Now I was trying to make a charakter that is half angel, so remembering all my old bible knowledge I started looking at ideas about nephilim. I found them and according to lore apparently everyone and their cat hates them. And Demigods who are somehow celebrated. And Aasimar ???. And now I really want to know what is the difference between these three and most importantly aren't they all half human half celestial/god/whatever? What makes the nephilim unholy while demigods are all fine and dandy?
The "Nephilim" you are referring to are likely from D&D Wiki's homebrew page. They are not real material; some random person made them up, likely without input or playtesting. D&D Wiki is really annoying for this. This nonsense race was derived from the Hebrew Bible Nephilim, who (depending on the reading version) are forbidden children of angels and humans (hence the assumption that fantasy versions would be shunned).
Aasimar are the coin-flip of Tieflings, and similar to Genasi and even Dragonborn: all of these races are related to their monstrous kin (angels, fiends, elementals, or dragons) but are in fact Humanoids rather than another Monster Manual type. There is no assumption that any of these races necessarily have monstrous blood, and might have been cursed or have other explanations for their race as detailed in their race entry; regardless, any monstrous heritage is assumed to be more than a generation or two back, else they would be a Half-Celestial, Cambion, Half-Genie, or Half-Dragon. Compare a Tiefling to a Cambion, which is a literal half-fiend: first, the Cambion is a Fiend, not a Humanoid. The Cambion has a number of more powerful built-in abilities, resistances to all kinds of things, an AC bonus, and is assumed to be evil and a powerful combatant. Half-Dragons end up being a bit different - they are also CR5, and while they have more powerful breath weapons and blindsight compared to Dragonborn, they are considered humanoids.
We can assume that a Half-Angel (if such a thing existed in your campaign) would be: an NPC with the Celestial type; resistances to radiant, necrotic, poison, and nonmagical weapons; inbuilt spellcasting with a limited subset of angel spells; fly 60 ft movement; and a more powerful Healing Touch than Aasimar. It would actually probably look basically like a CR5 Deva balanced against what the Cambion stat block looks like.
Thanks a lot for the help, and yeah I should be more carefull with taking d&d wiki seriously
It catches a LOT of people, don't worry. They have a banner saying that it's homebrew and might not be allowed in your campaign, but the banner looks like an ad so most people just ignore it. And google searches bring you straight to those pages, so it's easy to be confused - there are tons of questions on these forums bred from this very common issue :-)
Well in real-world biblical lore, nephilim were the result of angels doing dirty deeds with human women in rebellion against God, and those nephilim proceeded to lord it over the rest of the humans, set themselves up as false gods, and generally just muck up His plans, up until the Great Flood was needed as a reset button to wipe them out. So I'm not surprised that whoever wrote some homebrew up about them on dandwiki took a page from that book!
Gods in D&D pantheons generally are a lot more about playing chess against their fellow divines using mortal pieces, and less about setting up the world to play out according to their pre-ordained desires and getting angry when anything messes that up. As a result, allowing the Outsiders within ones domain to mess with (and mess around with ;) ) the mortals is more likely to be a thumbs up than a thumbs down. They also don't tend to be as overwhelmingly powerful and superhuman as biblical nephilim were made out to be, probably resulting in a lot less jealousy/hatred from their mortal peers.
That said, in your setting or game, you can justify it any way you want! Maybe Aasimar are the result of forbidden celestial daliances (boooo), but especially faithful mortals are lifted up to demigodhood as a reward for good behavior (yay!)? Or, the Aasimar of one deity are celebrated, while those of another are condemned due to being born from very different circumstances? Your call!
Now I was trying to make a charakter that is half angel, so remembering all my old bible knowledge I started looking at ideas about nephilim. I found them and according to lore apparently everyone and their cat hates them. And Demigods who are somehow celebrated. And Aasimar ???. And now I really want to know what is the difference between these three and most importantly aren't they all half human half celestial/god/whatever? What makes the nephilim unholy while demigods are all fine and dandy?
The "Nephilim" you are referring to are likely from D&D Wiki's homebrew page. They are not real material; some random person made them up, likely without input or playtesting. D&D Wiki is really annoying for this. This nonsense race was derived from the Hebrew Bible Nephilim, who (depending on the reading version) are forbidden children of angels and humans (hence the assumption that fantasy versions would be shunned).
Aasimar are the coin-flip of Tieflings, and similar to Genasi and even Dragonborn: all of these races are related to their monstrous kin (angels, fiends, elementals, or dragons) but are in fact Humanoids rather than another Monster Manual type. There is no assumption that any of these races necessarily have monstrous blood, and might have been cursed or have other explanations for their race as detailed in their race entry; regardless, any monstrous heritage is assumed to be more than a generation or two back, else they would be a Half-Celestial, Cambion, Half-Genie, or Half-Dragon. Compare a Tiefling to a Cambion, which is a literal half-fiend: first, the Cambion is a Fiend, not a Humanoid. The Cambion has a number of more powerful built-in abilities, resistances to all kinds of things, an AC bonus, and is assumed to be evil and a powerful combatant. Half-Dragons end up being a bit different - they are also CR5, and while they have more powerful breath weapons and blindsight compared to Dragonborn, they are considered humanoids.
We can assume that a Half-Angel (if such a thing existed in your campaign) would be: an NPC with the Celestial type; resistances to radiant, necrotic, poison, and nonmagical weapons; inbuilt spellcasting with a limited subset of angel spells; fly 60 ft movement; and a more powerful Healing Touch than Aasimar. It would actually probably look basically like a CR5 Deva balanced against what the Cambion stat block looks like.
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile.
Thanks a lot for the help, and yeah I should be more carefull with taking d&d wiki seriously
It catches a LOT of people, don't worry. They have a banner saying that it's homebrew and might not be allowed in your campaign, but the banner looks like an ad so most people just ignore it. And google searches bring you straight to those pages, so it's easy to be confused - there are tons of questions on these forums bred from this very common issue :-)
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile.
Well in real-world biblical lore, nephilim were the result of angels doing dirty deeds with human women in rebellion against God, and those nephilim proceeded to lord it over the rest of the humans, set themselves up as false gods, and generally just muck up His plans, up until the Great Flood was needed as a reset button to wipe them out. So I'm not surprised that whoever wrote some homebrew up about them on dandwiki took a page from that book!
Gods in D&D pantheons generally are a lot more about playing chess against their fellow divines using mortal pieces, and less about setting up the world to play out according to their pre-ordained desires and getting angry when anything messes that up. As a result, allowing the Outsiders within ones domain to mess with (and mess around with ;) ) the mortals is more likely to be a thumbs up than a thumbs down. They also don't tend to be as overwhelmingly powerful and superhuman as biblical nephilim were made out to be, probably resulting in a lot less jealousy/hatred from their mortal peers.
That said, in your setting or game, you can justify it any way you want! Maybe Aasimar are the result of forbidden celestial daliances (boooo), but especially faithful mortals are lifted up to demigodhood as a reward for good behavior (yay!)? Or, the Aasimar of one deity are celebrated, while those of another are condemned due to being born from very different circumstances? Your call!
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.