Lawful Good Tyranny - How would this look?

[I'm A Banana]

My understanding of alignment matches Clavis's. Even evil alignments lead to positive outcomes if you become the next Grazz't or Orcus. Or, if you prefer an afterlife that is less "aligned," good and evil both end up dead in the end. There is no "right" alignment, just different flavors of essence.

 

[Celebrim]

A lawful Good Tyranny would have two features:

1) It would be doing very little if anything which you could morally object to.
2) It would leave its citizens very little if any personal freedom.

I think to begin with you have to very carefully separate out your feelings about what is 'good', from the chaotic good stance that 'good' begins with personal freedoms. And in particular, I think you have to toss out the impulse to want to demonize moralizers as hypocrits.

There is plenty to skewer LG's types with, without resorting to saying that they are just as bad as LE ones only they are less honest about it. I think we have to recognize that impulse as springing from a world view that is itself characterizable as an alignment. That's the hard part of an alignment discussion. If we let ourselves define 'good' from our own subjective position, then we'll define NG as what we believe and characterize everything else accordingly. If you happen to be (just to pick on them) a libertarian that holds personal freedom as the highest good, you are going to tend to characterize all lawful/social/orderly impulses not designed to promote personal freedom as being the worst of evils.

A lawful good tyranny makes many many many very reasonable laws for the good of its citizens. To put it in modern terms, a lawful good tyranny makes an infinite number of 'motorcycle helmet' laws. A LG tyranny doesn't believe that there is anything like a victimless crime, nor that there is any limit to what the state ought to be able to tell people to do for their own good. If the law promotes goodness and order, that it is onerous and petty doesn't even come into consideration. On one hand, such a state is benevolent and prosperous and just and fair. On the other hand, most of us (not having strong lawful impulses) would find life under such a regime extremely challenging.

Things we'd likely find illegal that would strike us as utterly unreasonable:

1) Sedition: Speaking out against the state would be a crime. And no, the state wouldn't be using this to conceal its hidden nefarious schemes. The LG bureaucrats would be zealous in rooting out corrupt officials. It's more basic than that - you couldn't complain about the fine you recieve for parking a wagon with wheels higher than the king's waist within 12' of the city wall (or whatever other obscure law you'd find yourself breaking) without being suspected of being subversive. You'd be expected at all times to be courteous and cooperative with the authorities, who afterall, really were serving the greater good.
2) Every aspect of your life would be regulated: There would be a tendancy for the government to find reasons why everything should be done a certain way. There would be a tendancy for the law to cover everything. There would be a vanishingly small number of situations which personal choice was considered a valid reason for doing something. So, for example, everyone probably would eat the same thing at every meal, and it would require some sort of waiver to eat a non-government approved meal. Consumption of wine would be illegal except at government approved times. Indeed, consumption of anything not at a government approved time would be illegal. You cooked your meal in bacon fat instead of olive oil, on a thursday - time for a fine and a sit down with a magistrate on how all the food laws were for your own and societies greater good.
3) Taxes would be extremely high: The government would provide just about everything for you, and you would have no reason to buy something (because you have no choices about what to buy anyway) so most of your labor would be turned over to the state for everyone's good. Indeed, technically, you probably wouldn't own anything, but instead were simply borrowing property from the government.
4) Free expression would be frowned upon. Art serves the interests of the state, of glorifying the state, and of glorifying the things the state approves of. Art for art's sake would be suspect. Art which even incidently glorifies the artist, the individual, or something that the state doesn't approve of is probably subversive, and the artist if informed of this would be expected to cheerfully destroy his incidently dangerous works. If you have the slighest individualistic impulse, you'd probably find all artistic expression in such a society to be ultimately very banal and unsatisfying.
5) A fantasy LG society would have absolutely no qualms about squashing free will magically, if doing so prevented evil. Criminals wouldn't merely be killed - which might strike us as harsh but just. Criminals would, depending on the severity of their crime, be magically or surgically lobotomized, dominated, cursed, mind wiped, memores altered, charmed, and otherwise forced to behave morally - all for their own good of course. All of this would of course be undertaken with real and not feigned regret and tenderness toward the criminal.
6) Freedoms in general wouldn't be prized. The general argument would run that freedom isn't valuable or desirable, that what people really need is security, stability, and prosperity. The argument would run that freedom is really illusionary, and that people in free societies aren't really free but that they are predated upon by the powerful and so are less free than they are in the noble LG society. And so, the society would tell you who your friends are, what job you should have, where you should live, and so forth. And the really grating thing is that they really would care for your happiness. You wouldn't be sacrificed as a cog for the greater good. They'd pick the things you liked, that you'd be good at, where you should be happy, but they just wouldn't give you any choice about it or any freedom to find that out for yourself.

