Eberron...is it worth picking -up?

[Vocenoctum]

Setting: Awesome. Finally removing "all x (x=goblin, kobold, orc, etc) are evil" makes for a more realistic and interesting game.

I think it gets overstated some in the rulebook though, and I'd prefer that the "shades of grey" was more about having more Neutrals. A lot of the races have Usually Evil or such, so there's plenty of non-evil types mixed in, I think it'd be easier to say in Eberron you reduce the Always to Usually, Usually to Commonly (or whatever) rather than just dutching racial alignments entirely.

I think the Core book is actually opposite the theme of "more gray" though. Anyone that seems good is Good, and their enemies are Evil. (Sure, Boranel is Good, but do his enemies, who want to go away from hereditary leadership have to be evil?) Most of the races also tend to stick to Core Alignments also. (I'd prefer a certain Vampire to be LN for instance.)

For myself I've never had a big problem with Alignment, so it's not a big deal to me. I think you can have folks confronting Good without being Evil, and they can be self-proserving or greedy without being Evil also. But, I do like having Evil monsters that you can slaughter with impugnity as well.

 

[Grymar]

I think the Core book is actually opposite the theme of "more gray" though. Anyone that seems good is Good, and their enemies are Evil. (Sure, Boranel is Good, but do his enemies, who want to go away from hereditary leadership have to be evil?) Most of the races also tend to stick to Core Alignments also. (I'd prefer a certain Vampire to be LN for instance.

Sure, but at the same time that LE vampire is working for peace and reconciliation. On the other hand there is a good queen who is itching to restart the war.

I don't take the gray alignments of Eberron to mean as much that you can have a LG vampire, I take it to mean that the evil is internalized (negative energy, perhaps) and may not have much of an effect on his or her actions.

A paladin's evil-radar is meaningless because those he sees as evil may have a darkness in their heart, but have never acted on it. Others who detect as good might go on a purge, killing everything they see as evil in the world whether it is or not (ie, the lycanthropes).

 

[mhacdebhandia]

A paladin's evil-radar is meaningless because those he sees as evil may have a darkness in their heart, but have never acted on it. Others who detect as good might go on a purge, killing everything they see as evil in the world whether it is or not (ie, the lycanthropes).

That's not quite correct. Evil actions cause evil alignment: the point is that a paladin can't just kill anything that she knows to be evil, because an evil priest may be her superior and he might actually be a positive force for the church's goals as a whole - so the appropriate course of action for the paladin would be to encourage the priest to let compassion and generosity back into his heart, rather than immediately whip out the sword and go to town.

 

[Grymar]

That's not quite correct. Evil actions cause evil alignment: the point is that a paladin can't just kill anything that she knows to be evil, because an evil priest may be her superior and he might actually be a positive force for the church's goals as a whole - so the appropriate course of action for the paladin would be to encourage the priest to let compassion and generosity back into his heart, rather than immediately whip out the sword and go to town.

To be honest, I wasn't talking about paladins...they go by a whole different set of rules. I was speaking more of clerics and fighters of the Silver Flame who participated in the purge. A LG cleric could have slaughtered a whole village of good aligned lycanthrope children and not risked an alignment shift...she was following orders and killing what she had been taught was an inherent evil, morally corrupting.

I argue that a paladin can't just kill evil creatures by default period because he is held to a higher standard (this applies to everyone, not just those in the church). If he sees an evil innkeeper, he can't leap over the bar and behead him. Even if he saw the innkeeper overcharging or stealing, he would talk to him about the darkness in his soul or at worst arrest him, not kill him.

In other words, with the exception of paladins, alignment is not binding. It is a loose descriptor of past actions and a moderately good predictor of future actions.

I'm probably explaining this terribly, so excuse whatever doesn't make sense.

 

[Vocenoctum]

Sure, but at the same time that LE vampire is working for peace and reconciliation. On the other hand there is a good queen who is itching to restart the war.

LE is it's nature though, so it's a reasonable judge of what you could expect from that individual in the future. With shades of gray, things shouldn't be that cut & dry.

I don't take the gray alignments of Eberron to mean as much that you can have a LG vampire, I take it to mean that the evil is internalized (negative energy, perhaps) and may not have much of an effect on his or her actions.

See, that's what I don't get though. Why have an Evil alignment for someone that's not evil. Why not simply have them Neutral. I like to think that "shades of gray" makes folks that are mildly evil not "Evil", but they're all still capable of evil deeds. Of course, in that I don't think it's different than core D&D, just more of it.

A paladin's evil-radar is meaningless because those he sees as evil may have a darkness in their heart, but have never acted on it. Others who detect as good might go on a purge, killing everything they see as evil in the world whether it is or not (ie, the lycanthropes).

