Levistus's_Leviathan
5e Freelancer
I like Planetouched races/lineages in D&D. I’m a fan of Tieflings (though they’re probably not even on my list of top 10 favorite D&D races), I think they inspire a lot of interesting stories and characters in D&D settings. Baldur’s Gate 3 did an amazing job showing how good plots with Tieflings can be. The fact that they were used as scapegoats after Descent into Avernus and were kicked out of Elturel is a genius bit of writing. It totally fits how marginalized ethnicities have been/are currently treated in the real world. I don’t like Genasi nearly as much as I like Tieflings, but their connections to genies makes them interesting enough, IMO. You can do some interesting stories with genasi rejecting their genie parents and, in my experience, making compelling cultures based on the 4 elements is super easy. I don’t know if Reborn and Dhampir count as planetouched, but I like them too for a lot of the same reasons I like Planetouched.
However, of all the Planetouched and Planetouched-adjacent races, Aasimar have always bugged me. They’re just so boring and uninspiring. They don’t have an iconic look, they don’t have interesting hooks for characters or plots, and literally no culture information is given. There’s so much that can be done with the concept of a race of humanoids that literally have divine blood (which has been claimed as a justification for all sorts of messed up nonsense in the real world), and the Aasimar squander the potential. The few reinventions/reimaginings of Aasimar that I’ve seen and liked (Eberron’s Aasimar and Shulassakar, 4e’s Devas) don’t tend to fit into a standard D&D setting well and, in the case of the Shulassakar and Devas, bear very little resemblance to the base lore. Exploring Eberron’s section on Aasimar variants is very good, but also very specific to Eberron.
So when one of my friends started a new campaign with a collaboratively built setting with input from all players, I decided that I wanted to merge some ideas I’ve had floating in my head for a while to rewrite Aasimar lore in a way that I think is more interesting. So I started with the Tiefling lore and began inverting parts of it. Tieflings are stand-ins for marginalized people, like refugees and racial minorities? My version of Aasimar will be stand-ins for the oppressors, often being nobles and monarchs. Tiefling creation was “accidental,” (typically an unintended consequence of their ancestors making infernal pacts) so my Aasimar will be intentionally created through a magical eugenics program. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of monarchs, nobles, and aristocrats claiming to have “divine/pure blood” throughout history (Alexander the Great claimed that his father was Zeus, Anglo-Saxon and Norse kings claimed descent from Woden/Odin, the Romans claimed descent from Venus and Mars, etc). In a setting where gods, angels, and other celestial beings are proven to exist, kings and other nobles will most definitely try to gain divine blood in order to legitimize their rule and claim superiority over the non-divine commoners. Plus there’s the whole xenophobic post-Reconquista “blood purity” discrimination against descendants of Jews and Muslims that became the concept of “blue blood.”
After brainstorming some of the themes I wanted my version of Aasimar to have, I decided to start developing their origin story. Every setting seems to have an ancient empire of mages, so that’s what i connected my Aasimar to. I mainly took inspiration from Netheril and the Elder Scrolls’ Dwemer. The mage-run empire was obsessed with unlocking the secrets of divinity, so they used summoning magic to conjure celestials, Angels, Unicorns, and the like, and trap them in magic circles (they summoned other extraplanar entities too, but mostly focused on celestials). They then would do all manner of inhumane experiments on them, first draining most of their divine ichor (which was mostly used as an alchemical ingredient), then vivisection until they perished, and then using necromancy to revive them as sentient undead servants. Some of the aristocracy also began injecting the blood of the angels into themselves and their children in hope of granting them divine powers, but at first it seemed to have no effect. Eventually, disaster struck. It’s unclear what caused it. Perhaps the gods finally decided to deal with the Ildrithian nuisance. Maybe they ended up summoning a celestial that was too powerful to control, like an archangel or Empyrean, perhaps even the avatar of a god. Or possibly an Ildrithian project went wrong. Whatever the case, the result was cataclysmic. The undead angels revolted, going on a rampage and killing anyone in sight. Earthquakes and landslides toppled the skyscraper-sized wizard towers and left the cities in ruins. And worst of all, the cities of Ildrith became shrouded in sickening radiation that killed or mutated all inside it, like holy nuclear fallout. The only people that survived were the nobles that were injected with angel blood, the celestial radiation warping them into the first Aasimar.
