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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3339559" data-attributes="member: 4937">It depends on how divorsed from the underlying theology/mythology you wish to make angels and demons.Under orthodox theology, speaking of a 'risen fiend' is nonsense.  The reason is that angels, fallen or unfallen, are spiritual beings and therefore exist outside of what we modern types would call 'the space-time continium'.  When a spiritual being makes a choice, it isn't like the choice which would be made by a mortal being who experiences the universe sequentially and with imperfect knowledge.  When a spiritual being makes a choice it is enternal and irrevocable.  Thus, when the moment of decision came for the angels, all those that chose good are irrevocably good and incapable of falling, and all those that chose evil are irrevocably fallen and incapable of rising.  The full import of thier decision was known at the moment of the choice and there is no information or experience which can possibly alter that decision.  Faced with the choice, they will continually and eternally make the same choice.Since all the angels were originally in an unfallen state, 'a risen fiend' is impossible. While this is pretty much universally accepted as being true for the duration of time, some church scholars, for example Origen, believe that in eternal time - after time and the universe we know has stopped - that in the state after 'the end' eventually there is the possibility of redemption for all beings because Eternal time scales are beyond the capacity of any non-Divine being to foresee, and therefore is the possibility of an experience which even a spiritual being could not have foreseen.  But again, this is supposed to occur in eternal time, not over any mortal scale like mere thousands, millions, or billions of years.  In other words, the event would make no sense within the concept of a campaign or even campaign world.  The D&D conception of outsiders tends to make them extremely anthropomorphic - basically just humans with bumps on thier forward like some Star Trek costuming decision.  Outsiders basically think and act like people, and in this conception where a fiend is basically just a bad person with an unusual body a risen fiend makes as much sense as a fallen angel.  However, the more you divorse the cosmology from its mythic roots (mythic here in the sense of a powerful cultural narrative, not in a judgement of the stories truth or falsehood), I think the less power you are going to get out of using the superficial trappings of 'demon' and 'angel' in your story.  I think that people will tuitively rebel against the idea of risen fiends being as common as fallen angels even if they can't explain why the concept bothers them, and I think that if you really did have as many risen fiends as fallen angels the athropomorphic decisions in D&D would stand out even more.Contrary to some claims, I don't think a universe were nothing is alien and everything is basically human is more complex in its conception than one where alien things 'outsiders' are in thier basic nature alien.</blockquote>

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