Asura

[ Outsiders > Fiends > Parochial > Asura ]

Asura

Home Plane: Baator, and if you believe the chant they claimed it before the baatezu arrived.

Alignment: Lawful Evil

Themes: Anti-theistic nihilists, incarnations of divine error, and architects of religious unmaking.

Philosophy: Asuras personify divine mistakes, their very existence a rebuke to godly infallibility. Graybeards haven’t reached a consensus on which was the first error made by a power, but it’s said that the resulting paradox—after all, how can an infallible being make a mistake, right?—was the spark that created the first asuras. Whether they were born from blasphemies like the abandonment of the First World, from the first mortal death, or the first divine crime, perhaps the detail doesn’t even matter. Their goal is no less than the annihilation of divine creations, the erosion of mortal faith, and starving the powers of the nourishment they receive from belief. Oh yes cutter, the Athar would worship these cutters, if only they had the faith!

It’s said that every divine mistake spawns a handful of new asuras, but unfortunately for the powers, asuras also reincarnate cyclically, while retaining their spiteful memories. Turns out, divine errors leave an indelible mark on the multiverse. This gives the asuras many lifetimes to refine their hatred into an artform. They can also be born from the souls of heretics, apostates and atheists; at least the ones who end up in Baator and manage to evade the baatezu. Lucky sods!

The asuras claim they discovered Baator long before there were Nine Hells there. They dwelled alongside the kytons until they were discovered, and ultimately betrayed, by Asmodeus. While many of the lower castes of asuras still live in Baator, the high-up asuras disdain hierarchy beyond their own supremacy, and they will often consume rival fiends to consolidate their own power. Their asceticism and strategic patience, which can last over dozens of mortal lifetimes, makes them insidious long-term threats.

Sometimes an asura repents, turns stag on their wicked brethren, and seeks forgiveness from the powers whose mistakes caused them to be created in the first place. These bashers are known as aditya by the fiendish asuras, but confusingly, the Upper Planars still tend to continue to call them asuras anyway.

Paragons: The most powerful of the asuras are called asura ranas, who are directly born from the most terrible divine mistakes. Only a handful of these bloods are known, and they’re secretive in the extreme—you would keep your cards close to your chest too, if you were enemies with every single power in the Great Ring. One you might have heard of though is Geryon, a former Lord of Stygia. He’s not been heard from in a long time mind, and hopefully it’ll stay that way. They say that more than one fellow asura rana is frozen into the endless ice of Stygia too, awaiting his return…

More chant on the asuras coming soon…

Canonwatch: † from the Pathfinder setting. The asura lore here is from the Pathfinder setting, inspired by the demons from Hindu mythology. In 2e Planescape, the asura were all good, but that doesn’t reflect mythology; to fix that I propose reclassifying PS asuras as ‘aditya asura’—see the celestials page for more details there.