Motivating a perpetual war

[Feo Takahari]

How can I set things up so that various factions of demons constantly fight each other, preventing a proper government from forming in Hell? I've already put three factors in:

1): New demon lords constantly arrive in Hell, having been damned from Earth.

2): By and large, demon lords are awful people.

3): Demons survive by drinking liquid emotion, and there's never enough of it in Hell to go around.

Still, this seems insufficient. Even with resource scarcity, it seems like a coalition would eventually form to distribute resources among established demons and kill any new demons who arrived. (The dead in Hell go somewhere else--nobody knows where.) Anyways, what else can I add to prevent any demon lord from surviving longer than a few centuries before someone kills him, and to prevent any government from lasting longer than six months before crumbling?

Edit: I should add that demon lords arrive in Hell with the ability to summon and bind lesser demons, and that the longer they live, the more they can bind at once. Two demon lords who can each bind twenty lesser demons have some motivation to team up to kill one who can bind thirty--after all, he could become quite a nuisance if he lives long enough to bind forty.

 

[Graylorne]

Habit. Fighting becomes a way of life. Your whole organisation is geared to fighting, if you stop your faction crumbles.

 

[shangrila]

They could just be greedy, or power hungry.

 

[James Chandler]

If you have various factions, it seems there would be competition for recruiting better and stronger demon lords in order to strengthen your faction. So, while one faction may try to kill new demon lords, others may be trying to protect them at least long enough to recruit them. And, to second Shangrila, do not forget the fundamentally greedy nature of evil. While there could be some system of distribution of resources, there would be constant competition for controlling the system. Have fun.

 

[Jabrosky]

A lot of Native American cultures practiced a ritualized form of warfare that tended to last for generations but was actually low in intensity most of the time, with few people getting hurt or killed; it was mainly a means for young men to gain prestige within their society. In some of these cultures, merely sneaking up on an enemy and touching him with a stick was even more prestigious than actually killing him. I don't know if that's the kind of warfare you're interested in though.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Counting coup I think that is called?

 

[Queshire]

You could have a long lists of inncidents for each faction that they want revenge against the other factions for, sort of a "remember the alamo" (not sure if that's how you spell it) type of dealie.

 

[ArielFingolfin]

Actually factions tend to fight when there's not one powerful leader (just look at the Moors in Spain). Each faction leader has his own ideas about how things should be, and you've already got a strong foundation for discord in the constant arrival of new leaders, which creates constant upheaval.

 

[Caged Maiden]

I'm reminded of my role-playing days. I used to play vampire the masquerade and it was a constant battle to survive, gain power and then maintain it. Loyalty was easily switched, power balances shifted, and lesser members easily bribed. Even when someone is powerful, a handful of weaker people can usually rise up.

 

[Garren Jacobsen]

Generally a perpetual war has an ideological element to it that no side can agree on. Further these sides must consider this ideology as the ultimate end thus making compromise impossible, combine this with resource scarcity you mentioned and you should be all set.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Perhaps your demons don't have free will. They are bound by their nature to seek out violence and conflict; once put on a path (by a Creator of some sort, perhaps) they will stay on it eternally.

If your protagonist is one of these demons, then maybe he's special and has free will, which is what drives the story. Or maybe your prot is a human who's somehow ended up in hell, etc.

Or just ignore it. War can always have been going on, with no end in sight, and your story is about the Special Unique Snowflake who comes along to put a stop to it.

 

[Feo Takahari]

This is what I put in my universe Bible. ("Greater demon" is the in-universe term for what I called demon lords earlier.)

----

To understand why demon society is such a screaming mess, three things must be explained.

The first is that demons know they're not the biggest, baddest things out there. Would-be explorers often don't come back, and those who do return tell stories of monstrous creatures on faraway planets. When demons pool their forces, they've found that sheer numbers can overwhelm these monsters, but a single greater demon, even surrounded by lesser demons, can't do much but flee from them.

The second is that, on the planets that have been confirmed safe, there isn't nearly enough liquid emotion to support the population of lesser and greater demons. It would be easy to share if the greater demons kept their armies small, but no one wants to be the only one to have a small army when everyone else has a big one.

The third is that, as a general rule, greater demons literally can't cooperate to save their lives. The same foolish pride that sent them to hell sends them on to whatever comes next for dead demons, and only a handful ever learn from the mistakes of the past. The wisest few hide in secret places, growing ever stronger as the years go by, but never binding more than a handful of lesser demons. The rest fight on and on to gain control of the biggest and purest rivers, and every time one gets too powerful, all the others gang up to kill him or her, only to turn to squabbling amongst themselves upon victory.

