Book of Tieflings
By Rip Van Wormer, notallowedyet@hotmail.com
This file is Open Content. It can be freely posted anwhere, and may be
altered and added to without my consent.
A tiefling -literally, spawn of darkness, or devil-kin - is a creature whose spirit, blood, or form has been twisted by something else, and who is consequently not fully a member of its apparent race. Normally, the differences are subtle - a smoking shadow, the taste of ashes, eyes like a lizard. Sometimes they're very great.
In places where tieflings are greatly feared, people may be treated as tieflings even if they're not, simply because of unexplained differences in appearance. These characters will get their time in this book as well.
Tieflings are normally associated with the Lower Planes, mythic realms made from the essence of evil. However, any campaign location filled with sinister, supernatural energies - the Shadow World, the Gray, the Pits of Infernus, the Dark Side of the Moon, the Nether Kingdoms, the Whispering Vault, Yoggoth, the Dimension of Nightmares, the Demiplanes of Imprisonment or Dread - could theoretically produce tieflings.
Other words for tieflings or kinds of tieflings include cambions, damiens, alu-demons, nephilim, nethermar, darklings, evilseeds, abominations, witch-spawn, Scalped Men, Gifted Ones, and devil-kin.
It's usually not fun to be a tiefling. They may gain great power from their heritage, but it comes with a price.
The rest of this book is going to be filled with lists of traits that a tiefling might have.
Night hag tieflings:
During their dreamtime visits, occasionally night hags create children with mortal men. The result is always another night hag. However, sometimes a hag will dally with something with supernatural blood of its own. Certainly, the product of a night hag's dalliance with a full-blooded fiend will always be something unique, and these half-breeds may in turn mate with mortals, causing the mark of the Gray Sisters to appear in diluted form. Such children are always haunted by recurrent nightmares they can't explain: these are actually manifestations of their own half-formed supernatural command over dreams, which they are too weak to control. The hag-tieflings may believe they are being haunted by their wicked grandmothers, which might also be true.
If such a tiefling is ever to control their dreams, admission into a special prestige class is necessary, after they somehow find a tutor in such obscure arts.
A tiefling with night hag blood may have one or more of the following characteristics:
Gray or purple skin
Female
Warts, long nose
Hunchback
Iron claws
bat wings
the appearance of being blown by a phantom wind, which blows stronger near the sleeping.
wormlike appendagees
dusty
enhanced feminine attributes
supernatural beauty
bitchy, irritable.
Tendency to cackle.
Asleep more than usual. Some tieflings of this sort are comatose their whole lives.
Some radiate nightmares, involuntarily producing them in others. In a hidden chamber in Sigil's Harbringer House is a young woman, apparently normal except for her slightly violet skin, who creates the equivalent of a *mindspin* spell that affects everyone in a fifteen-foot radius, enshrouding them in a nightmare world that brings their deepest fears to horrifying life. She has never been awake, and the dreaming self that her victims encounter constantly shifts form, unaware of her true appearance. Her mother, half night hag and half shadowfiend, abandoned her at a very young age.
Yugoloth tieflings
Yugoloths don't commonly mate with mortals. They don't commonly mate with one another: they tend to be passionless as the Waste, as cynical as Gehenna, and mate only under special circumstances. When they do produce tieflings, it's often mechanically, by cursing the womb of a human thrall or actually surgically altering a changeling child. Rarely, though, a yugoloth will see fit to visit a mortal in a disguised form.
Symptoms of yugoloth taint include:
An eternally childlike appearance, the better to gain the confidence of others.
An appearance identical to that of a tanar'ri or baatezu, the better to infiltrate their ranks.
An appearance similar to that of an aasimar.
A completely average, unremarkable appearance.
Gray skin.
No mouth, or no nose.
Many arms
Furry body or unusually long hair.
Tail
Webbed feet
Surgical scars, strange implants of mysterious purpose.
Sexlessness
Hermaphroditism.
Slimy skin
Undead
Mismatched arms
Many legs
No shadow
Unusually arge and muscular
Tiny-brained, or no-brained
An unusually large skull
Wings
Chitonous skin
Insectoid eyes
A unnerving tendency to agree to everything.
Gehreleth tieflings
A situation that include rape by a demodand is too horrifying to contemplate. Slime or tar slowly dripping on a victim's body, seeking her mouth or nose, burrowing within... better to think of other ways that such a thing might happen. Perhaps an arcane ritual involving corpses, orchestrated by the shators. Yes, that sounds nicer. Now I can almost sleep soundly.
Gehreleth traits include:
The stench of the dead.
Slimy, shaggy, or tarry skin.
Mist, bleeding from the pores.
A triangle that marks the tiefling as a servant of Apomps. Or Nerull.
A fondness for poetry.
Claws and fangs.
Disgusting obesity.
Disgusting thinness.
Seemingly rotting flesh.
An ability to hide unobtrusively within corpses.
A prison, physical or otherwise, from which the tiefling cannot escape.
