Re: Dealing with Demons
If I was doing it, I'd stay away from anything resembling modern Christian "folklore" type demons, and stick to stuff like the Keys of Solomon, etc. They might be evil, they might be indifferent, they know tremendous amounts of stuff, etc. I'd probably want there to be a lot of rules for how they worked that weren't known even to those wizards that had knowledge of how to summon and bind them. "You read a story once about how [such and such] happened when Wendel the Wise summoned a demon and commanded it to do [a thing], but you don't know exactly why. Neither did Wendel."
Anyway, I'm a big horror movie fan, so I'd probably draw from stuff like Hereditary, The Alchemists' Cookbook, maybe Evil Dead.
Once someone summons a demon, even if they contain the backlash and nothing goes wrong during the wish itself, it's possible that wild and wooly things can happen in their life afterward, as that bending in reality sends out echoes and ripples. I mean, I don't know what those things might be, but you can give it a real "you have tampered with things you maybe shouldn't have" feel without killing any PCs.
|