The mythology invented in Demon: The Fallen? was the start, but a variety of other takes on the subject influence the campaign.

Games

Demon, of course, but there's a few others.

Comment by Russell:
When planning the game, I looked as much to WitchCraft as to the World of Darkness. While not a whole lot of this has become obvious in the game up through 1.4, I expect it to show up more and more as the game goes on. (I hate to be so vague, but these pages are supposed to be player-safe.)

  • Rebecca Sean Borgstrom, Nobilis?: Nobilis is absolutely packed with ideas. A lot of the sidebars dealing with angels (fallen or otherwise) were inspirational.

Fantasy and Horror

  • Milton, Paradise Lost: Not directly compatible with D:tF canon, but you can't expect two Brit Lit majors to not borrow the mood and majesty of this epic.

  • Gaiman, Sandman/Carey, Lucifer: Gaiman's take on the Morningstar was brilliant, and Carey's followup has given Lucifer a clear goal - to finally step outside of God's plan. Nicely compatible with some of the Cryptic themes of the campaign.

Comment by Russell:
Yeah, Gaiman and Carey are definite influences. I'd actually emphasize their styles in horror and fantasy a little more than their respective series, though.

Comment by Russell:
Come to think of it, if you really want Gaiman and Carey stories that inform Strange as Angels, you ought to look at Gaiman's short story "Murder Mysteries" and the icky but excellent Lucifer #45.

  • Charles De Lint, various works. De Lint's stories are, honestly, a little sunnier than ours, but I've picked up a lot of little tricks from him. For one thing, he's good at telling stories about people in common, unpleasant situations without sounding trite. Also, his handling of ghosts in The Ivory and the Horn has been pretty influential.

  • Jamie Delano, Hellblazer: One of the definitive combinations of fantasy and the hardboiled detective story. Delano's original run is, in my opinion, much better than Garth Ennis's later work on the title. (Ennis's work being good in its own way.)

  • About a bazillion books on Christianity, Judaism, and the stories we believers tell.

The Detective Story

  • Raymond Chandler

    • "Farewell, My Lovely": Really, we borrow from all of Chandler's detective fiction (including the non-Marlowe stuff). "Farewell, My Lovely", however, is probably closest to what we aim for- I'm thinking, particularly, of the ending.

    • The Long Goodbye: Veterans with identity issues? Mysterious pre-war relationships? Friendship and love in a world where everybody's a little dirty? What's not to steal?

  • Chinatown: If you haven't seen this movie, and you think you like detective stories even a little, go out and rent it. Now-ish.

Ratiocination

Poe's term for the thinking detective, a school we now associate more with Sherlock Holmes than Dupin. One of the prime motivations behind Angels was the desire to tap into the detective mythos, drawing on the icons of the American detective film in particular. D:tF was particularly suited to the noir feel we wanted, and in a "you got detective noir on my fallen angel/no, you got fallen angel on my detective noir" sort of combination, the campaign was born.

The genre really is defined by its icons, which become strangely perverted when impuned to a demon. The hard-boiled detective usually has the ability to find truth with his piercing gaze; now, that gaze truly can see into souls. Crime scenes can be recreated not with forensic evidence, but with the thoughts of the victims. And, in what is emerging as a central tension in the campaign, the D:tF take on Torment and Anchor plays into the detective icon of predatory nature. In the movies, we build to the moment in which we discover that the evil the detective fights so hard against in present within him. The same is true in Xariel's need to manipulate mankind even as he protects it, and is given a reverse by the running question of whether his protectionist impulses are the natural evolution of his former angelic duties or a character reversal guided by the remnants of Max.

Miller's Class

Upon reflection, this deserves a page of its own, methinks. As part of their final year of undergraduate education, R&J took a class together - The Detective Film/Film as Detection. It's the source of a lot of our joint beliefs on the genre, as well as a lot of our vocab. So, it might interest you to see our views on the curriculum.

Without further ado, the film list.