Hordling tieflings
The stolen wills, passions, and substance of the Gray Waste go to feed its masters, giving nothing back. The distorted evolutions that the most obsessive and vile of its petitioners undergo might sometimes bear dark reflections or twisted mockeries of what the planes victims have lost, however. The hordes of Hades have a thousand shapes, forms inspired by nightmare and secret depravity, or mimicking the visages of the gods of plague, death, and terror who call the Waste their home.
Despite their origin as sexless larvae, some hordlings have evolved the ability to bear or sire young. The tentacles, bone cages, and amorphous shapes that hordlings often use as sexual organs are usually not inherited by their children, although sometimes they are.
Signs of hordling ancestry include:
A wormlike limbs or torso.
Many limbs, or no limbs.
Headless
Psionic
Obsessive
Bound to some object or concept
Causes fear
Emotionless
Sociopathic
Odd skin tone
Eyeless, or too many eyes, or one large eye
Branded by yugoloths, night hags, or other hordling masters.
Several pairs of leathery wings
Insectoid limbs
Mucous, or partially liquid form.
Some tieflings resemble larvae more greatly than they do hordlings.
Some hordlings only spawn larvae, although these wormlike children may eventually evolve.
Tanar'ric tieflings.
Probably the fiend that most commonly breeds with humans is the tanar'ri, especially succubi, cambions, and balors. The lusts and adaptability of demonkind are well known and feared by all.
Marks of the Abyss include:
An affinity with a certain animal, such as rats, lizards, or spiders.
A body actually made out of hundreds of rats somehow joined to one another.
A shadow self, an evil twin invisible or otherwise.
An elemental body, or a resemblance to an element like fire, ice, poison, venom, blood, flesh, or bone.
Constant agony
A quasit which shares the tiefling's mind, or is able to read it, or occasionally trade places with it.
An addiction to blood.
An addiction to ashes, or fire, or self-mutilation.
An inability to eat anything. The tiefling is fed by a quasit familiar.
A skin which is shed at semi-regular intervals, or when danger threatens.
Six fingers
Ebon skin
Red slime constantly bleeding out of every pore.
Skeletal
Horned
Thorned
Scaled
Feathered
A childlike inability to take anything seriously.
A gremlin aura of entropy or bad luck.
Humanlike traits, if the tiefling is mostly nonhuman.
Pandemonic Tieflings
Tieflings born in Pandemonium don't require actual parents. They're often born from the hallucinations inspired by the winds, which can take on a disturbing reality for their victims. What may start out as a nagging whisper may eventually become an actual child, berating his shocked father for abandoning him for so long,or a long-dead lover may return for one last, inevitably disturbing encounter.
Most tieflings of the Howling Plane have no clear logic behind their origins, or if there is a logic it's one that's very disturbing to follow. Also, the dark and lonely Pandemonic natives may sometimes find non-native partners, often exiles to that plane. Such relationships usually end badly, and their tiefling children are often lonelier than their parents ever were.
Pandemonic traits include:
Dead, but doesn't know it
Limbs or face of pure darkness
Howling
Gibbering
Resembles ruined statue
Speaks with wind
Speaks with darkness/shadows
Speaks with howlers
Claws that grip stone
Aerodynamic form
Speaks in whispers
Made of voices, like an air genasi whose body really talks, or like an invisible stalker whose presence is always apparent.
Throws voice
Identical to another living person
Has an evil or chaotic twin
Unseelie taint: pointed ears, thorns and leaves, horns or pointed sidhe teeth
Followed by winds
Constantly surrounded by cold
Nocturnal
Burned by daylight
Requires smoked glasses to see clearly in daylight.
An inability to form close personal relatationships.
Acheron's tieflings
The origin of tieflings native to Acheron is as mysterious as the reproductive rites of the bladeling folk, or the krieg, but there exist strangely tainted ones who cannot be explained any other way.
Some symptoms include:
A rusty, corroded body.
Blades and knives poking out of the tiefling's bones and skin.
Mechanical or clockwork limbs.
An obsessive devotion to a mission or cause.
An intense affinity or repellence when magic is involved.
Some tieflings are completely immune to spells, while others are addicted to them.
The upright hair, immunities, and abilities of a lightning genasi, or an ice genasi.
The complete absence of long-term memory.
Too many memories, from too many people to keep track of.
A hivemind, with many tieflings thinking as one.
A tiefling may be born undead, or with undead traits.
Goblin features
mysterious objects lost or ruined by others long ago, manifesting in the tieflings' pockets, mouth, or other orifices.
Shadow Fiend tieflings
The shadow fiends are strange and insidious, and they know many secrets. It's not uncommon, much less uncommon than mortals would hope, for the creatures to twist or shape fetuses while still in the womb, or before they were even conceived. They may even twist surrogates, so that all a mortal man or woman's children are born with a shadow fiend's taint.
A tiefling touched by a shadow fiend may be born with no soul, its spirit traveling instantly to the fiend's dark clutches, or its soul may be imprisoned in a place set aside for the essence of tieflings.
On a less extreme note, a tiefling may be marked by a soulgem inbedded somewhere on his or her body, or may even have
shadowy limbs or forms somehow inherited through association.
Some of these tieflings have shadows that move and act entirely independently of their bodies.
