D&D (2024) Why aren't Angels concidered a type of Empryeans?

D&D has been very sensitive to demons, to the degree that all trace of the word was removed for a time.

Why? It's called treating others with respect, even if we don't share their beliefs.
To my knowledge, there are no major religions that have a prohibition against depicting angels. If anything, Islam has a carve-out for that because you're not supposed to depict living human beings, but angels are ok. Why is it ok to draw a picture of a human commoner, offending Muslims, but not an angel?
 

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From what I understand about the online D&D community, they're very hidebound about posting direct text from the books (even if that text is available elsewhere) due to that period when TSR would sue everyone on earth.
It has already been posted several times on this very website. And the source where it came from was permitted to pot by WotC. I don't think that was the concern.
 

To my knowledge, there are no major religions that have a prohibition against depicting angels. If anything, Islam has a carve-out for that because you're not supposed to depict living human beings, but angels are ok. Why is it ok to draw a picture of a human commoner, offending Muslims, but not an angel?

The depicting living beings was a pretty strong thing in some tribal cultures when the world was being civilized. Some tribal cultures would kill people for such things because they thought pictures and paintings that looked too real took a piece of your soul to make. Shouldn't surprise anyone. How many people still think the cold makes them sick instead of the viruses that they get exposed too in cold season. Science has definitively proved it doesn't, But I can start a 3 hour argument with my coworkers about it and they won't move even when I show them the hard science. <shrug>
 

D&D has been very sensitive to demons, to the degree that all trace of the word was removed for a time.

Why? It's called treating others with respect, even if we don't share their beliefs.
The word was removed because of the old satanic panic - being sued or physically attacked was a danger the writers of the time were understandably worried about. That's not respect, that's fear.

There's no reason for D&D to avoid the word angel. Certainly, MtG isn't suddenly avoiding printing Angel tribe cards. If anything is going on, its that we're fleshing out the upper planes to be more interesting, especially relevant because aasimar are now a core book PC option. We have Animal Lords now as well for the Guardinals. Emyreans getting a glow up is happening for a similar reason.

And I'm all for it. I mean, if I'm going to be perfectly honest, metalic dragons, celestials and so on are so often BORING. Getting a glow up and a bunch of different story hooks for a bunch of goodly beings is a great step in the right direction.
 

The word was removed because of the old satanic panic - being sued or physically attacked was a danger the writers of the time were understandably worried about. That's not respect, that's fear.
Respect and fear are two sides of the same coin. Either be sensitive because it’s the right thing to do, or because insensitivity is bad for business. The outcome is the same.
We have Animal Lords now as well for the Guardinals. Emyreans getting a glow up is happening for a similar reason
Quite. A bunch of not-angels as replacements.
To my knowledge, there are no major religions that have a prohibition against depicting angels
No, it’s not okay in many forms of Islam. But what major religions teach, and what people actually believe are often different. I don’t know of many religions that teach that angels are the spirits of good people who died, but a great many people believe that anyway.
 

Empyreans seems like a strange choice of name for children of the gods of any plane. It makes some sense when limited to children of celestial gods, but the word itself suggests origination in the realm of spiritual fire, which I would equate to the Positive Plane. Now, in my homebrew cosmology, all celestials, fey, and fiends, including "gods" of those planes, have their origin in the Positive Plane, so they would all be empyreans in that sense, as would those considered to be their "children" even though these are immortal beings who were "conceived" outside of the flow of time. For example, the archfey of the hunt, in some accounts, is considered to be the son of the archfey of crafts and his spouse, the archfey of living things. The three are coeval, however, and had these relationships from the beginning. Many mortals consider them to be gods.

Angels I would consider to be of a lesser order of the same type of being, so it makes sense for them to be a type of empyrean as far as I'm concerned.

ETA: Now, the question of how titans are involved is a bit of a mystery to me. In my homebrew, titans are the highest order of giants and are descended from primordials, who have a different origin from the "gods" described above, so I'm not sure how they became the children of the gods if that was indeed the intent.
 
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So. Food for thought.

There's a bit in the 2024 DMG, when it talks about gods and their ranks (page 74)? You have Greater Deities (think Moradin, Corellon, etc), Lesser Deities - "the creations, children, or servitors of the greater deities" - and Quasi-deities. That last rank includes demigods (half-mortals), titans (non-god creations of gods, such as the kraken and tarrasque) and vestiges (remnants of dead gods).

Empyreans in the video seems to fit the quasi-deity mold that the DMG. The write up says at various points, "Emyreans are the spawn of deities," "whether empyreans are idealized beings or vestiges of divinity," "inventors and their creations." All of these are basically just different ways of describing the different quasi-deities listed in the DMG.

I'm wondering if Empyreans are filling the niche of "fightable gods" at this point. Renamed because saying that you're going to be fighting a god is, well, has certain implications in D&D.
 



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