Demon Names: 200+ for RPG, Fiction and Worldbuilding

You open your campaign notes. The villain is unnamed. The demon your players will face in session eight exists as "???" on the page.

A name fixes that. Not just any name, but one that fits the creature's domain, sounds right in a sentence, and gives your players something to fear before they ever meet it.

This guide to demon names is built for exactly that. Organized by source, annotated with etymology, and paired with notes on how to use each name in your world.

What makes a demon name work

Hard consonants carry dread. K, z, x, r, and th signal something alien without being unpronounceable.

Short syllables hit harder than long ones. Malphas lands differently than Malphastorian. Vrock lands differently than Vrockenthar.

Domain matters most. A demon of avarice should sound different from a demon of despair. The name is the first hint at what the creature does. If a player hears the name and feels nothing, the name is not doing its job.

Phonetic credibility matters too. A name that sounds like it belongs to a real language, even an extinct or invented one, reads as more real than a random string of consonants. The best demon names feel like they mean something terrible in a language you cannot quite place.

Names from the Ars Goetia

The Ars Goetia, the first part of the Lesser Key of Solomon, catalogues 72 named demons. Each has a rank, a domain, and a physical description. For fiction and tabletop RPGs, this is the most practically useful source in Western demonology.

Bael -- King of Hell's eastern armies, commanding 66 legions. The name derives from Baal, the Canaanite storm god who was demonized in Abrahamic tradition. Short, blunt, and authoritative. Use this for a demon who once held divine power and still expects to be treated accordingly.

Agares -- Duke, 31 legions. Said to cause earthquakes and teach languages. A demon of knowledge and natural destruction, patient and old. Works well when your world needs an ancient evil that builds slowly rather than strikes fast.

Vassago -- Prince, 26 legions. A seer who reveals hidden things and the past. An unusual choice for an antagonist because the power is informational rather than destructive. The most unsettling villains are the ones who already know how the story ends.

Marbas -- President, 36 legions. Can cause or cure disease. Dual-function demons are narratively interesting. The thing that heals is also the thing that destroys. Players never know which version will show up.

Valefor -- Duke, 10 legions. Patron of thieves and their networks. Strong for urban fantasy, heist campaigns, or any setting where crime and shadow form the infrastructure of power.

Amon -- Marquis, 40 legions. A fire-breathing wolf-demon who can reconcile enemies. A peacemaker demon is more unsettling than a simple aggressor. What does it want from the reconciliation?

Barbatos -- Duke, 30 legions. Opens sealed doors and understands the language of animals. Works in any world where nature has been silenced, corrupted, or locked away from the living.

Paimon -- King, 200 legions. Said to appear preceded by a roar of many voices. The sound detail matters in tabletop. Describe the entry correctly and your players remember it for years.

Buer -- President, 50 legions. Healer, philosopher, and teacher of logic and ethics. A wise creature who is also fundamentally dangerous creates better long-term tension than a simple monster.

Eligos -- Duke, 60 legions. Reveals hidden things and predicts war outcomes. A strategist demon. Place this one at the edge of your campaign's structure, watching, not yet acting.

Bathin -- Duke, 30 legions. Knows the virtues of herbs and precious stones and can transport people instantly between locations. A demon of place and movement. Especially useful in any world where teleportation or controlled travel is a contested resource.

Purson -- King, 22 legions. Has the head of a lion and appears before a great roaring. Reveals hidden things and treasures. Thematically close to Eligos but with a more physically imposing presence.

Sallos -- Duke, 30 legions. Causes love between people. The gentlest-sounding name on this list, which is part of its threat. A demon of love operates inside trust. It does not need to force anything.

Sitri -- Prince, 60 legions. Inflames desire. Described as appearing with the face of a leopard and wings of a griffin. For mature campaigns and dark fiction where desire itself becomes a weapon or a trap.

Andras -- Marquis, 30 legions. Sows discord between servants and masters. A demon of betrayal and division. Runs quietly through organizations before players even notice the damage.

Focalor -- Duke, 30 legions. Drowns people and overturns ships. A demon tied to water and death at sea. Works well in any coastal or maritime campaign where the ocean has teeth.

Valefar -- Duke, 10 legions. Tempts those into theft and is said to keep his companions company on the gallows. One of the more darkly loyal figures in the Goetia. A demon who does not abandon the people he corrupted.

Names from world mythology

Beyond the Goetia, every culture has named its demons. These sources are less systematized but often more texturally rich.

Asmodeus (Persian/Hebrew) -- Demon of wrath and lust, possibly derived from Avestan aeshma daeva meaning demon of wrath. One of the most prominent figures in Western demonology. Centuries of literary weight behind this name. It reads as both ancient and alive.

Lilith (Sumerian/Hebrew) -- Associated with night, wind, and the boundary between life and death. Works best in fiction as a figure of ambiguity, not pure evil. Something older than good and evil, with its own agenda.

Pazuzu (Mesopotamian) -- King of wind demons. Causes disease but also protects against other demons. The dual nature makes this name narratively rich. A party could encounter Pazuzu as a threat, as a reluctant ally, or as both at once.

