Excerpts: Angels

[drjones]

4. The Belgariad/Mallereon by David Eddings (They only count as one cause they're almost the same.)

Not to distract from the fascinating discussion of angles and their pin-head-dancing but I have to say you reminded me of several months I spent devouring book after book of the Belgariad as a young teen. I was really pulled into the story as it went on.. and on.. and on...

And then I realized it was crap.

There is great fantasy out there (see The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss for a recent example), but 90% of what is on the shelves is not worth the paper it is written on.

 

[hong]

Angels and Demons predate Judeo-Christian Myth.
Vedic for the win!

(And really, the Vedic religions are FAR more interesting in their mythos.. and hideously complicated)

Hong - Its just too.. Christian.

Heh. I wasn't thinking of Christianity at all. Notice that I never mentioned where demons and the Abyss come into it....

 

[Hussar]

Quite the opposite. There was a reason that gods did not take an active part in the Blood War. They initially did, and ultimately something happened that led to the death of one deity and the weakening and near death of many others taking part. The precise reason was never explained, but planetary scale genocide of their worshippers was one possibility. Another specific but later example of deicide had the yugoloths slowly starving a god to death by corrupting and ultimately extinguishing its worshippers' faith over several generations (and heck, they carved a tower from the spine of another god they killed).

Asmodeus killed at least god and built a fortress on top of its petrified corpse. Either Bel, Zariel, or Asmodeus forcibly ejected both Gruumsh and Maglubiyet from the 9 Hells when their warring became an unwanted distraction to the fiends. Levistus was capable of shrinking Set's deific domain over time by sheer force of will over his layer of Stygia, and he did this while imprisoned in a glacier and also at war with Sekolah.

I have more examples too, from 3e as well as 2e.

See, the problem with this point of view is that you're trying to use canon that has been out of print for at least a decade. Many, and I'm going to guess most, 3e D&D players have no idea what you're talking about.

4e IS NOT using earlier canon. Why bring it up? None of it ever happened from a 4e perspective. Never mind that it never made any mechanical sense in 2e since dieties had divine ranks and devils didn't. How could even Asmodeus possibly compete with a god in 2e? God's couldn't be killed. They didn't even have stats.

Oh, but, we'll ignore those contradictions of course. We must step in line with earlier canon because it's canon.

Instead, why not do what they are doing? Wipe the slate clean. Everything that happened in earlier books is no longer core canon. Teneberous never existed. Asmodeus was an angel and now he's a god. 'Loths were a fever dream.

And, now, we have angels that can be used in pretty much any niche you want to use them in instead of useless stat blocks that just filled space in the monster manual. Fan freakin' tastic.

 

[small pumpkin man]

See, the problem with this point of view is that you're trying to use canon that has been out of print for at least a decade. Many, and I'm going to guess most, 3e D&D players have no idea what you're talking about.

Yes, I have no frickin clue what Shemeska is talking about, except that it's Planescape style "Gods aren't particularly powerful in the scheme of things" fluff, which like much of the rest of Planescape fluff is incredibly interesting, but becames unintuative, contradictory, and very intrusive when you were iusing any setting except for Planescape.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

Yes, I have no frickin clue what Shemeska is talking about, except that it's Planescape style "Gods aren't particularly powerful in the scheme of things" fluff, which like much of the rest of Planescape fluff is incredibly interesting, but becames unintuative, contradictory, and very intrusive when you were iusing any setting except for Planescape.

That's the tragedy of Planescape: it's a setting built on the idea of interplanar and inter-setting connections... but it works best as its own, separate setting, detached from every other one. (Much like Spelljammer, actually, except that PS got all of SJ's share of great ideas, designer love, and more.)

 

[hong]

PlanesJammer?

Alone, alone, all, all alone
Alone on the Astral Sea....

 

[Shemeska]

See, the problem with this point of view is that you're trying to use canon that has been out of print for at least a decade. Many, and I'm going to guess most, 3e D&D players have no idea what you're talking about.

About half of what I wrote can be found in 3.x sources mind you. I'm not exclusively mining from late 2e. Given that D&D predates me being alive, I hardly think it's shocking to reference a book from 1996. And for what 3e players might or might not recognize, perhaps I'm overly keen on planar stuff (probably true), but I never played before 3e either.

4e IS NOT using earlier canon. Why bring it up? None of it ever happened from a 4e perspective.

I bring it up because I found the justification for some of 4e planar fluff (or some folks' comments about it) to ring a bit hollow when compared to how the same topics had been touched upon in earlier editions ("new" 4e ideas being not exactly so new: fiends being made distinct from gods, doing their own thing, etc). Follow my posts and what I replied to. It's not a giant leap of logic if you scroll back a page or so.

Never mind that it never made any mechanical sense in 2e since dieties had divine ranks and devils didn't. How could even Asmodeus possibly compete with a god in 2e? God's couldn't be killed. They didn't even have stats.

