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Are "evil gods" necessary? [THREAD NECRO]
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<blockquote data-quote="prabe" data-source="post: 8021054" data-attributes="member: 7016699"><p>Opinions incoming!</p><p></p><p>So, if you have gawds in your setting, you need to decide what you want to do with them. If you want them to be (inter alia) exemplars of alignments, then you need all the alignments represented (for the same reason that if you want to include either the <em>Book of Vile Darkness</em> or the <em>Book of Exalted Deeds</em> you need to include both of them). Omitting any alignment from your collections of gawds would seem to me to imply some weird imbalance in the setting, and good gawds without evil gawds to oppose them seem purposeless from a storytelling perspective.</p><p></p><p>Gawds do not need to be aligned. There has been discussion upthread about this. In addition to arguably making the religion/s in your setting seem more realistic, allowing your gawds to transcend alignments gives you ways to have any gawd be antagonistic to your characters, or allied to them. The various sects and cults can be various degrees of right or wrong about how they see the gawds they worship. The gawds might come into conflict for reasons having nothing to do with alignment, which can set up a choice between competing goods--my own personal favorite kind of decision in fiction.</p><p></p><p>Of course, you can decide you don't want gawds in your setting. That can work just fine, too. There's some work figuring out if and how clerics (and maybe paladins) work, and what if anything serves the social and shrinkological roles of religion. Going this route has had a tendency in my campaigns to make Demon Lords and Archdevils more important (which casts the absence in official lore of archangels, et al. into something like stark relief). You also need to figure out how gawdhood works, and if there used to be gawds why there aren't gawds now.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="prabe, post: 8021054, member: 7016699"] Opinions incoming! So, if you have gawds in your setting, you need to decide what you want to do with them. If you want them to be (inter alia) exemplars of alignments, then you need all the alignments represented (for the same reason that if you want to include either the [I]Book of Vile Darkness[/I] or the [I]Book of Exalted Deeds[/I] you need to include both of them). Omitting any alignment from your collections of gawds would seem to me to imply some weird imbalance in the setting, and good gawds without evil gawds to oppose them seem purposeless from a storytelling perspective. Gawds do not need to be aligned. There has been discussion upthread about this. In addition to arguably making the religion/s in your setting seem more realistic, allowing your gawds to transcend alignments gives you ways to have any gawd be antagonistic to your characters, or allied to them. The various sects and cults can be various degrees of right or wrong about how they see the gawds they worship. The gawds might come into conflict for reasons having nothing to do with alignment, which can set up a choice between competing goods--my own personal favorite kind of decision in fiction. Of course, you can decide you don't want gawds in your setting. That can work just fine, too. There's some work figuring out if and how clerics (and maybe paladins) work, and what if anything serves the social and shrinkological roles of religion. Going this route has had a tendency in my campaigns to make Demon Lords and Archdevils more important (which casts the absence in official lore of archangels, et al. into something like stark relief). You also need to figure out how gawdhood works, and if there used to be gawds why there aren't gawds now. [/QUOTE]
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