Nergal (Mesopotamian) -- God of the underworld and plague who was demonized in later traditions. Works well in settings with a fictionalized ancient civilization at their roots. The name carries the weight of a civilization that rose and fell.

Belphegor (Moabite/Hebrew) -- Originally a god of fertility who became a demon of sloth in Christian demonology. A sloth demon who was once a fertility god is more interesting than one who was simply born lazy. The history matters.

Abaddon (Hebrew) -- The angel of the abyss. The name means destruction. Used in Revelation as both a place and a figure. Maximum blunt force as a name. Use this when subtlety is not the point.

Ahriman (Zoroastrian) -- The supreme evil spirit, the adversary of the creator deity Ahura Mazda. If your setting needs a demon who operates at cosmic scale, this name carries that weight without needing explanation.

Ammit (Egyptian) -- The devourer of the dead, part lion, part hippopotamus, part crocodile. A demon of judgment and consumption. Works well in any campaign where death and the afterlife are central mechanics.

Vetala (Hindu) -- A demon that inhabits and animates corpses. Associated with cemeteries and the boundary between the living and the dead. Strong for horror-adjacent campaigns where undeath is sacred to the wrong people.

Oni (Japanese) -- Not a single demon but a category. Horned, club-wielding figures of Japanese myth associated with disease, disaster, and the dead. Individual oni in fiction work best with names that follow Japanese phonetics. Raijin, Fujin, and Ibuki are historically grounded options to build from.

Demon names for D&D and tabletop RPG

D&D distinguishes between demons (chaotic evil, from the Abyss) and devils (lawful evil, from the Nine Hells). The names you give each type should sound different.

Demon names should feel chaotic: unpredictable syllables, hard stops, near-words your players cannot quite place.

• Balor -- Named from Irish mythology. One of the great demons in D&D lore. The name already existed as a giant of death before the game borrowed it.

• Marilith -- A six-armed female demon. The name sounds invented but feels ancient. Hard and soft sounds alternating, which makes it stick.

• Vrock -- Short, percussive, almost unpronounceable at speed. Vulture-headed demons in D&D. The brevity is part of the threat.

• Glabrezu -- Multiple syllables that belong to no recognizable language. Constructive alienness in a name.

• Nalfeshnee -- A boar-ape demon with a bloated body. The name runs long and awkward, which fits the creature's shape.

Devil names should feel more precise, like titles or contracts:

• Mephistopheles -- The most literary of devil names. Works best when the campaign needs a devil who values wit over raw power. Borrowed from Goethe's Faust.

• Dispater -- Archdevil of iron and caution. The Latin construction gives it scholarly weight.

• Mammon -- The embodiment of greed. One of the few demon names that has crossed fully into metaphor in common speech. Players arrive with a mental image already formed.

• Zariel -- A fell angel who became an archdevil. The name still sounds angelic, which is the point. The fall is written into the sound.

• Glasya -- Archdevil, daughter of Asmodeus. Short, sharp, and noble-sounding. Use this for a devil whose power comes through charm and inheritance, not brute force.

Names from modern fiction and games

Games and fantasy fiction since the 1970s have expanded the demon name lexicon significantly. These are worth studying as naming strategies.

Diablo (Diablo series) -- Spanish for devil. Blizzard used a common noun as a proper name and built the game world around earning that simplicity. A short, recognizable root can work if the world justifies it.

Sheogorath (Elder Scrolls) -- Daedric Prince of Madness. The name sounds unhinged. Phonetic match to domain is the principle here and it works completely.

Malthael (Diablo 3) -- Angel turned aspect of death. The -ael suffix carries an angelic quality, which makes the fall harder to accept.

Deathwing (Warcraft) -- A two-part compound name that describes the creature. Simple and effective at scale. Works because the setting needed names players could identify across thousands of hours of play.

Malefor (Spyro series) -- A constructed name with Latin roots (malus, meaning bad or evil). The -for ending gives it movement, like something that acts rather than simply exists.

Building original demon names for your world

Three methods that produce consistent results.

The domain method. Identify the demon's domain first, then find phonemes in a historically relevant language. A demon of silence might draw from Latin silentium or Greek sige. Compress, distort, run the consonants harder. The reference becomes invisible in the final name but the weight stays.

The phonetic recipe. Start with hard stops (k, g, t, d), add a fricative (z, x, sh, r), close with a short vowel or a glottal stop. Test it aloud. If you have to slow down to say it, your players will hesitate too. Hesitation creates presence.

The rank marker. In a hierarchical demon world, names should signal rank through structure. Short names for lesser demons. Polysyllabic formal names for lords. Titles that function as names, the Pale Keeper, the Wound That Speaks, for the truly ancient ones whose personal names have been lost or forbidden.

Your prompt is a place. Describe the demon's domain in one sentence before you name it. The name follows from the description, not the other way around.

For a demon of drought: hard vowels, nothing fluid in the sound. For a demon of deception: names that almost rhyme with something familiar. For a demon of grief: slower syllables, something that lingers in the mouth.

Tools for dark worldbuilding and campaign fiction

If you are designing a full campaign world or a fiction project that needs named characters, histories, and internally consistent lore: