[ Outsiders > Fiends > Dominant ]
[ Baatezu | Daemon | Gehreleth | Hag | Tanar’ri | Yugoloth ]
A Who’s Who Guide to the Fiends
The following is a collection of the dominant fiends for each of the Lower Planes—the most numerous, the most native, or the most dangerous. They’re also the most commonly encountered across the Great Ring. On their home planes obviously, but also on other Lower Planes and even Sigil as they trade, raid or invade their way across the multiverse.
| Fiend | Home Plane | Fiendish Theme | Appearance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Baatezu | Baator | Punishing sinners | Gothic devils |
| Daemon | Gray Waste | Eliminate all life | Apocalyptic horrors |
| Gehreleth | Carceri | Unfair imprisonment | Misshaped mistakes |
| Hag | Gray Waste | Trafficking souls | Hideous crones |
| Tanar’ri | Abyss | Sin and corruption | Highly variable predators |
| Yugoloth | Gehenna | Deception and lies | We are just simple merchants |
Baatezu
Devil (which more correctly refers to any fiend from the Nine Hells of Baator)
Home Plane: Baator
Themes: Lawful Evil bureaucrats, architects of systemic corruption and punishment, and masters of infernal hierarchy.
Philosophy: Baatezu (bay-ART-zoo) epitomize the belief that order must be weaponized to suffocate free will. The devils enforce a rigid caste system where authority derives from both power and station. Higher-ups in the ranks treat their subordinates with contempt, but when a baatezu is promoted to the next rank for good service (or the right garnish), they too treat their former peers the same way. The expansionist agenda of the baatezu prioritizes corrupting ever-more mortals through legalistic bargains, promising whatever it takes to bind their souls to Baator for eternal damnation.
Baatezu view chaos as a defect to be excised from the multiverse. They employ calculated cruelty—perhaps illusions of reinforcements during combat to destabilize foes psychologically or contracts with layers of meticulous language to ensure their will is absolute. High-ups stamp out any dissent as soon as it is discovered to prevent the rot spreading. Baatezu typically adopt a Gothic, gargoyle-like appearance, perhaps to reflect their connection to punitive order. The rarer forms of infernal beauty are reserved for those fiends who excel in manipulation.
Paragons: Powerful baatezu who ascent through the ranks may become baatezu nobles, although this honour is typically hereditary—there are many baatezu noble houses. The Dark Eight are a cadre of pit fiends who lead the Glorious Baatezu Army in the Blood War. Higher still are the Lords of the Nine; one baatezu noble who controls each of the layers of Baator. All of them fear, respect and loathe Asmodeus, who is said to be the Dark Lord of the Nine Hells.
More chant on the baatezu coming soon…
Daemon
Dæmon, Yugoloth (?)
Home Plane: Gray Waste
Themes: Neutral Evil harbingers of apocalyptic oblivion
Philosophy: These apocalyptic fiends seek nothing less than the extinction of all life in the multiverse. Each daemon [DAY-mon] is a manifestation of a particularly grisly end, and they obsess about snuffing out mortals by their psychotic method of choice, in order to devour them and doom their souls to permanent oblivion. Unlike baatezu or demons, daemons lack grandiosity—their evil is pragmatic, patient, and incessant. Believing that life itself is a curse, ultimately these nihilistic fiends even seek to destroy their own kind at the end of the multiverse.
Whether or not daemons are yugoloths, or the other way around, or whether they’re entirely unrelated types of fiends—well that’s a subject for another time. Safe to say, depending on who you ask, the question is far from settled.
Paragons: The daemons are led by the Four Apocalypse Riders (Szuriel, Trelmarixian, Apollyon and Charon), who personify the existential threats of war, famine, pestilence, and death. Responsible for the end of days on countless Prime worlds already, these harbingers of annihilation are a seemingly unstoppable force of doom. Speaking of harbingers, that’s also what the graybeards call particularly powerful daemons who serve the Riders.
More chant on the daemons coming soon…
Gehreleth
Demodand
Home Plane: Carceri
Themes: Chaotic Evil jailers of Carceri, enforcers of unfair imprisonment—themselves trapped in the prison of contorted, grotesque, and pain-wracked bodies
Philosophy: Gehreleth [GERRA-leth] view themselves as some kind of cosmic wardens, attempting to ensure that all beings—mortals and fiends alike—remain trapped on their prison plane. They alone seem to be able to leave freely, and they guard this secret jealously. The rigid caste system (farastu labourers, kelubar bureaucrats, shator overlords) enacts a parody of order, driven partly by envious hatred of tanar’ri and partly by a misguided and fanatical fixation with yugoloths—and part loyalty, part hatred for their creator Apomps. However, while all gehreleth are self-important bullies, the joke is on them, for they are viewed by other outsiders as cosmic mistakes, malformed, misshapen and broken creatures ruined by Apomps’ arrogance and hubris. The only reason graybeards consider them a dominant fiendish race at all is that gehreleth are encountered all over the Lower Planes as they are press-ganged into the Blood War by tanar’ri—and deserters from it too—so even their relative infamy is not a product of their own schemes.
