Tiefling

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Greyhawk Creature

Tiefling
General information
Size:	Medium
Alignment:	Varies
Type:	Humanoid
First appearance:	Planescape campaign setting (1994)

Tiefling (pronounced /ˈtiːflɪŋ/, TEEF-ling) is a humanoid creature found in the Flanaess and all of Oerth. Tieflings are either born in the Lower Planes or have fiendish ancestors who originated there. A tiefling (pronounced TEE-fling) is linked by blood to a devil, a demon, or some other Fiend. This connection to the Lower Planes is the tiefling’s fiendish legacy, which comes with the promise of power yet has no effect on the tiefling’s moral outlook.

Originally introduced in the Planescape campaign setting in second edition as a player character rac, they became one of the primary races available for player characters in fourth edition.

Ecology

Typical physical characteristics

Tiefling's appearance are as varied as the fiends from which they are descended. Some have tails, some have vasrious colors of skin or scales, while others have pointed teeth or unusual colored eyes. Almost all have horns.

"Since not all tieflings are of the blood of Asmodeus, some have traits that differ ... small horns; fangs or sharp teeth; a forked tongue; catlike eyes; six fingers on each hand; goat-like legs; cloven hoofs; a forked tail; leathery or scaly skin; red or dark blue skin; cast no shadow or reflection; exude a smell of brimstone."

Some tielflings are winged and have batlike wings jutting from their backs or have the ability to magically make "hellfire" burst forth from their hands.

In earlier versions of Dungeons & Dragons(thrid edition and previous), tieflings have any of a wide variety of features which reference their fiendish lineage (directly or indirectly). These include horns located on their heads, pointed sharp teeth, extra fingers, cloven hooves in place of feet, tails, and unusually colored eyes.

In fourth edition and later, tieflings are a core character race and their appearance changed ever-so-slightly from third edition and earlier. "Their hooves were changed to normal feet, and their horns increased in size in the transition to the fourth edition." While this appearance was possible previously, they became hard-coded in fourth edition. All tieflings possess large thick horns of various styles on their heads, non-prehensile tails approximately 4 to 5 feet in length, sharply pointed teeth, and their eyes are solid orbs of red, black, white, silver, or gold. Tiefling skin ranges through common human shades right into the reds, ranging from brick red to a ruddy tan. Tiefling hair, which starts behind their horns, ranges from dark blue to purple to red in addition to more normal human colors.

Tiefling bloodlines

The physical appearance of a tiefling often depends on the exact ancestry which spawned it, a bloodline that might have remained dormant for generations. Diabolic or demonic tieflings can, besides the common horns and tails, possess a forked tongue, leathery or scaly skin, the smell of brimstone, or unusually warm flesh. Some accounts even hold these tieflings to cast neither shadows nor reflections. Some diabolic tieflings also sport goat-like legs or hooves. Tieflings descended from rakshasa might have furred skin or feline eyes. Those descended from night hags can have small horns, glowing red eyes, or bruised, blue skin. Most tieflings have only one or two of these features.

"Tieflings are derived from human bloodlines, and in the broadest possible sense, they still look human. However, their infernal heritage has left a clear imprint on their appearance. Tieflings have large horns that take any of a variety of shapes: some have curling horns like a ram, others have straight and tall horns like a gazelle’s, and some spiral upward like an antelopes’ horns. They have thick tails, four to five feet long, which lash or coil around their legs when they get upset or nervous. Their canine teeth are sharply pointed, and their eyes are solid colors — black, red, white, silver, or gold — with no visible sclera or pupil. Their skin tones cover the full range of human coloration, but also include various shades of red. Their hair, cascading down from behind their horns, is usually dark, from black or brown to dark red, blue, or purple."

Related species

The term "tiefling" usually refers exclusively to humans with fiendish blood. Other distinct races with the bloodline of from fiends include the fey'ri (elves), maeluth (dwarves), tanarukk (orcs), worghests (goblins), wisplings (halflings), mur-zhagul (trolls), and baphitaur (minotaurs).

A large number of humans or humanoids with extraplanar heritage are known. These are called planetouched.

Tieflings are often descended from half-fiends, cambions, alu-fiends, or evil deities.

The planar opposite of a tiefling is an aasimar, a good-aligned planetouched.

The bladelings were once suspect to be tieflings, but are more correctly understood as a distinct extraplanar race.

Notable individuals

• Ardeth Webb (LE female tielfing Monk6/Tatooed Monk 10)—an NPC found in "Thirteen Cages", part 10 of the Shackled City adventure path (2004).
• Captain Xendros (CE female tielfing prist of Iuz—a quartermaster of Iuz.

Creative Origins

Name

The name, pronounced (/ˈtiːflɪŋ/ TEEF-ling), was derived by Wolfgang Baur from the German word tief meaning "deep, low", and the suffix -ling, "offspring," alluding to their origins in the "lower planes" (in the second and third editions).