Real world examples of anything like this would be very hard to come by at the level of a complete society, because real world people are seldom as moral and honorable as fantasy people. In my opinion, no real society so organized would stay good for long, on the simple grounds that power would rapidly corrupt the powerful however good their initial intentions. In fantasy terms, such a society would be like if Gandalf took the One Ring from Frodo, and set about creating a just society with Gandalf as its all-powerful moral busybody. It might be good for a while, but it would be a very transient good, because Gandalf wouldn't stay good with that power at his command for long.

I also should note that this wouldn't even be considered an idealized society even by LG standards. Most LG's would probably consider this a society turned far too down the road to Lawful Nuetrality with too much law and not enough good.

PS: It should be pretty easy from this to see how to create a CG society and skewer it:

1) It would be doing very little that was morally objectionable.
2) It would do very little or nothing to gaurantee stability, order, security, or prosperity.

 

[catastrophic]

Let's take some inspiration from some other genres, and look at this LG tyranny based on it's agenda.


So let's say the PCs are in the conventional 4e points of light style setting. It's a rough world, mostly in ruins, and the threat of evil and chaos is ever-present. There are few if any kingdoms remaining, and heroes are needed to fight hard if they're going to save the world.
Some distance from where the PCs reside, is a small kingdom known for it's safety and virtue. An order of knights from this kingdom run chapter houses in the area, and hire the PCs for various missions.

They pay them very well, and offer them magical items, ritual components, ect, both for sale and as rewards. They work with this order for some time, hunting down cultists, slaying orcish and gnoll chieftains, exploring and recovering ancient artifacts, and defending other smaller comunities in their own area. The PCs are often aided by prophecies or auguries presented to them by the knights, who claim they come from seers back home.

Then the PCs get to paragon tier or whatever, eitehr wya they take a trip to the kingdom who's knights have supported themf or so long. And they find out where all those cash rewards and magical items were coming from.

The entire kingdom is set up as a militaristic theocracy. It has to be, so the knights claim, in order to defend its borders, and beat back the tide of evil and chaos in the world. If the world is ever to recover- or just go on surviving- then the Kingdom must be not just a bastion or a beacon, but a well-oiled and effective fighting machine. It's armies are not large enough to tame the endless hordes of orcs and the like, so it's splits it's efforts between conventional military forces, and more powerful agents- like the PCs.

Most people in the kingdom are serfs- they have to be, somebody has to grow the food, mine the metal ore, forge the weapons, build the walls, and all the other tasks besides. Their life is hard, and they have to work from sunrise to sun-down to build and produce with sufficient output to keep the kingdom's armies and agents equipped. They have one day of rest, but that's often given over to medical aid, and new training for the constantly updated and refined methods they use. Dissent and freedom is limited, if they were to move out of their alloted role, the kingdom's productivity would collapse, and the tide of chaos would swallow it. Serfs know that the less they work, the more of them will, regretfully, have to be pressed into military service. Freedom is a privilege their nation cannot afford them.

Those above them are arranged in castes. The knights actually wield little power- after all their job is very dengerous, and they spend all their time training and fighting, so they have no time to run things. Knights are chosen for their martial skill and resourcefulness- after all they operate alone and in small bands, far from home or any support. The risk-takers and would be rebels of the kingdom, those who might otherwise dissent, are trained from an early age into a force of versatile, effective, and if need be, suicidally brave mounted warriors. It is in this way that the Knighthood has preserved life in dozens of small villages all over the land, and headed off disasterous incursions for hundereds of miles around the kingdom. Their calling is a grim one, and a softer, safer life is a privilege their duty cannot tolerate.

Leadership and policy is left to Wizards, Scribes, and others with the natural aptitude for planning and invention. These planners and leaders make a virtue of Disinterest, a dispasionate, logical view of events that allow them to remain unbiased, and make the best decision possible. Only in this way has the military and the knighthood been able to beat back forces many times it's own size, only in this way have the serfs been traned in the the most optimal and efficient methods. The leaders of the kingdom must operate from a position of pure logic and strategic acuity.
Compassion is a privilege that would only cloud their jugement.

