Tabletop Game / Demon: The Fallen

The final game in White Wolf's Old World of Darkness.

In the beginning, God made seven Houses of angels, who forged reality out of the void of non-existence: the House of the Dawn, angels of radiance and fire, God's Heralds to Creation; the House of the Firmament, angels of the winds and the breath of life; the House of the Fundament, angels of earth and matter; the House of the Spheres, angels of pattern and fate, the House of the Deep, angels of the waters and desire; the House of the Wild, angels of nature; and the House of the Second World, angels of death.

The pinnacle of the Houses' collective act of creation was mankind, destined to be a reflection of all the greatest traits of God and Angels and beyond. Except it didn't happen. Everyone waited and humans were still focused entirely on humping and eating anything they saw. The angels tried to ask God what was wrong with them, but anybody who went to see Him didn't come back, with the best case scenario being that God assimilated them and worst case unmade them.

Impatient and feeling abandoned, a third of the angels decided to just give humans the blessings of civilization themselves. For this, they were cast out from the angelic host, punished by seeing their gifts to humanity twisted to bring humanity low, and branded with new names to signify their new status. The House of the Dawn became the Namaru, the Devils. The House of the Firmament became the Asharu, the Scourges. The House of the Fundament became the Annunaki, the Malefactors. The House of the Spheres became the Neberu, the Fiends. The House of the Deep became the Lammasu, the Defilers. The House of the Wild became the Rabisu, the Devourers. And the House of the Second World became the Halaku, the Slayers.

There was war then, between the loyalists and the rebels, war for countless mortal generations, the rebels steadily making themselves into true monsters as it progressed. In the end, the loyalists triumphed, and the vanquished rebels were sealed in a featureless abyss.

Millennia later, the Abyss cracked open as a great storm raged across the realms of the dead, and the fallen angels began escaping, with the weakest demons slipping through the cracks first. Weakened, they had to possess the bodies of dying or comatose humans to survive. There was no sign of any angels or God's influence left in the world, which was now filled instead with jaded humans and unfamiliar supernatural creatures. During their time in the Pit, the demons had fractured into five factions, which came to color their philosophies now that they were free: those who wish to destroy all of creation to spite an absent God (Raveners), those who see Lucifer as the Messiah of both mankind and angels (Luciferians), those who want to fashion mankind into a weapon to destroy God (Faustians), those who seek redemption and repentance (Reconcilers), and those who have come to the sinking realization that all of this was probably what God wanted to happen (Cryptics), and want to figure out why God would want this, of all things?

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This RPG provides examples of:

• Anti-Villain: Naturally, many of the Fallen are this. They had sympathetic reasons to rebel against God, and what happened to them after they lost the war was fucked up.
• Alien Geometries: The Lore of Paths can bend space for any number of effects; it's possible to, in effect, turn a crack in the wall into a six-foot-wide corridor or change the angle of a street you're driving down. Once, during the War of Wrath, Malefactors cut off an entire city from normal reality by simply removing any path between it and the rest of the world. The Loyalist Host started down the road to the city, and ended up on the other side without finding it.
• Always Chaotic Evil: All demons initially are this. Only by merging with the body and mind of a human, like all protagonist demons do, can they hope to break free from their all-consuming hatred. The Earthbound demons, who inhabit inanimate objects instead, embody this trope without exception.
• And I Must Scream: Imprisonment in the Abyss. The Fallen went from having a fundamental connection to all of reality to an existence defined by non-existence and their own anger. The only Fallen to escape this punishment was Lucifer. The Earthbound were summoned out of the Abyss long ago, and the player characters only recently managed to slip out.
• Animorphism: Two Visages of the Devourers, the Demons of the Wild (the third being an idealized version of their mortal form).
• The Armies of Heaven: In the backstory, Lucifer's rebellious angels have battled the angelic armies loyal to God and led by Archangel Michael, but the latter seem to have disappeared from the world while the Fallen were locked up in the Abyss.
• Ascended Demon: What quite a few wish for.
• The Atoner: The Reconcilers have as their major agenda making some sort of peace with God and the world, as repayment for sending everything downhill during the Fall.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: How demonic/angelic hierarchy works.
• Ax-Crazy: The Raveners embrace their Ax-Craziness and really high-Torment demons in general qualify for this trope almost by definition.
