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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DarkKestral" data-source="post: 4231013" data-attributes="member: 40100">Certainly, no individual may be utterly Lawful or Chaotic, but when you have deities that directly interact and speak with individuals and thus have a say in a society's actions, it can be perfectly reasonable to have a war between LN and CN gods, because the gods CAN be pure expressions of an ideal.For an example, Moorcock basically has the lords of Order vs. the lords of Chaos. Order has rules for everything, but their real goal is to create a never-changing reality where the past is the same as the present which is the same as the future. Their home and ideal is a an utterly featureless plane that extends forever. On the other hand, Chaos is ever-changing. None of the lords of Chaos ever stay the same from moment to moment, and so does their home, a place where the laws of reality literally don't exist. Things come in and out of existence all the time and the one rule is that anything is possible.These gods, unlike mortals, are totally without mercy. They can be good or evil depending on situation, but ultimately they are neither in and of themselves, and basically represent primordial visions of the two concepts, "unsullied" by other ideals. They may want individuals to commit acts which are evil, but they themselves don't perceive these acts as having any moral or ethical consequences beyond protecting Order or Chaos, because they are utterly apathetic to the desires of mortals. On the other hand, devils and demons have historically paid quite a bit of attention to mortal desires; their role in D&D has always been to tempt individuals into expressing their darker desires at the expense of their fellow man. This introduces a significant difference that helps clarify the "N" section of spectrum... Moorcock's gods will do whatever it takes to promote their cause, be it a good or evil act, while D&Ds fiends and evil deities are supposed to find it hard to do good acts unless they can hide a greater evil within. Moorcock's gods are in one sense extreme examples of the LN and CN alignments, then.Their mortal followers tend to be either good or evil, but it's made clear that slavish devotion to one of the two sets of principles/deities without concern for your fellow man is going to end up with the follower doing very evil stuff, and that in general, while a given individual may prefer the actions of one side or another, the balance must be struck somewhere in the middle. Balance isn't the be-all and end-all, however, as a society may function well even if it is tipped somewhat to one side or another philosophically as long as it does not get too aligned.</blockquote>

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