Today’s post is going to be about angels and demons.

The Host Above

Angels were one of the first thing God created. They were meant to both bear witness, and help Him in his works and to ease His loneliness. They are also first and foremost soldiers and warriors. They were the first ones to help keep the Nameless Ones in check and defended the Garden of Eden. Like most all-spirit beings they need not eat, sleep, drink, breathe, etc. They heal wounds from non-unholy weapons with relative ease and are difficult to injure anyways. An angel’s halo is imbued with the power of Heaven itself and can be used as a kind of throwing weapon, much like a chakram, or a sword. In both cases, it can be encased in flames or not as the angle wishes. The halo in either form can easily attack insubstantial beings and is one of the mightiest weapons an individual angel possesses.

Angel’s themselves are divided into nine subclasses:

• Archangels: The highest order of angels they get their orders directly from God or one of His prophets. There are only seven known archangels: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Saraqael, Raguel, and Samael.
• Seraphim: The order of angels whose duties include making sure prayers reach the throne of God and assigning power and responsibility to mortal agents such as prophets, Virtues, and other divinely empowered beings.
• Cherubim: This order of angels are guardians of gates and special locations. The higher ups of this order are the generals and officers of the Host. Occasionally, cherubim are sent to Earth to act as a guardian angel for especially important mortal beings. In this capacity they are second to none.
• Thrones: This order of angels are the lawkeepers of the Host. They make sure justice is delivered to those who’ve earned it and mete out retribution.
• Dominions: This order of angels keeps the celestial bureaucracy running making sure all angels are where they are supposed to be. They rarely leave Heaven for any reason and theoretically can tell any other angel what to do though it rarely happens in practice.
• Virtues: When a miracle is called for, it’s the Virtues who do it. They are often in the Inlands and are also the keepers of doors throughout the planes.
• Powers: Powers keep the heavenly bodies in the sky along their rotations, but they are also warrior angels and are the angelic version of “NCOs” as they tell the lower tiers of angels what to do.
• Principalities: This tier of angels are like guardian angels, but for groups of people such as nations.
• Angels: This tier is the rank and file of angels and might get tasked with helping the higher ups with any other sort of task. The grigori (or Watchers) were among the common angels before they fell.
• Guardian Angels: While not every human has a guardian angel, most do. Some mortal beings even share angels if their particularly close (or meant to be together). Guardian angels have one primary job other than guarding their human(s): when their ward dies its the guardian’s job to argue their case in front of a fetch (a reaper of souls) for entrance to Heaven using the ward’s time on Earth to argue for them. A demon is assigned to the soul to argue instead for their condemnation to Hell.

Occasionally, angels are promoted or demoted as befit their actions and some types may have been others for centuries or millennia before their current domination. There are also outcast or rogue angels who Fell for one reason or another and now on Earth or in Hell. The latter type of fall is fairly uncommon these days, but still possible.

The Legion Below

In the Ceteriverse, Hell is a real place. It’s occupied by demons and fallens souls and ruled in part by the Fallen themselves. There is a hierarchy as their is in Heaven, but it’s less complicated.

• Demons of Idolaters: Less powerful than a lord of Hell, but more powerful than a typical demon, idolater demons pass themselves off as gods, wise men, and other similiar beings to build a cult that seemingly worships one then while actually providing Hell with power.
• Demons of Deception: Demons of deception have all manor of jobs among the hordes of hell, but chief among them is to deceive humanity in innumerable ways in order to seduce them into sin.
• Demons of Iniquity: Demons of iniquity spread immorality and the seven deadly sins in a multitude of ways and are among the chief “recruiters” for Hell only behind the tempters and idolaters.
• Demons of Imitators (of Miracles): Wherever there is a miracle, there can be (elsewhere or there) a false miracle. This class of demons only gets to act when Heaven does, though not in the same way and not proportionately.
• Demons of Pestilence: Spreaders of plague, disease, and other ailments, modern demons of pestilence have begun to invest in widespread pollution as a way to make people sicker faster.
• Demons of Discord: Demons of discord get humanity to work against itself. Whether it’s in small groups or lard, discordian demons do their best work when no one realizes what they’re doing.
• Demons of Calumniators: Demons of calumniators serve two roles: 1) they tempt men into bearing false witness and bringing good men who work against evil into wickedness; 2) they serve as the prosecutor for dead souls against that soul’s guardian angel and do their best to get them condemned to Hell. That’s right. Hell has Lawyers.
• Demons of Temptation (Maligenii): Also called cacodemons, demons of temptation are in charge of tempting mortals into sin, offering Faustin bargains, and in general leading men to evil.
• Demons of War: The lowest of the low, soldiers demons also make up the vast majority of this type of demon and all demon lords have several legions of such.

Each lord of hell, of which there are 72, has a numerous demons under their banner and such beings are loyal to their lord first. This creates a very disharmonious landscape where demon vs. demon is a real threat and tends to keep such beings in Hell instead of in the Inlands.

Regardless of what’s done, Lucifer rules over Hell and wants new souls for one thing only: his unending war on the Outside/Nameless Ones that God has given him. Each new soul in Hell is a potential recruit for this war and after so much time down below souls are worn away until they are reborn as demons.

Picking Over the Bones

And that’s it for demons and angels. Up next are notes on the dregs and then we’ll move onto some of the more crunchy aspects of the campaign setting.