Excruciarch

Excruciarchs, also called pain devils, were mercenary baatezu torturers. Whether they be the soul shells of the damned, captured intruders or other devils who displeased their masters, pain devils performed their duties with relish and equanimity. They were lesser devils in the hierarchy of the Nine Hells and shared the same rank as falxugons and erinyes.
==Description==
Excruciarchs were bald, pale-skinned humanoids that stood just under tall and weighed about . They typically wore blood-stained leather aprons over their suits of leather armor and wielded two-handed flails covered in spikes and long, sharp blades. Their faces were hidden by black-spiked masks held in place by a narrow leather strap, revealing only their baleful red eyes.
==Personality==
Excruciarchs were utterly sadistic creatures that delighted in causing suffering and derived dreadful pleasure from bringing pain to the helpless. Such an eye did they have for torture that the insightful devils could, within seconds, study an opponent's defenses to identify where to strike to negate them. Their ordered minds and moral bankruptcy reflected their commitment to perfecting their torturous techniques, the greatest feat of torment being to destroy the very last spark of a victim's hope.
==Abilities==
Excruciarchs, like other fiends, possessed several spell-like abilities, including being able to mimic the effects of vampiric touch and greater teleport (itself only plus of objects) at will, and cure moderate wounds and wave of grief thrice per day. Additionally, once per day a pain devil could attempt to summon another pain devil, although this only worked a little less than half the time.
Excruciarchs gained almost supernatural power through the act of hurting others. In battle they wielded hell scourges, +3 cold iron spiked chains that they could instantly recreate and which crumbled to worthless dust out of their hands. Through these weapons pain devils could send a wave of agonizing arcane energy, wracking their foe with unimaginable pain to leave them briefly crippled and unable to defend themselves. They also radiated an aura of suffering and misery that caused painful wounds to spontaneously appear on nearby non-devils.
==Combat==
Despite their relative weakness among other devils, excruciarchs were eager, bloodthirsty combatants who relished a good fight and the chance to crush their foes beneath their scourges. Such was their deep cruelty streak that, in addition to the pleasure derived from hurting the helpless, they also found defeating those with an actual chance of escape all the more compelling. When fighting, they loved to lure almost-defeated opponents into a false sense of hope by seeming weaker than they were, just to cruelly rip said hope away. Their sadism spurred them on in particular when they landed an especially devastating blow, notably weakened a foe, or simply had unleashed enough collective pain on anything nearby.
However, pain devils were not mindless fighters, as indicated by their skill in deciphering ways around their opponent's defenses and resistances through their torturous expertise. They generally targeted nimble enemies, using the debilitating powers of their scourges to keep them within fighting range while leveraging their superior reach to keep them at arm's length. They utilized hit-and-run tactics, attacking and stepping back to force the foe to keep up with them or leaving them crippled before moving so far away that the enemy could do little but try to reach them again. They could also unleash a wave of pain, striking several enemies at once with their scourges, but this was usually withheld until their were multiple foes to strike or until their sadism was spurred.
Pain devils fought best in pairs, where they lured specific targets away from the safety of their allies through their usual tactics of forcing an approach. Often they spread out amidst the enemy, positioning where their aura of torment would envelop the most foes, before flanking them, forcing the warriors of a group to decide which one to engage. One might move into the midst of the more physically vulnerable before whirling their hell scourges in a wide, deadly arc above their heads, preventing any others from safely or quickly approaching. Meanwhile, the second moved in to attack, forcing those caught in the maneuver to either flee and suffer the whirling of the first or stand their ground against the direct attacks of the second.
Pain devil captains differed from their inferiors in several ways. Though they too waded into battle pounding enemies with their scourges, they might also avoid the fray until directly attacked or a threat proved dangerous enough to wound a fellow devil, instead commanding from afar. Strikes from their scourges left their outright victims weakened rather than slowed and rather than unleashing waves of pain they could ignite the weapons of nearby allies (which they did as often as possible). Furthermore, their sadism was a step beyond that of their common kin, such that their cruelty rejuvenated their peers.
