Aasimar
Aasimar are planetouched humanoids with otherworldly characteristics. Aasimar bear within their souls the light of the heavens. They are descended from humans with a touch of the power of Mount Celestia, the divine realm of many lawful good deities. Aasimar is born to serve as champions of the gods, their births hailed as blessed events. They are a people of otherworldly visages, with luminous features that reveal their celestial heritage.
While aasimar are strident foes of evil, they typically prefer to keep a low profile. An aasimar inevitably draws the attention of evil cultists, fiends, and other enemies of good, all of whom would be eager to strike down a celestial champion if they had the chance.
Basic Information
Biological Traits
Aasimar bear the mark of their celestial touch through many different physical features that often vary from individual to individual. Most commonly, aasimar are very similar to humans, like tieflings and other planetouched. Nearly all aasimar are uncommonly beautiful and still, and they are often significantly taller than humans as well.
While several aasimar are immediately identifiable as such, others are even less distinguishable than tieflings from their human ancestors, commonly standing out with only one unusual feature. Most aasimar have pupil-less pale white, gray, or golden eyes and silver hair, but those descended from planetars can also have emerald skin, while those descended from avoral celestials might have feathers mixed in with their hair. Those descended from ghaeles often have pearly opalescent eyes. Solar-descended aasimars often have brilliant topaz eyes instead of silvery or golden skin and those with couatl or lillend lineage most commonly have small, iridescent scales. Many aasimar also have a light covering of feathers on their shoulders, where an angel's wings might sprout. As in tieflings, aasimar bloodlines can sometimes run dormant for generations, reemerging after being hidden for some time.
Basic Traits
Ability Score Increase: Charisma score increases by 2.
Speed: Base walking speed is 30 feet.
Darkvision: Can see in dim light within 60 feet of you as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. Can’t discern color in darkness, only shades of gray.
Celestial Resistance: Have resistance to necrotic damage and radiant damage.
Healing Hands: As an action, touching a creature and causing it to regain a number of hit points equal to your level. Once this trait is used, it cannot be used again until after a long rest.
Light Bearer: Know the light cantrip.
Languages: Can speak, read and write Common and Celestial.
Subrace Traits
Fallen Aasimar
An aasimar who is touched by dark powers as a youth or who turns to evil in early adulthood can become one of the fallen — a group of aasimar whose inner light has been replaced by shadow.
Ability Score Increase: Strength score increases by 1.
Necrotic Shroud: Starting at 3rd level, use your action to unleash the divine energy within yourself, causing your eyes to turn into pools of darkness and two skeletal, ghostly, flightless wings to sprout from your back. The instant you transform, other creatures within 10 feet of you that can see you must each succeed on a Charisma saving throw (DC 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Charisma modifier) or become frightened of you until the end of your next turn.
Your transformation lasts for 1 minute or until you end it as a bonus action. During it, once on each of your turns, you can deal extra necrotic damage to one target when you deal damage to it with an attack or a spell. The extra necrotic damage equals your level.
Once you use this trait, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest.
Source: Volo's Guide to Monsters
Protector Aasimar
Protector aasimar are charged by the powers of good to guard the weak, to strike at evil wherever it arises, and to stand vigilant against the darkness. From a young age, a protector aasimar receives advice and directives that urge them to stand against evil.
Ability Score Increase: Wisdom score increases by 1.
Radiant Soul:Starting at 3rd level, use your action to unleash the divine energy within yourself, causing your eyes to glimmer and two luminous, incorporeal wings to sprout from your back.
Your transformation lasts for 1 minute or until you end it as a bonus action. During it, you have a flying speed of 30 feet, and once on each of your turns, you can deal extra radiant damage to one target when you deal damage to it with an attack or a spell. The extra radiant damage equals your level.
Once you use this trait, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest.
Source: Volo's Guide to Monsters
Scourge Aasimar
Scourge aasimar are imbued with the divine energy that blazes intensely within them. It feeds a powerful desire to destroy evil — a desire that is, at its best, unflinching and, at its worst, all-consuming. Many scourge aasimar wear masks to block out the world and focus on containing this power, unmasking themselves only in battle.
Ability Score Increase: Constitution score increases by 1.
Radiant Consumption: Starting at 3rd level, use your action to unleash the divine energy within yourself, causing a searing light to radiate from you, pour out of your eyes and mouth, and threaten to char you.
Your transformation lasts for 1 minute or until you end it as a bonus action. During it, you shed bright light in a 10-foot radius and dim light for an additional 10 feet, and at the end of each of your turns, you and each creature within 10 feet of you take radiant damage equal to half your level (rounded up). In addition, once on each of your turns, you can deal extra radiant damage to one target when you deal damage to it with an attack or a spell. The extra radiant damage equals your level.
