Fiends are allowed to invade the Material Plane basically whenever they like

Who says shit about that being allowed?
Don't know aboutyour settings, but in mine the heavens regularly send celestial equivalents of seal team six out to go fuck up evil's shit, they just send commandos instead of hordes

one thing i've always wondered is that if half celestials are damn near always good, why doesn't heaven just send a bunch of angelic waifus/husbandos down for a generation or two and eugenics out evil?

Three reasons come to mind.

1) That would leave a lot of mortals alone and feeling left out and unloved, or inadequate.

2) It would suggest that success and goodness are hereditary, when they may not be by the world's mechanics.

3) Or they could just be using them all for other things. Remember the Avatar Crisis from Forgotten Realms? They demigods, Avatars, and angels were fucking BUSY, they didn't have time to be making godbabbie even if they physically could have more or less any time they wanted.

You're going to have to dumb this down for me, because I don't get it at all.

What's the point of celestials if they can't even intervene to demon lords literally invading the mortal world through the Underdark? Which was exactly what happened in Out of the Abyss. Not a single celestial showed up there.

The setting makes sense. The adventures that people make in that setting don't always. FR has a very active extraplanar community (especially when it comes to deities) but as far as official shit goes, it barely ever moves, and that goes double for what people do at their own tables.

Remember, these are the people who made an adventure all about Elemental Evil trying to take over the world and centered it on the cults of four powerful Elemental Princes of Evil / Evil Archomentals, but did not ONCE mention the Elemental Princes of Good / Good Archomentals or the Elemental Lords (who are mainline FR deities that didn't even get billing in the PHB).

Yeah, that makes sense.

Rise of Tiamat: Bahamut never intervening a single time.
Princes of the Apocalypse: Good archomentals and elemental lords never intervene.
Out of the Abyss: Celestials never intervene.

Are the good guys just lazy?

The writers are.
I don't know when this shift happened, but it was never a problem back in the old BECMI days. You had Immortals hopping down and risking their own godhood to fuck shit up all the time.

Presumably because the mortals are really good at curbstomping demons

>Why is this allowed?
Because they signed the Pact Primeval and didn't read the fine print.
Asmodeus checkmated them before the game even begun.

The Pact Primeval doesn't cover willy-nilly fiendish invasions.

The exact details of the pact are left to DM interpretation but in a vague, general sense they prevent the upper planes from interfering directly with the lower planes.

I know. Planescape did it best though.

This is why they should have kept Gargauth on retainer.

Magical_realm_intensifies.jpg

While individual celestials may be stronger than individual demons and devils, the total sum host of angels is ridiculously tiny compared to the armies of Hell and the literally infinite hordes of the Abyss.

One Solar going down to face the demon lords will find himself mobbed by three of them and seventeen balor generals besides.

Okay, but it's better than letting some mortal chucklefucks risk their lives doing the same thing, right?

Not really. Depending on setting of course, but mortals can outstrip the powers of angels and gods by ridiculous degrees.

In Forgotten Realms (where Out of the Abyss takes place), remember that Bane, Bhaal, and Myrkul were all 3 mortal adventurers who decided to kill the ultimate god of evil and claim his power. (The ultimate god of evil politely handed his power over without resisting but the point here is that they thought they had a fighting chance.) The vast majority of mortals are useless, but truly exceptional mortals are beyond the machinations of anything except the overgods and elder evils (and the Lady of Pain).
Given time and the right equipment, mortals can defeat both heaven and hell. Only the fact that the abyss and the far realm are infinite prevents them from being surmounted in the same way.

When angel souls get captured and turned into demons and shit it tends to turn out way worse than if another four or five mortals get turned into lemures / manes.

But 5e is making it so that these mortals are achieving all this shit as a party of four level 15 PCs.

Isn't a single solar angel completely stronger than a party of four level 15 PCs?

Levels are just an abstraction to represent power, all that means is that level 15 represents a higher level of power in 5e than it did in previous editions.

No way, level 15 PCs in 5e are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay weaker than level 15 PCs in 3.X.