• Badass Army: The Fallen were this once upon a time. Despite going up against the will of God Himself and being outnumbered by the loyalists 2:1, the Fallen did remarkably well in the War of Wrath. And if it weren't for a rather large and ultimately fatal fuck up near the end, they probably could have kept going.
• Being Tortured Makes You Evil: By the time a few demons manage to escape the Abyss, the eons of suffering have so broken them that even what were once the most noble among them can only be dragged into sanity by exposure to the memories and feelings of a human host. The Earthbound, lacking such a host, are without exception horrid monstrosities.
• Big Red Devil: If a high-Torment Namaru invokes Bel, the Visage of Celestials, they look like this. (At low Torment they appear the most like the classic Winged Humanoid angel of any of the Visages.)
• Brilliant, but Lazy: The human race, from the perspective of demons (who, conversely, are driven and passionate in their actions but rigid and unimaginative in their thinking).
  Lucifer: Humans have the potential for so much but the drive to do so little!
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Human Faith can potentially reshape the very laws of the universe. In the modern day, few people can marshal enough Faith to accomplish much, but back during the war there were examples of human communities being attacked by monsters that had been brought into being by their own fear.
• Cosmic Flaw: The backstory of Demon: The Fallen describes the original universe as a perfect machine, with every natural law, concept, being, and atom humming together in harmony and beauty without parallel. The one flaw was that mankind seemed... unable to gain sapience on their own. Long story short, God got angry that Lucifer forced the issue by giving mankind sapience, and so God "brushed" the world with his presence, which was the equivalent of hitting a car with a wrecking ball. Sure, the universe survived, but in a broken, imperfect and continually decaying state that can't ever self-repair to its former state.
• Council of Angels: How the universe was run in the old days. God had to remain apart from Creation because the Infinite touching the Finite would cause massive destruction, so the angels had to carry out the duty of actually running existence. The Fall was in many ways due to this lack of direct oversight.
• Crapsack World: Standard for the gameline. In this case it might actually be the demon's fault. Or God's. Or humanity's. Or some mixture of all of the above. Or maybe this is just the way things are supposed to be.
• Creative Sterility: A subtle example. Angels (fallen or otherwise) can create like nobody's business. What they can't do is innovate. Only God or humankind (who are created in His image) are capable of creating entirely new concepts - angels can follow their instructions, improve on their overall designs, make a few personal flourishes within an established theme, and even take their ideas further than they thought possible, but they can't conceive of a truly original idea.
• Cruel Mercy: God declared an individual punishment for each House of fallen angels. His punishment of the Devils was... not deigning to punish them at all. That sounds underwhelming, but the Devils, whose defining characteristic is Pride, could have endured anything other than being beneath God's notice. The same principle may have been the reason for why Lucifer was not sent to Hell - what better way to punish the proudest and noblest Devil of them all than by letting him off scot free while his followers suffered eternal torment?
• Dark Is Not Evil: The demons certainly aren't all evil, and the reason they're in this mess now is because they chose humans over God.
• Deal with the Devil: The demons can strike bargains with mortals, granting them boons, such as superhuman abilities, in exchange for a steady trickle of Faith. Unfortunately for mortals, becoming a demon's thrall means granting a demon access to one's soul and ability to ravage it for extra Faith, at the cost of major harm to the thrall...
• Death Is Cheap: Kind of. Destruction of its host body does not kill a demon and they can try to find a new body or possess an inanimate object (becoming one of the Earthbound) before being drawn back into the Abyss. However, demons can be made Deader than Dead, as this process causes permanent loss of power, whittling the demon to nothingness if they lose bodies too often; and other demons can attempt to devour a disembodied demonic spirit, to absorb its power and knowledge.
• Demonic Possession: All of the characters. Thankfully, demons are usually able to possess only the comatose, suicidal or dying.
• De Terminator: The Luciferans consider being imprisoned in Hell for eons to have been a minor setback, and now that they're free again they're planning to pick up right where they left off. Whether that makes them magnificently stalwart heroes or just stubborn jackasses who don't Know When to Fold Them is a matter of some contention, mind you.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Player Characters are supposed to battle Eldritch Abominations that can torch whole continents in seconds, if they push their abilities to the limit. Thankfully, at the moment of the game's start, said Abominations are supposed to be in a weakened state as well.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Almost impressively, as the Fallen weren't to a man the most sympathetic of people by the time they had lost the war against heaven. Still, condemning each and every one of them to absolute and solitary isolation in an empty void (to the point that it's likely even the nicer Fallen were Driven to Madness and turned into spiteful horrors) was a pretty petty thing to do.
