The Encyclopedia of Angels

The Encyclopedia of Angels is a d20 sourcebook from Fast Forward Entertainment (aka Fast Forward Games, though the proper abreviation is apparently "FAF"). I had bought their first Encyclopedia of Devils & Demons and liked it, but it had a lot of stat problems, which required me to do a lot crossing out and writing in the book.

They had been getting better at d20 stats, so I had pretty good hope for this sourcebook. And for the most part, my hope was vindicated.

Basically, it's what it sounds like, a book full of Angels for use in D&D/d20, sort of a monster manual for Angels. Each Angel gets 1 or 2 pages devoted to it, and while there are a few instances of general types of angel described, most entries are for a specific, unique, individual angel. For instance, Gabriel or Michael.

The first thing that's obvious, is that pretty much all the angels are male. There are actually a couple of female ones tacked on at the end, but the vast majority are male

But it's somewhat surprising. While it's true that most historical angels were male, there were some female ones, and a lot were just names, no sex or details about them. So they could have at least included a few more.

The d20 stats are quite good. Hit dice are generally what you expect, hit points are calculated right, challenge ratings are good. So there has been a huge improvement from their first Demons & Devils Encyclopedia.

They also did a good job of research into the backgrounds of the specific angels, I happen to have Gustav Davidson's "A Dictionary of Angels", and they all check out, though in most cases, this book has a lot more background info.

For the most part, also they did a good job of being respectful towards the subject. Religion in gaming books can be a touchy matter, but they do a pretty good job of being respectful toward the source religions - Chistianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism. Which is a good thing, as a d20 book from another company on a similar subject, goes out of it's way to slander my religion (Gnosticism), more or less flat out lying and misrepresentating it. (Which not surprisingly, really really irks me).

On the other hand, it is a bit funny seeing them making personifications of things that were meant to be allegories or symbols. For instance, the "Demiurge" gets statted up. That's more or less like someone coming up with stats for Freud's "Id" or "Ego", or for the inhabitants of Plato's cave.

There's a template, Nephilim, a type of half-celestial, spawned by "fallen" angels and mortal women. It's a lot like the Half-Celestial, maybe 50% better. But as a downside, divine magic (beneficial or bad) has a 30% chance of failing on them, because the gods don't like them.

In reality, the Nephilim were the "fallen" angels themselves , not their offspring. The offspring between angels and mortal women were actually called "Anakim" (IMHO, this is probably the source of Anakin Skywalker's name in the Star Wars movies). Still, I think it's probably deliberate because it's a cooler name than Anakim. (I mean, some speculate that is why he turned into Darth Vader, - being called "Annie" all the time was kind of embarassing)

Rounding out the book is a selection of prestige classes. These are all good, generally being worshipers (or followers) of given angels. For instance, the "Demon Hunter" is for followers of Michael (at least the ones who also like to hunt demons, like he does). A couple do have non-standard Attack Bonus progressions, and while that annoys me, that seems fairly common in prestige classes.

Each angel gets an illustration by long time industry artist Steve Bryant, and is generally well done. Some generic medieval-ish clip art is also used. Frankly, I'm not the sort that likes a lot of pictures of bare chested males with wings, but if you are, you're sure to love the art in this (a slight exageration, but it's quite a striking difference than the usual RPG book).

The cover art is a bit sleazy, with a scantily clad (do angels really wear thongs?) pneumatic female angel with a pet horned monkey and what looks like a faerie dragon. While I joke about it, it is perhaps a good example of how advertising works - nevermind that the book has 65 male angels, 1 female, and 1 very confused, the book gets a bimbo angel on the cover.


B. There are some cases of the stats not matching up well with the description (for instance, Zehanpuryu is described as more powerful than Metratron, but the stats are much worse), and I would have liked to see a greater variety (ie, more female angels, but also from a wider range of sources than just religion, for instance, literature has probably contributed more to angel lore than any other source), and I really don't like paying $25 for a softcover 128 page book (Though I got it for $15 used)