Your post is very interesting and all, but let's turn our attention to the point that really matters here.

I'd fuck the angel on your picture.
I don't care what is it - a girl, a boy, even some kind of sexless abomination with vagina dentata and seventeen eyes in places where they clearly don't belong.

I'd find a way to fuck it.
I'd find a way to get myself off and get it off too.

Mark my words.

Then everything else must also be weaker.

>celestials are not allowed to intervene
But they are.
They're allowed to empower mortals to go do that shit.

mortals dieing is not a horrible thing. they'll die anyway.

Why is it that angels NEVER exist in games except when Gate is involved but there's demons in every spooky forest on the continent?

So that the mortal PCs have something to do.

DMs are bad

In any game that has Devas as a playable race, that isn't true. In the Forgotten Realms and the default Greyhawk/Blackmoor worlds, that isn't true. In Planescape and Spelljammer, that isn't true.

>In any game that has Devas as a playable race

4e devas aren't angels.

I like 4e's devas, which were explicitly Earthbound angles designed to work around limits.

Oh, and M:tG has angels as actors just as much as demons. (the last block literally redid the metaplot of 40k replacing space Marines with winged ladies)

How are they not angels?

They literally have Paragon Path's dedicated to being more angel like.

No, but they are the incarnated spirits of them, and Aasimar are their offspring, so their mere existence means they were around at some point.

No (angel) keyword.

Blame your DM. In my setting outsiders only ever come to the realm when someone gives them a way in.

No aasimar in 4e.

The same way elves aren't eladrin or rilmani despite starting out that way.

True, but how hard is it to houserule them when they existed in most editions before and after?

4e solved this with the primal ban and as and mentioned, the Gods and their servants are outnumbered. They only won the Dawn War because most of the primordials were absolute retards, so the Gods formed the first adventuring parties to chain them up, and this still ended with a shattered Lattice of Heaven, a ton of dead gods, and that whole Tharizdun thing.

Good and Law are stretched thin. Chaos and Evil are rampant.

Why does the primal ban not stop demons from pouring in anyway?

And literally every pure church in the world doesn't allow for even a single angel to pass through?

>Heaven steps up it's game
>All angels are now 20/10 cheesecake/fuckbois
Let the breeding program commence

It does, for the most part. It's why Demogorgon couldn't just gate his ass to the world and fuck everyone to death back then.

The primal ban can't stop mortals from inviting bad shit into the world, so when primordial cultists, demon cultists, devil worshippers, the priests of evil gods, etc. get offered delicious candy in exchange for letting their lords and masters step into the world...not a lot the ban can do.

That's pretty pedantic.

But why can't we do the same with Anges? Sure you might go to the "If angels do everything humans will be babies" argument, but it doesn't matter if there are no humans left because some cultists summoned just a few too many demons and the heroes died early in their quest. Why can't we get Angels when shit goes sideways through a blender?

>But why can't we do the same with Anges?

You can. Angel summoning is a thing.
Shit you can become an angel in 4e. But there are a lot less angels than there are devils, demons, and elementals.

Angels are native to all of the celestial Upper (Good) planes, in something of a break with how the Lower Planes work. There you have a clear delineation between the Devils (LE), Fiends (NE), and Demons (CE). The respective Good counterparts are Archons (LG), Guardinals (NG), and Eladrin (CG). When you're factoring in all of those guys as being in opposition to the Lower Planes forces, the fight isn't so lopsided.

Angels are unique in that they also have to watch out for the Elementals of the Inner Planes depending on how much you want to use the Primordial stuff from 4E. Most of that fight is completely gone though with the Abeir/Toril split, and the remaining Primordials / Elemental Lords don't really give a shit about the Prime Material or any Outer Plane (with the exception of Kossuth, who still cares less about the PM than pretty much any non-Primordial). Opposition to remaining Elemental-typed Outsiders like the various Genie races would be predicated on them primarily being evil assholes.

I mean I specifically run 4e PoL cosmology for the reasons you state, because if the fight isn't lopsided then there's no reason for multiplanar adventures or demon princes to be a thing at all.

