Unboring angels: more than haloed humans
I often have angels in my campaigns.
If your party is doing things that can change the world, while steadily growing in power - and if not, why not? - then you’d expect the gods to take notice.
Even if they don’t, your party will cross a line eventually. They’ll accidentally (or not) slay a prophet, defile a shrine or steal a holy relic.
Or they fight villains so twisted and powerful, they’ve captured angels. Maybe they’re corrupting them, plucking their feathers, eating them - who knows?
Either way, angels make the story more epic. It’s a transition out of material affairs and into the realm of the divine.
You might not agree, which is fine by me.
If you do, though, you might wonder how to portray them.
One take is to treat angels as no different than humans. Sure, they don’t need to sleep or pee, but they can think for themselves. Serving their deity is both a job and a cause, with stuff they enjoy and stuff they don’t.
They can disagree with their deity.
Maybe even betray them.
It’s a reasonable choice. For one thing, it makes them easier to portray. For another, it adds layers to the drama. Maybe the party doesn’t want to fight the angel - could they reason with it instead?
Then again, maybe that rubs you the wrong way.
Why would divine servants of the gods have pesky glitches like free will? Wouldn’t gods rather have reliable and trustworthy servants?
Unlike a CEO who might also like that, gods have the power to make that happen.
Then again, intelligence is a useful trait too…
I like to assume angels come in a hierarchy. This is useful for the sake of the story and combat - the party faces the mooks before they face the big boss. Angels higher on the totem pole have greater free will and flexibility.
One thing they all have in common, though?
Obsession.
Obsessive Compulsive Divinity
The lesser angels have no independence - they are basically robots. Deities use them as messengers, guards and soldiers.
Some problems require sophisticated angels, though. They’ll have the ability to reason, think critically and act autonomously.
There’s little danger of them going rogue, though, because they have obsessive tendencies burned into their essence.
Consider an angel like this for the God of Justice.
They’ll be obsessed with their deity, of course. They’ll also be obsessed with serving them - following their orders exactly, fulfilling their divine mandates and doing things that will please their god.
Let’s say this angel is ordered to capture the party. Could the adventurers reason with this angel? Theoretically, but good luck to them. The angel is so fixated that it’d barely hear them when they speak.
But this angel isn’t an automaton. It would consider the situation. Savvy adventurers might be able to defuse the situation.
No, the players couldn’t make a Persuasion check. Even a natural 20 would fail to convince a being whose every fibre tells them to fulfil their mission.
However, the angel is also obsessed with pleasing their deity. What if, say, the party took refuge in a temple to the Goddess of Love?
The angel is obsessed with capturing them.
However, they’re obsessed with serving their deity. Storming a temple to another deity would not please them.
Don’t expect the angel to combust or retreat, though.
They want - no, they need - to follow their orders. If they have to threaten, bribe, coerce, bluff, lie or simply wait them out, they will.
However, not even the priestesses to the Goddess of Love can threaten, bribe, coerce, bluff, lie or wait the angel out. The angel is unrelenting - closer to an intelligent force of nature than a person. It has no fears to leverage or ego to exploit. It doesn’t even have a body that can succumb to hunger, disease or age.
The only way to stop it is to defeat it.
It’s not that the angel would rather die than fail. They don’t even consider failure. They must succeed because their deity told them to - end of discussion.
Turning the strength into a weakness
Of course, this obsession has a great weakness.
It relies on the deity giving wise orders.
Angels have their free will hobbled by their obsessions. That means the adventurers would find it easier to persuade the deity than the angels.
Again, I say good luck to them.
Still, particularly mischievous adventurers will see the opportunity here. It shouldn’t be easy. In fact, persuading a god to take a certain course of action should be harder than doing it themselves.
If they pull it off, though, I say let them enjoy that victory. Stopping a mid-tier sorcerer by sicking a god on them is overkill, but it works.
Now, let’s talk about Call of the Gods.
It has a few techniques and thought experiments for putting yourself in the mind of a truly alien creature. Angels certainly qualify. Why would a being forged from divine light, with no mortal failings or material concerns, think anything like a human?
They wouldn’t.
Saying that’s the easy part. Figuring out how they’d think instead is trickier.
But not by much. Using the AMAM model, you can go way beyond giving them OCD and really flesh out their mentality.
You find that in Call of the Gods, which you can find here: