How many Balors would you have to slay to get noticed? (And Other Questions)

[BlueWitch]

I'm talking strictly theoretically. (Our group is nowhere NEAR this level of power)

But just for the sake of argument, how many Balors would you have to kill in order to be noticed by Demi-Gods, stronger Gods and Demon Lords?

2nd Question: How many Balors, Pit Fiends, and Solars are in existence at any given time?

I know since the Abyss is Infinite, we could just say there are infinite Balors, but didn't there only use to be like, 20? Or was the the Solar lore? (I swear I read it somewhere before.)

[SLOTHRPG95]

To get noticed? Just one. A Balor is one of its lord's most powerful minions, so that even if the number of Balors is infinite, you'll still get the attention of the particular demon lord whose rare, high-power underling you just ganked. Not saying they'll necessarily do anything about it, just that they'll definitely notice. Same way that you'd notice if you were Chairman of the Board of some company and one of your C-suite execs disappeared.

Oh, and I think you're thinking of Solars for that bit of lore.

[Anthrowhale]

I don't believe there is a canonical answer and it makes some sense that "which Balor?" matters.

Unrelated, I've always wanted to find some way to get a large enough concentration of Balors in a small enough volume of space that you can kill a few to set off a criticality event wiping them all out. I'm not sure how to engineer that, but maybe a Malconvoker going nuts with Greater Planar Binding could do it...

[Zancloufer]

You only really need to kill 6 Balors to Guarantee that they can take out one with their death throes. Combine that with the 100ft radius of it they actually don't have to be that densely packed. Even being just ~20ft apart should statistically set off an explosive domino chain that only ends when you run out of Balors.

On the OP topic: Depends on your established characters. Even though there is a theoretically infinite number of them reasonably speaker most people will only intersect with a few of them. It would probably be more so how many Balors you stop from doing important evil stuff than how many you kill.

Also in 1st ed AD&D there where originally six Balor (lords). That is probably what you are thinking of. They even all had unique names like [miniature] demon lords.

[John05]

More accurately, there were six Type VI demons. One of them was named “Balor”. That unique name turned into a demon type for later editions.

[BlueWitch]

I see! Yeah that makes sense that even one going down would be noticeable. If sources caught wind that the same group slew 3 or more, I can easily see them gaining notoriety.

And yeah, it was the Solar I was reading about that only had about 20!

Thanks for the replies you guys! ^^