Angels and the Roleplaying Thereof

 

Archangel Michael, Ivanka Demchuk

Been giving more thought to the eschatological Cold War setting I posted about last time and have been mulling over the nature of angels. The trouble with angels as characters is that the traditional Christian understanding makes their psyche almost impossible to comprehend.

Like human beings, angels possess free will, but unlike humans, they lack an intellect as we would understand it; rather than processing and mulling over thoughts, angels either know or do not know - unless given new information, they cannot change their minds. At the moment of their creation, the angels thus had to choose to fully serve God or rebel against Him. Fortunately, God gave them perfect foreknowledge of the consequences of their rebellion (eternal separation from the one thing that can make them happy); unfortunately, a third of them still chose to rebel anyway.

So, we have beings that can't change their minds but still have free will? While obviously metaphysically possible, trying to imagine what it'd be like to think that way is mind numbing - mainly because they don't even actually "think".

What this means is that I am going to have to play a bit fast and loose with the nature of angels if I want to even consider using them as player characters in an RPG. But at the same time, I don't want to turn this setting into one in which Heaven and Hell are painted with shades of gray. While individual angels can be a bit more malleable, Heaven and nearly all of its angels will remain capital-G Good and Hell and nearly all of its angels will remain capital-E Evil.

That's enough theory for now. Next time, I will go into detail on the different kinds of angels and the factions in the spiritual realms.