pit fiend. He has offered them his one wish spell per year (porting this from 3.5 but am playing 5e) in exchange for his freedom. He is tremendously weakened and desperate at the moment. We left the session with the wizard about to draw up the contract as dictated by the fiend.
My question is threefold. . . first, what should be in the contract? Second, how does a dm twist the intended consequences of a wish spell in a fun and interesting way? Whatever the party wishes for, I want to be able to manipulate the result so that they're not getting exactly what they want (it's a pit fiend granting it, after all). But how does one do this on the fly? The session will begin with the contract being drawn up and most likely with the PC's stating their intended wish so I'm going to have to twist it around in the moment.
Thirdly, if they release the fiend, he will be stuck on the Material Plane for a bit while he recuperates. What would a pit fiend like to do on the Material Plane if there's nothing in the contract that states that he cannot wreak havoc while there?
Re: the contract, I've found a few good resources for devil's contracts but would love anyone's input here who's drawn one up.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, thanks very much!
I'd say if you can't think of a downside to a spell in the moment, let it work as intended and figure out a downside later on. That said, if your players really go out of their way to make sure that they craft a reasonable, non-game-breaking Wish that is very carefully worded to avoid any major downsides, you should reward their resourcefulness by having it just work as intended.
I think a Pit Fiend stuck on the material plane would probably focus on gathering minions. Pit Fiends are usually in charge of vast legions of underlings, so they're probably not used to doing things like preparing their own food or like... maintaining a house or something. I think it could lead to some fun down the road, because gradually there would be something like a criminal organization or cult or band of raiders led by a Pit Fiend.
Agree on the "works as requested" for openers, provided there isn't an obvious (to you) loophole in the contract. An alternative would be to request the player submit the contract a day or so before your next session, to allow you time to find and exploit any loopholes you find. As stated, this fiend is going to try VERY hard to turn the Wish into a screw job for the party, so dedicating some time to REALLY working it out is a good idea.
Also as mentioned, the fiend would most likely be focused on gathering minions to begin a reign of terror. Hey, it's what they do, so no surprise there lol.
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Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
This is extremely helpful, many thanks, TransmorpherDDS and Falwith. Sage advice and you’re right. . . always best practice to reward resourcefulness, in this case if they’re actually able to pull off a clean deal with a devil.
I love the idea of his recruiting followers and becoming a massive can of worms for the party!
Follow up question. . . by what means would a pit fiend make it back to the hells outside of being destroyed?
I think something interesting for a Pit Fiend to do is not attempt to return to the Hells, but rather, use their position on the Material Plane to try and open up a big, permanent doorway to the Hells. It's rare for a Pit Fiend to be on the Material Plane, and as you pointed out... if the Pit Fiend really wanted to get back home all it has to do is kill itself and it will manifest back in its home plane. But being on the Material Plane gives it a unique opportunity to do things that aren't possible from the Hells... so maybe your players eventually need to stop the Pit Fiend they released from opening up a huge portal and letting an army of Devils flood into the Material Plane and start taking over.
That is extremely well-considered advice, Lyxen, thank you. It actually buys me much more freedom and time to figure out if and how things go sour depending on the roll. A high INT roll actually allows me months or years of game time to come up with the in-game effects of the contract and the wish.
TransmorpherDDS, that’s a very fun idea and actually can tie well into the arc of the story. Going to tweak it a tiny bit and then run with it.
You're very welcome. I love devils and their deals, and I have faced the problems many times myself, asking myself how I could roleplay such a powerful and devious entity.
One more think that you can do to make your player sweat is to ask him to make a blind check, i.e. rolling the dice but not knowing what the result is. You can do that physically by asking to roll in a cup, and most VTTs allow you to do this as well. That way, the player will not even know whether he can trust the deal or not, and that will make him rightly cautious. And even without cheating on your side, you gain the advantage of twisting things the way you want and at the rhythm that you want.
I love that idea. Tormenting the player(s) for who knows how long may be worth more than any downside to a contract with evil far more intelligent and experienced than the players. There is also of course, the simple answer if any of the players worship a good deity. Such deities frown on consorting with evil.
This is so great, thank you, Lyxen and Vince_Snetterton, for the additional input. The blind check has me so excited about this. The players are absolutely going to love navigating this bit of business.
