Angels

Cassisians are the weakest sort of angel, but are absolutely dedicated to the cause of good. They serve as messengers for more powerful angels, and on the Material Plane they are often bound to good mortals to serve as familiars, acting as spiritual guides, reciting platitudes and quoting scripture from various benign faiths and philosophies (some forgotten for centuries). A 7th-level lawful good spellcaster with the Improved Familiar feat can select a cassisian as a familiar. A cassisian’s true form is a helmet possessing a pair of bird’s wings. The exact style of helmet varies by the deity the angel serves—most appear to be steel with angular cheek-plates, though some resemble bascinets, skullcaps, great helms, or even samurai helmets, and a few older cassisians appear to be bronze or even leather. Though cassisians can assume other forms (that of a child-sized angelic humanoid wearing a proportional helmet matching the cassisians’ true form, a dove, a dog, or a fish), they find it strange and rarely stay in that form for more than a few minutes. Typically formed from the souls of trustworthy and pious soldiers, some cassisians arise spontaneously from the spiritual fragments of great angels destroyed while defending the celestial planes against fiendish incursions. In many cases, the lowly cassisian retains fragments of its previous life’s memories, and friends of that old soul may visit with the cassisian to reminisce with what remains. Unfortunately, the reincarnated angel’s memories are more like something memorized from a book, and lack the character and camaraderie the friends expect.

Choral angels are singers of great skill, and their ranks fill the halls of good deities with soaring hymns and solemn chants. They manifest from the spirits of the pious dead who had exceptional musical talent. While they aren’t soldiers, chorals can defend themselves with their magical voices. Chorals sometimes visit the Material Plane with auspicious messages for mortals.

Balisses, sometimes called confessor angels, appear to good individuals on the horns of moral dilemmas or who are struggling with crises of faith. Though balisses may appear stern and unyielding, they prefer to guide individuals to their own moral decisions rather than ordering them to conform to a specific ideal of good, knowing that the goodness found on one’s own is stronger than mere obedience. Balisses are formed from the souls of individuals who committed evil acts but were later redeemed and died while living an exemplary, moral life.  Some balisses seek out mortals in need of their help, while others are given specific assignments by deities or empyreal lords. Balisses are used to dealing with stubbornness, and have an eternity’s worth of patience. Though they brook no physical attacks, they can endure almost any other hostility for the sake of their mission.  The average balisse is 7 feet tall and weighs 200 pounds.

Movanic devas serve as infantry in the celestial armies, though they spend most of their time patrolling the Positive, Negative, and Material Planes. On the Positive Plane, they watch over wandering good souls, which sometimes puts them into conf lict with the jyoti. On the Negative Plane, they battle undead, the sceaduinar, and the other strange things that hunt in the hungry void. Their rare visits to the Material Plane are usually to help powerful mortals when a great menace threatens to plunge an entire realm into evil.

Monadic devas are stoic watchers of the Ethereal Plane and the Elemental Planes. They search those planes for fiendish enclaves, battle evil planar monsters such as xills, and act as celestial liaisons to the genies and elementals. They have been known to broker temporary peace between warring elemental factions, often using their inherent magic to end hostilities long enough for negotiations to take place. In the armies of the good planes, they are leaders and officers, and after centuries of service to a deity, they may be transformed into astral devas. Monadic devas like giving their maces names and proudly announcing them in battle with evil foes. Many of these weapons have seen battle for thousands of years and are quite battered. Younger devas may lend their weapons to good churches on the Material Plane so they can be used by great mortal heroes, though the angels eventually reclaim them after no more than a year and a day. A monadic deva is 7 feet tall and weighs 220 pounds.

Empyreans are a race of ancient angels created by the gods before the dawn of mortalkind. Among the angelic hosts, empyreans serve outside of the usual chain of command. Standing 15 feet tall and clad in the trappings of mortality, which wrap their brilliant forms in a shape mortals and other angels can easily understand, empyreans are physical embodiments of the good energy of a deity or deific being, and they answer only to that higher power.  While other angels arise from an amalgam of good souls or the soul of an ascended mortal, the birth of a new empyrean is a momentous event, for it occurs only if another empyrean is slain. To fill the void, the remaining empyreans temporarily become receptive to the energy of good deities other than their original progenitors, which can eventually cause an empyrean to split in two. The offspring empyrean shares many of the memories and personality traits of the original, but its power is influenced by the deity who sparked its creation.  Empyreans serve as secret agents for deities—operatives who can be trusted to perform sensitive tasks, especially those that require a long view. Unlike solars, who often become slayers of great evils, empyreans rarely pick fights, but when they do, they prefer to use their deities’ favorite weapons.

