These skull-headed, vulture-winged daemons are harbingers of pestilence and servants of their patron Horseman, Apollyon. Manifestations of evil souls who perished from disease in life, leukodaemons work tirelessly to spread disease across all the worlds of the multiverse. More than any other daemon, leukodaemons cooperate with each other and those who conjure them to mortal worlds to spread sickness and plague, eschewing personal glory for end results.
Denizens of the bleak and terrible plane of Abaddon, daemons are shaped by and devoted to the destruction of life in all its forms. They seek the death of every mortal being by the most painful and horrible means possible, all in service to the apocalyptic entities known as the Four Horsemen. Each kind of daemon represents a different way to die, and their powers are nearly always aimed at spreading that particular form of death. Through the use of these powers, they seek to drag all existence down into a pit of hopelessness and despair, and to commit all souls to oblivion.
While those who summon daemons to the Material Plane usually seek to use the creatures’ destructive and corrupting powers for their own ends, daemons always look for ways to spread fear, doubt, and despair wherever they go. Often, daemons disguise their plots as the workings of other fiends, knowing that such confusion compounds mortals’ fear.
While all fiends seek to tempt mortals into lives of evil to increase their own numbers and power on their native planes, daemons are further driven by a supernatural hunger for mortal souls and use a variety of methods—not least of which is the cacodaemons’ soul gems—to entrap them. On Abaddon and in other forbidding places across the multiverse, souls are simultaneously a delicacy, a trade good, and a source of magical power, and the daemons are among the greatest gluttons, merchants, and abusers of this spiritual “resource.”
Daemonic Divinities
Numerous powerful and unique daemon demigods, known collectively as harbingers, rule over swaths of Abaddon. Above these demigods, though, are entities of even greater power—the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As the eons go on, the names and identities of specific horsemen change. Currently, they consist of Apollyon (Horseman of Pestilence), Charon (Horseman of Death), Szuriel (Horseman of War), and Trelmarixian (Horseman of Famine). Of these, only Charon has never fallen to an upstart. Some hold that a “Fifth Horseman” once ruled over the other four, while others maintain that the eternally eclipsed sun in the skies above Abaddon is all that remains of this long-dead god.
Soul Gems as Treasure
Soul gems are traded in illicit markets, a tradition celestials and psychopomps alike find vile. Soul gems’ value varies, but is generally worth an amount relative to the level of a gem’s captive soul.
The Daemonic Paradox
Daemons embody a fundamental paradox—while they are incarnations of death and seek to devour all that lives, they are themselves living creatures. Some speak of a glorious end time after which reality will finally be free of the contagion that is life itself. Most daemons give no thought to this paradox.
Other Daemons
As many daemons exist as there are awful ways to die. The bloody sangudaemon personifies death by blood loss, while the skeletal thanadaemon represents death from old age. The most powerful daemons are the olethrodaemons, who represent the massive deaths caused by apocalypses and the end of entire worlds.