• Divine Conflict: Lucifer's rebellion against God is a key event.
• Divinely Appearing Demons: The low-Torment demons are virtually indistinguishable from non-Fallen angels, allowing the former to pass for the latter to the mortals.
• Driven to Madness: An eternity of damnation and hellish torment within the Abyss has driven every last Fallen insane. Only by merging with a human host (and by extension, their memories and emotions) can a demon ultimately get enough of a grip on themselves to avoid being a hate-filled monstrosity.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Earthbound. Some demons got dragged out of the Abyss early by mortal sorcerers, and that really didn't help anything... "normal" demons also can turn into this.
• Elemental Embodiment:
  • Ride the Flame transform a Devils in a pilllar of fire that shifts size and shape according to her will; or in a black, fiery skeleton wreathed with flame.
  • Water Form allows a Defiler to transform her body into water, either as a liquid or a mist.
• Empty Shell: This is the usual state of those humans eligible to be hosts for the Fallen. Stated possibilities include vegetative-state brain damage, drug overdoses, catatonia, and the like.
• Escaped from Hell: The player characters are minor fallen angels who escaped from the Abyss when its walls cracked under the Sixth Maelstrom and latched onto human hosts to stay in the mortal world. There are also the Earthbound—much more powerful demons who instead escaped via diabolists' summons and possessed inanimate objects instead.
• Evil Feels Good: Subverted. Demons' Karma Meter is called "Torment" for a reason. High-Torment demons (and all of the Earthbound) invariably are insane, screwed up monsters.
• Evil Makes You Ugly: A demon's Torment affects its true, apocalyptic form. At low levels of Torment, demons may look strange or frightening, but they will at the very least come across as majestic and awe-inspiring, to the point of being all but indistinguishable from their un-Fallen counterparts. High-Torment demons, on the other hand, are hideous, deformed monstrosities, usually with a generous helping of Body Horror. For example, a Devil specialising in the Lore of Flames will be a radiant figure Wreathed in Flames at low Torment, and a scorched, burning skeleton at high Torment.
• Face–Heel Turn: Every Demon did this as part of the back story. They started out as noble idealists. War against their own kind, followed by eons of imprisonment in the Abyss, twisted them into hateful monsters. Player Characters are the ones who managed a subsequent Heel–Face Turn (or are at least capable of trying).
• Genius Loci: Some Earthbound are incarnate in a location rather than an object. This makes them even less mobile and flexible than others of their kind, but also harder to get rid of permanently. Smashing an idol is one thing, but how do you destroy a whole mountain?
• Go Mad from the Revelation: One look at a manifestation of a high-end Earthbound can crush a human's mind and willpower.
• God: He exists, or He did, having created the basic underpinnings of the universe then created the Angels to make the rest. He then became increasingly hands off and refused to explain anything which led the Fall. After that the Demons only ever heard from him via proclamations from Loyalist Angels who seemed to have His power behind them but he Demons can't be sure. Upon being freed the Demons have found no evidence God is still around.
• A God Am I: The Earthbound present themselves like this to their cultists, and many of them are insane enough to seriously believe in this.
• God Is Dead: A monk once suggested that The Fall wasn't malicious on God's part. But that it was just the collateral damage of God sacrificing himself to save the world. Lucifer kills the monk, but not before the thought is engraved into his mind.
• God Is Evil: Here things get confusing. The general demon line is "God is a dick, and we were right to rebel". The problem comes when you realize that God's version of events is never told. Every account of the War of Wrath is from a demon's first-person viewpoint, and they don't seem to line up. Even the demonic accounts claim they did some truly horrible things before getting sent to Hell. There's a faction, the Reconcilers, who have as their central conceit that God was right about the whole mess. All that said, God doesn't do a lot to counteract the general "God is on the bad side" line, having denied humanity sapience without a word of explanation (even the angels who were loyal admitted that one). The overriding feeling is more "God is Apathetic." Given the fact that the World of Darkness is such a crapsack world, perhaps He just gave up on the whole thing. Not to mention that a free and sapient humanity managed to create the Crapsack World, even without the presence of the Earthbound; after all, many of the supernatural threats were once human.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The Fallen need Faith, which is a rare thing to find in the World of Darkness, to power their Evocations. The Fallen make pacts with mortals to draw on their Faith potential in exchange for a supernatural boon.
