Baatezu Overview

The baatezu are a powerful, ill-tempered and highly organized fiendish race. Within their strict castes, authority comes from both power and rank. Rank rises either through service in the endless war between demons and devils or, more often, through the many vacancies left by deaths at the top. A baatezu that pulls off a feat that cripples the enemy is promoted, which means being physically transformed into a higher form.

Two obsessions drive them. The first is wiping out their age-old enemies, the tanar'ri; both sides see the war not just as a fight to extinction but as the very meaning of their existence. The second is humanity, a small but intriguing race they noticed only recently by immortal reckoning. Followers won in the mortal world supply magical energy and an advantage over the tanar'ri, so the baatezu work to dominate humans by persuading them that they have godlike power.

Unlike the chaotic evil tanar'ri, they pursue a long-term vision of their whole race ruling across the planes. They cultivate the evils of the mind, such as ambition and pride, instead of the immediate physical cravings the tanar'ri feed on.

Baatezu vary widely in form, though many look like ugly Gothic gargoyles by human standards. They fall into three divisions: least, lesser and greater. Lemures sit so low they do not even rank as least, the absolute bottom of the order, but scholars include them as a fourth type for completeness.

Every baatezu except lemures, mindless devils and spike devils has these spell-like powers: teleport without error, suggestion, charm person, animate dead and advanced illusion, plus infravision and a constant know alignment. Each can summon others of its kind as noted in its own entry, and a unique telepathy lets it converse with and understand any thinking being.

Mundane weapons wound only the least and lesser kinds. Higher ranks need silver or magic to hurt them, and silver deals just half damage to a greater baatezu. A table of attack forms gives their other resistances; where a type is affected by normal weapons, damage follows weapon type. The gelugon stands out: cold cannot harm it at all, and fire does only half.

Baatezu move freely among their home plane, the other lower planes, the neutral planes and the Astral Plane, but they cannot reach the Prime Material Plane or the upper planes unless properly summoned. A gate spell combined with the correct pattern of written magical glyphs binds a least or lesser baatezu to nine days of service and stops it from harming the caster. Greater baatezu can be commanded or held off the same way for nine hours.

Their twisted, evil sense of honor gives them a clear route upward: works that advance evil earn honors, rank and power. A diligent spike devil might, through a long and agonizing process, become a scaled devil. Just as often a baatezu simply vanishes and its direct subordinate steps into the vacancy, since quiet assassination is routine.

At the top sits the Infernal Eight, a council of eight of the mightiest pit fiends, who meet four times a year in a fortress on the lowest layer of their plane to set policy, from war strategy against the tanar'ri to the promotion of lesser fiends. Attracting their notice invites annihilation. Oddly, all eight have held power for ages, apparently untouched by the assassinations that plague the upper ranks.