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Quasit
Gutterfiend; Abyssal Imp (CR 2 / Creature 1)
Home Plane: Abyss / any layer
Alignment: Chaotic Evil
Themes: Treacherous magical servitors
Keep your eye on the shadows, cutter—if you notice a toad that watches you too intently for too long, or a centipede that seems to enjoy your fear, you’ve likely spotted a quasit on the job. These tiny Abyssal sneak-fiends are little more than stringy sinew over knotty bone, with hooked claws, barbed tails, horn-nubs, and batlike wings. When around mortals they’re prone to disguising themselves in the form of animals, with bats, insects, or amphibians being particular favourites. You can’t really blame them for choosing the creepy ones—quasits are from the Abyss after all—so they don’t have much choice of role-models. When trouble goes down however, quasits tend to vanish outright, turning themselves invisible at the first sign of danger.
While quasits are very much born of the Abyss, you trip over them on the Prime more often than you’d like, because witches and wizards have a bad habit of binding them as familiars. To be fair to them though, perhaps not all of these careless summoners realise their magical toad is really a nefarious demon—quasits are sneaky like that, see. While they’re notoriously fickle fiends, quasits are also capable of playing the long game, which basically involves finding ways to make sure their patron becomes thoroughly corrupt, and then waiting for their spellslinging slavemaster to get written into the dead-book. The quasit then leaps into action, riding the soul of their former master all the way down to the Abyss. There the diminutive fiends will try to take control of the larva that’s formed from the wizard’s soul, to use as a bargaining chip in Lower Planar economy of power. Of course, quasits do tend to be impatient, so if their master were to accidentally get dead-booked early, well that would be convenient, wouldn’t it?
The resemblance between quasits and imps is a coincidence that has many graybeards wondering whether these two types of fiends are in some way related. Both of them deny this vehemently of course, but it makes a body wonder, right?
Philosophically, quasits are the embodiment of petty malice and small fiend-syndrome. They might be one of the physically weakest demons in the Abyss, but you wouldn’t guess that from their self-aggrandising egos. They’re vulnerable to cold iron like many demons, but the sting in their tail is literally venomous. A favourite tactic is to sting their targets, then scuttle off and hide in the shadows, invisible, while they wait for the toxins to do the dirty work.
One thing they’ve learned from being dragged up in the Abyss is to be stubborn survivors. Planewalkers treat them as omens of brewing trouble: Spot a quasit, and that means a more dangerous tanar’ri’s scheme is rarely far behind. Think of them as the Abyss’s gossip-mongers and least trustworthy messengers, and you won’t go far wrong.
Canonical Sources: Planescape Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1 [2e] p56; Monster Manual [3e] p46; Monster Manual [5e] p63; Bestiary [PF1e] p66; Bestiary [PF2e] p76.
Source: Jon Winter-Holt