I've never been big on Detect Evil/Smite Evil as a roleplaying device, so again I don't count that as a big difference. I also think Good folks can fight Good folks over disagreements on who would lead better or do a better job of helping folks. Heck, it's one of the things I always liked about the Theocracy of the Pale from Greyhawk.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I think the Core book is actually opposite the theme of "more gray" though. Anyone that seems good is Good, and their enemies are Evil. (Sure, Boranel is Good, but do his enemies, who want to go away from hereditary leadership have to be evil?)

Well, obviously. Or at least misguided.

Unless Boranel has lost the mandate of heaven, which, from what I can see of his strong but benevolent rule, his country's comparative success during the last war and the prosperity of his major cities, is not the case.

 

[Nightfall]

One of my first Eberron games actually centered around the demon prince Pazuzu and the cult trying to make the floaty bits of Sharn fall in a mass sacrifice intended to bring Him out and have dominion over Sharn's manifest zone as a kind of fiendish beachhead.

Now THAT sounded like fun AND exactly what I'd expect of Pazuzu.

Maybe my next try should place the characters in an uneasy alliance with the Blood of Vol against a cult of Orcus. Even the blood worshiping necromancers know that the bloated goat walking about is a bad BAD thing.

Nah it's not bad. But the Orcus worshippers might take umbrage at Vol's claim to be the one to discover undeath. Orcus proves he can handle it and come back.

 

[Stone Dog]

Nah it's not bad. But the Orcus worshippers might take umbrage at Vol's claim to be the one to discover undeath. Orcus proves he can handle it and come back.

I'm not sure that they even claim to have discovered undeath actually, just that they have a much more pragmatic outlook on it ("Yeah, it sucks and is creepy, but it beats oblivion till we figure something else out").

Orcus might have a claim to fame that he was the only one who managed to survive the last days of the Age of Demons. He figured out how to use is unholy powers of Undeath and slip under the radar of the Coatls as Tenebrous instead of just reforming after a while like the other Rajahs. The knowledge of how to exist between discorporation and reformation makes him envied and hated.

It took him a while digging about angelic graveyards in Syrania, interrogating yogoloths in the black gloom of Mabar and discovering just what demiplane hole his Wand was stored in when Khyber was bound in Silver Flame by subverting the elemental lords of Lammania to scour the world for information... but the Bloated Goat might just be walking the face of Eberron right now. Or at least, Tenebrous is flitting hither and yon pulling influence away from his fiendish rivals in effort to bring his wand to the surface, bathe it in the desecrated heart's blood of a coatl and return to power.

Orcus in Eberron would have no fiendish allies, but be the best bet to escape his prison. That opens up all manner of strange bedfellow adventures since even the most ambitious of Rajahs would postpone plans for a generation or two just to keep him from being the first to consolidate power.

Or the holy radiance of the Silver Flame blasted Orcus to the Outer Dark where he grew in power beyond the rings of Siberys and now is in place to hurl Demon Shards down to the world that plant fiendish links to Mabar and spew the energies of Khyber to the surface.
I was going to go further about death aspected areas growing around skull topped crystal towers, but I realized that lunch is getting on and I was just pulling inspiration from Necromongers anyway.

Plane hopping PCs might have to go to Dolurrh to negotiate aid from Marut forces as well as from the demonic eaters of wicked souls (Gabberslug was one, I forget the name) for the forces that Orcus works with pulls souls from the natural order (pissing off maruts) and starving the ... whatever those demons are. They might remember and hate Orcus themselves and have knowlege of his wand and how it might be used to shatter his remaining power.

 

[Nightfall]

Some very interesting ideas to be sure. Couple that with binders that also might work with Orcus cultists, and you have some push/potential to truly mess with PCs perceptions about "divine/arcane" status even more so.

 

[Grymar]

LE is it's nature though, so it's a reasonable judge of what you could expect from that individual in the future. With shades of gray, things shouldn't be that cut & dry.



See, that's what I don't get though. Why have an Evil alignment for someone that's not evil. Why not simply have them Neutral. I like to think that "shades of gray" makes folks that are mildly evil not "Evil", but they're all still capable of evil deeds. Of course, in that I don't think it's different than core D&D, just more of it.


I've never been big on Detect Evil/Smite Evil as a roleplaying device, so again I don't count that as a big difference. I also think Good folks can fight Good folks over disagreements on who would lead better or do a better job of helping folks. Heck, it's one of the things I always liked about the Theocracy of the Pale from Greyhawk.

All good points. Believe me, I'm about ->| |<- far from pulling alignment completely out of the Eberron game, but it is so entrenched that it may cause problems. For the most part, we almost entirely ignore it since it is so gray in the world.