Earth would change all that. As the original source of human emotions, controlling it would allow demons more emotion than they could ever hope to eat. But demons don't have the infrastructure to build guns and bombs, and there's only so much claws and teeth can do against a platoon armed with modern weaponry. Thus the plan to take Earth bit by bit, openly conquering disorganized or poorly armed regions, while using guerrilla tactics and taking full advantage of teleportation to keep more powerful armies too distracted to send aid.

----

P.S. I've already written a story in this setting, so I've got a group to focus on--a collection of lesser demons who managed to kill the greater demon who commanded them. Normally, any lesser demons who do this are hunted down and killed, but in the chaos of the Earth invasion, these ones might have a fighting chance.

 

[Caliburn]

Hey that sounds interesting. So clearly there's a heap of things you have already defined in your world ie the demons feed off emotions, they want to invade earth and so on.

Of course it should be stated--just for the hell of it--that you don't really need to justify why they are fighting. Basically, if they are demons, that's usually all the justification you would need. Why do they fight? They are evil. The real question would be why don't they fight? Everything else is just icing on the cake. If anything, the "reasons for fighting" that have been outlined above might even serve to provide some sort of cohesion or sense to otherwise random acts of violence.
That's my take on it anyway. I'm not saying you should scrap all the other stuff, just that if you want some sort of foundation for their evil behaviour then you've probably already got one.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that I like the idea of the group of lesser demons being able to survive and stuff

 

[BeigePalladin]

Another poossible thing to consider is that, until the advent of bleeding edge weaponry and WMDs, alliances and power strugles even in our world where practically never ending. If there is no existing form of easy to use endgame, then it's perfectly believiabl for an etrnal conflict as most demon lords would probably - if they're anything like human warlords - sieze any advantage for more land/power, even if it means breaking/changing alegiance. tripply so if there is a lack of resources, so they need to be the one in command

and there could well be temporary alegiances. very, very few alliances in history have lasted more than a few years prior to the advent of modern warfare tactics, so it's perfectly believiable for it to apply to demons as well. along those same lines, the potential for unlimited resources does sound like the thing sort of thing that could combine warring sates/demon lords

 

[Feo Takahari]

"Of course it should be stated--just for the hell of it--that you don't really need to justify why they are fighting. Basically, if they are demons, that's usually all the justification you would need. Why do they fight? They are evil."

I should probably make it clear here that the demons in these stories all used to be human, and that they're damned because they're evil according to their own judgment. Sociopaths almost never go to Hell, but abused children often do, particularly if they blame themselves for being abused. (The mechanics are a bit more complicated than that, of course--for instance, greater demons are hypocrites, having judged others for an action that they themselves committed and didn't judge themselves for--but the upshot of it is that, although the process of becoming a demon changes someone's personality a bit, I can't rely on the transformation as a primary explanation of the system.)

 

[Caliburn]

ohhhhh ok! I've got no idea

If you've already got all that figured out I don't think you'll have much problem though. What alternatives have you considered so far?

...Ok let me think...

How about something to do with the liquid emotion? Those who get lots of it eventually become fat and complacent, and are consumed by other hungry demons?

The second thing I'm thinking is the lesser demons. If there are multiple greater demons all swollen with power (literally swollen if you take into account the previous suggestion) then it would be easier for the lesser demons to rise up and kill them!

That's the best I can do with what I know but it sounds like there are probably a whole bunch of other factors I am not aware of. Hope it gives you something new to consider in any case

By the way, I like that the demons are actually weak compared to human technology that is fascinating I'm kind of used to demons being absurdly powerful compared even to modern man so this is a pleasant surprise

EDIT: also a prison system might be something you could mirror with how things work in Hell. Even in prisons where a few leaders have taken over, all it takes is one new inmate who is crazier than they are to shake things up. So "new inmates" (ie new demons arriving in hell) could be a constant threat to the established power-base. Just watch the TV show Oz

 

[Anders Ämting]

Fun fact: Depending on how you set it up, it's actually possible to have a war where neither side can afford to stop. Not in the sense that the stakes are too high, mind, but in a literal economical sense - once you achieve peace the economy collapses because the market have grown too depandant on the war effort.

 

[Robert Donnell]

Well you could introduce Lawyers.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

Well you could introduce Lawyers.

I was going to make a joke about "demon lawyers" but then I realized that would be redundant.

(disclaimer: my dad's a lawyer)

 

[James Chandler]

I was going to make a joke about "demon lawyers" but then I realized that would be redundant.

(disclaimer: my dad's a lawyer)

I don't get it. (says the actual lawyer)