So, I've read the segment on the Soul Trade and I understand what interest Daemons have in mortal souls. But I'm curious about the other races of outsiders, and how they view/use mortal souls. In particular, Devils. Devils are all about damning mortals to Hell, getting them to sign away their soul, all that jazz. But... What does an individual Devil actually get out of it? Do they consume souls to gain power, or are they all working together to gather souls for the creation of new Devils/the expansion of their plane, or do they do it for entertainment and like to watch mortals suffer in their free time, or do they do it for the warm fuzzies they get in their Outsider-equivalent of heart when they think about how happy they must be making Asmodeus?
Any official lore would be really nice to know about, if there's much out there on a subject this specific. I'm playing in a Hell's Vengeance campaign, and it's been making me wonder about this topic.
Fairly certain it's a mix of all but the first one.
From my understanding, souls are used to build the actual structures and things in Hell. The souls are transported by Barbatos to the appropriate level based off their punishment. After thousands of years and memory-decimating agony, they turn into lemures. More powerful devils can then sculpt minions out of these lemures and they can in turn evolve.
That is why Hell is so aggressive about claiming souls. It takes a long time to produce a devil of any significant power, and it can take more than one soul per devil. Whereas in the abyss, just one soul can spawn dozens of dretches.
So, you can think of souls as carbon if that helps. It's used to make everything, and if you know what you are doing you can even make life.
To the best of my knowledge, Devils use souls for three things. Crafting, currency, and creating new devils. I would imagine that new Devils are created from souls sentenced to Hell, rather than those which were purchased/traded for/gotten by other means, but I don't know that that's true outside of my own headcanon.
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There's also a sort of holy mission to it - Asmodeus believes that free will in of itself is a crime that merits eternal punishment, and so Hell has a duty to gather every soul it can in order to met out that punishment.
If you're lucky, the nature of the punishment changes from eternal torture to eternal servitude.
I think there's an argument to made that almost every devil in Hell suffers from some level of Stockholm Syndrome.