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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4917345" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, but is it?  I don't see alot of evidence for the assertion.  I would assess it as probably lawful, likely LN, with a slight tendency toward evil.Don't apologize for the length of the post.  I have one of the highest kilobyte to post ratios at EnWorld.  I'm nothing if not wordy.There is alot of internal evidence for that in what you provided - alot more than what you initially provided that provides evidence of good.  To put it in your terms, there is alot more evidence of a well oiled military machine than there is that this is any sort of beacon of light and goodness.  You in fact say this yourself: Is it a description of a good kingdom, or of the structure of a Duchy of Hell?  If we can ask, "Who wants to live in a place like that?", one thing it isn't is a beacon.  Compassion not being something that leader's can afford could be said by Asmodeus himself, and a dispassionate demeanor is the very soul of lawful neutral conduct.  That pain and rapture are intimately connected and indistinguishable is something that the devils might argue for.  A deity that demands of his clergy endless stress, pain, and sanity shredding rigor - but does not demand that they heal the sick and less fortunate - does not sound like a lawful good deity to me.  That society must be organized in such a way to maximize military prowess at the expense of any benevolence in society, and that its members must be effectually dismembered and disfigured to something less than whole humans so as to be better components for the machine, describes to me LE's outlook better than perhaps anything could.Simply put, I find it impossible to call any society that sees its people as machines - as things - 'Good'.  You say, "Perhaps they have a point.", and perhaps they do.  Perhaps LE is correct - that only by organizing a society such can you maximize its strength and capacity to work its will and any society not so organized is doomed to lose its identity to some society which is.  But I think that if we are just with the outlooks, we ought to be able to make an argument that caused every one of the nine moral outlooks to seem reasonable and to construct the society in such a way that we were sympathatic to it.  Afterall, if there wasn't something attractive about all of them - even the evil ones - then who would follow them?  I mean one of the interesting questions you can ask with this sort of alignment play is, "Who is right?", rather than merely "Who is Good?"In this case, I just don't think they plumb as good.  There is too much evidence that they've comprimised enough with the need to survive ('dishonor before death') that they are LN at best.</blockquote>

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