What about the priests? The holy people of the Kingdom spend their lives in rapure, or torment, depending on how you see it. They can't afford to heal the sick, or offer their wisdom to the planners and policy makers, because put simply, they're too busy praying. Huge and intricate rituals are conducted by the clergy and their lay bretheren, who operate in a world apart from the rest of the kingdom. These rituals play many roles- they bolster the terrtory against extraplanar incursions, create grand auguries in order to determine and pre-empt the rise of great and apocalyptic threats, and harvest residuum from the Astral plane, which is used in more rituals and the creation of magical weapons and devices. Some Arcanists contribute to this process, but mostly it's organised around the faith, for only those of deep an abiding faith can endure the rigorous stress, pain, and sanity-shredding supernatural exposure that touches them in their every waking hour. The life of a terrestrial, flesh and blood creature is a privilege they can never know- their lives are spent in pain, blinding light, and endless prayers.

So there you have it. Who's want to live in a place like that? Sounds horrible. But they may well have a very good point, particularly if there are endless hordes of orcs in the wilderness, and various otherplanar beings straining to invade the natural world. Maybe they're right, and they need everyone in their lands to work as part of a machine, in order to prevent the destruction of cvilisation.

And sooner or later, they're bound to try and expand. They'd be unlikely to trouble smaller comunities- trying to force themself on small populations would be unethical and not result in effecitve outcomes- but if say, another city-state asks themf or help, they might decide to invade, and convert it to their grueling, machine-like approach to heroism. Meanwhile, the PCs are afforded much the same respect as knights, as long as they keep putting themselves on the line for the right cause.

But if the PCs dissent? Object to their regime, or plans for it to expand? Just imagine how those deliberatly callous planners, and their extremly formidable knights might respond.

 

[Celebrim]

catastrophic: The basic problem with that approach is that its equally applicable to LG, LN, or LE. In fact, the 'us against them' approach you describe of a community just fighting for survival could be organized top down as little more than a front for, 'Protect us elite from those orcs, people!'. As a community goal 'survival' tells us very little, and if I understood the community goal as 'survival', my first instinct would be to say that the society was basically neutral, being so concerned with simply surviving that it was too busy to concern itself greatly any other more abstract goals. When you say something like "Compassion is a privilege that would only cloud their jugement.", it seems to be a concession to this.


Even the structures and forms of government you site seem to me to be sufficiently conventional that its hard to tell from the description whether the society is lawful or chaotic, evil or good. Ok, so the society has a lot of serfs. But I can't tell from the description why the society has serfs other than, 'Well, someone has to work.'. But that would be true even if real power was weilded by a bunch of self-centered lords enslaving people for their own profit.

I can't tell if the society you describe is lawful or good or neither. Certainly I can see nothing that separates what you describe from sterotypical lawful evil except the labels - "Hey, we kill orcs, so we must be the good guys, right?"

 

[zen_hydra]

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

In Huxley's novel Brave New World one can see a depiction of a dystopia that is the result of a Lawful Good tyranny. People are bio-engineered and born/hatched into different castes without a means of social mobility. The populace is kept happy with an assortment of side-effect free recreational drugs. People are kept reproductively sterile, but casual, recreational sex is encouraged to promote unity. The greater community has replaced the family as the basic social unit, and people are discouraged from spending time alone. Brave New World is a great read, and does an excellent job of demonstrating why a world of unity and bliss might not be the utopia that people make it out to be.

 

[Roger]

I think I'd probably start with the Flanders Dictatorship from the Simpsons episode "Time and Punishment".



Cheers,
Roger

 

[coyote6]

Unlike the real world, this society has access to magic and perhaps even psionics (which I haven't actvely worked into the campaign, but I'm not adverse to it). So the fear and paranoia that we see in the real world might not be as strong when the rules can use divinations to learn the truth and enchantments to help correct behavior. Torture isn't needed for interrogation when zone of truth, detect thoughts and/or read thoughts is available. This way, the interrogee can't actually lie, and may very well not be able to hide anything. You don't need to break prisoners when you can just slap a mark of justice or quest on them to get them to do what you want. You don't worry as much about criminals using technicalities and loopholes in the law when they must testify in court under the effects of a zone of truth.

