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Anger of Angels
As angels are beings of pure spirit (compared to mortal souls, which are impure spirit), they too release this energy while in Heaven. Fiends, too, are pure spirit (evil spirit, but spirit nonetheless) and can release energy benignly but rarely do so, nor are they often tortured because (unlike souls) they have the ability to fight back against their attackers. In some worlds, the active worship of living mortals transfers this soul energy directly to deities. In such worlds, even good deities compete vigorously for the attention of mortal worshippers and have an active hand in world events, hoping to garner more worship for themselves and thus more power with which they can promote their plans. In other worlds, living souls do not increase divine power in this way, so deities must wait until their worshippers are dead and in Heaven before they can draw upon this source of power. In these worlds, the deities are more remote, rarely intervening in worldly events and relying upon their worshippers to deal with mortal matters while they engage in greater intrigues in the celestial realms. Divine magic may be limited in such worlds because deities are more frugal with their power. The ability to bring back the dead may be especially rare, as it deprives a deity of an active source of soul power.
Souls as Player Characters While some game products state that the souls of the dead appear on the home plane of their deity without any memories from their mortal life, this actually contradicts most common conceptions of how the afterlife works. Dead family members watch over their living relatives. Friends that have passed on greet a newly dead person in a tunnel of light leading to Heaven. Séances and mystics contact the spirits of loved ones. Saints retain ties to their mortal existence, as do mortals. In fact, there is no game balance reason why the spirits of the dead should not retain the knowledge and abilities they had when they were alive, and as an extension of that, there is no reason why a person couldn’t play the spirit of a dead person as a player character. Player character souls function in a manner similar to saints, gaining the celestial template but otherwise retaining their original abilities. If “slain,” they reform in Heaven (or Hell, if an evil soul) and they can be banished or hedged out like outsiders. Unlike saints, common souls do not have the ability to activate spells by accepting temporary negative levels. Souls might return to the mortal realm on a quest for many reasons. The souls may have special knowledge or expertise required to accomplish a quest. They may have been dead too long for any mortal spellcaster to bring them back, or they might have learned something after death that they would forget if raised from the dead. (The game rules say that a formerly dead person retains no memory of what happens after death.) Magical barriers may prevent the approach of living creatures to key locations. An important descendant of one or more powerful souls may be at risk and need guidance or protection. The souls might try to prove their worth to ascend to a higher level of Heaven or be transformed into actual angels.
Of course, the circumstances where a soul might return to the Material Plane should be unusual and brief or else the players will wonder why more souls are not running around in the world. (If anything, it is probably more cost-effective in terms of divine energy to raise a person from the dead—an instantaneous effect—than constantly provide them with a link to Heaven.) As with adventuring saints and martyrs, adventuring souls are best used for special occasions or short-term campaigns where the dead can return to their proper plane when their duties are fulfilled.
Becoming Angelic Most templates in the game assume that the base creature was “born that way.” The template is a natural part of the creature (as natural as any of its other abilities), and a creature with that template would have it at 1st level and beyond. However, some templates can only be acquired later in a creature’s life (one cannot be born a lich, for example), and others (such as the lycanthrope) are meant to be used for both “natural” template creatures and “acquired” template creatures. (Those who gain the template.) The precedent for such a thing opens the door for acquiring other “natural” templates later in life. In the case of this book, living mortal characters serving the cause of angels might acquire the celestial or half-celestial template as a reward for some service or as part of a quest of purification, enlightenment, and apotheosis. Unfortunately, a character with such a template is more powerful than a character without it, and this power disparity is unfair to a character of the same level who lacks the template. One way to balance acquiring a template mid-campaign is to break the template’s powers into smaller steps equivalent to class levels. In this way, a character pursuing the template can gain a set of abilities instead of advancing in a standard character class. The character increases in power in scale with the other characters, the player gets to make changes to the character on a regular basis, and everyone is happy. A breakdown of the powers of the celestial and half-celestial templates in this manner is shown in “Template Classes,” below. Each level in the template increases the character’s level adjustment by 1 (so a human Ftr4/celestial1 has an effective character level of 5, equal to that of a human 5thlevel fighter). It is important to note that angels should not be able to acquire the celestial or half-celestial template, as the thought of a celestial angel (one born in Heaven but more beautiful than its “earthly counterpart”) or half-celestial angel (born of a mortal and an angel) is redundant and absurd, as is the idea that such a being would be more powerful than a normal angel of its kind.
Template Classes A character can select one level of a template class in place of a normal level in another class. The only qualification necessary is the approval of the DM (who might require a special quest or other criteria before allowing such a choice, as a mortal gaining the celestial template implies a more fundamental transformation than a nonsorcerer gaining a level in sorcerer or a lowly
