Ruler Devil [Greater Baatezu]

Ruler devils are ugly, 4-foot-tall fiends with long bald heads, stunted arms and legs, and big leathery wings. Big eyes and a squashed, upturned nose sit above a snarling maw full of jagged teeth as sharp as razors.

As greater baatezu they prefer to let minions do the fighting. A ruler devil's touch channels destructive energy for 2d4 damage and ignores ordinary armor, so it needs only to hit Armor Class 10. Magical bonuses from armor, shields or protective items like a ring of protection still apply, and so does any magic item that grants a base Armor Class.

Their bond with the river Styx makes every attack a potent forget effect as well: unless the target saves vs. spells, a full day of memory is wiped away.

Beyond the abilities all baatezu share, a ruler devil can use one of these per round: fireball three times a day and imprisonment once a day. Once a day it may try to gate in scaled devils, 2 to 20 of them with a 50% chance, or erinyes, 1 to 8 with a 30% chance. A holy word sends it back to its home on the fifth layer.

Ruler devils live mainly on the fifth layer of the baatezu's plane and often carry out missions on the higher layers. They count as a kind of nobility and obey only because they crave advancement and dread the pit fiends. As any fiend rises in rank, the more closely the Infernal Eight watch it. Still, given a chance, a ruler devil will set its servants on anything the Eight control, and it might even strike at a pit fiend if it had good reason and believed it could avoid blame.

They guard the Styx, which flows into the plane both through their layer and through the first layer, a gap in the plane's defenses. Each commands an army of thousands of erinyes and scaled devils, partly to defend the layer and partly for its own twisted purposes.

Their power of imprisonment exists because they defend the plane against invaders, and mortals who come to battle evil there usually end up as their victims.