Demonology & Me

Demonology & Me is a progression mod about forbidden magic. You start with a bone dagger and a stone altar. You end up wearing a demon's crown, with your soul locked in a jar, or with hellfire in your veins. And if you go far enough, you can tear the sky open and let Hell pour through.

• 37 rites across three ritual circles, each one more costly and more dangerous than the last
• 34 Goetic spirits from the Ars Goetia, each with its own seal and title, and each remembers how you've treated it
• The Maw: a hell dimension of nine regions with its own creatures, ruins, rules and riches
• A dozen new creatures, from lowly imps to Baphomet, a 450 HP boss
• Demonic pacts: real power with a lasting price attached
• Three transformations: Vampire, Cambion and Lich
• A rite that ends the world, and one that can save it
• Blood as a real fluid: pipe it, store it and automate your altar

⛧ How Rites Work

1. Gather blood. Slay creatures with the Sacrificial Dagger near your altar, bleed into vials, or cut yourself.
2. Draw the circle. Sneak-use chalk on the altar to draw a pentagram, then light candles around it.
3. Lay your offerings on the altar.
4. Use the dagger to begin, and stay close.

If the circle breaks, a candle goes out, or you wander off mid-rite, the rite backfires. Greater rites may let something else through.

Every greater rite is paid for in the spoils of ever harder creatures: an Imp Horn, a Hellhound Fang, a Succubus Wing, a Banshee's Veil, a Rime Heart, a Doom Core, a Colossal Bone, and at the very top, the Heart of the Horned One himself.

⛧ The Maw

Work the Rite of Descent and the floor of the world gives way beneath you. The Maw is a waste of ash and hellstone under a black, eclipsed sun. It's the only source of brimstone in the game, so the road to the final circle runs through it.

Nine regions, each with its own terrain, murk, sounds and inhabitants:

• The Ashen Wastes, the Crimson Thicket, the Wailing Hollow, the Brimstone Crags and the Lake of Fire
• The Frozen Pit: a hell of ice where the cold itself kills. Sinners are frozen in the ice, and some break free when you mine them.
• The Gullet: the Maw's living throat. Walls of flesh, rows of giant teeth, shrieking eyes, poison pustules and pools of clotted blood.
• The Burning Tombs: smouldering ruins, burning coffins and mausoleums with guarded crypts.
• The Ossuary: skull-lined catacombs far below, reached through rifts torn in the ground.

Great ruins: the roofless Profane Cathedral, the broken Hellwatch Tower, the Fallen Colossus sunk in the ash, the ice-crowned Frozen Citadel, the burning Hellfire Citadel and the walled Heretics' Graveyard. Each one is guarded, and the cathedrals and citadels are kept by wrathful Goetic spirits.

Its creatures:

• Succubus: charms you and drags you into her grasp
• Pit Fiend: paws the ground, charges, and hurls you aside
• The Damned: shamble in shackled packs, and sometimes claw back out of the ground
• Banshee: wails to slow, blind and weaken everything nearby, and calls the demons down on you
• Bone Colossus: pulls itself together out of the Ossuary floor and slams the ground
• Maw Worm: rears up out of the flesh, spits bile, then sinks and resurfaces somewhere else
• Burning Heretic: leaves fire in its footsteps and bursts into flame when it falls
• The Frostbound: freezes what it touches and breathes the cold of the pit

No rest for the wicked. Beds explode, spawn points are refused, portals won't light, and every minute down there stains your soul. The Maw keeps sending its own after you. Die there and you wake up above, with everything you carried left below.

The only way out: pay the Ferryman two Charon's Obols in the Rite of Deliverance. Only the damned carry them.

⛧ Pacts With Demons

Summon a Goetic spirit by its true seal, and Bael, Paimon, Astaroth or any of the others will offer you three bargains. Every boon comes with a lasting price.

• Boons: Might, Vigour, Swiftness, Hellfire Skin, Abyssal Sight, Dominion, Vampirism, Avarice
• Prices: Flesh Tithe, Soul Debt, Sun's Scorn, Eternal Hunger, Branded, Frailty

Spirits remember you. Keep your pacts and a spirit grows favoured, then sworn, and may waive its price altogether. Refuse it, strike it or sever its contract, and it holds a grudge. It may come for you by night, or answer its seal only to kill you. Slay one and it drops netherite scrap: a dangerous road to netherite without ever visiting the Nether.