The pit fiend has claimed the spell is a wish spell but have you considered that he is probably not telling them everything, maybe every time they cast it a part of there soul goes to hell, maybe someone close to the caster suffers the consequence of the good luck caused by the wish.
I will say be very very careful with how you allow this spell to be used wish by definition can be a game breaking spell, maybe make the wizard have to invoke a ritual of some sort as a way of making the player give you some idea of the wish they will cast ahead of time rather then simply allow them to cast it mid battle and “wish the bbeg” dead.
Good advice, Scarloc_Stormcall, especially about the ritual, thanks. Re: wishing a BBEG dead, there are lots of ways to make that a really unfortunate experience for the PC's but I definitely hear what you're saying. Wording is everything.
Just jumping on to let everyone know that the session went incredibly well, thanks in very large part to the advice I got here. Many thanks to you all, very much appreciated!
Glad it went well. I just wanted to offer this follow-up thought: In my game, angels can automatically void any infernal contract. Any angel can void any contract written by any devil. It's considered an "act of God."
It drives the devils insane with rage, because they think they're the only ones with good lawyers.
The reason it doesn't happen more often is that angels just don't have that much sympathy for the types of people who enter these arrangements. Plus, there's the price they extract. Devils give their counterparties their part of the bargain upfront; angels want you to go be nice to poor people and do charitable works while you're still alive. It's easier for a D&D player to just murder the devil who holds their contract, or condemn some other poor slob who's stuck in a soul coin.
Glad it went well. I just wanted to offer this follow-up thought: In my game, angels can automatically void any infernal contract. Any angel can void any contract written by any devil. It's considered an "act of God."
It drives the devils insane with rage, because they think they're the only ones with good lawyers.
The reason it doesn't happen more often is that angels just don't have that much sympathy for the types of people who enter these arrangements. Plus, there's the price they extract. Devils give their counterparties their part of the bargain upfront; angels want you to go be nice to poor people and do charitable works while you're still alive. It's easier for a D&D player to just murder the devil who holds their contract, or condemn some other poor slob who's stuck in a soul coin.
In the past all contracts I have had devils make have stated conditions related to the players killing the contract holder without a number of addenums being met, in fact one pathfinder adventure saw the players take out a contract with a devil, then be forced to kill that same devil for "reasons" which then led to us roleplaying out the court proceedings as the player who had signed the contract had to explain how he was not bound by the terms of the contract to be immediately imprisoned in Hell. Whole thing had been a power grab and the players where simply pawns in a far bigger, longer term plan, which they then managed to thwart and ended up with a major devil owing them a favour.
Glad it went well. I just wanted to offer this follow-up thought: In my game, angels can automatically void any infernal contract. Any angel can void any contract written by any devil. It's considered an "act of God."
It drives the devils insane with rage, because they think they're the only ones with good lawyers.
The reason it doesn't happen more often is that angels just don't have that much sympathy for the types of people who enter these arrangements. Plus, there's the price they extract. Devils give their counterparties their part of the bargain upfront; angels want you to go be nice to poor people and do charitable works while you're still alive. It's easier for a D&D player to just murder the devil who holds their contract, or condemn some other poor slob who's stuck in a soul coin.
In the past all contracts I have had devils make have stated conditions related to the players killing the contract holder without a number of addenums being met, in fact one pathfinder adventure saw the players take out a contract with a devil, then be forced to kill that same devil for "reasons" which then led to us roleplaying out the court proceedings as the player who had signed the contract had to explain how he was not bound by the terms of the contract to be immediately imprisoned in Hell. Whole thing had been a power grab and the players where simply pawns in a far bigger, longer term plan, which they then managed to thwart and ended up with a major devil owing them a favour.
Yes, for me it's very interesting to roleplay the infernal hierarchy properly, with all its consequences. A devil is rarely alone, and certainly not in proposing pacts, and the reason for which people get trapped is often because of all the references to other contracts and situations stipulated in other pacts that they have never heard of. The solution, as you point out, should often be with Hell's politics which are very interesting in and of themselves.