• Good Feels Good: The more a Demon works to heal the world's many wounds, the more their own Torment is eased.
• Gothic Punk: It's the World of Darkness and the game maintains the style from earlier games.
• Gravity Master: The first power of the Lore of Fundament, Manipulate Gravity, allows a Demon to leap enormous distances, hangs suspended in the air or plunge at her foes like a meteorite and is a common lore favored by all the houses.
• Hard Light: The ritual Tapestry of Light, invented by the Neberu, creates a strong material out of light itself, allowing the creation of objects of any color (including completely invisibile), that can also be fashioned as an inexhaustible light source. Among it's useful properties is that the material is unaffected by heat and all known acids. Exist a variation that is only material with respect to one substance, for example, human flesh; leading to interesting possibilities for weapons that ignores armour.
• Have You Seen My God?: God and the loyalist angels are nowhere to be seen in the modern era; one supplement gives guidelines for making angels, though. Oh, and Lucifer is AWOL as well, having never been sent to the Abyss. He's supposedly Walking the Earth though and messing around with the Meta Plot of other gamelines.
• He Who Fights Monsters: The Fallen became profoundly less sympathetic as the war against Heaven raged on, as the the millennia long conflict became more brutal and vicious and the rebels became much more jaded and bitter. Some of them even began to turn on humanity, as misunderstanding and frustration turned to outright rancor and disdain.
• Hive Mind: The Lore of the Firmament can allow a Scourge to remotely control his or her thralls and sense what they sense.
• Holy Burns Evil: See below. A sufficiently Tormented Fallen takes constant aggravated damage if they tread on holy ground.
• Holy Ground: Played With; Fallen can walk freely into holy places if either the ground is insufficiently "holy" (e.g. nobody who goes really believes, including the priests) or their Torment is low. Otherwise, stepping onto a holy ground kills their host bodies quickly and efficiently.
• Hopeless War: After Caine invented murder, Lucifer essentially lost control of three of his five legions, and many of those renegade Fallen didn't take long at all to more or less spiral into Stupid Evil. The Fallen who kept their shit together were pretty much fucked from word go because they had to spend almost as much time and effort fixing their fellows' screw-ups and bullshit evil experiments as they did resisting the heavenly host.
• Horned Humanoid: The Apocalyptic form of the Lore of Radiance provides horns.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: It's right there in the title. The demons used to be capable of creating life, moving mountains, engineering entire parallel dimensions and similar feats of literally divine might. In their current state, they are reduced to using a handful of limited parlour tricks to wheedle a mere trickle of the Faith they need out of humans who are, quite frankly, also just a pale shadow of what they were. Subverted with the Earthbound, who are described as being in some ways more powerful than they were as angels — though at the cost of even what little sanity regular demons have managed to hold on to.
• Hufflepuff House: The Alabaster Legion was made up the demons who for whatever reason didn't want to join either the Crimson, Iron, Ebon or Silver Legions.
• Humans Are Flawed: And apparently by design. Adam and Eve had the capacity for literal divine greatness but never exercised it until the rebel Angels shwed them how. Later humans have mostly done the same.
• Humans Are Special: A decidedly cynical and downplayed take on this. Humans are special, each one having a spark of divine creativity in them that demons can never hope to emulate, making them capable of reshaping the world according to their will and coming up with endless wonders — and maybe one in a million actually makes good on that potential, with the rest just acting like stupid, selfish apes. Much of the demons' frustration throughout history has come from just how difficult it is to make humans get their asses in gear and act like the elevated beings they were meant to be.
• Humanity Ensues: To stay on Earth, demons need to take a human host. For some demons (e.g. PCs), possession can shock them out of their Torment, as they experience human memories for the first time; for others, however, it has little effect.