The first Aasimar quickly began to claim that the reason for their survival was due to their “blood purity.” Over hundreds of years the divine radiation that killed the Ildrithian cities never faded, with only those that were resistant or immune to radiant damage being able to survive in the ruined Ildrithian cities. This led to the foundation of the modern Aasimar city-states, cities built on the ruins of major Ildrithian cities inhabited solely by Aasimar. The shroud of radiation prevents any outsiders from conquering the Aasimar, but the Aasimar are also very low in population and only rarely have enough warriors to threaten to their neighbors. I haven’t decided whether or not I want my Aasimar to rely wholly on trade for food, or if some mutated plants or animals can survive in the divine shroud. I also have the idea that maybe water in the divine shroud becomes holy water, so one of the Aasimar’s main exports is holy water from their rivers and wells. The religion I made for them is mostly based off of Mandaeism, with parts of other Gnostic faiths mixed in along with some aspects of Jainism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. Ritual washing and baptism are pretty important to Mandaeism, so maybe they exclusively bathe in holy water rivers or something like that. Maybe holy water can mutate plants and animals to allow them to survive the divine shroud?
Aasimar are a very arrogant and xenophobic people. They live in isolationist ethnostates, the only contact they have with the outside world is through trade, they’re ruled by monarchs and councils of nobles descended from the Ildrithian mages that caused the fall of the empire, and they’re obsessed with preserving the “purity” of their divine blood. The nobility practice extreme inbreeding, getting more extreme the more powerful the noble house is. Lower nobles being akin to the Habsburgs and high nobles/monarchs are more akin to the Ptolemies. Some city-states are extremist theocracies where the worship of other gods is punishable by death. Aasimar name their children after angels (I used Mandaic angel names, like Zihrun, Yukabar, and Saur’iel) as they see themselves as their deity’s chosen people, literal manifestations of angels on earth. If they could, the Aasimar would genocide all the other races, starting with Tieflings, who they say are soulless corrupters of the natural world, children of Ahriman and Yaldabaoth.
These Aasimar look very off-putting. They are extremely skinny, all appearing severely emaciated and malnourished no matter how much they eat. Their eyes have no pupils or irises and are pure orbs of milky gold. Their skin is alabaster white, far paler than normal human skin tones. Their hair is either blonde, silvery gray, or pure white. And, due to extreme inbreeding amongst the nobility, congenital disorders such as hemophilia, Habsburg jaws, cleft palates, and worse are common.
This is just one version of Aasimar that I thought was more interesting and unique than the base Aasimar lore. They have a clear identity and role in the setting. They’re xenophobic oppressors, claiming that they have the “pure blood of angels,” while being the most disgustingly inbred abominations on the planet. They’re an interesting inverse of Tieflings, one of the main groups that oppresses them in this world.
Any thoughts? If you’ve created your own version of Aasimar, what’s your version like? Any ideas that I could add to this concept? I didn’t go too in-depth in the religion I created for them, but if anyone’s interested I could explain it in another comment.
Edit: For some reason when I posted this it deleted the middle section. Fixed.
However, of all the Planetouched and Planetouched-adjacent races, Aasimar have always bugged me. They’re just so boring and uninspiring. They don’t have an iconic look, they don’t have interesting hooks for characters or plots, and literally no culture information is given. There’s so much that can be done with the concept of a race of humanoids that literally have divine blood (which has been claimed as a justification for all sorts of messed up nonsense in the real world), and the Aasimar squander the potential. The few reinventions/reimaginings of Aasimar that I’ve seen and liked (Eberron’s Aasimar and Shulassakar, 4e’s Devas) don’t tend to fit into a standard D&D setting well and, in the case of the Shulassakar and Devas, bear very little resemblance to the base lore. Exploring Eberron’s section on Aasimar variants is very good, but also very specific to Eberron.
So when one of my friends started a new campaign with a collaboratively built setting with input from all players, I decided that I wanted to merge some ideas I’ve had floating in my head for a while to rewrite Aasimar lore in a way that I think is more interesting. So I started with the Tiefling lore and began inverting parts of it. Tieflings are stand-ins for marginalized people, like refugees and racial minorities? My version of Aasimar will be stand-ins for the oppressors, often being nobles and monarchs. Tiefling creation was “accidental,” (typically an unintended consequence of their ancestors making infernal pacts) so my Aasimar will be intentionally created through a magical eugenics program. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of monarchs, nobles, and aristocrats claiming to have “divine/pure blood” throughout history (Alexander the Great claimed that his father was Zeus, Anglo-Saxon and Norse kings claimed descent from Woden/Odin, the Romans claimed descent from Venus and Mars, etc). In a setting where gods, angels, and other celestial beings are proven to exist, kings and other nobles will most definitely try to gain divine blood in order to legitimize their rule and claim superiority over the non-divine commoners. Plus there’s the whole xenophobic post-Reconquista “blood purity” discrimination against descendants of Jews and Muslims that became the concept of “blue blood.”