I love visits to hell, it is one of the best ways to make even the most powerful players understand that really they are just a small part in a universe that is revolving around other larger things. Nothing like a high level group of players thinking they are going to fight there way through Dis, only to then be caught up in protocol and paperwork, or escape the 9 Hells to have a devil appear with a list of charges informing them they are due to appear before a court to answer for the laws they broke while there. Once had a Cleric take it upon herself to try to free the slaves while doing something very different in Hell, that turned into a whole storyline as she was charged to either return those souls back to there place, or find an equal number of souls, when she went to her god for help He had to explain to her that actually, the rules of Hell are baked into the rules of existence, Asmodeus and by extension all under him have rights to those souls and as such she had to make it right, or risk upsetting the balance that prevents the Abyss from swallowing up all. Was a chastening experience for a player who thought because she was lawful good cleric, she could do whatever she wanted against the forces of evil, anywhere she was.
Exactly, in addition to raw power, there are good reasons for which the forces of "heaven" actually have to acknowledge the need for hell. The trial of Asmodeus and how it can be woven into the narrative and in particular Descent in to Avernus makes it really one of the greatest adventures published yet, even if it needs a bit of work to complete it as always.
But IS there a need for Hell? As a place, as a metaphysical location, of course. Something has to exist between Hades and Mechanus. But did the fallen angels of D&D actually take up the burden of fighting the Blood War, or is that just a lie they tell themselves? The Blood War has actually been a net benefit to Asmodeus, since it distracts his cohort from noticing what a truly shitty job he's doing bringing them the glory and power he promised them before the Fall. In this way his situation is familiar to a lot of us who watch incompetent autocrats rattle sabers at one another for domestic political reasons, shouting idealistic rhetoric the whole time.
Why have Wizards - and TSR before it - spent so much time on the Blood War when the demons could just attack the Upper Planes through Limbo? Or the Outlands/Concordant Opposition? No one has greater respect for the slaads (slaadi?) than I do, but Orcus vs Ygorl? That's a whitewashing. And yet, the demons keep marching in exactly the wrong direction. The genuinely poetic insight that Monte Cook, or whoever it was who designed the Great Wheel, had was that evil people hate each other because they're evil and good people find a way to work out their differences because they're good.
If we stipulate that the Blood War can't be won or lost, by either side, ever, the fallen angels - who are not indigenous to their plane in the way that the demons are - could just stop being eaten by demons, swallow their pride and go home chastened, and abandon Asmodeus to his selfish quest for universal ownership. They don't and they won't, for several reasons, but they could. The history of Graz'zt implies this; one ending of DiA makes this explicit. Progress out of Hell, in one direction or another, is an option.
And that leads me to where I am with soul coins. These were a fantastic invention (sincerely, hats off to whoever came up with the idea) because they finally finally made sense of D&D devils' interest in something as ephemeral as a human soul. You can burn them. Quick and dirty spelljamming to power the war machines. Are the souls in Hell already damned? Yes. Did they make their choices? Yes. But there is a small grey area between "imprisoned and tortured for eternity" and "annihilated;" and that area is made of hope. I had a player who was playing a rough tough half-orc barbarian. She asked a question of a soul coin, realized there was someone in there, and couldn't bring herself to burn that particular one. It was an irrational decision, but one that was rich in dramatic potential. I haven't got time to really explore this phenomenon in game, but it exists and it's interesting.
It would be impossible for me to express how much I love the fact that this thread has continued after the session is completed. This community is phenomenal. Many thanks for the additional and extensive thoughts on the Hells and diabolic contract negotiation! Which brings me to. . .
the pit fiend is now recovering its strength on the Material Plane after being imprisoned there and slowly drained of its essence for numerous millennia. Here's some info:
1.) the PC's have freed him in exchange for one Wish which they have a week in-game to devise.
2.) Both parties are contractually agreed not bring physical harm of any sort to the other either directly or indirectly.
3.) The pit fiend holds a prominent position as "right hand fiend" to an Arch Duke on Minauros. He feels that he can't return to Minauros other than at full strength in order to retake his position from whomever has replaced him and eventually overtake the dukedom. The amount of time he has on the Material Plane is basically whatever I want it to be as I determine how long it will take for him to get his strength back.
He's in a backwater area surrounded by only small hamlets, etc., some of which he knows have meaning to the PC's. So. . . what would a Pit Fiend do for fun on the Prime Material? Some of you mentioned previously that he'd immediately seek followers. What might you imagine he'd do with those followers? Take over a major city? Would he want to get back to Minauros as soon as he's healthy in order to reclaim his position of importance within the pecking order?
