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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1069768" data-attributes="member: 3146">Actually I prefer Yugoloth, Tanar'ri, and Baatezu to Daemon, Demon, and Devil. The reason is that demon is (IIRC) a derivative of the greek Daemon (which, again IIRC, was simply a word for spirit that could be benevolent or malevolent, and sometimes even referred to what we often call soul). When it is used in non-academic english language environments, it seems, 9 times out of ten, to be used as an alternate pronunciation or cooler and edgier spelling of demon. And devil is simply the historic christian title for a particular head demon that has often been misappropriated to refer to demons. In other words, except in D&D and a few other artificial language-games, there the terms all tend to refer to more or less the same class of beings.Tanar'ri, Baatezu, and Yugoloth, however, have no real world analogues and can serve as precise designations for particular kinds of evil spirits--or more precisely in D&D terminology, evil extraplanar creatures which don't bear a whole lot of resemblence to the evil spirits of myth and legend since they are usually corporeal. If I want to create a unique cosmology for my game world, I'll only use words with real-world baggage and historical associations if I want that baggage and those associations. (So, I might choose to use the word Heaven to describe the dwelling place of god/the gods if I want to include the idea of it also being the place where, after death people enjoy the rewards of a moral life and exclude the idea of a specific location on this earth. If I don't want to imply that the dwelling place of the gods is also the dwelling place of the (morally) worthy dead and want it to be connected with a specific prime material location, I'd pick a term more similar to Mount Olympus (or more generically, the mountain of the gods). Sure, I could explain that "heaven in my campaign world isn't really like heaven in the Christian religion or the vaguer idea of heaven embedded in our culture; it's like this" but then, why call it heaven? Much easier to call it something else and not have to explain that the ideas generally attached to the word don't apply in my campaign world.)The new adoptation of the term "angels" to refer to a specific class of extraplanar good beings bothers me for the same reason. I would much prefer to use Demon, Daemon, and devil more or less interchangably in my game like they often are used in real life. The educated might call evil outsiders by their proper names but common people would refer to them all as demons, devils, or daemons--regardless of their alignments. Similarly, I would prefer to have angel be the general term used to refer to the emissaries of the (good) gods and use terms like Archon, Avariel, Eladrin, etc when more precision is called for.</blockquote>

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