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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1469228" data-attributes="member: 3146">SnipOf course it's impossible to "prove" that a fictional cosmos doesn't depend upon such a conflict or that it's possible to check out of it. It's also impossible to prove that there are no square circles or married bachelors if the DM who's creating the world decides to create such things. Of course, they won't correspond to anything in our experience and won't make sense if logically analyzed but if the DM says that the world depends upon the obverse side of an inverse square circle it does. All that "proves" however, is that the DM made an incoherent world.My point is not that the creatures in such a world would know what is going on but rather that it doesn't make sense  when looking at it from the top down and that consequently, sooner or later, it will cease to make sense from within the framwork as well. Presumably if one wants to create a world that showcases the "law/chaos" conflict, it will actually showcase it--that is to say, that it will not simply remain a thing for cthuloid beings of Law or Chaos whose actions and purposes are inscrutable to PC races and who interact with them not on the level of persons or even manipulators but rather on the level of forces of nature. If the conflict is on the level of "shadows and vorlons do their thing somewhere in the solar system and then stop for a moment to annihilate a couple continents on a planet populated by pre-industrial magical societies" then there is no perceptible law/chaos conflict. There are only inexplicable cataclysmic events. If you want to showcase the conflict then its agents need to be seen as such and their motivations made apparent.To continue with the Babylon 5 example, the law/chaos beings actually have to be like the Vorlons and Shadows of the early seasons (clearly agents whose purposes may be mysterious but aren't entirely obscure, who interact in an intelligible manner with the inhabitants of the world, and whose goals are not actually self-contradictory (both the Mimbari who are clearly the kind of society the vorlon would construct and would not erradicate) and the Drakh (clearly the kind of society the Shadows DID construct without much if any interference for the Vorlons) are both functional societies). If it were like the shadows and the Vorlons after the death of Kosh II when the Vorlons stopped communicating and simply began annihilating everything the shadows had touched and the shadows were likewise, annihilating planets of the younger races, then the only possibility for interaction that could make the conflict understandable (and thereby bring the ideas it represents to the fore) is an apparently rational agent like Valen who has perhaps obscure but not impenetrable motives. Otherwise, they would remain as inscrutable as the other first ones and whatever themes and philosophies they represented would not become apparent.On the other hand, the fact that you assert that something can work does not mean that it can. And, if inherent difficulties can be shown in a concept, that can demonstrate that it will not work.In this case, your account of the great powers is incoherent as are their goals. The great powers, on the one hand, supposedly take no more notice of human goals and necessities than they do of a pebble in their shoe. On the other hand, they are intensely interested in the affairs of mortals. The law lords "enslave" mortals. They see mortals as potentially useful in their (eternal?) struggle and see some of the very things you say they take no account of (free will, love, family, honor) as corruptions inherent in mortality. Yet they apparently (since, for instance love is only seen as a corruption by law in your account), see the others (which depend upon or are the natural results of the things they see as corruptions) as useful or neutral aspects of mortality. Perhaps more to the point, since as I argued above, they have to be recognizable agents with discernable purposes (although they may be obscure ones) in order to serve as vehicles of a cosmic conflict rather than inscrutable wreakers of calamities, they will also necessarily possess a lot of the qualities that you maintain they see as the inherent corruptions of mortality.The essential problem is that, in the attempt to create an alien and inhuman cosmology, you wind up splitting up the necessary ingredients for action and sentience into opposing camps. Doing that precludes those camps having sentient agents which actually embody their principles to carry out the supposed cosmic conflict. And if they don't have agents, then there is no personified cosmic conflict. But if they do have agents who don't personify their principles then those agents don't really embody the cosmic conflict either. Now, if you ignore the philosophy and make it us vs. them (like Warhammer) that isn't necessarily a problem. But it isn't a cosmic conflict between principles either.</blockquote>

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