• Immune to Mind Control: All Demon hosts are immune to all mind-controlling effects including hypnosis, thanks to being already possessed by a demon. They are still susceptible to I Know Your True Name, however. They are also vulnerable to methods that affect the physical body/brain rather than the spiritual mind/soul. As an example they are explicitly able to be subjected to a vampire's Blood Bond. On the upside (for the demon) leaving the body for a new host removes any such effects.
• Karma Meter: Torment, which is unusual in that it goes up. At 10, you fall so deeply into hatred and revenge that you can never come back. Conversely, reaching zero Torment would hypothetically redeem the fallen back into their angelic self. However, this is impossible through normal mechanics, but with proper roleplay...
• Kick the Dog: God and the heavenly host made the defeated Fallen watch as they destroyed everything the rebel angels had worked for, then, rather than simply unmaking them, sealed them away in the Abyss so that their suffering would be eternal.
• Knight Templar: A great deal of the angels who didn't rebel, if demons are to be believed about this, and some of the ones who did. Most particularly Usiel, who never joined the rebellion but Fell anyway because he slaughtered an entire valley of people just to get at Gaviel.
• Logical Weakness: Demons occupy a very high spot on the power scale of payable characters in the Old World of Darkness, only being outdone by very high level mages. However while they may be amazingly powerful cosmic being they can only stay out of Hell by inhabiting objects (in which case they struggle to move) or human bodies. Unless a Demon is using it's powers that body is every bit as frail as a normal human body. As such a Demon who is caught by surprise could be killed by, say, a single well aimed gunshot from a perfectly normal human while less powerful but more physically resilient supernaturals from the setting would shrug off.
• Love Hungry: A few demons, and mind control makes it easier, and if done "right" gains the demon spiritual power.
• Mad Scientist: A number of the Malefactors fall into this category, as do a few of the Devourers. One of them is directly responsible for the demons losing the war against Heaven thanks to her experiments.
• Mana: Faith, which is harvested from mortals, either willingly or, erm, less willingly...
• Mind Rape: The side effect of reaping Faith from an unwilling mortal. The Earthbound-exclusive Lore of Violation's second rank power is called "Mind Rape." Both kinds cause physical damage as well as psychological. Doing this more than once to your thralls can turn them against you.
• Nephilim: Offspring of humans and angels who tried to Take Over the World.
• Nice Guy: Ahrimal/Detective Gerhard Leibner is an entirely benign, genuinely altruistic and well-meaning demon upon his return to the world. He was apparently drawn to his host because he was something of a Knight in Sour Armor, being an idealist who had his hopes crushed repeatedly by the cynical World of Darkness. Ahrimal admits Gerhard was more or less a shell of a man by the time he arrived and took control of his body.
• Noble Demon: The Devils, in particular, have a traditional code of honour that aims to make them this. You can conquer, kill and destroy, but you must do it with courage and integrity, making sure to honour your promises and paying whatever personal price your convictions may require of you. Not all modern Devils still live up to this ideal, mind.
• No Social Skills: A common flaw amongst the Malefactors (who find humans uncomfortably unpredictable) and the Slayers (who have a tendency towards isolation). The Devourers have a decided tendency towards this, as they're often tactless and aggressive.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: The Ebon Legion consisted of those demons who were committed to the war against Heaven but who were in it solely to further their own interests. In the modern day, the more cynical Faustians are this compared to their more idealistic peers — they want humans to be healthy and plentiful, yes, but only because they want more worshipers feeding them Faith and doing their bidding.
• No True Scotsman: The angels do not consider the Fallen their brethren. Some Fallen couldn't agree more.
• Number of the Beast: There are six hundred sixty-six Earthbound. Likewise, Lucifer's True Name, when translated into binary and written in eight-point type, covers exactly six hundred and sixty-six pages. He thought that was funny when he found out.
• Offended by an Enemy's Indifference: The rebel Angels of the House of the Dawn could have born any curse that God could have laid upon them, since their pride would have worn it as a badge of honour for their courage to stand against the Almighty. So instead God didn't curse them like the other Houses were cursed, he merely named them as "Devils" and left at at that. The impression that they were not worth cursing and the resulting damage to their precious pride hurt them far more than any curse ever could have.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The Raveners want to kill every living thing and destroy everything that isn't living; the idea is to spite God by destroying Creation. Some of the Earthbound also qualify.