Once you use this trait, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest.
Source: Volo's Guide to Monsters
Angelic Guide
An aasimar, except for one who has turned to evil, has a link to an angelic being. That being—usually a deva—provides guidance to the aasimar, though this connection functions only in dreams. As such, the guidance is not a direct command or a simple spoken word. Instead, the aasimar receives visions, prophecies, and feelings. The angelic being is far from omniscient. Its guidance is based on its understanding of the tenets of law and good, and it might have insight into combating especially powerful evils that it knows about.
Even aasimar wholly dedicated to good sometimes feel torn between two worlds. The angels that guide them see the world from a distant perch. An aasimar who wishes to stop and help a town recover from a drought might be told by an angelic guide to push forward on a greater quest. To a distant angel, saving a few commoners might pale in comparison to defeating a cult of Orcus. An aasimar’s guide is wise but not infallible.
Additional Information
Geographic Origin and Distribution
Aasimar are most commonly found in the eastern lands of Unther and Mulhorand, where they are the descendants of the good deities who once walk among the mortals. Since the Spellplague, however, and the devastation of both lands, aasimar become wandering nomads bound to no land or god and spread widely over the face of Faerûn, as well as other parts of Toril. Those from outside of Faerûn are often drawn to it, perhaps by the ancestral lure of Unther and Mulhorand, and so many aasimar can be found in borderlands such as Durpar, Murghôm, Thesk, or Waterdeep, though none of these places are considered traditional homelands.
Civilization and Culture
Naming Traditions
Most aasimar are born from human parents, and they use the same naming conventions as their native culture.
Common Dress Code
When traveling, aasimar prefer hoods, closed helms, and other gear that allows them to conceal their identities. They nevertheless have no compunction about striking openly at evil. The secrecy they desire is never worth endangering the innocent.
Culture and Cultural Heritage
Despite its celestial origin, an aasimar is mortal and possesses free will. Most aasimar follow their ordained path, but some grow to see their abilities as a curse. These disaffected aasimar are typically content to turn away from the world, but a few become agents of evil. In their minds, their exposure to celestial powers amounted to little more than brainwashing.
Though many aasimar are good in nature, thanks in a large part to their celestial ancestors, not all are, just as not all tieflings or fey'ri are evil. Some aasimar fall into the trap of evil, corrupted perhaps by experience or the counsel and aid of an evil god.
Aasimar are rare throughout Toril and, as such, had no true cities or societies of their own, much like other planetouched. Aasimar can live for the whole of their life without ever meeting another of their kind and, as such, are resigned to living amongst other people. Though such meetings are more common in Mulhorand, owing to the relatively larger number of aasimar there. On the rare occasions where two aasimar do meet, they often feel a kind of kinship and unspoken understanding with one another. Most aasimar are likely to take the side of another instinctively, regardless of personal feeling and there is a strong bond between aasimar of all stripes.
Common Customs, Traditions and Rituals
Because of their ties to the goodly gods and celestial beings, many aasimar are drawn to a religious path and most aasimar spellcasters call on divine magic as opposed to arcane magic.
Like other half-bloods, aasimar do not feel, as a whole, beholden to any one particular god or pantheon, but many aasimar worship the Mulhorandi pantheon and a large proportion of the race is descended from the goodly gods of Mulhorand. Many of these aasimar in particular often feel a strange bond to the animals for whom their divine ancestor is a patron. Others, particularly those born outside of Mulhorand or its neighbors, often take on gods appropriate for the nation in which they live.
History
Though mortal aasimar are the result of breeding between humans and celestials, devas were unheard of in the local multiverse prior to the arrival of the Mulani from a forgotten plane. Drawn to Imaskar by powerful wizards, the Mulani slaves called upon their gods for aid. Just as the gods could initially appear only as avatars so did their celestial servitors initially requiring mortal bodies, resulting in the first devas. Since then, devas, also commonly called aasimar in Mulhorand, (a term then adopted for the mortal progeny of celestials and mortals by others), were created through other means, but all of nowadays aasimar share certain qualities with these first individuals.
Interspecies Relations and Assumptions
Aasimar, despite their human ancestry, do not typically feel a strong draw to their kin but instead feel a stronger bond with other half-bloods. Many aasimar enjoy the company of races as varied as half-elves or half-orcs, though very few aasimar get along well with tieflings, whom the celestial-descended race is instinctively wary of. Genasi are likewise alien to aasimar, who find the elemental race strange even by their own standards.
Why go on an adventure?
- Are you beseeched by your guide to take on this pilgrimage?
- Is there an innate urge driving you to seek justice for all?
- Maybe you only head out to help out the church you grew up in?
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