The difference between devils and demons should be that devils look angelic.

I’m not making any claims to originality here: angelic devils are just about the next most gothy thing after vampires. But if Asmodeus, Baalzebul, bone devils, pit fiends, etc all looked like angels, it would solve a lot of specific D&D problems.

1) Right now, players treat devils and demons the same way. Is that a pit fiend or a balor? Imp or quasit? Who cares, just smite it. If it’s red and has horns, it probably has the same immunities and weaknesses. It’s an irrelevant distinction unless a player happens to have, say, a lawfully-aligned sword.

Now change it so that devils look like angels. Instead of being irrelevant, that ambiguity drives the story. In most cases, players really want to know whether they’re facing off against a devil or a good angel.

2) It’s impossible for me to care who wins the Blood War. A bunch of red goat men shooting fire at each other? Sounds like a family squabble I’d rather stay out of, and I’m not even interested in reading about. But red goat men battling the shining heavenly hosts, and both sides are evil? That’s a spectacle worth staging as part of an adventure. Because you can tell who’s who, it’s easier to players to foolishly root for one side or another, or, even more foolishly, get involved.

3) Pacts with devils are insufficiently tempting. The cool thing about devils is their cunning and persuasiveness. Their appearance doesn’t support that. Once you see a guy with horns, you don’t care how good his contract looks: you know that if you sign it, you lose.

Now imagine this: an angel visits you. The angel will help you, if you prove yourself worthy by performing a holy service. There’s no tip-off pitchfork in sight. The only way to distinguish between an angel and a devil is by using your own moral sense about whether the deed the angel requires is really a good deed – and your moral sense, naturally, might be skewed by your desire for the reward. This is a much more effective and plausible temptation than the usual deal offered by devils: “I’m gonna tell you right up front: eternal torture comes with the package.”

In fact, as far as I’m concerned the whole “sign your name in blood” thing can go. Both angels and devils can work the same way. If you do the deeds they require, and thus prove yourself “worthy”, you’ll get the appropriate afterlife reward (good or bad).

4) Demons don’t currently have their own thing. Devils have a thing: they’re manipulators. Demons’ thing is that they are red fire guys who cause destruction — just like devils and demodands. If anything, the demon’s defining characteristic is negative. Unlike devils, they’re NOT manipulators. This doesn’t even work very well, since the demons have Graz’zt and (sometimes) succubi on their team. If the demons had sole ownership of the horns, leathery wings, and brimstone, they’d at least have something.

5) Bad match with the lore. In a lot of cosmologies, devils are angels who were thrown out of the heavens. In a strange case of parallel evolution, they ended up looking just like their neighbors the demons – for some reason? Let them keep their nice heavenly robes. I think they’re more sinister that way anyway.

So if devils look like, think of themselves as, and refer to themselves as angels, what separates them from angels? Clerical magic certainly can’t reliably distinguish them, otherwise devils would never get their hands on their favorite victims: clerics, paladins, and inquisitors. But there are differences between the types.

For one thing, devils have no godly master. They serve themselves or other devils. (They still serve with the same spooky singlemindedness and self-righteousness as angels.)

Furthermore, they have some imperfection not shared by real angels. I’m leaning towards the fact that they need to eat souls to maintain their immortality – that’s why they want them so badly. They might need to eat living bodies to get the souls, which is why Faustian devils so often drag people offstage alive. When they can’t get human souls, they’ll take anything. You might turn a corner in a dungeon to find a bunch of “angels” stuffing bugs and rats into their mouths.

Here are some potential problems that might be caused by swapping all the devil art in D&D. Maybe you can help me solve them.

Tieflings. Their story is that they were corrupted by devils, and so they got horns and tails. Doesn’t make as much sense anymore.

Maybe you’re attached to some of the existing devil art, like the 1e fly-eyed Baalzebul. I can’t say I blame you, that guy is awesome. My suggestion: nothing wrong with an angel with fly eyes.

How do the angels of evil gods fit in here? How are they differentiated from devils?

Angels can be a little… well… kitschy. I mean, that might be a problem for some. It’s fine with me. I’m honestly not sure what’s spookier as a devil: the magnificent St. Michael type, or the cute harp-and-halo guardian angel.

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So I was wikipedia’ing random things, like ya do, when I discovered that cubic zirconia are made in something called a “SKULL CRUCIBLE.” Developed by the Soviets – of course it was – it uses lightning bolts (well, a radio frequency magnetic field, but let’s say lightning bolts) to heat the inside of a big block of zirconium oxide. The inside melts and turns into crystals, while the outside remains a solid white shell, like a skull.