• Omniscient Morality License: God responded to the angels' concerns about the state of humanity by claiming that in contrary to appearances, He had excellent reasons for what He was doing that He would not explain, but would show to anyone who came to Him and asked. Those who did were never seen again, and their fate is left ambiguous.
• One-Winged Angel: Every demon has an "Apocalyptic Form," a reflection of the angelic Lore they embody the most. They can take on this form for extra power, as well as to reap Faith from mortals. Low-Torment demons generally have a beautiful apocalyptic form, but even they can go one-wing if the fight turns against them and they need to tap into their Superpowered Evil Side.
• Original Man: Of the "modern humans are pathetically frail by comparison" variety. Adam and Eve were supposed to be the ultimate lifeforms and we just can't measure up.
• Our Angels Are Different: The Angels are arranged into Houses, each being responsible for creating and maintaining areas of Creation. They were also responsible for most of the actual work of creating the universe, with God basically only providing the initial raw materials and general guidelines that the Angels were to follow.
• Our Demons Are Different: The Demons were originally exactly the same as the loyalist Angels, with their only differences being philosophical. However as the war between the two dragged on the rebel Angels began to use increasingly extreme measures, corrupting themselves with Torment, a kind of spiritual sickness. Being trapped in Hell turbocharged this corruption as there was nothing in Hell except each other, giving them nothing to do but wallow in their misery and resentments and take it out on each other. By this point the Demons are twisted monsters only able to remember their better natures through the examples they sometimes find in human memories.
• Our Souls Are Different: Angels and Demons don't actually have souls. They're the celestial equivalent of software, and they can be deleted or made into hand puppets if someone discovers their true name. Demonically possessing a human (even an Empty Shell) gives them direct access to a human soul, which lets them experience (among other, less pleasant things) real love for the first time. This is part of what frees them from Torment after leaving the Abyss.
• Physical God: What the demons used to be, before God stripped them of much of their power and threw them into Hell. Lucifer is still this trope.
• Permafusion: When demons possess mortals, the result cannot be separated into its constituent parts anymore under normal circumstances as the demon displaces the mortal's soul, leaving behind a mindless, soulless shell if the demon is later exorcised (and it's not fun for the demon, either, who actually benefits from being grounded by mortal morals, memories and sensations, as they stave off the horror of the Abyss).
• Playing with Fire: The Lore of Flames of the Devils involves a lot of summoning fire for various purposes.
• The Powers That Be: The Earthbound, lacking physical bodies, have to act through agents or by performing wide-ranging feats of Lore. On a much larger scale, God never took direct part in either the creation of the world or the war, instead empowering His loyal angels to work and fight in His name.
• Power at a Price: Every power available to the Fallen comes in both normal and twisted versions; while the latter usually only happen if they lose control of their Torment, they can intentionally invoke their Torment to use the twisted version "on command". However, this involves dredging up their memories of Hell, worsening their Torment in the process.
• Prophecy Twist: Some powers of Lore of Patterns point the fallen towards key events, allowing him to execute a Butterfly of Doom scenario — but the vision provides the key event without context (and if the evocation has got warped, the meaning will be exact opposite)
• Rage Against the Heavens: The war against the loyalist angels.
• Religious Horror: In two directions, as the game both has the horrors of demons tormenting humankind and the knowledge that God either cannot help anymore or has ceased to care.
• Satan Is Good: While there are options offered for making Lucifer a deceitful Smug Snake who led the Fallen to damnation to serve his own petty ambition, the default is that he is and was idealistic, heroic and determined to save humanity. Since he never suffered in Hell, he has a Torment rating of 1, making him almost an angel. Of course, Good is Not Nice — he's got his eyes firmly fixed on the fate of all of humankind, making him decidedly cavalier with the lives of individual humans and demons. That said, Lucifer's Pride still lead to his fall from grace, so to speak. It is just that the story plays around with the context of exactly what that meant.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • The demons as a whole were this bar a very few of them, trapped in Hell for most of history and only occasionally summoned by magic users for a brief time before being returned. The Sixth Great Maelstrom opened holes in Hell that the weaker end of the demon hierarchy can slip through, though the more powerful demons are still trapped, at least for now.
  • More specifically Earthbound were imprisoned in objects by masters of holy magics, guided (rather ironically) by Lucifer to stop their growing power and keep them in slumber. Unfortunately the Maelstrom woke them up as well and, while they are still a lot weaker than they were, they're getting back into the swing of things alarmingly quickly.