Zeb Cook, original creator of the tiefling, intentionally chose the name "tiefling" to be evocative of the species' roots:

"One of my preferred naming tricks is to derive from some root (preferably archaic Latin or Greek, but other languages also). A name has a lot more weight if it's built out of elements already associated with something (even if you don't know the source). Hence the dragon Tyranthraxsus from Pool of Radiance or tieflings from Planescape, both a couple of my favorite namings."
—Cook, "Q&A with Zeb Cook", Dragonsfoot.com (2008)

Origin

In 2019, Cook wrote about the motives which inspired the race's creation:

"I created a couple of new races and definitely needed one that played on the fallen angel/reformed devil trope. It's a type of anti-hero who has always been popular in fantasy and was necessary in my opinion for Planescape. I didn't want it to be "oh, you're a junior demon" -- that would have been problematic in play for a number of reasons. At the same time I wanted them to be unable to hide their origin because that was such a defining part of their character. In the end, it was a blatant attempt to appeal to the goth/emo mindset -- plenty of opportunity for angst and drama but without giving them unbalancing power. Part of the role-play about them was the idea that you couldn't hide or escape the suspicions about your parentage, even if you were playing the most lawful/honest/good tiefling out there."

Development

The decision to promote tiefling to a core race in fourthth edition is described in Wizards Presents: Races and Classes.

Richard Baker describes the tiefling one of the most popular and evocative uncommon races, and a natural choice for the new warlock class.

Chris Perkins defines the tieflings as an opportunity to play angsty antihero characters, much like the popular rebellious drow archetype inspired by Drizzt Do'Urden, but without the inconsistency of the subterranean drow. The decision to give tieflings normal feet rather than cloven hooves was inspired by a need to allow tiefling PCs to wear magic boots.

Perkins summed up the tieflings to concept artist William O'Connor in one sentence: "They are the forsaken people." Their look was intended to be cloaked, secretive, catlike, and undulating. The jagged look of tiefling weapons in 4e was inspired by the notion of weapons melted in hellfire. Perkins suggests that the weapons define tiefling culture, serrated and jagged to cause maximum pain and injury.

James Wyatt describes the tiefling as rebellious, equivalent to 1950s leather jacketed bikers. He notes that the tiefling allows players to explore darker character concepts.

Publishing history

Tieflings weren't present in the earliest Greyhawk sourcebooks, especially in original D&D and first edition AD&D, but this is solely because they did not emerge in official sourcebooks until Planescape (1994) in second edition. Since then, they have become increasingly more common and popular with players, even being placed in the Player's Handbook. Since then, they have always been a part of the Great Wheel, and present in Greyhawk's larger setting. There have always been other, similar beings, such as cambions, half-fiends, alu-fiends, and other half-fiend or fiend descended creatuers found in Greyhawk.

One of the first artists to depict the tiefling, and possibly most famously, was Tony DiTerlizzi.

Second edition

The tiefling was introduced in the Planescape Campaign Setting (1994) with more information in the first Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix (1994) and The Planewalker's Handbook (1996).

In Planescape, they are described as being a mixture of human and "something else" with the implication that the medium-sized non-human ancestors originated from the evil "lower planes". In further supplements it was clarified that tieflings were usually descended from fiends, but not in the same manner as half-fiends,^{[citation needed]} since a tiefling's fiendish ancestry lies further up the family tree.

Third edition

The tiefling appears in the Monster Manual for this edition (2000) under the "planetouched" entry.

The fey'ri and tanna'ruk tieflings appear in Monsters of Faerun (2001). The tiefling is presented as a player character race for the Forgotten Realms setting in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (2001), and the tiefling and fey'ri appear as player character races in Races of Faerûn (2003).

Third edition (v3.5)

The tiefling appears in the revised Monster Manual for this edition (2003) under the planetouched entry.

The tiefling paragon was introduced in Unearthed Arcana (2004).

The tiefling appears as a player character race in the Planar Handbook (2004), and Races of Destiny (2004).

In Complete Divine (2004), Pyremius is decribed as "a tiefling with ears like a bat’s wings."

Fourth edition

The tiefling appears as a player character race in the Player's Handbook for the fourth edition (2008), and again in Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms (2010). Tieflings also have a racial book dedicated to them in this edition, Player's Handbook Races: Tieflings.

In fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons, tieflings are a race whose human ancestors made a bargain with devils to increase their power.

William O'Connor, the artist responsible for designing tieflings in this edition, commented that there were few artistic depictions of the race in previous editions. However, with the tiefling becoming a core player race, the fourth edition design team "wanted to radically update their appearance to make them look more intimidating and 'cool'. [...] The horns and the tail were the defining elements of the race so my first direction was to make them as prominent as possible. Part of the design of the fourth edition was to integrate the design into being a miniature game so part of the process was to make the character's silhouettes easily recognizable from a distance". O'Connor highlighted a conversation he had with the creative director Stacy Longstreet who described tieflings as a "cursed people" which helped him figure out "their cultural aesthetic". O'Connor stated that:

"My immediate touchstone was of course vampires, and I worked to give the tielfing that sexy, dark and gothic appeal despite their "deformity". I carried this idea over into everything about them, their clothes and equipment. I wanted everything to have a twisted aesthetic as if all of their prized heirlooms and weapons, all the relics of a lost past, were also cursed and contorted into horrible but beautiful shapes, imagining that the forms of the weapons should reflect the shapes of their tails. Elegant and deadly like the tielfing themselves."

