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Leliel
2013-01-22, 06:14 PM
Well, we all can probably understand why books about the planes on the north end of the alignment scale are scarce-Good isn't exactly an antagonistic thing, so not a lot of writers bother except as class options.

However, fighting angels, particularly misguided but not evil at all ones, is cool. Besides the whole moral question, you're fighting angels. Hell, they can even be charactrer options, done properly.

So, seeing as how NG is my favorite alignment, here's something for Pathfinder's agathions (guardianals):

"Native inhabitants of Nirvana, agathions are rightly respected for being saints among saints. Kind, merciful, and completely unbiased, agathions are looked up to as models of perfect serenity and compassion.

"Thanks to their nature, they are also respected as some of the finest, smartest, most subtle, and outright stylish manipulators and schemers in the entire Great Beyond, matched only by devils-and even then that's a question that's up in the air depending on the agathions and devils serving as examples.

"The reason for this is twofold. First, Good is, at its core, more complex, multifaceted, and overall smarter than evil. Pure Good thinks in the long term, genuinely weighs others' interests against its own, takes risks that might harm itself in return for massive reward, comprehends moral ambiguity (although it doesn't like it) and above all else, understands other perspectives. Evil is purely 'me, me, me', all the time, and thus, it is ultimately predictable no matter how smart it is.

"Secondly, agathions are, by nature, peacemakers, and given how divisive the concepts of Law and Chaos are, act as neutral parties and diplomats between the archons and the azatas on the frequent occasions their political and philosophical divides creates conflict. As a result, many-most-agathions who want to do their jobs properly quickly gain as much political and social experience as possible, so that their greatest fear-a Blood War in Heaven-never even has a remote chance of materializing. Since, as mentioned, Good outsiders are more complex in their motives and actions then Evil ones, this means that agathions who want to remain diplomats hone their ability to judge and manipulate emotional states, and they have literally eternity to work on it.

"Add that together, and one has a major reason why that about all fiendish incursions into the Realms Above are doomed to failure-more than one agathion remembers the story of Harut the Magician and Marut the Wise, two brothers who sacrificed their existence to trick an iathavos who was nearing divinity into bringing its army directly to the heart of a Nirvana silver armory. The qlippoth population was reduced by a factor of twenty that day.

Not bad for a bunch of pacifistic animal people."

So, any other ideas to make the Upper Planes interesting and cool to play as, for, or against?

(also, for "qlippoth", read "obyrith". The iathavos is the current leader of the race, there can be only one in existence at any given time).

Kane0
2013-01-22, 07:52 PM
Pure Good thinks in the long term, genuinely weighs others' interests against its own, takes risks that might harm itself in return for massive reward, comprehends moral ambiguity (although it doesn't like it) and above all else, understands other perspectives. Evil is purely 'me, me, me', all the time, and thus, it is ultimately predictable no matter how smart it is.


In regard to fiends, you know that's not necessarily true, right?
Evil can and does think about others interests, and is very capable of using them to get things done. They think nothing of bribery and blackmail, as well as being able to cooperate with those of similar goals.
Where Good would sacrifice itself for a goal, Evil will sacrifice others. That is then balanced out by other evil entities attempting to sacrifice the same others, as well as the others themselves refusing to be sacrificed.
Evil does not have to mean selfish, although the vast majority of evil is. It is entirely possible for them to be selfless, on the condition that in doing so they do not suffer for it.
Evil often think of themselves as good and others as ignorant, or simply as thinking more intelligently and efficiently than those that cal themselves good. Emotion is a tool, not a motivation.
The argument could be made that the Devils you describe could simply be baiting the Guardinals into a false sense of competence and security, to prey upon later.

But I digress

Heres a concept, though it isn't exactly original:

Angels (and other Good exemplars) of the jaded, grim variety. These individuals have high ideals and even higher standards, constantly being disappointed with the state of the multiverse.

Some become crusaders of their causes and wage personal wars to right the wrongs they see everywhere, bordering on vendetta.

Others grow weary of the constant decay (moral or physical) of that around them, retreating to isolated havens of goodness where their bitterness and fatalism are more bearable.

Still others rationalize and compromise, slowly taking on aspects of those they despise in order to understand and ultimately beat it in some way through force or cunning. The success rate of this fate is not something to boast.