The wizard who imprisoned him thousands of years ago is the BBEG of the campaign but neither he nor the PC's know yet that they (the PC's) will have a final face-off with that wizard. When they do fight the BBEG (months from now in-game and out), the pit fiend would want to see them win but ALSO get them somehow to breach their contract with him so that he can claim one or all of their souls.
Anyway, you all have offered so much, no worries if this feels like flogging this poor, dead horse. But if anyone feels like they'd like to offer up some thoughts, they'd be hugely appreciated as always.
Well, the pit fiend probably wouldn't just want to return to the Nine Hells with their old strength. They'd want to have something to show for it. I assume that no one in the immediate area has even a slight chance of stopping the pit fiend. If so, it would probably declare itself a ruler over the region, burn down any temples, and make the area's residents worship it. Then it would conscript the people of the region into an army, and, using its military genius, begin to conquer the surround areas, laying down the foundations for an empire who's only gods are the fiends of the Nine Hells. Then, once it rules the territory with an iron fist, it will appoint a trustworthy and power-hungry cultist as a regent in its place and it will return to the Nine Hells, with an entire nation under its sway.
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Homebrew (Mostly Outdated):Magic Items,Monsters,Spells,Subclasses ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
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So The PC's have come across an imprisoned pit fiend. He has offered them his one wish spell per year (porting this from 3.5 but am playing 5e) in exchange for his freedom. He is tremendously weakened and desperate at the moment. We left the session with the wizard about to draw up the contract as dictated by the fiend.
My question is threefold. . . first, what should be in the contract? Second, how does a dm twist the intended consequences of a wish spell in a fun and interesting way? Whatever the party wishes for, I want to be able to manipulate the result so that they're not getting exactly what they want (it's a pit fiend granting it, after all). But how does one do this on the fly? The session will begin with the contract being drawn up and most likely with the PC's stating their intended wish so I'm going to have to twist it around in the moment.
Thirdly, if they release the fiend, he will be stuck on the Material Plane for a bit while he recuperates. What would a pit fiend like to do on the Material Plane if there's nothing in the contract that states that he cannot wreak havoc while there?
Re: the contract, I've found a few good resources for devil's contracts but would love anyone's input here who's drawn one up.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, thanks very much!
I'd say if you can't think of a downside to a spell in the moment, let it work as intended and figure out a downside later on. That said, if your players really go out of their way to make sure that they craft a reasonable, non-game-breaking Wish that is very carefully worded to avoid any major downsides, you should reward their resourcefulness by having it just work as intended.
I think a Pit Fiend stuck on the material plane would probably focus on gathering minions. Pit Fiends are usually in charge of vast legions of underlings, so they're probably not used to doing things like preparing their own food or like... maintaining a house or something. I think it could lead to some fun down the road, because gradually there would be something like a criminal organization or cult or band of raiders led by a Pit Fiend.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
Agree on the "works as requested" for openers, provided there isn't an obvious (to you) loophole in the contract. An alternative would be to request the player submit the contract a day or so before your next session, to allow you time to find and exploit any loopholes you find. As stated, this fiend is going to try VERY hard to turn the Wish into a screw job for the party, so dedicating some time to REALLY working it out is a good idea.
Also as mentioned, the fiend would most likely be focused on gathering minions to begin a reign of terror. Hey, it's what they do, so no surprise there lol.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
This is extremely helpful, many thanks, TransmorpherDDS and Falwith. Sage advice and you’re right. . . always best practice to reward resourcefulness, in this case if they’re actually able to pull off a clean deal with a devil.
I love the idea of his recruiting followers and becoming a massive can of worms for the party!
Follow up question. . . by what means would a pit fiend make it back to the hells outside of being destroyed?
Thanks again!
I think something interesting for a Pit Fiend to do is not attempt to return to the Hells, but rather, use their position on the Material Plane to try and open up a big, permanent doorway to the Hells. It's rare for a Pit Fiend to be on the Material Plane, and as you pointed out... if the Pit Fiend really wanted to get back home all it has to do is kill itself and it will manifest back in its home plane. But being on the Material Plane gives it a unique opportunity to do things that aren't possible from the Hells... so maybe your players eventually need to stop the Pit Fiend they released from opening up a huge portal and letting an army of Devils flood into the Material Plane and start taking over.
