I've often talked about how I prefer Magic's five colors over D&D's alignment system. A big part of that probably has to do with the fact that I was first introduced to the five colors when I was eight, and while I already knew about alignments long before I started playing D&D, I didn't actually play the game or really delve into the lore (like knowing, for example, that there's a difference between Devils and Demons) until I was 29.
But I also think that there's an inherent limitation when you make the concepts of good and evil a literal, quantifiable thing in your game. Angels (and other Celestials) in D&D, except those who fall (and typically become fiends) are literally good - as in they are, by their very nature, benevolent.
And I think it's for this reason that while the Monster Manual has something like a dozen devils and demons each (and five or six Yugoloths,) they only have three types of Angel.
Because the expectation is that you're not going to be fighting angels, typically.
Now, to be fair, there are opportunities for your party to encounter a hostile angel.
The most obvious way is if your party is evil - while I think it's definitely rare to run an "evil campaign," the rules of the game don't really do anything to prevent it. I'd say it's more of a challenge to build a satisfying narrative in which the players are evil, fighting against good.
The next way, and one I think is probably far more common, is to have the players fight an angel (or other celestial) over a misunderstanding. As a spoiler for my own players who I'm pretty sure don't read this blog, there's a region in my world that has a hidden enclave of angels trying to subtly fight against the cult that basically destroyed the world's previous global civilization. Given that this region is in a larger area that is basically full-on Mad Max, I think the party will at some point encounter a character who seems to be just another wasteland warlord but is actually a Deva who has been charged with preventing people from finding the angelic enclave. (And could easily become a party contact/ally if the party plays their cards right.)
But borrowing from other games, I think there are ways we could play with the idea of "good."
Before we do, however, I think it's notable that usually, the way you make traditional "good" characters into villains is by making them actually lawful. Because our culture (and indeed most cultures in settled civilizations) often links good with lawfulness, it becomes easy for lawful evil characters to use their lawfulness as a way to portray themselves as good. Think about how often people have justified brutal treatment of individuals or entire populations by claiming that they are merely enforcing the law against criminals.
But we've got Lawful as an element in D&D already - Lawful Good celestials like angels are not just lawful, they're also good. If you want a callous legalistic bureaucracy, you've got Mechanus for that. If you want a dystopian authoritarian police state, you've got the Nine Hells. Mount Celestia is, explicitly, good.
So I'll be honest, we might not actually find a compelling way to make villains out of the upper planes.
But let's look elsewhere for inspiration:
The Diablo series by Blizzard is in some ways infuriating to me, given how its moral universe is so simplistic - there's evil, with demons and the Burning Hells, and good, with angels and Heaven. Humans in Diablo are the de-powered descendants of the Nephalem, who were the offspring of angels and demons who tired of the Eternal Conflict and created the world of Sanctuary. The Nephalem were incredibly powerful, and by Diablo III, the player characters are the first humans to recover their Nephalem power, making them more powerful than angels or demons because they combine both. It also means that humans have free will, with the ability to choose between good and evil.
Now, Reaper of Souls, the expansion to Diablo III, introduces a really fascinating wrinkle to the lore. Its villain is not a demon - not Diablo for the umpteenth time (though he/she was the big bad in the main game) but rather Malthael, one of the archangels.
Malthael, long aloof, found a way that he could suck the demonic aspect of human souls out, which would have the acceptable-to-him consequence of destroying all of humanity's souls. Malthael wants to end the Eternal Conflict once and for all, taking advantage of the fact that the 7 great evils (the demonic equivalent of the archangels) were trapped in the Black Soulstone.
So the villain's great plan in Reaper of Souls is actually to defeat evil once and for all. And from a certain angle, it actually makes perfect sense - after all, if demons are fundamentally evil, ridding the world of any demonic essence would mean ridding the world of evil entirely - and the end result would, in Malthael's mind, just be angels going around being good.
But in looking at good and evil in this way - treating them as physical substances that can be strained out, separated, and contained or even destroyed - Malthael actually winds up performing acts that are far more evil than what we've even seen the demons do.
And while you could simply replicate such a plot, adapting it to D&D, I think the broader lesson from this is that you can have a conflict between simplicity and nuance.
I think there are a lot of different definitions for humanism, but the way I think of it is that it's a worldview that embraces humanity as flawed, sure, but capable of bettering ourselves - it's not that we can truly rid ourselves of all of our faults, but that we can learn to manage them or redirect them into productive uses. Humanism, in this way, requires a nuanced view of people and a respect for the complexity of the world.
In my mind, true goodness requires one to embrace this nuance and complexity, and to make the effort to understand and empathize even with those who do things you think are wrong.
Thus, when coming up with D&D villains from the upper planes, a way you could manage this is by having celestials who are so used to perfection - distilled "good" behavior - that they become intolerant of anyone who fails to live up to their standards. And I believe that this could work well for both Lawful Good and Chaotic Good characters - a Chaotic Good villain could be something like a radical environmentalist who sees any harm caused by humanoids trying to build up the safety of a civilization as unforgivable.
Given the structure of the D&D multiverse, it would be a challenge to make your campaign's big bad an upper planar entity, but I think if you make it less a conflict between total good and total evil, and more a conflict between absolutism and nuance, you might have some room to work with.
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