Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3339697" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think I more or less said that.  If I wasn't clear, I wasn't trying to claim that the D&D cosmology resembled the Judeo-Christian cosmology no matter how many parallels we can find between 1st edition clerical spells and Biblical miracles.  What I was trying to do was show ultimately why 'risen fiends' are rarer than 'fallen angels', because while the D&D cosmology in no way resembles much anything but itself, it has borrowed heavily from many sources.  In the source material that D&D is borrowing from, 'fallen angels' are more common than 'risen fiends' because 'risen fiends' don't exist.  Hense, its hardly surprising that they've only been adopted in D&D cosmology at a relatively late point.Whether its good for the game to have 'risen fiends' is a totally different question.  My general feeling is that the farther away from the audiences mythic understanding of the concept that you get, the better off you are using a fresh and invented name for your concept.  Otherwise, you get problems of misleading expectations.  If it doesn't borrow from one of the mythic traditions we can call 'faerie', don't call it a faerie.  I think there is a good deal of truth in that.  Its probably also on sounder ground theologically if it doesn't pretend to model reality with any degree of closeness, so you are less likely to offend religious players. No, but in most attempts at filling in the details of the cosmology there is almost always wars in heaven and a division of the celestial race into fallen and unfallen.  The thing is, attempting to explain the D&D cosmology in any sort of comprehensive and coherent way is actually pretty rare.  No two descriptions are likely to be anything alike, and thus we would almost always fail when reaching for generalities.  Some explanations will have a distant 'overgod' creator.  Some won't.  Some will have demons that were always demons, and some will have a mythic fall.  I'm not convinced if we can make assumptions about what most campaigns assume about the origins of fiends, because I doubt it comes up in most campaigns.</blockquote>

Verification