Watch Crits for Breakfast, an adults-only RP-Heavy Roll20 Livestream at twitch.tv/afterdisbooty
And now you too can play with the amazing art and assets we use in Roll20 for our campaign at Hazel's Emporium
That is extremely well-considered advice, Lyxen, thank you. It actually buys me much more freedom and time to figure out if and how things go sour depending on the roll. A high INT roll actually allows me months or years of game time to come up with the in-game effects of the contract and the wish.
TransmorpherDDS, that’s a very fun idea and actually can tie well into the arc of the story. Going to tweak it a tiny bit and then run with it.
Thank you both for the input!
I love that idea. Tormenting the player(s) for who knows how long may be worth more than any downside to a contract with evil far more intelligent and experienced than the players. There is also of course, the simple answer if any of the players worship a good deity. Such deities frown on consorting with evil.
This is so great, thank you, Lyxen and Vince_Snetterton, for the additional input. The blind check has me so excited about this. The players are absolutely going to love navigating this bit of business.
The pit fiend has claimed the spell is a wish spell but have you considered that he is probably not telling them everything, maybe every time they cast it a part of there soul goes to hell, maybe someone close to the caster suffers the consequence of the good luck caused by the wish.
I will say be very very careful with how you allow this spell to be used wish by definition can be a game breaking spell, maybe make the wizard have to invoke a ritual of some sort as a way of making the player give you some idea of the wish they will cast ahead of time rather then simply allow them to cast it mid battle and “wish the bbeg” dead.
Good advice, Scarloc_Stormcall, especially about the ritual, thanks. Re: wishing a BBEG dead, there are lots of ways to make that a really unfortunate experience for the PC's but I definitely hear what you're saying. Wording is everything.
Just jumping on to let everyone know that the session went incredibly well, thanks in very large part to the advice I got here. Many thanks to you all, very much appreciated!
Glad it went well. I just wanted to offer this follow-up thought: In my game, angels can automatically void any infernal contract. Any angel can void any contract written by any devil. It's considered an "act of God."
It drives the devils insane with rage, because they think they're the only ones with good lawyers.
The reason it doesn't happen more often is that angels just don't have that much sympathy for the types of people who enter these arrangements. Plus, there's the price they extract. Devils give their counterparties their part of the bargain upfront; angels want you to go be nice to poor people and do charitable works while you're still alive. It's easier for a D&D player to just murder the devil who holds their contract, or condemn some other poor slob who's stuck in a soul coin.
In the past all contracts I have had devils make have stated conditions related to the players killing the contract holder without a number of addenums being met, in fact one pathfinder adventure saw the players take out a contract with a devil, then be forced to kill that same devil for "reasons" which then led to us roleplaying out the court proceedings as the player who had signed the contract had to explain how he was not bound by the terms of the contract to be immediately imprisoned in Hell. Whole thing had been a power grab and the players where simply pawns in a far bigger, longer term plan, which they then managed to thwart and ended up with a major devil owing them a favour.
I love visits to hell, it is one of the best ways to make even the most powerful players understand that really they are just a small part in a universe that is revolving around other larger things. Nothing like a high level group of players thinking they are going to fight there way through Dis, only to then be caught up in protocol and paperwork, or escape the 9 Hells to have a devil appear with a list of charges informing them they are due to appear before a court to answer for the laws they broke while there. Once had a Cleric take it upon herself to try to free the slaves while doing something very different in Hell, that turned into a whole storyline as she was charged to either return those souls back to there place, or find an equal number of souls, when she went to her god for help He had to explain to her that actually, the rules of Hell are baked into the rules of existence, Asmodeus and by extension all under him have rights to those souls and as such she had to make it right, or risk upsetting the balance that prevents the Abyss from swallowing up all. Was a chastening experience for a player who thought because she was lawful good cleric, she could do whatever she wanted against the forces of evil, anywhere she was.
But IS there a need for Hell? As a place, as a metaphysical location, of course. Something has to exist between Hades and Mechanus. But did the fallen angels of D&D actually take up the burden of fighting the Blood War, or is that just a lie they tell themselves? The Blood War has actually been a net benefit to Asmodeus, since it distracts his cohort from noticing what a truly shitty job he's doing bringing them the glory and power he promised them before the Fall. In this way his situation is familiar to a lot of us who watch incompetent autocrats rattle sabers at one another for domestic political reasons, shouting idealistic rhetoric the whole time.