At the end of the process, a Soviet scientist cracks the skull with a hammer (note that there’s an actual hammer in the picture below), and cubic zirconia spill out like candy out of a pinata! But instead of candy, it’s gems, and instead of a pinata, it’s a skull! Science is awesome!

This is so D&D it’s almost too D&D. I mean, how do you improve on that?

Inspired by this process, here’s a creepy any-edition D&D spell to teach your Big Bad Evil Guy:

Skull Crucible

This is a horrifying variation on the Lightning Bolt spell – same level, damage, and effects, except as noted below. It is available to any evil wizard who knows Lightning Bolt and has a Carbuncle as a familiar.

When you cast it, you can voluntarily reduce its damage by any amount, down to minimum damage of 1 HP.

Each time you hit someone with the spell, a part of their brain turns into a gemstone of random type and value. Reduce the target’s Intelligence by 1. If the target receives any form of magical healing, the gemstone is destroyed and the Intelligence is restored.

The only way to harvest the gemstones is to perform a killing blow with a bludgeoning weapon, breaking open the victim’s skull and spilling forth the gems. Any other cause of death, including reducing Int to 0 and excessive HP damage from the Skull Crucible spell, will cause the gemstones to revert to brain matter.

Chances are, the PCs will first learn of this spell when a mysterious wizard starts paying for kidnappings with handfuls of uncut gems. The smarter the kidnapping victim, the more valuable to the wizard!

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If you’re reading this blog, then somewhere around your house, you probably have a map of your own private D&D world. Take a look at it.

Now delete everything in the middle. Just leave a half-inch strip along the edges.

What’s left in that half-inch strip? Is it all ocean? That’s how mine looks. I’m starting to think that’s a problem.

I’m coming to think that maps are better when they have more seas, fewer oceans. The Mediterranean and the English Channel are interesting in a way that the Atlantic and Pacific are not.

For one thing, I think land-heavy maps just look cooler. Maybe it’s because well-defined continents are really easy to read at a glance. Winding inland seas, though, stagger the brain. A staggered brain is good. It’s one step away from Wonder.

Let’s say you eventually decide to add another big continent, culturally isolated from the starting area: Kara-Tur, say. Many D&D campaigns have Renaissance-level naval technology (the Renaissance has cooler ships), which means that oceans are not much of a barrier to trade and exploration. An impassable desert might be a more plausible barrier.

There’s also something about a water-surrounded continent that throws a net around the whole campaign world. The players, and maybe the DM, might not think of exploring beyond its boundaries. On the other hand, areas of land drifting off the map, even featureless areas like impassable mountains, frozen wastes and trackless deserts, suggest who knows what wonders on the other side?

Check out this awesome map of Earth from 1448. Although it’s basically encircled by sea, it does have lots of complex, winding inland seas. It does fill me with a sense of wonder. It takes you a while to even see that it’s Earth: you can eventually identify Europe, upside-down, but the rest of the world is pretty conjectural. And look at the details! Look how red the Red Sea is! Look at the cute little towns and castles! And look at that awesome city on the left side! Apparently that’s Paradise – right on the world map. Come to think of it, the edges of the world map is a great place to put all the Planes.

Here’s an image I made years ago and just rediscovered: it’s my idea for a new series of annotated fantasy classics reprints. Each book’s text would be interspersed with the D&D die rolls that explain the action.

(click to enlarge)

For long scenes of dialogue, nothing would be needed but the occasional charisma check, noted in the margin. For combat scenes, though, the book would shift to a format inspired by Loebs editions and other high-quality scholarly translations: you’d have the original text on one side and the D&D rules/rolls on the facing page.

Fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and even D&D-inpired books like the Drizzt novels would obviously work quite well. Other books that might benefit from D&D Annotations:

Sherlock Holmes: the facing page would show the DC to notice each clue in the room, as well as Irene Adler’s Bluff checks and Sherlock Holmes’s character sheet (all 18s).

Romeo and Juliet: There’s a ton of swordfighting. The poison rules alone would fill out a decent Apothecary class. Mercutio’s monologue could be printed opposite a Monster Manual entry for Queen Mab. (All Shakespeare tragedies come with a house rule: you can deliver soliloquies while at negative hit points.)

The Bible: Lots of the Bible ended up in D&D, so it would be pretty easy to annotate (“Moses casts Raise/Lower Water”, etc.) The Bible would also provide a nice list of new magic items: Coiffure of Ogre Power, Staff of Time Stop, and Bronze Serpent of Proof Against Poison.

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