Author’s Note: This is a rather lazy post, not at all a proper worldbuilding article. All I did down below is collect answers to some of the questions about angels and demons and such, which already exist in the comment sections of my previous articles, and posted them together. I’m doing this because I’ve been getting a fair amount of questions about the topic and I don’t think I’ll be able to write up a proper article about the topic any time soon. This collection will allow readers some answers without having to hunt down various disconnected comments, and give me an article to link to when people ask me about the topic in the future. I will eventually turn this into a real article, but for now this will have to do.

Angels, Demons, Spirits:

Demons are just powerful, simple-to-acquire minions with very little moral standards. They accept life force and souls as payment, which may be easier to get than money or exotic merchandise needed to hire a mage, and they are a lot less reluctant to risk their lives because they don’t really die when their vessel on the material plane is destroyed. Aside from that, some demons have been alive for a long time and have interacted with many summoners – they know secrets that many mages badly want to acquire, and can show you spells that the state would otherwise want to stay restricted or lost…

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Angels and demons (and fey and elementals) are fundamentally the same thing – spirits. Angels are spirits that serve the gods as part of the angelic hierarchy. They are bound with a multitude of rules about what they can, and have duties they must attend to, but in return they live a relatively comfortable and safe life. Demons are spirits that have rejected the gods and their hierarchy, due to being unable to stomach the many rules that bind the angels. They live in the ‘wilderness’ of the spirit realm, which is a sort of dog-eat-dog world of constant competition and strife. Demons aren’t necessarily raging sadists, but they tend to be aggressive, deceptive, and opportunistic – those that aren’t tend to be weeded out very quickly.

Officially, angels (and other spirits) were created by the gods. Unofficially, people in the know wonder if that’s really true. No currently living spirit actually remembers the creation of the world, and it’s a bit baffling why the god set up the situation as it currently is if they created the spiritual worlds and the spirits that inhabit it. Some claim that gods merely found the spirits and co-opted some of them as their servants, though the angels and most mortals find this heretical.

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Native spirits are elementals and fey. They also originate from the spirit world, but they have since then descended into the material world and decided to settle there permanently. They’ve become ‘native’. You might say they are demons that colonized the material world, except that they left the spirit so long ago and are so different from modern demons that most people assigned them to their own categories.

Since they no longer live in the spirit realm, they are not involved in the conflicts between angels and demons. They were very powerful and influential in ancient past, but their reach and territories have since then been chipped away by human expansion and they are currently rather weak and withdrawn.

Elementals and fey have already been long native to the material plane by the time humans started building civilizations.

The Silence weakened angels, but they inherited considerable infrastructure from their divine masters and eventually learned how to deal with it. Their current situation can be considered stable. Their reach in the spiritual realm has shrunk considerably, but their stronghold still remain essentially unassailable. Modern demons are bolder and more more aggressive when dealing with angels, but since angels are mostly united and demons are constantly fighting among themselves, this hasn’t result in some huge loss for the angels.

Triumvirate Church has always been strongly against demons and demon summoning, both due to their ties with the angels and due to their dogma stating that demons are essentially rebels against the gods. Demons hate them back as a result, thought from their perspective the Church is just a lackey for the angels.

Yes, the Silence definitely created more demon summoners.

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Some demons are malicious, but mostly they’re just really violent, selfish, and domineering. A demon generally has little empathy for people they don’t share a personal bond with, tends to act on a whim rather than consider wider ramification on the future or society as a whole, considers preying on those weaker than them to be perfectly right and justified, and are obsessed with being the top dog and thus free to do whatever the hell they want. Having grown up in the violent, dog-eat-dog world of their demonic realms, they see virtually every social interaction as a struggle for dominance and are prone to attack people for slightest of reasons.

Of course, to the humans and other natives of the material realm, there is little difference between this and Evil with the capital E. Even a troll would consider demons to be bloodthirsty maniacs. Set a demon loose in the material world, surrounded by a multitude of beings too weak to stop it from taking whatever it wants, and it will create a trail of atrocities in its wake. Humans in MoL are aware of this, that demons have a… ‘different perception of right and wrong’, as you call it, but that only makes demons that much more evil and heinous in their eyes.

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>You can call the spirit from the spiritual plane, but can they get here on their own?

No. They need to be summoned by somebody.