Note that zone of truth is a poor spell for a courtroom. If a target makes their save, they can lie all they want, and it's an area spell, so you can't tell if any particular person made their save vs. the spell. Thus, you can't actually know whether someone made their save and is lying, or failed the save and is thus guaranteed to be not lying.

The priests will need to cast discern lies to really have semi-foolproof lie detection in court. Since discern lies is a targeted spell, the caster knows when the subject saved. Of course, discern lies is a 4th level spell, so now every court needs a 7th level cleric -- more correctly, they need a 7th level cleric per minute or so of testimony.

I suppose the society would make resisting such spells a crime itself, at least when cast in the right circumstances, by the right people (e.g., in court, by court-approved spellcasters).


FWIW, IMO, such a society can only remain LG as long as the vast majority of people go along with the society's ways voluntarily. Once there is a significant counterculture (of people that object to anything about the existing laws), then the main culture's laws will, IMO, either change, becoming less "tyrannical", or enforcement will tend to inevitably become more draconian, and thus slide slowly away from Good.

 

[catastrophic]

catastrophic: The basic problem with that approach is that its equally applicable to LG, LN, or LE. In fact, the 'us against them' approach you describe of a community just fighting for survival could be organized top down as little more than a front for, 'Protect us elite from those orcs, people!'. As a community goal 'survival' tells us very little, and if I understood the community goal as 'survival', my first instinct would be to say that the society was basically neutral, being so concerned with simply surviving that it was too busy to concern itself greatly any other more abstract goals. When you say something like "Compassion is a privilege that would only cloud their jugement.", it seems to be a concession to this.

I think you're applying a false criteria here. The idea is not to come up with a society that can only be LG, but to come up with one that is.

Furthemore, while I apologise for the length of the post, you didn't read it that well to presume survival only. The knights can and do rescue other comunities, and the seers do pre-empt disasters in other parts of the world. The only reason the PCs know about the kingdom is because it hires them to do good and save people in their local area. The reason the kingdom I propose is so tyrannical to it's people is so that it can do more than simply survive.

Even the structures and forms of government you site seem to me to be sufficiently conventional that its hard to tell from the description whether the society is lawful or chaotic, evil or good. Ok, so the society has a lot of serfs. But I can't tell from the description why the society has serfs other than, 'Well, someone has to work.'. But that would be true even if real power was weilded by a bunch of self-centered lords enslaving people for their own profit.

Yes but as noted, they work as hard as they do in order to support the productivity that allows the kingdom to achieve it's goals, including goals other than survival.

I can't tell if the society you describe is lawful or good or neither. Certainly I can see nothing that separates what you describe from sterotypical lawful evil except the labels - "Hey, we kill orcs, so we must be the good guys, right?"

I don't think that's a valid criticism, and while I could have gone into more depth, I think it's clear that this is about more than survival.

 

[catsclaw227]

I've got a kindgom in a homebrew I'm working on that is a fairly despotic state -- but the overall alignment is Lawful Good. It's a fanatic theocracy run by paladins and clerics of a LG god where the worship of other gods are forbidden, and which has very strict moral laws against things considered evil and/or chaotic. It's also waging a war of agression against its neighbors which do not share its black and white views on morality.

Aren't we getting too close to real world religious history with this one?

 

[catsclaw227]

Unlike the real world, this society has access to magic and perhaps even psionics (which I haven't actvely worked into the campaign, but I'm not adverse to it). So the fear and paranoia that we see in the real world might not be as strong when the rules can use divinations to learn the truth and enchantments to help correct behavior. Torture isn't needed for interrogation when zone of truth, detect thoughts and/or read thoughts is available. This way, the interrogee can't actually lie, and may very well not be able to hide anything. You don't need to break prisoners when you can just slap a mark of justice or quest on them to get them to do what you want. You don't worry as much about criminals using technicalities and loopholes in the law when they must testify in court under the effects of a zone of truth. They methods aren't all foolproof of course, but there's no need to revert to dehumanizing cruelty either.

You would enjoy reading the 3.x Atlas books: Crime & Punishment and Dynasties and Demagogues (not sure where to find it).

There's some great stuff in there about this kind of thing.