Azata Matta You
April 25th, 2011
Azatas. Boy, if there was ever a group of outsiders that had an identity crisis, it's the azatas. You probably know them better as eladrin, which is what they were in 3.5 D&D, and, far more importantly (in eladrin history, at least), in Planescape. However, as "eladrin" is the intellectual property of Wizards of the Coast, and they don't like to share all of their fun toys, we third-party publishers, if we want to use eladrin, tend to follow Paizo's example of calling them azatas, because, well, we can't call them eladrin, and azata is as good as anything else, right?
Whatever you call them (I'm going to call them "eladrin" for the rest of the article, because I'm such a rebel), they've always been a bit confused, as a race. It doesn't help that they apparently began life as part of a CCG about the blood war (raise your hand if you knew there was a CCG about the blood war. It's certainly news to me). More to their detriment as a clearly-defined planar race is the fact that they are children of Planescape.
Don't get me wrong, I love Planescape. As in, really, really a lot. As in, I would probably kill a man and wear his skin as some kind of morbid costume if it meant that I could do some design work for Planescape. But, even I have to admit that sometimes it had a few problems giving a clear identity to the archetypical alignment races. You can't really blame them: after all, they had to make interesting and three- (or at least two-) dimensional characters out of creatures whose very essence is a code of conduct. Talk about boresville. Naturally they had to get away from the idea that all outsiders were automatons who could do nothing but follow the pre-programmed alignments built into them.
So, they got cute, and changed the alignment axes from a continuum (ie. a straight line), to a circle, meaning that if you were, say, chaotic enough, then you would really start to be lawful, and vice versa.
I'm not sure that this was deliberate on their part (though, as someone who's read a lot of Planescape books, it seems far too pervasive to have been an accident), but the effect is clear: despite pages and pages of talking about how modrons are the epitome of law, we find that they actually act rather ridiculous and silly. Even though slaadi are the embodiment of chaos, they will line up in a row and fight you one at a time, to determine who "is strongest one there is." The good/evil axis tends to have less of this, but, well…there is always the Friendly Fiend, if nothing else, and I remember a few angels who did bad things for good reasons.
As though that weren't enough, azatas fell into an alignment bracket that was already largely associated with another type of otherworldly creature (fairly or unfairly), meaning that they had competition for their already ill-defined spot. What creature? The fey, of course. Though fey aren't actually outsiders, they certainly could be, and, flavorfully, they feel as outsider-y as anything else. And, frankly, fey tend to resonate much more strongly with the average player than a "bralani" or a "tulani" or the like.
Of course, to be honest, even Planescape only had so much interest in eladrin. They aren't featured very prominently in the sourcebooks. In fact, other than their monster manual entries, I'm not 100% sure they show up in the sourcebooks at all. Most of the chaotic good planes use other entities, like the various CG deities, or elves, or cloud spirits, etc., etc., etc. As I pointed out above, this may ultimately have been good for the eladrin (after all, look at all the good the Planescape treatment did for the modrons), and, actually, it sort of foreshadows what "eladrin" would come to mean when 4th edition came around some time later. In the meantime, however, it left them, racially, more than a little stunted, and hardly able to compete with the fey, who had hundreds of years of folklore lending potency to them.
This is largely how things were after the shift to third edition as well. Eladrin, like all the good-aligned outsiders, suffered from being "unusable." Of course, it isn't really that good outsider stat-blocks aren't worth the ink they're printed on, but that's kind of a story for another article. However, if all you're going to do with those stat-blocks is put them into a monster compendium between dragons and ettins (or whatever), then they don't exactly stand out when it comes time to pick a monster for that week's adventure, even less so when the "good outsider" slot also includes the far more iconic angels and archons. So…eladrin kind of languished in third edition, waiting for the opportunity to be used for something cool.
Then fourth edition came along, and completely reimagined the default D&D cosmos from the ground up. Eladrin, as they were, were basically thrown out. After all, what was the point of chaotic-good outsiders when good-aligned outsiders were persona non-grata and chaotic good isn't even an alignment anymore? Still, considering what happened to archons and angels (let alone guardinals, who were completely abandoned), the eladrin came out of that shift pretty good. I mean, for one thing, they're a basic player race now. Talk about a rags to riches story. Of course, they don't look quite the same as they used to: they're basically elves now (or, really, "high" elves, to differentiate them from the elves who are good at being rangers, rather than wizards). On the other hand, some of the more impressive eladrin NPCs are treated more like faerie lords and ladies than like elves, and these actually bear the names of some of the old eladrin (bralani, tulani, ghaele, etc.), so maybe there's still a hint of the old eladrin in there still.
In the meantime (or, rather, sometime subsequent), Paizo released the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, in which they kept the original eladrin (by which I mean those featured in the 3rd-edition Monster Manual), but, for reasons enumerated above, changed their name to azata. So far, they don't really seem to be doing anything with azatas, but instead are giving them the same basic treatment they received throughout third editions: window dressing for the Monster Manual (now Pathfinder Bestiary), to show a fully-rounded world with good outsiders there in the event that some DM needs them.
Of course, it's easy enough to sit back and say that other people have perverted the definition of eladrin or that they aren't allowing them to live up to their full potential. It's another thing entirely to actually get out there and do something about it. So, in case you hadn't guessed, this week is officially Azata Week. We may not be able to do too terribly much for azatas in the space of a week, but damned if we're not going to try. And, of course, if you want to see more azatas in the future, well, you, too, can make a difference by writing one of us and telling us that you want to see more azatas. Who knows, maybe we'll devote a book to them.
Join me next week, when I'll be discussing campaigns in pre-existing settings. In the meantime, find out who you are, and don't let anyone tell you you're someone else.