==Society==
Pain devils existed to bring suffering to the condemned. They mastered the art of torture, studying various techniques of agitation meant to bring the greatest pain with the least effort. It was often their attentions that dissolved the memories of soul shells, transforming them into unthinking lemures. After the paperwork was taken care of, their torture teams mercilessly mutilated and broke in new petitioners, wringing every iota of magical energy from the process of stripping a soul of identity.They learned to corrupt souls from the inside out through exquisite disassembly, hoping to stand out both by mastering the art of torture and adding their own creative touches. Through this they hoped to attain the highly ranked status of harvester devil, although some might so thoroughly enjoy their work as to avoid promotion.
Besides this primary duty, pain devils acted as jailors. They could also be persuaded to part with the many secrets they often heard from their victims for a price (although normally this knowledge went to their masters), and they were known to operate in gangs (alongside barbazu) that scavenged for escaped damned souls and other interesting trinkets. They generally possessed a remarkable amount of wealth, but kept most of it in the forms of magic items and potions, and besides those were equipped with masterwork torturing equipment.
===Homelands===
Exactly how pain devils operated depended on their layer. They existed throughout all the Nine Hells, though were common on the upper layers, especially Dis.
On Avernus, bands of pain devils watched listless soul shells mill about in stony, garrison style-structures, crankily ensuring none escaped. Eventually a legion of them hauled trembling, insensate soul shells from carts and wagons before prodding the protesting petitioners into the crater of the Maggot Pit. There they quickly drowned, were consumed by the worms, excreted out, coalesced into lemures, and then fished out by the excruciarchs with nets.
Meanwhile, Malbolge's soul shells were taken to the bulging Birthing Pit, where they suffered a similar process. After being pushed in by pain devils and devoured by dozens of toothless mouths, lemures dribbled down the side of the earthen mound. However, Glasya was disgusted by lemures, and so the miserable creatures were driven off by the pain devils to mindlessly wander Malbolge.
Pain devils were most common on Cania, where they crept and crawled through the tunnels of Mephistopheles’s dungeons, practicing on the captives.
===Other Devils===
Pain devils were often given the task of administering the punishment of demotion for other baatezu. While a less severe failure might only warrant a loss in position and caste, some were sent by their masters for more extreme lessons in duty and obedience. After a regiment of gruesome disfigurement, the pain devils extracted the devil's brain through their nostrils, leaving a nupperibo behind. As one might expect, pain devils were feared and reviled by most other devils, who wasted no time destroying any they found alone and unbound to a devil lord's service.
Due to these poor relations with their fellow devils, excruciarchs usually accepted the patronage of more powerful fiends, serving in the courts of pit fiends and archdevils. However, pain devils were mercenaries at heart, and would work for all the lords and ladies of the Nine Hells in turn, or indeed any master who allowed them to torture the weak and helpless. They would inevitably grow bored and seek new lodging, usually seeking out others of their kind in isolated keeps in Hell once their contracts ran out. There they gathered in teams to 3-6, able to work and practice their torturous art and roguish skills without interruption.
Pain devils had an intense and deadly rivalry with the chain devils, their chief competition as torturers and interrogators, such that the two types of devils endlessly plotted against each other. While excruciarchs tended to work primarily on mortal captives and other devils and kytons on soul shells, both were frequently assigned the latter work. Pain devils were known to be about as common on Minauros as they were in Dis, but the city of Jangling Hiter, a veritable factory-farm of torment, was mostly populate by kytons, and excruciarchs were distinctly unwelcome in the City of Chains.
Notably, Styx devils handed captives over to pain devils, but not before attempting to tortuously tease the secrets out of them themselves.
===Mortals===
Pain devils also sold their services beyond the Nine Hells, such as the Material Plane, and could be found in the company of various evil creatures. They were summoned by sadistic mortals as mercenaries, but also traveled there themselves in search of new creatures to experiment on. An evil spellcaster could alter the spell summon monster VI, allowing them to summon excruciarchs at the cost of the ability to summon kytons.
==History==
In the later years of the 15 century DR, the Ashmadai cells in Neverwinter were known to employ pain devils.
==Appendix==
===See Also===
*Kocrachon
===References===
===Connections===
Category:Lesser baatezu
Category:Creatures found in the Nine Hells