The Tzaddikim
In a world full of legends with caveats,
distortions, misunderstandings and Getting It Just Plain Wrong, there's
something... calming about the Tzaddikim. They really do exist as living saints, there
really are 36 of them hidden among humanity and they really do support and
redeem the world with their actions, every day.
All of this is True.
Whether Heaven is entirely pleased with the situation as it stands is, of course, a different
matter. Certainly Hell is not pleased
with it at all, at all.
The Tzaddikim are
superficially underpowered for direct agents of the Almighty: they are almost
never Symphonically Aware and are unlikely to even have a sixth Force. Most have no idea of the War, or that they are
involved in it. They do effectively have
the equivalent of the Blessed advantage, but that is often a moot point (see
below). They are not flashy or famous
people, but often extremely influential ones.
A Mercurian resonating one would be almost blinded by the connections
that he or she has to other people - not only the number of links, but their
strength as well. They seem to mostly
act as a stabilizing force at the base level of human society. No Great Works or Epic Quests; just the quiet
strengthening of humanity.
This is not to say that they are powerless. Hell finds them loathsome, on as much for
ideological reasons as for anything else.
This is primarily because demonic resonances and attunements do not work
on Tzaddikim under any circumstances. They aren't immune to a physical attack (or
even non-Band specific Songs), but anything explicitly and esoterically
Infernal in nature will fail. While the
Host finds this immunity to be marvelous (in both senses of the term), they are
somewhat more concerned over the Tzaddikim's theurgic abilities.
No angel may - ever - disobey a Tzaddikite's
commands. The Tzaddikite
may not be aware that the entity being commanded is an angel (or vice versa),
or that there even are angels, or
that he or she has the power to require obedience; the angel is still required
to comply, to the best of he, she or its ability, with no games, clever parsing
of words or creative misunderstandings.
Finally, any disturbance generated from harming a Tzaddikite
is tripled (and not affected by Roles or corporeal artifacts). Harm one, and the Symphony shouts its rage.
As can be seen, both Heaven and Hell can fairly
quickly determine when they've come across one of the Tzaddikim. The trick is figuring out what to do about it. Hell has found that corrupting one is damned
difficult - there are no authenticated examples of it happening, in fact - and
that regular hassling (or killing) is almost as hard to do quietly. You need a
reliable human agent, and the Symphony will be unforgiving of any shortcuts
taken. And you can't talk about it afterwards.
Ever.
There's this Laurentine Order that has a list
of demons who need soul-killing, you see, and they'll add anybody materially
involved in a Tzaddikite killing in a
nanosecond. In other words, this is a
situation where you'd want to think things through before you do anything rash.
Heaven has different worries. Their automatic inclination to meeting what
is essentially a direct agent of God (even an unwitting one) is to blanket the
area with Servitors, the better to serve the Tzaddikite's
every requirement. However, past history
has shown this to be usually wasteful and inevitably impossible to keep
secret. For that matter, there is
something, well, odd, in the way that angels must obey all commands from the Tzaddikim with
equal vigor. Saving a neighborhood is
one thing; spending the same amount of time and effort to make sure that the
mutton is nice and lean is another. For
that matter, does God even want
Heaven getting too involved? Sure, if
there's an actual problem - but if the Tzaddikite is
doing fine on his or her own, or even well enough, the inclination is to keep
the interference to a minimum. Again,
think things through, first.
A final note: GMs will have to tinker with this
concept to reflect their own campaign Brightness and Contrast, of course. It is explicitly stated that, as conceived, a
Tzaddikite has in some ways more power over an angel
than the angel's own
There are implications to such an assumption.