Asmodeus didn't have stats in 2e either. In fact I can only think of 2 archfiends with stats during 2e, and I'd chalk up their entries to uncertainties at the time for how they were going to handle planar lords versus the statless gods of 2e. Except for Pazuzu and Grazz't, none of the others had stats (we can argue about material in the late 2e GtH being avatars or not). In the absence of stats we then have to rely on flavor text and in-game history to gauge the balance of power between the two. And while it varied depending on author, the gods tended to get manhandled on the planes at large if push came to shove, but generally the two groups had such divergent interests and spheres of influence they tended to not directly interact all that much and leave one another alone out of mutual enlightened self-interest.

And, now, we have angels that can be used in pretty much any niche you want to use them in instead of useless stat blocks that just filled space in the monster manual. Fan freakin' tastic.

Or they come off looking relatively generic and not (yet at least) making sense to have a single, seemingly homogenous pool of deific servitors for evil gods. For what it's worth, I'm not entirely in favor of a monolithic angel/aasimon servitor race for good deities either.

 

[AverageCitizen]

I was thinking more of gods being flawed entities and opening themselves up to eternal damnation, just as mortals do.

They couldn't do that before? I really don't see what the angel preview has to do with gods.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

What I noticed is that one could construct a new symmetry for 4E.

My original idea to hinge this on where the Angels. They seem similar to Archons, in a way. Both appear to be mercenary like. While Archons are made from the Elements (Fire, Ice,...) which fits the Elemental Chaos, Angels are made from higher concepts (Valor, Vengeance), fitting the Astral Sea.

If one would want to construct a "Great Wheel", it would probably have the Feywild as good, the Shadowfell as Evil, the Astral Sea as Law, and the Elemental Chaos as, well, Chaos.

Interestingly, every single one of these realms seem to have his own "Underdark" equivalent. The Abyss in the Elemental Chaos, the Hell in the Astral Sea, the FeyWild Underdark/Feydark in the Feywild. I am not sure if the Shadowfell also has an Underdark element, but it should have, being a "dark mirror" of the material world.

There are some breaks in the "alignment" symmetry. The feywild is also Chaotic, and possibly even more so then Good. Each of the Underdark equivlanets off course is also evil, so evil is not limited to one of the planes.
Aside from the alignment, Shadar-Kai or Eladrin don't look similar to Archons or Angels, either.

 

[Sashi]

Second, they're either trying to make the setting involve as few concepts from actual religion as possible OR they're very strongly over reacting from the problems that arose from hardwiring alignment into the 3e system. (Detect spells, alignment spells, etc.) Throughout 4e they are removing the ideas of good and evil, which is resulting in a very washed-out setting. Very bland, if you ask me.

They're not "removing the ideas of good and evil" they're making it so people have to be evil through actions, instead of just having "evil" stamped on their foreheads.

When a Paladin breaks into the Red Dragon's lair and beats him to death with a pointy stick is he doing something evil? How about if a Paladin of Slaughter breaks into a Gold Dragon's lair and does the same? Is it the reasoning behind the acts that makes one "good" and the other "evil"? Or is it because in one case it's a member of "team Good" going and slaughtering a member of "team Evil" and the other case it's the opposite? Is it okay because one of them literally radiates Goodness and the other Evil? Consider that radiating Goodness has the exact same effect on Evil as radiating Evil has on Good. You could change the alignments to "Red" and "Blue" and get the same effect ("Is killing this guy okay? Well he's on Blue team and we're on Red, so yeah.").

Very few people wake up and say "What a lovely day to get some Evil done." Most people believe what they are doing to be Good, or at least in the pursuit of Good. And, at the risk of Godwining myself, even Hitler fundamentally believed what he was doing to be right. The Allies disagreed and so he was bombed to smithereens. When the US Army bombs and Al Quaeda headquarters they claim that it is a good thing they did it, when Al Quaeda bombs a US Headquarters, they claim the same thing. Such claims are mutually exclusive. And the debate on who is right will essentially devolve into the two groups of people shouting at each other while gesticulating wildly, (note that this is a hot button issue, and I would rather we not devolve into shouting at each other and gesticulating wildly.).

On the other hand, if you allow people to be judged by their actions, and for conflicting views of what good and evil are, you allow for the concepts of good and evil to take hold, instead of the rubber stamp "You're on Team Evil, therefore it's okay for me to kill you and take all your stuff."

For example, Hextor could send an Angel of Vengeance after a party that broke into one of his temples and slew his high priest, but Heironious could do exactly the same thing. The two gods play by essentially the same rules, they're just on different sides. But then if I were to bring in a pacifist god (deified Ghandi or Buddha, if you will) he's not going to send an Angel of Vengeance no matter what, it doesn't fit into his idea of what good is. The question is does that make him "good"? Does that make him "more good" than Heironious? Are the two ideologies incompatable? Does that mean that Heironious makes war on Buddahdiety because of this incompatability? How does such a god exist in a world where other gods are empowering people with the ability to call pillars of fire to smite their enemies?

Yes, you've removed "good" and "evil" as absolutes and labels, but by making it so that nobody radiates pure goodness, you've reintroduced the concepts of good and evil, and that's a welcome change.