Why have Wizards - and TSR before it - spent so much time on the Blood War when the demons could just attack the Upper Planes through Limbo? Or the Outlands/Concordant Opposition? No one has greater respect for the slaads (slaadi?) than I do, but Orcus vs Ygorl? That's a whitewashing. And yet, the demons keep marching in exactly the wrong direction. The genuinely poetic insight that Monte Cook, or whoever it was who designed the Great Wheel, had was that evil people hate each other because they're evil and good people find a way to work out their differences because they're good.
If we stipulate that the Blood War can't be won or lost, by either side, ever, the fallen angels - who are not indigenous to their plane in the way that the demons are - could just stop being eaten by demons, swallow their pride and go home chastened, and abandon Asmodeus to his selfish quest for universal ownership. They don't and they won't, for several reasons, but they could. The history of Graz'zt implies this; one ending of DiA makes this explicit. Progress out of Hell, in one direction or another, is an option.
And that leads me to where I am with soul coins. These were a fantastic invention (sincerely, hats off to whoever came up with the idea) because they finally finally made sense of D&D devils' interest in something as ephemeral as a human soul. You can burn them. Quick and dirty spelljamming to power the war machines. Are the souls in Hell already damned? Yes. Did they make their choices? Yes. But there is a small grey area between "imprisoned and tortured for eternity" and "annihilated;" and that area is made of hope. I had a player who was playing a rough tough half-orc barbarian. She asked a question of a soul coin, realized there was someone in there, and couldn't bring herself to burn that particular one. It was an irrational decision, but one that was rich in dramatic potential. I haven't got time to really explore this phenomenon in game, but it exists and it's interesting.
It would be impossible for me to express how much I love the fact that this thread has continued after the session is completed. This community is phenomenal. Many thanks for the additional and extensive thoughts on the Hells and diabolic contract negotiation! Which brings me to. . .
the pit fiend is now recovering its strength on the Material Plane after being imprisoned there and slowly drained of its essence for numerous millennia. Here's some info:
1.) the PC's have freed him in exchange for one Wish which they have a week in-game to devise.
2.) Both parties are contractually agreed not bring physical harm of any sort to the other either directly or indirectly.
3.) The pit fiend holds a prominent position as "right hand fiend" to an Arch Duke on Minauros. He feels that he can't return to Minauros other than at full strength in order to retake his position from whomever has replaced him and eventually overtake the dukedom. The amount of time he has on the Material Plane is basically whatever I want it to be as I determine how long it will take for him to get his strength back.
He's in a backwater area surrounded by only small hamlets, etc., some of which he knows have meaning to the PC's. So. . . what would a Pit Fiend do for fun on the Prime Material? Some of you mentioned previously that he'd immediately seek followers. What might you imagine he'd do with those followers? Take over a major city? Would he want to get back to Minauros as soon as he's healthy in order to reclaim his position of importance within the pecking order?
The wizard who imprisoned him thousands of years ago is the BBEG of the campaign but neither he nor the PC's know yet that they (the PC's) will have a final face-off with that wizard. When they do fight the BBEG (months from now in-game and out), the pit fiend would want to see them win but ALSO get them somehow to breach their contract with him so that he can claim one or all of their souls.
Anyway, you all have offered so much, no worries if this feels like flogging this poor, dead horse. But if anyone feels like they'd like to offer up some thoughts, they'd be hugely appreciated as always.
Many thanks!
Well, the pit fiend probably wouldn't just want to return to the Nine Hells with their old strength. They'd want to have something to show for it. I assume that no one in the immediate area has even a slight chance of stopping the pit fiend. If so, it would probably declare itself a ruler over the region, burn down any temples, and make the area's residents worship it. Then it would conscript the people of the region into an army, and, using its military genius, begin to conquer the surround areas, laying down the foundations for an empire who's only gods are the fiends of the Nine Hells. Then, once it rules the territory with an iron fist, it will appoint a trustworthy and power-hungry cultist as a regent in its place and it will return to the Nine Hells, with an entire nation under its sway.
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall.
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Homebrew (Mostly Outdated): Magic Items, Monsters, Spells, Subclasses
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If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.