Many Dark Ages chronicles include the pos-
sibility of demonic activity, but that doesn’t mean
demons will personally interact or engage with the players’ characters. Demons shun the light and stay to the shadows, working through pawns and thralls whenever possible. For a demon to visibly act to further its plans, or against its rivals, is generally counterproductive, due to the wide- spread belief and fear of demons in the Dark Medieval. Drawing attention to one’s activities,
to one’s existence, is to invite attack from other demons, or from the agents of God who still seek to protect humanity.
Instead, demons rely on mortal agents: wor- shippers and cultists willing to do anything for their dark masters; or venal fools who damn their souls to eternal darkness in exchange for fleeting, temporary pleasures. Like spiders in the middle of vast, decaying webs, demons work patiently to- wards their goals, protecting themselves from danger with multiple layers of thralls.
While the methods demons employ are often Byzantine in complexity and subtlety, the goals they work towards are usually very simple. De- mons want to be worshipped, they want to destroy their enemies, and they want to indulge their need for corruption and sin. The following information shows just how demons pursue those ends.
Sin
Demons are sins made flesh, the embodiment of all that is wicked and evil in Creation. This was not always the case, though, even after the rebel angels fell from grace. While demons were at- tracted to certain sins and evils even in the early days of the War, that attraction did not consume them or break their self-control. As the War raged on, and the demons learned of the vast and un- tapped potential for evil in Creation, attraction turned into desire, and the ability to control those desires weakened. In Hell, forever locked into empty nothingness, desire turned into obsession; and the torments of the Abyss shredded whatever self-control the demons might have possessed.
When demons finally returned to Creation, they flew into horrific frenzies, indulging every desire that had gone unfulfilled for eons. Every demon to escape from Hell has gone through a period of unfettered, unthinking indulgence, an insane scramble to finally address the obsessions that consumed it. Eventually the demon’s needs are blunted and it can regain self-control, but the obsession always remains. Only the most iron- willed of demons can resist the need to indulge its obsessions for more than a century or two, and some are already chafing under Lucifer’s call for patience and restraint.
Every demon has a barely controllable obses- sion with a particular sin, and it passes this obsession on to its followers. Demonic cults revere
a particular sin, holding it up as the One Great Truth. By building cults on a foundation of sin, demons are able to attract followers with their own established vices, who are easy to convert and fervent suppliers of faith.
Demons also use their beloved sins as tools and weapons. They understand their favored sin’s nature, the attraction it holds for mortal and demon alike, and the ways in which it can affect a mortal’s behavior and morality. By holding out the possibility of sin as a reward, demons can tempt humans and control their actions; by using the repercussions of indulgence as a weapon, de- mons can destroy mortals and set them up to be destroyed by their own kind.
There are seven deadly sins, according to folklore.
Avarice
Demons of greed want to possess everything, to control all they see and deny it to others. Unlike gluttons, greedy demons don’t want to
consume the things they covet, they want to keep
those things forever, long after they have crumbled into uselessness. Demons of greed tend to be subtle and sly, keeping an eye on long-term gains; for an immortal being, it’s no great effort to spend three centuries gaining influence over a country or cult, as long as you have total control of it in the end.
Greedy mortals tend to want temporal power and wealth, not spiritual riches, and so greed cults are often small. But what they lack in size, they make up for in power; for the members of these cults are the wealthy and powerful who will wor- ship anything that can make them richer and more powerful. Such cults gather massive tempo- ral power for their demon masters, using bribes and rewards to control society’s power structures.
Envy
Demons of envy seek to destroy those who possess what demons lack — freedom, love, hope and the comfort of God’s blessing. Such demons do not want such things for themselves; what they want is to punish those who have the audacity to possess such things, who feel themselves superior for having such blessings. Only after dragging everyone else down into the mud can these de- mons be satisfied, knowing that no one else in Creation is happier than they are.
In the Dark Medieval era, the primary targets of envy are those who rule and lead; kings and
noblemen, priests and wealthy merchants. Cults founded on envy point at such people and demand to know why they should be warm and well fed, healthy and happy, when the common people starve and die in the cold. This is not a message of democracy, but anarchy; such cults focus on de- stroying the fortunate and powerful, not replacing them with the “more deserving.” It’s a message that attracts the disenfranchised, the angry and the poor, but also those rich and privileged per- sons who are unhappy and unloved, who hate their equally powerful but happy rivals.
Gluttony
Demons of gluttony crave sensation, to in- dulge every appetite and desire past the point of satiation and to keep going. Mortals usually asso- ciate gluttony with a desire for food, but truly it is simply the desire to consume, to use more resources than necessary. A demon on a gluttonous rampage chooses a particular resource — food, faith, hu- man lives — and takes obscene joy not just in using up or destroying that thing, but flaunting the destruction and consumption to those now forced to go without.
Gluttony cults are perhaps the largest and most prevalent in the Dark Medieval, because gluttonous demons want to consume faith and worship more than anything. To attract followers, these cults often preach a doctrine of worthy indulgence — that it is right and proper to con- sume the bounty provided for you today, rather than deny that appetite in the hopes of a reward in the next life. Mortals who have been denied what they want one time too often flock to these cults, craving validation for the desires they want so badly to indulge.