A few even go underground, using deception as a weapon against those that would strike down good. They become adept at turning evil against evil, a shortcoming most good outsiders do not possess. They are more likely to be indiscriminate as they are less directly involved in the conflict they cause, but often believe in the greater good at the cost of their own purity and perhaps a bit of 'collateral damage'. Their path is a fine line between righteous and callous.

These Celestials can each, in their own way, personify the idea that 'The end justifies the means', and would make fine adversaries for a party, especially if the party fancies themselves more good than the celestial(s) in question.

genmoose
2013-01-22, 09:47 PM
Not entirely original but I have a few adapted ideas.

1. A Celestial that has incredibly high standards that finds either the entire world, or maybe a region wanting. Perhaps he was dormant for a time and after being revived is aghast at what he sees as the decay of society. At first he may make targeted strikes hoping to save/convert the population but after a while he grows frustrated and goes for the 'kill them all and start over' theory.

For this I starting thinking about someone coming from out of time and seeing modern society. Think of a 'proper' Victorian gentleman that was dropped into the 21st century and then made to watch Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives of whatever. Now give that guy nearly God-like power and a mission save mortals from themselves.

1.5 One side concept to this could be a 'righteous' Celestial that works to destroy an 'evil' nation. Well the king may be evil, the nobility evil, the church evil, etc but the people are just people. Sure some folks are evil too, but a lot are just trying to survive and a good number may even be good. The PC's may have to decide between fighting the Celestial to protect the 'people' or trying to overthrow the evil regime to ward off divine destruction.

For a modern analogy think of Iran or North Korea. Sure Kim Jong-un might be a nutbag, his government a totalitarian nightmare, and the army paranoid, but there are 24 million people who are just unlucky enough to be born north of the DMZ. If NK were to nuke Tokyo for some stupid reason, the American nuclear response could be analogous to divine wrath.

2. A 'long game' Celestial that supports various evil causes in order to keep various threats fighting each other rather than anyone else. IE if your setting has the traditional devil vs demon Blood War, then maybe this angel is helping one side or another to maintain the balance.

This could evolve to where the Celestial starts to enjoy the 'perks' of being around evil and finds some way to mentally justify that he's still helping the greater good. IE he lives a decadent lifestyle with booze, women, gambling, etc to keep his cover and work against a greater evil. Who cares about hookers and blow when the alternative is the baby eating third cousin of Cthulhu.

Craft (Cheese)
2013-01-22, 10:10 PM
The first problem is, well, there's no way to get around this, but Celestials are sortof defined as "Good Outsiders," with all the problems that "Good" alignment entails. Simply put it's rather difficult to get Celestials in conflict with adventurers, unless the adventurers are Evil, the Celestials are acting quite out of alignment (which should be impossible given the definition of an Outsider embodying that alignment), or the reason is totally contrived.

Secondly, it's difficult to have adventurers working with Celestials, unless the adventurers are absurdly powerful themselves, without the Celestials turning into quest givers who suck for all the same reasons quest givers usually suck.

Finally, there's simply a stark lack of material on them: There's information abounds on adventuring locations in Baator or the Abyss (or the setting equivalents) but almost never anything on the upper planes more than a general description. A group choosing to take their campaign to the upper planes pretty much has to start from scratch.




One idea I think might be worth trying to solve the first problem is to divide the outsiders not by broad philosophical principles related to very general (and extremely loaded) labels but rather to extremely specific stuff. For example, let's say this setting was created by a single creator deity, who left the multiverse behind to be managed by their servants according to a Plan of some sort. We can then define the Celestials as those who decided to stick to the Plan, and the various other types of outsiders as those who want to divert from the plan in various ways. This way, whether adventurers partner up with or fight against celestials depends on both pragmatics and their personal philosophical feelings about the particulars of the Plan, without needing to be Evil (whatever that might entail depending on the particular group's interpretation of Alignment) to have a disagreement.

As for the second problem, you need to make them vulnerable. This seems sortof counter-intuitive, but for interactions between celestials and the players to have much meaning then these interactions need to be on roughly equal terms. This doesn't mean they can't have Cool Powers or do badass stuff, but the idea of them being an infinitely large army of Solars with Gate-spam simply isn't feasible.

