What's a Devil to do?

[Casey Bradley]

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This post contains spoilers for Turn of the Torrent
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I'm running Hell's Rebels for a group of 6 players and ran into a really interesting situation today. I find myself left with a 'free' Bearded Devil and I'm not really sure what to do with him. I will post the details of the situation below and I would love to know what ideas people have for him.

A changeling woman by the name of Luculla Gens runs a cult of Mahathallah under the ruins of the Lucky Bones, an old thieve's guild den. Luculla is a big fan of kidnapping people and sacrificing them to Mahathallah. She prefers to capture teens and then sacrifice them on their birthday as soon as they hit adulthood. To aid her in this task she has used Lesser Planar Ally to summon an Advanced Bearded Devil named Elgadazum the Hateful. The exact terms of their agreement is that Elgadazum guards the kidnapped prisoners until they 'ripen' to sacrificial age. In return, Luculla provides Elgadazum with the thirteenth sacrifice's soul as payment.

My PCs just raided the Lucky Bones in this past session. They ran in to Elgadazum and the two parties got into a friendly discussion. Elgadazum mentions that he finds “waiting for the cusp of adulthood to sacrifice a soul is a waste of time, and that souls are souls regardless of how long they’ve been lodged in living flesh." My party's CN Half-Orc Warpriest readily agrees with Elgadazum (as most people facing a Devil tend to do) and the two strike up a deal, much to the dismay of the party's LG Monk. Since Elgadazum's bargain is strictly to guard the prisoners he will continue to do just that, ignoring Luculla's cries for aid when the party inevitably attacks. Elgadazum's reasoning is that with Luculla dead, their arrangement is complete and he can go ahead and take the souls of the two prisoners he is currently guarding.

The party attacks Luculla and Elgadazum stays out of the way. The party is beat up (the LG Monk is a wee bit dead at the moment), but victorious and we ended the session with the party looting the room and figuring out what to do with their now dead monk. As soon as Luculla dies, I assume Elgadazum has a nice soul snack on the two prisoners, but what does he do then?

Lesser Planar Ally states "At the end of its task, or when the duration bargained for expires, the creature returns to its home plane." Does the Devil HAVE to return to his home plane? And if so, how immediately? Would he have even had time to snack on some souls once Luculla died or would he have been sucked back to Hell? If he does have a bit of time to roam around in Kintargo would he? What kind of plans do you see him getting up to? Would he spring an attack on the now weakened PCs (that seems a bit more Demon-like to me)? Would he attempt to make another bargain with them?

The thing is, I can TOTALLY see my party making a deal with a Devil, especially with the Monk too dead to object. I'm just not exactly sure where to take things from here.

[DominusMegadeus]

If you as the DM want him to stay on the material for a later story development, that's your right, but if you're asking what I think would happen...

He kept his word to Luculla until she died in exchange for one (1) soul, and he kept his word to the party in exchange for that soul not taking as long to be his. The spell is up, he goes home.

[UnArcaneElection]

Of course, this is assuming that this Devil can go home on his own. With his caller dead, he might not be able to go back unless he can get a spellcaster capable of Banishing him.

Also, Imps are canonically notorious for staying after having been summoned (actually called -- for instance, Korvosa has an ongoing plague of them due to recurring incompetence of new Infernal binders at the Acadamae) or bound as Familiars and then unbound by their masters' deaths.

[Eliandra Giltessan]

So up until this point, I thought my party were horrible for totally ignoring the room Elgadazum was guarding after killing him. (They came back 3 days later. I ruled that one twin was dead and one was nearly dead.)

You could always have Elgadazum be one of the bearded devils at the masquerade at the end of Dance of the Damned.