(But I also run 4e so I'm a filthy heretic in general).

I run standard cosmology with the 4E Primordial background, but none of that Elemental Chaos stuff. Gives the Inner Planes something to do and adds more to the creation myth beyond "in the beginning Shar and Selune fought a lot".

>inner planes
>not elemental chaos
Awful taste.

I'm personally not a Faerun fan so I run with the 4e cosmology and a customized Nentir Vale setting.

If you have a full understanding of all the Inner Planes there's plenty of interface between them all to allow for multi-elemental and competing elemental nonsense. They're geographically infinite and pockets of opposing alignments show up in a given plane anyway (a giant fireball in the middle of the Plane of Water for no reason).

Most people deal with the Inner Planes as just Air-Fire-Earth-Water as distinct entities, ignorant of how they meld together into the paraelemental Smoke-Magma-Ooze-Smoke, or with the Positive and Negative everyone also forgets about creating the quasielemental Lightning-Vacuum-Radiance-Ash-Mineral-Dust-Steam-Salt Planes.

And if you're playing Dark Sun, you want quasi-elemental shit everywhere, because those are your baddies outside of Defilers and fucking slaad.

You're basically saying "the most interesting parts of the planes are where elements meet and collide."

So... why not just use Elemental Chaos?

Planes of smoke, ooze, vacuum, ash, and dust are boring as fuck.

DMs and writers don't even use the interesting parts of the "boring", single-elemental planes.

Everything you want out of the Elemental Chaos, minus Limbo, is already in the standard Great Wheel shit, plus a crapload of other stuff you'll never get to kick around in. There's simply more stuff, more options, more potential to do shit under GW than you'll ever have under EC.

After 5E went back to the Great Wheel, they also put Elemental Chaos around everything else, so you have THREE fucking kinds of cake to eat now. There should be nothing to complain about.

Why do you need planes of smoke, ooze, vacuum, ash, and dust when you can already have those in the Elemental Chaos and have them crash and collide with other elements anyway?

As someone who is familiar enough with the 2e/3.X-era Great Wheel to know what "kamerel," "vaati," and "khayal" all are and to know of the bizarre border regions of the quasielemental planes featured in the 2e Inner Planes book, I can safely say that the 2e's configuration of the Inner Planes is incredibly dull and without purpose.

A more interesting way to handle it, so I believe, is to cast the Deep Ethereal as the Elemental Chaos (because that is what it is: the primordial font of all matter and energy, the plane of infinite potential) and to cast various Prime worlds as element-specific "elemental planes," as described here:

The Great Wheel gives them entire borders where they crash and collide with the other elementals, and they can crash and collide even in planes they DON'T border because pockets of any plane can show up in any other plane regardless of proximity. You can have everything you want out of the EC here, and 5E ALSO gives you the EC.

Because the Material Plane
, important as it is to its inhabitants, is merely one of billion planes that make up the Multiverse. Celestials and Infernals reside outside the timeline, which allows them full view of everyone's destinies. When either one of them intervenes, they need to limit their powers as to prevent rendering the plane asunder. Also, the act binds them to the timeline, changing it and limiting their view of it.

Furthermore, Celestials disdain intervening because not only they prefer mortals to clean their shit up, it gives fiends the perfect excuse to escalate by bringing more forces and powers to bear

>Celestials and Infernals reside outside the timeline
Bullshit.

I believe many celestial outsiders would love nothing more than to take the ol' cosmic battle of good vs evil right to the fiends who make a move on the prime material, but are held back by their superiors/elders/deities. This stems from a fear of corruption and eventual "fall", though not by exposure to demons. They fear corruption by MORTALS.

A mortal's existence is defined by a daily compromise between the ideals of good and evil simply to live and survive. Living a perfectly good life is impossible. Whether it's the paladin allowing a corrupt politician to stay in power to maintain societal order or the peasant stealing an honest merchant's goods to feed his family, all people balance somewhere between ethical ideals.