Lust
Demons of lust become lost in the urges and sensations of the physical, maddened by the pos- sibilities of physical indulgence. These demons possess followers on a regular basis, gorging them- selves on pleasure and activity before relishing the sensations of the vessels’ hideous deaths. Lusty demons are often obsessed with sex, but it’s not the only form of physical pleasure they desire — they embark on orgies of eating, fighting, drinking and destruction in the time they have available in a vessel.
Cults of lust tend to focus more on the sexual elements of the sin than their masters. After all, a man can indulge a lust for food or wine or violence in socially acceptable ways, without attracting the
wrath of the Church or the king; but sexual appe- tites and cravings almost always draw condemnation and punishments. By offering mem- bers an outlet for their desires, cults win their loyalty; by using sex (or other indulgences) as a reward, and the threat of exposure as blackmail, cults gain temporal power and influence.
Pride
All demons understand the sin of pride, per- haps better than humans ever could. It was pride that was the First Sin, the sin of Lucifer and all the angels who rebelled against God rather than ac- cept His decrees. Demons of pride still place themselves above all other entities, and demand the worship and adulation of mortal and demon alike. Lost in arrogance, a prideful demon might raze a city as punishment for a minor slight, or torture an entire society until every member agrees to love and worship it unconditionally.
Cults based on pride are most common in cultures that revere honor and respectability, and preach bloody revenge as rightful punishment for any offense. They attract followers (primarily young men) who feel slighted or overlooked in their lives, telling them that they are truly supe- rior to other people, and that any kind of atrocity is an appropriate punishment for imagined slights. These cults can be both violent and subtle, influ- encing the useful with money and flattery, then sending well-equipped, machismo-addled worship- pers to destroy their enemies.
Sloth
Demons of sloth are hardly lazy; that’s a mis- guided, mortal view of the sin. Sloth is the need for simplicity, for convenience — an ultimately sociopathic disinterest in the world. Demons of sloth are almost all demons of death, who once shepherded souls to their final rewards. Now they crave the solitude and calm of death, the serenity of an empty world. These demons are rare, because the nothingness of Hell tends to swallow them forever; those remaining are monsters who would snuff out a country to silence a crying child, who long for absolute destruction and a world of dust and gravestones.
Like demons of sloth, cults of sloth are rare, and those that exist are small. Their members, though, are perhaps the most monstrous of mor- tals, absolute sociopaths who feel no kinship with their fellows. Some are assassin cults, who kill for money and influence; others are simple death
cults, poisoning wells and burning villages to offer the dying souls up to their masters.
Wrath
Demons of wrath are whirlwinds of carnage and destruction, monsters who rampage and kill for the sheer joy of destruction. Wrath is more than just a lust for violence, though; it is the claim of righteous anger, of inflicting punishment on those who have transgressed. Some demons of wrath see themselves as enforcers of a social order, but others don’t bother to tell themselves such lies. In any case, the demon’s obsession is with lashing out and destroying anything that frus- trates, blocks or simply inconveniences it.
Wrath cults are widespread through Europe, for they preach a simple and appealing message —
anything that blocks your will is wrong, and you are justified in your retaliation. The appeal is there for
warlocks and priests alike, for Saracen and Cru- saders, kings and commoners. Many armies and militias harbor wrath cultists, as do the Church and the secular authorities. Their minions and pawns are widespread, and their angry punish- ments are as likely to be social or economic as they are to be military or violent.
Cults
The cults of demons are always based on a single lie — that it is better to be damned for eternity in the next life than to deny yourself what you want in this one. You can indulge the sin you know is wrong, for a power greater than yourself has given you permission to do so. And all you need do in exchange is offer your faith to that power, to sacrifice your sanity and soul on its blood-caked altar; a small price to pay for getting what you want right now.
Demon-worshipping cults are an abomina- tion, rightly loathed across Europe and all of Creation. Yet many of them exist, and each time one is suppressed another rises to replace it. In a world of rules and restrictions, danger and duty, many people want to be given permission to in- dulge their sins, and are prepared to worship any entity that will do just that. Some lie to them- selves, telling themselves that they worship “the true God” or a hidden face of a pagan god, that they have been trusted with a holy secret because of their special virtues. A few don’t bother with the pretense, and simply accept their damnation. It is also true, though, that many lay members or fringe members of demonic cults don’t realize
what they’re doing, or what kind of being they are being groomed to worship. Secrecy is vital for a demonic cult, because it risks destruction if it reveals its true nature to the wrong person. Pro- spective members are kept at arm’s length for months or years, fed lies about the cult’s rites and purposes, until they can be debased and degraded to a point where they will accept a demon as their god. Those who prove unsuitable are occasionally diverted into other religions and heresies — but murder is usually the easiest solution.
A cult also accumulates a protective layer of mundane associates, from the mercenaries who unwittingly protect a demon’s reliquary to the baker who makes their sacramental cakes. Such mortals have their uses, from scapegoats to pawns to sacrificial victims; and there’s always the possi- bility that they may prove to be appropriate for recruitment into the cult proper.
For more information on how forbidden cults operate, see Ashen Cults. While its focus is on cults that venerate vampires, the information is broadly applicable to any kind of abhorrent and secretive sect.