And for the third problem... sorry, you're sorta stuck with solving that problem yourself no matter which way you split it.

Mikeavelli
2013-01-22, 10:35 PM
I game once which revolved around two celestials, an Archon and an Eladrin, in conflict with each other.

- Sometime in the vaguely defined past, a greater fiend was summoned by a mortal too weak to control it, and it promptly escaped in order to cause havoc in the mortal world. It gained access to sufficient magical items and spells to perpetually hide itself from divination spells, and set to work corrupting as fiends are ought to do. The exact nature of the fiend (Baatezu, Tanar'Ri, Yugoloth, etc.) was unknown, only that it was very powerful.

- Two organizations (one chaotic good, one lawful good, as you can tell) found out about the summoning, and independently decided to call for celestial aid. The Archon and Eladrin took advisory roles in their respective organizations, directing resources towards fiend-hunting, but forced to keep their nature as celestials hidden due to various convenient excuses.

- The two organizations distrusted each other along philosophical grounds from the beginning. With some extremely subtle pushing from the fiend, they began to suspect each other of being the hidden fiend. The Archon was convinced he was hunting a powerful Tanar'Ri who had corrupted the forces of chaos. The Eladrin was convinced he was hunting a Baatezu who had done the same to the forces of law.

- The campaign involved the players being a completely independent group investigating the initial fiend-summoning, being courted by both sides in what was rapidly approaching all out war between the two organizations, and either picking sides, or realizing it was all a setup, and figuring out where the REAL bad guy was.

- When actually running it, I was a bit too loose with the clues, and they figured it out well before they needed to, so they never actually fought one of the celestials. C'est la vie.

Leliel
2013-01-23, 12:15 AM
In regard to fiends, you know that's not necessarily true, right?

But of course!

Pure Evil, on the other hand, is rather simple. There may be an intelligent mind that turns it into a lethal force, but Evil, in and of itself, is rather straightforward a concept.

One of the components of Pure Good, however, is the fact that no one can perfectly agree on what good is, and thus, introspection and the ability to question "what is Good" is one of the central conceits of Good. Thus, Pure Good is rather more cerebral than Pure Evil. Here, intelligent minds who do not fully understand what Good entails make it simple and straightforward, and agathions/guardianals, by virtue of who and what they are, don't do that.

Also, about the devil thing-that's why I said "matched" and not "exceeds even". A mental duel between the two is likely to resemble something out of Death Note or Code Geass as plot and counterplot dance. And of course, no one said anything about Good being unable to sacrifice a few for the good of the all, and then hate itself afterwards...Or playing Evil against itself...

EDIT: Basically, in my headcanon, the agathions are responsible for malconvokers after a lovely little story in which they tricked a pit fiend into exposing herself to an artifact that would allow perfect recall of memory...and it caused her to remember her human existence as a loving mother, and how happy it made her to be able to trust someone else implicitly. Hijinks, by which we mean suicide by demon followed by a loss of a rather frightening demonic foothold that was winning them an advantage in the Blood War, and the secrets of pactmaking getting out to the archons (that was not an anticipated benefit, but a welcome one)

Basically, agathions are a perfect pacifist people normally, until they suspect that they will be able to make a metaphorical omelette by breaking a few eggs. Then they will happily lie, cheat, and steal for the Greater Good, and unlike about every antagonist ever, when they say "it's for a noble cause", they mean it, and will give a very reasoned explanation of why, and why this little grey deed will lead to a direct increase in the amount of happiness and hope in the universe.

And they're very experienced with their predictive models.

SgtCarnage92
2013-01-23, 03:14 AM
I've always imagined celestials as beings far beyond mortal understanding and morality and while their actions are in the long run for the benefit of the greater good where "good" is literally a force of nature. Their concern is with the multiverse and most mortals are beneath their recognition. Celestials may save one world while another burns as it is consumed by the Abyss. They make sorties throughout the planes to make sure evil stays in check and is pitted against each other.

An angel may destroy a city, just to make sure the cult doesn't manage to summon an archdevil to bring it under it's rule, justifying that all of the good souls within the city will make it to their given paradise plane anyway.