Paragons: There is but one gehreleth paragon for each of the layers of Carceri, like a tragic parody of Baator’s Lords of the Nine or the Abyssal Lords. These sods are simultaneously the most powerful of their kind, but also the least respected and most despised by their peers. They are called the Lowest. Such is the upside-downly grotesque society of the demodands.
More chant on the gehreleth coming soon…
Hag
Home Plane: Gray Waste
Themes: Neutral Evil coven witches, weavers of curses, and traffickers of souls
Philosophy: Hags thrive on mortal frailty, exploiting the greed, fear, and vanity of berks through hexes and magical bargains. Often disguised as ordinary women, each hag specialises in preying on children or adults with particular forms of malevolence. Cuckoo hags trick their way into the confidence of youths before stealing their souls. Sweet hags lure children with sugary treats. Night hags are the most sinister of the planewalking weird sisters, traversing the dreams of mortals, hunting for souls to trade in infernal markets.
When a group of hags come together to form a coven, they become even more powerful, as their magical synergies only serve the amplify their power. Unlike many other fiends, hags prefer to weave their plots with subtlety—poisoning bloodlines with curses, seeding discord through omens, or stealing children they have forseen as important and substituting their own changeling spawn in their stead. Always taking the long view, hags tend to view mortals as crops to be harvested across generations.
Paragons: The most insidious of the sisters may become graeae (gree-eye), truly fearsome foes of mythic might. It seems the more dangerous a coven becomes, the fewer eyes and teeth they tend to have to share between the members—but the more powerful those artifacts become.
More chant on Lower Planar hags coming soon…
Tanar’ri
Demons (which technically refers to any of the many fiendish races from the Abyss)
Home Plane: The Abyss
Themes: Chaotic Evil embodiments of mortal sin and Abyssal corruption.

Philosophy: Tanar’ri [ta-NAR-ee] believe existence is a crucible for perfection through carnage. Weaker demons evolve by asserting dominance, while high-ups like Demogorgon manipulate millions of souls in endless Blood War to cement their power. Their forms reflect their sins, from the gluttonous nalfeshnee, or the bestial bar-lgura, to the manipulative marilith. There are dozens of types of tanar’ri catalogued in the ledgers of the Guvners, with more being encountered all the time. Chant goes that the brutally deadly nature of the Abyss forces its demonic hordes to adapt quickly or perish, and each layer is inhabited by monstrosities perfectly adapted to thrive in the awful environment.
Paragons: The most fearsome, cunning, wicked, treacherous, or lucky of the tanar’ri may find themselves at the top of the pile, for a time at least. With no defined mechanism of promotion, it’s usually the most murderous tanar’ri who become the high-ups of these fiends—and the only most paranoid who remain so. While many tanar’ri lords also control one layer (or sometimes more) of the plane, other layers have more than one Lord, some layers are uncontested, and some Lords have no layer. What, you expected Abyssal politics would make sense or something, leatherhead?
More chant on the tanar’ri coming soon…
Yugoloth
Dæmon(?)
Home Plane: Possibly Gehenna? They now inhabit Gehenna, the Gray Waste and Carceri
Themes: Neutral Evil embodiments of deception and lies
Philosophy: Yugoloths [YOU-go-loth] transcend the ethical dichotomy of the Blood War by selling their services to all sides—while advancing their own secret agendas. Consummate liars and manipulators, the yugoloth will tell you anything they think you want to hear, and you’ll believe them. The tangled webs of untruth and misdirection they weave are so complex that even the history of their race is uncertain. Yugoloths claim to be from Gehenna, although you can find them all across the Lower Planes of Conflict, and even occasionally in Baator or the Abyss. They say they are more ancient than either baatezu or tanar’ri. They will tell you they are simple merchants or mercenaries—or even diplomats trying to end the senseless Blood War. They also distance themselves from the hordes of rapacious daemons who dwell in the Gray Waste, who seek the annihilation of all life in the multiverse. But other graybeards will warn you not to believe a word of that, and that the yugoloth are the same as daemons and the whole ‘yugoloth’ identity is a thin veneer to make themselves seem respectable, and give them plausible deniability. I’ll leave that one to you to work out who you believe; all I’ll say is that daemons and yugoloths certainly seem very different…
Paragons: There are several figureheads of the yugoloths. Some are apparently self-made: the General of Gehenna is the blood in charge of the mercenary armies of the yugoloths. The Oinoloth is the nominal leader of the race, ruling from Khin-Oin in the Gray Waste. Other are hag-made: the altraloth are said to be yugoloths who have made pacts with hag covens and been transformed into strange and powerful entities. But looming behind all these high-ups are the shadowy forms of a mysterious cabal of creatures called baernoloth, of which little is known.
More chant on the yugoloth coming soon…
Source: Jon Winter-Holt. Canonwatch: †from the Pathfinder setting; ‡ homebrew. The yugoloth / daemon controversy here is my own personal head-canon, the intention being to muddy the waters between the yugoloths of Planescape and the daemons of Pathfinder while simultaneously drawing some new interesting dividing lines. I also thought I’d throw in a grain of truth about where the name ‘yugoloth’ (as well as baatezu, tanar’ri and gehreleth btw) came from in the first place—a literal rebranding attempt by TSR to make AD&D 2e seem less ‘demonic’. The early 1990s were a weird time for sure, cutter… I’d love to hear what you think!