Even though angels and demons are enemies, both sides are Good

>Even though angels and demons are enemies, both sides are Good.
How would you make this work without involving the third party to play the villain?

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Long term vs. short term

Master morality vs. slave morality

>Angels seek order
>Demons seek chaos
Earth is the battleground. Either side winning would not end well for the earthlings.

Angels are about keeping order and tradition, demons are about having fun and living in the moment.

Sometimes the angels need to be beaten up because they're stifling the pleasures of life, but sometimes the demons have to be stopped because they're fucking up society for a giggle.

Well, good is relative. Or if you want to keep the fantasy image of goodness, you can make them represent different aspects, like civility vs. freedom.

>Good
According to whom? Do you mean they're "humanitarian" and don't cause any meaningless harm? Help the weak, protect the innocent, that sort of shit?

It is the prophesized Time of Ending, and the Demons have come to do their duty of destroying the world. The Angels, however, fight against them in a misguided attempt to keep the world going.

Disgaea.

It's the demons' jobs to punish the evil and wicked. After an eternity of seeing only the worst humanity has to offer, they've gotten extremely jaded and trigger-happy. They're also extremely bitter about the angels getting cushy positions up in Heaven while they bust their asses doing dirty work in Hell.

On the flip side, many angels find demons disgusting and question their necessity. They believe everyone is inherently good (because like demons they've only seen one sort of person).

Since both sides are immortal/reincarnate, there's really no reason to NOT have their disagreements on philosophy and morality turn violent; the demons get to work out some of that aggression on a prissy do-nothing and angels get to put a brutish asshole in their place.

Balance. The overgod decided that the world needed a balance between being nice and being a hellhole and if the balance is disrupted he just rips it all apart and starts again.

/thread

But more seriously just make them servants of gods with clashing ideologies. i.e. warrior god and fertility god
> Humans! We gon fight the gud fight bop them gais yeeee
> No! Humans, we gonna make dem babies and nurture shit
> Clearly our ideals are irreconcilable, we must Bible fight to the death.

Or you could have God be an asshole/uncaring/detached, angels unaware/trying to make the mortals have as good a life while it lasts and demons trying to bring down god so he doesn't reset the world.

god is an asshole and decided that suffering and mandatory evil desires are a required thing in the universe. Hell is real and overcrowded in oceans of torture. Heaven is real but unreachable.

REMOVE ALIGNMENTS

This should be a rule for every game though.

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Alignments are pretty shit though. Objectively.

They're not, objectively.

>Neutral Good
>Edgy

>Naruto
>Chaotic Neutral

>Lawful Evil
>"I want to murder everything"
Yeah...no.

Ifn ya can't use your head and treat them as guidelines or just ignore them I've got nothing for you.
The flaws of the Alignment system are well established and the continual complaints are infantile.

But user, there's already a villainous third party.

Because God thought that it would be fucking rad, so now eternally respawning armies of heaven and hell fight each other across the world.
>also it creates a power vacuum for mortal to live in, without being dicked around by angels/demons too much.

Just depict both side as having logical standpoints and understandable goals. If you want them to appear good over just being neutral, make them fight over something good.

They could, for example, have different views over saving humanity from itself. Angels wanting to ascend humanity to a higher plane of existence while demons believing that humanity can be tought a better way and considering an ascention would be too dangerous.

Just be creative.

and you, post more.

>Demons are inherently human entites. They may be unpredictable, backstabbing eccentrics as a rule but they are relatable - they have personalities and distinctly material goals, embodying freedom, independance and the search for personal power and fullfilment.
>Angels are inherently inhuman entities. They are agents of a cosmic order that mortals cannot percieve, enigmatic and unyielding. They embody order, authority and self-sacrifice in His name.

Reality works like a Karmic Wheel, where hardship Ascends you to a higher plane.

Demons inflict suffering and misery on the Souls trip to reincarnation, so it will Ascend to a higher plane without the need for earthly and thus memorable pain.

Angels Belive the Soul is better equipped to experience the Hardships in Earthly life, so offer the Soul a reprieve during it's passing through the veil.

Law versus Chaos

carrot and stick
angels encourage nice people, demons punish bad people

I probably wouldn't use those exact terms, since demons has a pretty evil association, but I would do it that the angels are tied to actual gods and are their servants, whereas demons are freer agents, attached to idea based notions of goodness.

This is probably the way i'd see it.

After millennia of only dealing with the worst and the dregs of society, wouldn't you get pissed off too? Being the fucking janitors of the afterlife, cleaning up everyone elses shit and the worst of the worst. You'd probably wanna find out what the fuck is going on and how to fix it.

>Angels represent ORDER -> calm but stagnation
>Demons represent CHAOS -> aggression but progress

Pretty much all of this famalamadingdong.

Demons are "evil" if only because their nature is that of chaos; they're impulsive & emotional, but their brand of evil is ironically quite relatable on the basis of it most resembling the evils that men do: pride, lust, wrath, greed, gluttony, sloth, etc.. They're paranormal in origin, but very mortal in their motives.

Angels are "evil" if only because their nature is that of order; they're strict, unrelenting & unsympathetic. They're the sort of entity that comes down and tells you it knows what's best for you and that to defy it's will is to sin and that may be true, but it's lack of bed side manner is unappealing and dehumanizing.

It's why when an Angel comes down and he's all feathers and eyeballs he has to tell a human to "fear not".

Where as no one is afraid of Demons with their goat horns, bare chests, love of barbecues and sodomy.

But demons are good, baka, hell was made before the fall, Lucifer was created to rebel and take his place there, he could see his destiny before playing it out.

Literally demons and the devil exist by design, not against it or against god's will, so that there can be meaningful moral choices.

And fucking obviously the entities which punish wrongdoers are not themselves evil, as hundreds of "insightful" cartoons crack jokes about.

Angels and demons are just paid advocates for various causes. The demons typically are prosecution and sting operations, while the Angels are defense attorneys and social workers.

Simple. God is in a coma. One side wants to preserve God and let Him awaken whenever he planned to. The other side is desperate to awaken their Creator.

Basically, put the biggest deity on life support.

Fuck yeah, Kill Six Billion Demons! I love that comic!

OK, so, I basically think most of the stuff in this thread is stupid. You lose way too much of the impact of the two groups if you're just lifting a surface level reading of angels and demons and then throwing in some christian imagery.

It's stupid and it sucks. Stop.

Ok, here you go, taken right from one of the main real world theories on where demons come from:

>Lucifer and Co. rebel and are cast out of heaven. They take shelter on earth.
>These "sons of God" rape the "daughters of man", begetting the Nephilim.
>The Nephilim are born as an act of further defiance against God and the humans made in his image.
> Watching the world become more sinful God floods the world killing off the old world and with it the Nephilim.
>The Demons, caught on earth in a limbo, without bodies are abandoned by the fallen angles. They resort to stealing human bodies outright, or, bargaining their influence for space in bodies.
OK, now, the fiction:
>Being half human as well as half angel some of the Nephilim, either before the flood or after declare allegiance to God and his kingdom.
>As immortals they must wait until judgment day to join their extended family in heavy.
>There is still tension between the Nephilim and Angels.

God is a colossal dick and the Demons have legitimate grievances.

No good, no evil, only subjective morality and conflicting ends. Angels want order and demons freedom

"They will not follow you if you are dead."