If you’re gonna have demons, you gotta have angels, right? The next box set in the Demons line is Sentinels (1993) and has a very Hellblazer-y cover painting by Glenn Fabry.

Angels are tough, man. D&D struggled with making Solars and Devas interesting, but while devils and demons seem fine for a multiverse populated with multiple divine pantheons, angels feel a little weird outside of monotheism. And even then, people don’t really read Paradiso in the same numbers as Inferno. If Dante couldn’t pull it off, I am kind of dubious of Mayfair Games’ chances, you know?

Sentinels’ approach borrows from both Demons box sets. The sourcebook has a lot of lore, spells, magic items, two new divine magic user classes and a sort of angelic bloodline race. There are a couple of adventures, some more in-universe stuff and a pile of Monstrous Compendium sheets, in which the Ghost of Christmas Present is introduced as an important personage in heaven, I guess?

Sentinels is like the old college try in a box. An angels box set was sort of inevitable, even if it was unlikely to be, you know, good. It veers from doofy to strange from page to page and honestly my eyes glaze over at a lot of it. Some of the strange is cool though. There is all sorts of surreal imagery in Judeo-Christian myth (and it is one of the big appeals for Pendragon for me, TBH) and there is some of that in here, and it is probably worth mining. A crown with eyes that is a powerful entity? I am into that! Blue and white and glowing just has less appeal to me than dark and red and fiery, I guess.

Back to the war between Mayfair and TSR (I’ll let you decide which side the angels were on). TSR didn’t like losing, so after the 1993 judgment, they just bought Role Aids from Mayfair and mothballed it. Talk about a sore loser.