General tiefling traits
There are thousands of different inhabitants of the netherworlds, and no list of the tieflings they inspire can ever be exhaustive. Here are some miscellaneous traits, appropriate for many different spawn of darkness:
Hollow bones
Syringes in skin
Immune deficiency
Addiction to a certain (probably fiend-brewed) drug
Nymphomania
Shifting gender
Abnormally large body parts
Lycanthropy
Exhales smog or tainted water
An infinite supply of cigarettes
An infinite supply of cigarette butts
Mind merged with vehicle
Multiple limbs or genitalia.
Feeds on hate or suffering.
Hooks or chains extending from body
absorbs dead matter
dead conjoined twin
false aasimar traits
traits of opposed fiendish race
ghostly twin
iron body parts/nails/hair
anguished faces imprisoned in body
extra nipple
gift of prophesy
ages backwards
fangs/claws/horns/spikes
unusual amount/color of hair
emanates a feeling that "someone stepped on my grave."
Unable to eat mortal food
wanderlust
bleeding
bubbling
fiendish animal companions
other fiendish traits
Memories of the dead
speaks with the dead
burnt by light/love/law/chaos/righteousness/honesty/charity/freedom/sharing
healed by darkness/antipathy/chaos/domination/slavery/despotry/selfishness/deceit/thievery
Vulnerable to holy symbols
no shadow
feeds on smoke and dust
probiscis
enhanced speed/strength dexterity
scalped skull-like visage
glowing bestial skull
posesses traits or memories of extinct, fiend-worshipping people or race
acts as mouth for fiend or dark god
shares body with fiend or imp's mind
has secondary, fiendish arms and perhaps body emerging from his or her waist which acts independently, hurting those nearby or preventing the tiefling from moving.
has secondary fiendish face, head, or mouth which talks independently.
has tentacles emerging from the back of his or her head which suck, bite, and lash the tiefling's back; they may appear to be whiplike or barbed, like a scourge, or organic like a mind flayer's tentacles or many snakes or leeches.
the tiefling may be mindlessly obedient, or incapable of agreeing with anything
the tiefling may be surrounded by shadows, ashes, flames, slime or another substance that acts independently, against his, her, or its will.
the tiefling may become spontaneously and periodically pregnant, giving birth to tieflings of greater evil than itself, either parthenogenically or because of fiendish seed stored in a hidden part of her body. the tiefling may be falling apart, its pieces eventually growing into fiendish creatures. Or it may just be dropping eggs or spores.
the tiefling may have many alternate personalities, not necessarily more evil, but perhaps at odds with the main one.
the tiefling may have been groomed since birth to be a sacrifice to a fiendish god, or the body of an entity that's been without one for a long time.
Perhaps it was once human, and still considers itself to be so. Perhaps not.
The tiefling may seem to belong to an enemy people or race, as the malenti are for sahuagin. If her or she survives the mother's punishment, the tiefling's existence should admirably increase the tensions between the two groups.
New Feats
(sketches)
Glide: The tiefling is able to use his or her wings to glide short
distances. Prerequisite: Leap.
Fly: The tiefling is able to use his or her wings to fly short distances.
Prerequisite: Glide.
Other feats: Tentacled fighting, swallow, ooze, multiple arm use.
Rilmani tieflings
Gateward from the Spire a humanoid with golden or silver skin will occasionally emerge, righteously defending the Land from invasions from other planes. They resemble aasimar in many ways, carefully raised by powerful planar beings and taught to take pride in their heritage. They shine, and many find them beautiful. But the rilmani have a dark side equal to their brightness, and it causes them to occasionally make tieflings as well. Their tactics can be as cruel as those of the fiends', creating children as accursed as any cambion, for reasons ranging from a need to infiltrate the lower planes to a desire to sow discord in a place once at harmony. If they feel the need is urgent, the rilmani have no scruples over how they make and shape their children.
The tieflings the rilmani make may have some of the following traits:
bestial appearance
metallic-hued skin
strangely ridged scalp
elemental traits
fiendish wings
celestial wings
a completely ordinary appearance
completely ordinary appearance for another people, race, or species
reproductive roots, spores, or eggs
always pregnant
slaad reproduction
hunchbacked, hairlipped, blind, etc.
glowing eyes
light or darkness spell-like ability
advisor in the form of a companion animal
intolerable odor
eyes of two different colors
skin of two different shades or hues
horns: one pointing up, one pointing down
two tails
attended by petitioners
ability to become intangible
Fairy tieflings
Fey-touched, or just fey. As in, "Jacob was a bit fey; they say his mam was an asrai who had forsaken the sea." Tiefling, aasimar, or genasi might be appropriate terms too on occasion (especially if you consider beings like sylphs and genies to be fairies, or if the denizens of the Seelie and Unseelie courts count as celestials or fiends).
Fey traits would include things like
pointed ears,
leaves for hair,
a greenish or barklike complexion,
sharp teeth or claws,
an unusually delicate body,
less fingers than usual,
hairy or goatlike legs,
webbed fingers,
a talent for healing,
a wild, contrary personality, or
a tail.
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