Guizonde
2013-01-23, 08:22 AM
I've always imagined celestials as beings far beyond mortal understanding and morality and while their actions are in the long run for the benefit of the greater good where "good" is literally a force of nature. Their concern is with the multiverse and most mortals are beneath their recognition. Celestials may save one world while another burns as it is consumed by the Abyss. They make sorties throughout the planes to make sure evil stays in check and is pitted against each other.

An angel may destroy a city, just to make sure the cult doesn't manage to summon an archdevil to bring it under it's rule, justifying that all of the good souls within the city will make it to their given paradise plane anyway.

and here i am, thinking NG meant "neutral good". i stand corrected: NG means nietzchian good. the end totally justifies the means :smallbiggrin:

this is for me the better way of playing good badasses without hitting alignment changes. way better than the church templar, truly, good is not nice.

Yora
2013-01-23, 10:51 AM
One way might to differentiate between specific cases of mortal good and evil, and universal cosmic Good and Evil.

In mortal terms, we admire and respect heroes for their good deeds because great sacrifices and risks are not expected and the will to do them anyway is exceptional.
Good outsiders are manifestations of Cosmic Good, for them sacrifice for the greater good could be expected and demanded and they might feel that the same standards should apply to mortals as well. The big issue always comes first and they never stop to save people of minor concern if it means risking ultimate victory. Mortals might take the risk to save trapped people and hope they can catch up with the escaping villain later on. But celestials never take that gamble and go straight for the villain if his escape puts more people at danger than those who are in danger now.
And in extreme cases, they might even try to stop mortals from doing such "small good deeds" if it risks the successful defeat of the greater Evil. However, I think that's not easy to pull of as in my experience many players are actually quite likely to follow such a reasoning, cut their losses, and know when to walk away to save their strength and resources.

SgtCarnage92
2013-01-23, 02:37 PM
and here i am, thinking NG meant "neutral good". i stand corrected: NG means nietzchian good. the end totally justifies the means :smallbiggrin:

this is for me the better way of playing good badasses without hitting alignment changes. way better than the church templar, truly, good is not nice.

I wasn't thinking about that, but it works well for beings beyond mortality, beyond mortal perception of time and space and beyond mortal morality. They are truly beings above, there are untold billions of good souls throughout the material plane that they are responsible for.
A few people die here in there in a struggle against evil and they don't bat an eyelash because they have bigger problems to deal with.

ngilop
2013-01-23, 02:48 PM
I have alwasy beleived celestials were badass.

I think the whole image of them NOT being badasses is Good tends to be more subtle than evil is.

Evil for the most part is 'im evil rarw evil evil evil!' while good is kinda slinkin along the edge doing what is right and good. and nobody really pays attention to that.

exampel from real life here.

Guy is a great father and has been his children's entire lifes. nobody says anything becuase he is good.

but the one time the dead beat dad actually does something peopel are all ' wow'

Yukitsu
2013-01-23, 03:12 PM
I'm running a campaign that is using the more apocryphal angels, which means gigantic 6 winged flaming serpents, many faced flying wheels, big flaming swords and all that. The older Judeo-Christian mythos is far more badass than the 1900s hallmark mythos.

Kane0
2013-01-23, 04:24 PM
You could always try taking some ideas from the Diablo games, those angels were pretty badass.

AgentofHellfire
2013-01-23, 05:41 PM
Another option would be to make the struggle have nothing to do with morality...for example, Celestial drug addicts, who aren't all that good under the lack of recent influence...

Actually, even better: Using the concepts of celestial naivete (not Knight Templar tendencies, naivete) as a way to make them do evil.

So I'm going to go ahead and make an example of the second one, which will be longer when I decide whether to use an existing Celestial race or make a new one.

--First up, a none-too bright (read Int<6) Celestial creature is summoned during a ritual that's supposed to be conducted only by the purely good-aligned. Unfortunately, an evil spellcaster managed to fool the world as to his nature sufficiently to be able to perform it. Which means, the Celestial creature now serves him, which is fine by it, since it figures this fellow is good like the others, and what he's asking of it will be totally justified. Said evil individual has it go out on a killing spree in "evil lands" The worst part, though, is that this could be fairly easily resolved with just a little chat with the celestial, if it weren't for the fact that it doesn't speak Common. Or Draconic. Or any other recognizable language.