EMPYREAN PARAGONS  Empyrean paragons stand among the most powerful servants of good deities, and a given deity can have at most one paragon. Empyrean paragons vary from CR 23 to CR 30. Each paragon possesses a unique ability tied to its deity. The following are a few examples of such powers.
Paragon of the Dawn (Ex): The paragon glows like the sun, shining light in a radius of up to 1 mile. This light automatically shines through and dispels all effects with the darkness descriptor, and counts as true sunlight for all purposes (including harming undead that are vulnerable to sunlight).
Paragon of the Rose (Su): The paragon is surrounded by rose petals and songbirds. It gains a 30-foot aura that has the effects of euphoric tranquility and that affects creatures for as long as they remain in the aura and for 1d4 rounds thereafter. A creature that succeeds at its Will save ends the effect completely, but if the effect expires naturally, the creature can accept the effects of an atonement spell to change its alignment to neutral good. Either way, the creature is immune to this ability’s effects for 24 hours.
Paragon of the Shield (Ex): The paragon’s protective aura is extraordinarily powerful. It acts as a globe of invulnerability instead of a lesser globe of invulnerability, and all allies within the aura except the paragon take half damage from all attacks.
Paragon of the Sword (Sp, Su): The paragon’s blade is fueled by honor. The paragon is lawful good and gains bestow grace of the champion as a constant spell-like ability, except the paragon counts as a 20th-level paladin for the purposes of lay on hands and smite evil and gains the number of daily uses of each that it would as a 20th-level paladin.

Solars are the greatest type of angel, usually serving at the right hand of a deity or championing a cause that benefits an entire world or plane. A typical solar looks roughly human, though some physically resemble other humanoid races and a rare few have even more unusual forms. A solar stands about 9 feet tall and weighs about 500 pounds, with a strong, commanding voice that is impossible to ignore. Most have silvery or golden skin. Blessed with an array of magical powers and the spellcasting abilities of the most powerful clerics, solars are powerful opponents capable of single-handedly slaying mighty evils. They are the greatest trackers among the celestials, the most masterful of which are said to be able to track the days-old wake of a pit fiend flying through the Astral Plane. Some take on the mantle of monster-slayers and hunt powerful fiends and undead such as devourers, night hags, night shades, and pit fiends, even making forays into the evil planes and the Negative Energy Plane to destroy these creatures at their source before they can bring harm to mortals. A few very old solars have succeeded at this task and bear slayer-names of dread creatures that are now extinct by the solar’s hand.

Solars accept roles as guardians, usually of fundamental supernatural concepts, or objects or creatures of great importance. On one world, a group of solars patrols the energy conduits of the sun, alert for any attempts by evil races such as drow to snuff out the light and bring eternal darkness. On another, seven solars stand watch over seven mystical chains keeping evil gods bound within a prison demiplane. On yet another, a solar with a flaming sword stands watch over the original mortal paradise so that no creature may enter. In worlds where the gods cannot take physical form, they send solars to be their prophets and gurus (often pretending to be mortals), laying the foundation for cults that grow to become great religions. Likewise, in worlds oppressed by evil, solars are the secret priests who bring hope to the downtrodden, or in some cases allow themselves to be martyred so that their holy essence can explode outward to land and grow in the hearts of great heroes-to-be. Though they are not gods, the solars’ power approaches that of demigods, and they often have an advisory role for younger or weaker deities. In some polytheistic faiths, mortals worship one or more solars as aspects or near-equal servants of the true deities—never without the deity’s approval—or consider notable solars to be offspring, consorts, lovers, or spouses of true deities (which they may be, depending on the deity). Unlike other angels, most solars are created from an amalgam of good souls and raw divine energy to directly serve the gods, but an increasing number of these powerful angels have been “promoted” to their existence as solars from lesser creatures like planetars or devas. A few rare and powerful good souls ascend directly to the status of solar.

The oldest solars predate mortality and are among the gods’ first creations. These strange solars are paragons of their kind and have little direct interaction with mortals, focusing on the protection or destruction of abstract concepts such as gravity, dark matter, entropy, and primordial evil. Solars who spend a long time in the Material Plane, especially those in the guise of mortals, are sometimes the source of halfcelestial or aasimar bloodlines in mortal families, due either to romantic dalliances or simply the mortals’ proximity to celestial energy. Actual offspring are rare, and when they occur, it is always a mortal mother that bears the child—while solars can appear as either sex, the gods have not granted them the capacity for pregnancy or motherhood. Indeed, this fundamental truth is often what drives a solar to seek out a mortal lover. Since begetting a child upon a mortal is generally frowned upon by other solars, a solar father rarely interacts directly with the fate of his lover or child, so as to avoid bringing shame upon himself or his responsibilities. Yet such solars still watch over their progeny from afar, and in times of peril, they might even be moved to intercede to aid one of their endangered children, albeit in subtle and mysterious ways. All angels respect the power and wisdom of solars, and though these mightiest of angels usually work alone, they sometimes command multiple armies led by planetars, acting as great field marshals for massive incursions against the legions of Hell or the hordes of the Abyss.