• Seeker Archetype:
  • This is the trademark weakness for the Neberu, the fourth House: it was curiosity of the unknown that led to their downfall, and it's a need to investigate mysteries that afflicts them now. This curiosity usually stems from an unforeseen chain of events that arises over the course of their actions. Most Fiends want to know why this happened, focusing their analytical abilities to find the source of the anomaly, and in so doing losing sight of the task at hand.
  • The search for knowledge, in every field, is the purpose of every member of the Cryptic, one of the factions of the fallen. The Cryptic's attitude toward the rebellion can be summed up as "Well, that didn't work. Let's go find something that might."
• Self-Inflicted Hell: There is no inherent punishment in the Abyss but the rage and pain of those trapped within. With nothing else to do the Demons took their resentments out on each other.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: While the Reconcilers have as their Plan A making peace with God, if that proves impossible, Plan B is repairing the damage the Fall did to the world.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: You'd be hard pressed to find an angel or demon who isn't this, what with every single one of them having fought in a bitter, generations long, unimaginably brutal civil war.
• Shout-Out:
  • Earthbound Belial, one of Lucifer's five most powerful subordinates before the imprisonment, looks a lot like Cthulhu. Or at least the reliquary inhabited by his spirit does, as his manifestation is said to be so horrible that it defies description.
  • In the tie-in novels, the Trilogy of the Fallen, one demon happens upon a vampire, to which he immediately reacts, "Caine? Is that you?"
• Shock and Awe: the Apocalyptic Form of the Lore of the Storms gives this capacity
• Speak of the Devil: Saying the Celestial Name of one of the Fallen causes them to hear the next few words you say.
• Superpowered Evil Side: The Demons can harness their Torment to juice up their powers and make them stronger. However this only increases the hold their Torment has over them.
• Technopath: The Lore of the Forge, the signature power of the Malefactor, grants power over objects and machines.
• Time Abyss: Technically every demon is this, being older than the universe itself. However, the Fallen tend to be this in theory only, since they've been gone from the world for its entire recorded history and having only very spotty memories of the dawn of time. The Earthbound, on the other hand, are very much this, immortal entities that have shaped human civilisation pretty much since the start and having missed only a few centuries at the tail end of it to hibernation. Likewise Lucifer, and presumably any other surviving angels (wherever they are).
• Unholy Ground: The fallen angel Kupala is bound within the soil of Eastern Europe.
• Vampiric Draining: All Elohim require Divine Faith to live and cast magic, and the only way the Fallen can obtain it is from humans, the image of God. For this, they can either reveal themselves to certain humans and let their Faith trickle to them constantly, or reap them for all their Faith in a one-time boost. Unlike vampires, demons don't actually expend Faith by merely existing.
• Villainous Underdog: The books stress that most modern-day exorcists are perfectly ordinary people who have learned that demons walk the Earth and decided to do something about it, lacking supernatural abilities, training or even much of an idea of what they're fighting. They can still be dangerous through sheer determination and because the demons are unlikely to see them coming, but they don't have much hope of making a dent in demon-kind as a whole (notably even at their most successful they can only banish demons back to Hell from which they likely will escape in time, actually destroying demon would require either its True Name or some serious magical power).
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Lucifer was of course the original one, and other demons can fall into this when their Torment is low but their ambition remains high (as is the case with the nicer sort of Faustians). In fact, it's implied to have been an intrinsic part of the angelic mindset even before the Fall — at Torment 1, representing the highest moral state a demon can realistically achieve, a demon is forbidden from showing "unwillingness to sacrifice for the greater good."
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Apocalyptic forms of demons not only automatically grow more powerful with accumulation of Torment, but also can be powered up temporarily by accepting more Torment. Moreover, the Earthbound are considerably more powerful (although much fewer in number) than regular Fallen.
• Words Do Not Make The Magic: It's explicitly noted that even though evocations are performed by speaking special words of power encoded in the Lores, just repeating those words by rote isn't enough to perform an evocation - you need to have a deep spiritual understanding of what they mean, to the point where the knowledge shapes your very nature. Humans also can't perform evocations at all, though they can be given similar abilities by making a pact with a demon.

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