Seals are found on Sigil Pages in dungeons, strongholds, ancient cities, bastions, nether fortresses, and every chest in the Maw.

⛧ Corruption

Every rite, pact and drink of blood stains your soul. Corruption makes your Sceptre and Soulreaver hit up to 50% harder, but it also brings whispers, stalking imps, creeping darkness, and demons who come to collect.

At 100, the Maw claims you. Cleanse yourself within a minute or die. Corruption can be lifted with Holy Water (made with Blessed Salt, which only clerics sell), a daily prayer at a Shrine of Absolution, or the Rite of Severance. Damning a village, or becoming something villagers flee from, has consequences.

⛧ Become Something Else

• 🦇 Vampire: blood feeds, heals and strengthens you. The sun weakens you.
• 🔥 Cambion: half demon. Fire and lava can't touch you, and corruption fuels your power without ever turning on you. Holy water scalds you, and villagers flee.
• 💀 Lich: your soul is sealed in a Phylactery. While it stands, death returns you to it with everything you carried. But it is as fragile as glass. If any monster comes near it, you die instantly, wherever you are.

⛧ The End of the World

Baphomet, the Horned One, can be called up under a Blood Moon by those already bound by a pact. He is a 450 HP boss with hellfire volleys, novas, summoned minions and an enraged second phase. His heart forges the Crown of Domination.

The Rite of Doom is the hardest rite in the Codex, and its offerings include the Horned One's heart. It tears a rift across the sky of the whole overworld, and the rift never closes on its own. Netherrack, soul sand and magma rain down trailing fire. Grass scorches, forests burn, and every living thing under the open sky catches fire. Demons and Nether mobs drift down out of the rift to hunt, and they grow harder the longer it stays open.

Only the equally costly Rite of Salvation can seal it. It needs nothing from the Maw, so someone who never bargained with Hell can still save the world. (Server owners can turn off the terrain damage in the config.)

⛧ Blood Engineering

Blood is a real fluid, so the altar plugs into any mod's pipes.

• Blood Conduits carry blood between altars, wells and any tank that holds fluid.
• Blood Wells store 10,000 mB each. When a rite can't be paid from the basin, the shortfall is drawn from nearby wells and streams through the air into it.
• Hoppers above the altar feed it vials and offerings. Hoppers below it collect the results. A comparator reads the basin.
• The Well of Suffering flays grown beasts and monsters that wander near it and bleeds them into your altar. It spares the young, so the herd breeds back. It is never entirely free of sin.

⛧ Also Inside

• Demonic Sceptre: four spells (Hellfire Bolt, Soul Siphon, Abyssal Nova and Imp Legion) paid for in your own blood
• Soulreaver: a netherite-tier runeblade frozen around a Rime Heart that drinks the life of what it cuts
• Familiars: bind an imp or hellhound as a loyal companion that never despawns
• The Gate of the Maw: open it under a Blood Moon and survive six waves of everything the Maw can send
• Transmutation rites: wither skeleton skulls, hearts of the sea, totems of undying, ancient debris and elytra, without the usual hunt
• Cultist Robes with a set bonus, Ritual Candles, Infernal Braziers, the Idol of the Horned One, and a full Infernal Bricks building set
• The Codex Daemonium: a full in-game guide that tracks your corruption, your pacts and every spirit you've met
• An advancement tree to follow you down

⛧ Mod Support

• JEI: every rite has its own page showing offerings, blood cost, circle, lights, corruption and conditions. Every demon's spoil and every block of the Maw has an information page saying where to find it.
• Jade / WTHIT: look at an altar to see its blood, the wells feeding it, its circle, and the rite its offerings answer (or the rite under way). Look at a Blood Well to see its blood and whether it feeds an altar.
• Server config: blood cost multiplier (shown to every player in the Codex and JEI), corruption events, the death claim, ritual backlash, the Maw's hunts, Rite of Doom griefing and more.