Before a fiend, the celestial sees only a simple obstacle to cosmic good that must be destroyed and given no consideration. The chance of being corrupted through exposure to a fiend is extremely low. But in the presence of mortals who even at best must contend with minor evils or indiscretions in their daily lives, the faith and resolve of a celestial can be gradually chipped away. And like a frog in slowly boiling water, the celestial will find themselves and their views of the multiverse changed before they know what happened.

The higher-ups in the heavens have been around long enough to see it happen before and thus will avoid exposing the rank and file to the corrupting influence of mortals.

angel bump

Also realized the vast majority of my angel folder is either sexy or horrifying

Those are both good things, though.

So why aren't fiends other than succubi redeemed by mortals?

Is it basically "lol, good is fragile and uselessly bureaucratic"?

It has to do with the very nature of good and evil, and the environments their representatives reside in.

In the lower planes it's every fiend for himself. They may form alliances or even long term relationships, but it's all in the pursuit of their individual advancement. They neither expect nor receive support on "good will". When a fiend appears on the prime, it's usually because some mortal called them there for power, money, information, and so on. They're used to dealing with others who have only their own self interest in mind. Even if they should end up on the prime by accident or luck, what mortal would show kindness to clawed/scaled/flaming/whatever monster whose personality is shaped by an existence of cruelty, selfishness, and literal evil with a capital E V I L. Succubi occasionally reverse-fall through the tendency of mortals to have attachments to beautiful and/or fuckable entities and thus show them affection that fiend had otherwise never known.

Celestials, on the other hand, nominally exist in a place where everyone looks out for everyone else and those in charge who responsibility over them have their best interest in mind. It's an ideal that all but the most twisted of mortal civilizations hold dear but can never truly attain. An angel appearing in a prime settlement is in for quite a culture shock when they find homeless people, racial and class prejudices, or just plain capitalism. Imagine a Starfleet officer from Star Trek beaming down to medieval Earth. Imagine being from a world where everyone is equal, has access to miraculous magic/technology, and no one starves or falls ill. Then teleport down to a world where every day is a struggle to survive, where your course in life is primarily due to luck of birth, where the threat of disease, starvation, or death always lurks around the corner.

I could write all night about how an average prime civilization would react to an actual angel appearing but I'm out of time.

>So why aren't fiends other than succubi redeemed by mortals?
My explanation is that succubi are more likely to go native while undercover, when other fiends enter the world they don't pretend to be something they're not and are likely surrounded by evil while they're there

Now I really want to see a non-succubus turn good or hell even neutral, just because they went native.

>Pit Fiend crosses over into the world, takes over a mortal kingdom.
>Once he's actually in charge, his new kingdom falls into turmoil as the people rebel, refuse to work, run away, and otherwise refuse to serve him.
>He begins making concessions, giving them rights, paying them instead of enslaving them, letting them worship their gods, and so forth.
>One day he wakes up to a peaceful prosperous kingdom, with singing birds and laughing children in a city of marble, and realizes he's not actually much of an Evil Overlord anymore.

>Redemption via practicality
My favorite kind of redemption, even better than redemption via snu snu

Stealing this.

Because Evil is inclusive while Good is exclusive, a Good being has very strict rules to follow in order to maintain goodness, while Evil beings can mostly do whatever they want without compromising their core morality.

To clarify, very few acts are inherently good, almost any benign act could actually be evil if it's done for the purposes of deception. On the other hand many things ARE inherently evil, as an extreme example murdering an orphanage full of innocent children will always be an evil act regardless of what good it might cause for whatever contrived reason.

I know this strays in sophistic shit, but I dunno about that categorization; deception itself is an act, and an arbitrarily good act is, likewise, an action.

Blending them together arbitrarily inflates the number of 'evil' actions in potentia, when in reality deception itself is the evil act. Furthermore, deception itself may not even be an evil act, but a morally ambivalent one.

I mean, really, Evil actions are those intended to wound or cause harm to a subject, and Good actions are intended to be beneficial or helpful to a subject, right?

Of course, morality then gets a lot more shifty at that point, so I'm going to stop there.