After brainstorming some of the themes I wanted my version of Aasimar to have, I decided to start developing their origin story. Every setting seems to have an ancient empire of mages, so that’s what i connected my Aasimar to. I mainly took inspiration from Netheril and the Elder Scrolls’ Dwemer. The mage-run empire was obsessed with unlocking the secrets of divinity, so they used summoning magic to conjure celestials, Angels, Unicorns, and the like, and trap them in magic circles (they summoned other extraplanar entities too, but mostly focused on celestials). They then would do all manner of inhumane experiments on them, first draining most of their divine ichor (which was mostly used as an alchemical ingredient), then vivisection until they perished, and then using necromancy to revive them as sentient undead servants. Some of the aristocracy also began injecting the blood of the angels into themselves and their children in hope of granting them divine powers, but at first it seemed to have no effect. Eventually, disaster struck. It’s unclear what caused it. Perhaps the gods finally decided to deal with the Ildrithian nuisance. Maybe they ended up summoning a celestial that was too powerful to control, like an archangel or Empyrean, perhaps even the avatar of a god. Or possibly an Ildrithian project went wrong. Whatever the case, the result was cataclysmic. The undead angels revolted, going on a rampage and killing anyone in sight. Earthquakes and landslides toppled the skyscraper-sized wizard towers and left the cities in ruins. And worst of all, the cities of Ildrith became shrouded in sickening radiation that killed or mutated all inside it, like holy nuclear fallout. The only people that survived were the nobles that were injected with angel blood, the celestial radiation warping them into the first Aasimar.
The first Aasimar quickly began to claim that the reason for their survival was due to their “blood purity.” Over hundreds of years the divine radiation that killed the Ildrithian cities never faded, with only those that were resistant or immune to radiant damage being able to survive in the ruined Ildrithian cities. This led to the foundation of the modern Aasimar city-states, cities built on the ruins of major Ildrithian cities inhabited solely by Aasimar. The shroud of radiation prevents any outsiders from conquering the Aasimar, but the Aasimar are also very low in population and only rarely have enough warriors to threaten to their neighbors. I haven’t decided whether or not I want my Aasimar to rely wholly on trade for food, or if some mutated plants or animals can survive in the divine shroud. I also have the idea that maybe water in the divine shroud becomes holy water, so one of the Aasimar’s main exports is holy water from their rivers and wells. The religion I made for them is mostly based off of Mandaeism, with parts of other Gnostic faiths mixed in along with some aspects of Jainism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. Ritual washing and baptism are pretty important to Mandaeism, so maybe they exclusively bathe in holy water rivers or something like that. Maybe holy water can mutate plants and animals to allow them to survive the divine shroud?
Aasimar are a very arrogant and xenophobic people. They live in isolationist ethnostates, the only contact they have with the outside world is through trade, they’re ruled by monarchs and councils of nobles descended from the Ildrithian mages that caused the fall of the empire, and they’re obsessed with preserving the “purity” of their divine blood. The nobility practice extreme inbreeding, getting more extreme the more powerful the noble house is. Lower nobles being akin to the Habsburgs and high nobles/monarchs are more akin to the Ptolemies. Some city-states are extremist theocracies where the worship of other gods is punishable by death. Aasimar name their children after angels (I used Mandaic angel names, like Zihrun, Yukabar, and Saur’iel) as they see themselves as their deity’s chosen people, literal manifestations of angels on earth. If they could, the Aasimar would genocide all the other races, starting with Tieflings, who they say are soulless corrupters of the natural world, children of Ahriman and Yaldabaoth.
These Aasimar look very off-putting. They are extremely skinny, all appearing severely emaciated and malnourished no matter how much they eat. Their eyes have no pupils or irises and are pure orbs of milky gold. Their skin is alabaster white, far paler than normal human skin tones. Their hair is either blonde, silvery gray, or pure white. And, due to extreme inbreeding amongst the nobility, congenital disorders such as hemophilia, Habsburg jaws, cleft palates, and worse are common.
This is just one version of Aasimar that I thought was more interesting and unique than the base Aasimar lore. They have a clear identity and role in the setting. They’re xenophobic oppressors, claiming that they have the “pure blood of angels,” while being the most disgustingly inbred abominations on the planet. They’re an interesting inverse of Tieflings, one of the main groups that oppresses them in this world.
Any thoughts? If you’ve created your own version of Aasimar, what’s your version like? Any ideas that I could add to this concept? I didn’t go too in-depth in the religion I created for them, but if anyone’s interested I could explain it in another comment.
Edit: For some reason when I posted this it deleted the middle section. Fixed.
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