>Can a called spirit call another one?

No.

>Can spirits get into the afterlife? What are the death criteria for them?

The afterlife was created by the gods, and only things they chose can enter it. This doesn’t include spirits, but spirits never die of old age and can only be killed through soul warfare. Demons are extremely proficient in soul warfare for this reason, in a way no human can really be. Humans neither perceive souls as clearly as spirits do, nor do they depnd so heavily on their soul magic skills just to survive on a daily basis.

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Elementals are native spirits. They are largely identical to other spirits, except they have left the spiritual planes in order to settle the material world a long time ago. They have no grand king or all-encompassing hierarchy – each elemental-inhabited region has its own hierarchy and organization, sometimes with an undisputed ruler and sometimes not.

An element is anything that some elemental is an embodiment of. Elements, in the magical sense, do not exist outside elemental spirits and abilities descended from them.

Fey: A type of native spirit. Unlike elementals, who build themselves bodies made out of soil, water, fire, magma, and other relatively simple materials, fey crafted themselves bodies made out of ectoplasm. They generally look more lifelike and biological, and often take on forms of animals… but their ectoplasmic bodies are extremely maleable and they’re very proficient shapeshifters. They can mimic just about anything if they set their minds to it.

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>Can humans enter the spirit world, even temporarily, how would that work

They can, but it’s difficult and very dangerous. It involves separating one’s soul from their body and traveling there in soul form. Since it requires superb soul magic skills, the spirit world is mostly a savage land inhabited by demons, and angels don’t allow these kind of soul travelers into their strongholds, almost nobody does it.

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>What about the local spirits who were born here?

They stay here. You have to either seal them in something or use soul magic to mutilate their actual souls (their bodies are easily replaceable) to actually get rid of them.

Mind you, native spirits are a fairly mysterious part of the setting. It’s unclear under what limitations they’re actually functioning under, but it’s clear they do have them, or else it would not have been possible for humans to supplant them to an extent they did. Most people suspect they either can’t reproduce here on the material plane or are extremely limited in their ability to do so.

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Yes, demonic possession is a thing. But more than that – once a demon is summoned into the material plane, it doesn’t go back to the spiritual realms until its current vessel is destroyed. A demon in a ectoplasmic shell or a puppet can stay and cause chaos as long as they wish, they just need to find enough mana to power their vessel and avoid anyone powerful enough to banish them back to their home plane.

Most demons don’t understand human norms and culture well enough to mimic humans, but yes, it’s entirely possible. Possession of a body by a soul that doesn’t match causes the body to degrade, though, so there is an upper limit to how long such a charade can go on. Though I suppose illusions and shapeshifting magic can prolong that period indefinitely.

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>What can we know then about the sense of morality of the angels

Very little. Angels are deliberately very mysterious when interacting with material beings, supposedly because they are under a lot of restrictions about what they can and cannot say to them. They’re clearly not human in mentality, because they clearly care more about obeying the rules, listening to their superiors, and staying true to their morals, and in general take their jobs far more seriously than 99% of humanity does theirs. They care about the ideals they are supposed to embody and the duty they have to the angelic hierarchy on a deep, instinctual level that humans would find next to impossible to grasp. As far as the angels are concerned, humans and other material beings are severely lacking in dedication, thoughtfulness, and selflessness.

Angels definitely try to live up to their virtues. It’s not just a matter of them being forced to behave as they do by divine restrictions. However, it is debatable how well their virtues line up with that of humanity and other material species. Angels rarely explain their philosophy and thoughts on ethics to people, and when they do it’s always somewhat cryptic and curt.

>How would they be different from say an ultra-utilitarian who is ruthless and methodical or a deeply sensitive person who is caring and empathetic

Hard to say. I guess a ruthless and methodical angel would be far more concerned about not crossing certain invisible lines than a human, who would see laws and ethical restrictions that get in the way of their ‘utility maximization’ as annoying and onerous, and try to weasel out of them in any way they can. A caring angel would be far more thoughtful and long-term about it than a caring human, who would be far more likely to be swayed by purely emotional appeals, short-term emergencies, and so on.

>can they even manifest emotions and desires the same way humans and other sapients do

Yes.

>are there fallen angels?

No. A ‘fallen’ angel is simply classified as a demon that used to be an angel by both angels and material races.