D&D 5E Fallen Celestials and (the lack of) Ascended Fiends

[Chaosmancer]

The issue is a very basic one: in real-world human experience, it is harder to be good than it is to be bad.

For an angelic being to fall generally just requires them to give up, become lax, abandon discipline. That's easy. To enforce enough self-control to make oneself better, however, is not easy for humans, much less for something so steeped in evil as a devil or demon.

I let my players answer. Their answer was "no, it doesn't, good demands more above and beyond fear of personal loss or maintaining the status quo." They confronted the deva, cast down the erinyes that was manipulating him, destroyed the Steep Ascent, and brought the deva back to Mount Celestia where he was tried and imprisoned. They were regaled as heroes, and there was no hope for devils to be redeemed (though the players would have said "there never was hope – they already baked their bread").

I think it is here that we find the answer to "why isn't this more common"

Right or wrong there is a bit of an.... oddity, in Western Morality, potentially due to the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas. See, you do good, you act good, because if you do not you get punished. You get sent to Hell for being Evil after all.

Devils are already in Hell, they are already Evil, they are already being punished. And, the mythos around morality doesn't allow second chances after you die. Once you are dead, you cannot repent, or to phrase it another way, after you go to Hell, you cannot get back out.

Meanwhile, like Umbran said, it is easy to see someone fall from grace. It happens all the time, it just requires you to lose focus on being good. It is easy to let pride, anger, or some other emotion overwhelm you and make you fall from grace, and so it is easy for us to see that, much like good people, the very embodiments of good are fallible. After all, the source of evil came from a fallen angel. The very conception of Hell comes with this idea of fallen angels as part of its lore.


And, how do you convince something inherently selfish and cruel to be "good", especially since a lot of people follow the logic of Quickleaf's group and say that doing good for selfish reasons isn't enough to be good. Now, I disagree with that, but it points to something. The bar for redemption is high, and it gets higher the more evil a person is perceived to have been. And since it is so easy to see selfish motivations, since it is so hard to convince someone to do good for the sake of good with no thought of a reward to set them on the path for a reward, then the bar for a Devil, which is evil and selfishness incarnate in many ways, would be so astronomically high, that very few people would even conceive of it as an option.

So, the literary logic creates a downward pressure. Everything falls to evil, but rising to good is exemplary even for nominally good individuals, so it is impossible for evil individuals.

Edit: To make a finer point, think of how hard it is for a mortal Paladin to be good enough to become a Celestial. Literal Saints, beyond the goodness of even other Paladins. Can a Devil ever achieve that same lifetime of devotion to the concept of good?