Fifth edition

The tiefling is first published in fifth edition in the Player's Handbook (2014) as a player character race . Variant tiefling options appear in the Sword Coast Adventure Guide (2015) and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes (2018). Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes specifically outlines the nine tiefling bloodlines of the Archdevils of the Nine Hells.

The Player's Handbook (2014) somewhat changed the background of the tiefling's origin, making it strictly tied to Asmodeus—"a pact struck generations ago infused the essence of Asmodeus — overlord of the Nine Hells — into their bloodline."

The One D&D playtest released in August 2022 updates the base tiefling to have "options encompassing all the Lower Planes. Infernal tieflings are tied to lawful evil planes like Acheron or the Nine Hells, abyssal tieflings to chaotic evil planes like the Abyss or Pandemonium, and chthonic tieflings to neutral evil planes like Gehenna or Hades. The options differ in their damage resistances, and in the spells they learn at first, third, and fifth level".

In the 2024 Player's Handbook, tieflings continues this, making it so that they "are either born in the Lower Planes or have fiendish ancestors who originated there. A tiefling is linked by blood to a devil, a demon, or some other Fiend."

Reception and influence

In Kobold Quarterly #6 (2008), Zeb Cook wrote The Truth About Tieflings, an article which draws inspiration from the (then new) 4e lore about tieflings.

In 2019, Zeb Cook criticized the 4e instance of the tiefling which strictly defined the tiefling's origins:

"I deliberately left it vague for two reasons. One, because that's not my job, as it were. I didn't want to constrain the player about how or what they imagined their character's past and parentage to be. To my mind, setting specific limits or definitions on what that "other" part of them is takes away from the mystery and makes their background a bit more of a rules mechanic as opposed to an RP opportunity. To say it was a pact or whatever removes so many other good possibilities ..."

Cook attributed the tiefling's success to their uniqueness and ability to fill a particular thematic role:

"The tiefling falls into a fantasy archetype -- the changeling, the trickster, the cursed hero/heroine -- that hadn't been represented in D&D's characters lineup to that point. D&D's roots were focused on the epic/high fantasy stereotypes (and there is nothing wrong with that) while the idea of the quasi-damned character is more a romantic/tragic/dark fantasy tradition. Therefore, they filled a gap in the choices for the player."

Planescape author Colin McComb wrote:

"Tieflings resonate because they're dark and edgy. They've got an automatic built-in secret. They're outsiders and loners, and they have a good reason to shun society (and be shunned by it). They're a perfect stand-in for misunderstood youth."

Johnny L. Wilson called tieflings "the paranoid, loner obverse" of halflings, who "believe that life is out to get them". Looking at the second edition of the game, Wilson found them "suited to be great thieves" and "great point persons" due to favorable saving throw bonuses.

Appearances

Adventures

• Bastion of Faith (1999)—"Basttlescourges" (specialty priests of Hextor)— tieflings are one of the four races permitted to be Battlescourges, "Battlescourges must be humans, half-orcs, half-ogres, or tieflings....most battlescourges are humans of mixed or pure Oeridian descent."
• Die Vecna Die! (2000)—tiefling "pilgrims" are present in the Palace of Vecna, Citadel Cavitus, and Sigil.
• "Thirteen Cages(2004)—Ardeth Webb (LE female tiefling monk6/tatooed monk 10) one of the thirteen leaders of the Cagewrights.
• "Three Faces of Evil" (2005)—Some tieflings are from the Great Kingdom. Additionally, there are tielfings present in the Dark Cathedral as guards, and a total of seven tieflings in various rooms of the Citadel of Hextor.
• "City of Broken Idols" (2007)—Throgiff (CE male tiefling rogue 12)

External links

Disclaimer:Any lore presented through the following links does not necessarily adhere to established officially published content, and the views expressed do not necessarily represent the views of the editors of this wiki.

• Tiefling races and subraces on DnDBeyond.com.

References

Bibliography

This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).

This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Tiefling on the Forgotten Realms Wiki (view authors.

This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from the D&D Lore Wiki— (Tiefling).

Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index

The Encyclopedia Greyhawkania Index (EGI) is based on previous work of Jason Zavoda through '08, continued by numerous other fans. The EGI article has a list of sources, product names, abbreviations, and a link to the full, downloadable index.

Topic	Type	Description	Product	Page/Card/Image
Tiefling	Monster		Monster Manual 1, D&D 3.5e (Premium Edition)	209, 210
Tiefling	Monster		Monster Manual 1, D&D 4e (Deluxe Edition)	250
Tiefling	Monster		Oerth Journal #14	13,14
Tiefling	Monster		Oerth Journal #23	33
Tiefling	Monster		Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus, D&D 5e	4, 5, 11, 24, 40, 45, 46, 188
Tiefling	Monster		Dragon magazine #356	67
Tiefling	Monster		Dungeon magazine #147	52
Tiefling	Monster		Ghosts of Saltmarsh, D&D 5e	11, 13, 14, 210
Tiefling	Monster		Monstrous Compendium - Planescape Appendix I	112, 113