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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tristissima" data-source="post: 7992660" data-attributes="member: 6162">Here's the actual next post:The Umbral Court, as with all groups of two or more people, has its divisions and its arguments. They work to hide them from their subjects and foreigners, hoping to build up an image of a cabal unified by their Kuthite devotion and their personal infusion with the Midnight Lord’s power. We are given two examples of their divisions: a political one concerning Nidal’s relationship with Cheliax, and a theological dispute concerning something called the Belevais Doctrine. That latter argument is one of my favoritest things in the book, by the way.Nidalese city-dwellers and graduates of the School of the Pale Sun in Elith Lorin tend to be super-excited about Nidal’s alliance with the infernalists of Cheliax. The vampire sorcerer Kholas has voiced this opinion more eloquently, louder, and more often than anyone, making him something of the face of this contingent, who wish to expand their nation’s influence across all of Golarion and to bring more and more to the revealing ways of Zon-Kuthon’s pain.However, Eloiander of Ridwan and the Uskwood druids have argued against them, pointing to the Nidalese’s special status as the chosen people of Zon-Kuthon, exalted in suffering above all the rest of Golarion. Foreigners, they say, mean little to the lord of the velstracs, and extermists (including Eloiander himself) have even gone so far as attempt to sabotage the alliance or make any Chelish in their borders’s stay unbearable.I enjoy this conflict! It feels very well-placed so that the Cheliax-Nidal alliance can present all the dangers of a unified evil alliance to those games who want such a thing, but which clever heroes like the PCs can sabotage, defeating it by means of subterfuge instead of meeting an overwhelming force head-on. It can also provide a good reason for Nidalese PCs of any alignment to join forces with a party crusading for the forces of good ~ imagine the possibilities of an evil Nidalese Kuthite PC teaming up with a bunch of Iomedaean and Milanite PCs against the devil-worshippers of Cheliax. Even if the party is composed entirely of relatively typical Nidalese, this division can generate any number of plots.The Belevais Doctrine, as I said, is one of the peaks of this book. It feels very reminiscent of actual theological debate (it would fit in with questions like the medieval European debates around things like God’s ability or inability to create a boulder He can’t move, or whether imagined things have enough reality to be considered moral patients, or whether Jesus ever shat and what that would mean about His blend of divinity and humanity), while also remaining very grounded in the reality of a pulpy fantasy setting. My main metric for such things in recent years is gem fusion from Steven Universe ~ which is clearly an allegory for romance and even sex, allowing the cartoon to comment on such things, but is also alien enough to spawn storylines of its own that would not make any sense if they were about such things. I feel like that’s the kind of allegory that Tolkien would be happy with.OK, but WTF even is the Belevais Doctrine? It is an answer, the orthodoxy of which has haunted Nidalese theologians for centuries and yet is still very much in question, to a very important question to Nidalese culture: do the undead feel pain as intensely or as loudly, as the living? Adherents of the doctrine claim that pain exists to warn the living of danger or death, and that therefore those who have nothing to fear from most sources thereof, those who are already dead, cannot feel true pain by definition. Certainly, the undead can suffer ~ no Nidalese who can lookout their window would debate that ~ but the Belevais Doctrine seeks to distinguish misery or agony from pain itself. And it is pain that Zon-Kuthon bequeaths as gift to those he blesses.Velstracs, according to the doctrine, are alone among the races of the Realms Beyond to feel true pain, either because they’ve replaced some skin with that of living mortal beings or simply through sufficient body modification in service to the Midnight Lord. Thus, its believers, believe that undead and non-velstrac outsiders are forever shut out from proper dedicated worship of Zon-Kuthon. The undead are the more politically important and contentious of the two groups, due to the large number of them within the shadowed borders of Nidal.Belevaisians argue against raising the undead above living worshippers who profess an equal amount of piety in the Kuthite hierarchy, effectively holding them to a higher standard to achieve similar rank. As one would expect, they have made few friends and many enemies amongst the undead population of Nidal.The fact that these two divisions are largely unrelated gives me intriguing ideas of rather complicated Nidalese political divisions. I’d love to explore them in a campaign someday: Belevaisian isolationists vs. undead-supporting expansionists vs. Belevaisian expansionists vs. undead-supporting isolationists. With four great poles around which to circle and (on the lower side of the scale) dozens of people in the Umbral Court, you can easily keep each faction down to a manageable but easily expandable 10-15 members. Imagine the sociocultural drawing-and-quartering you can put the PCs through, with what they think of as a single, god-given voice pulling them in four different directions!</blockquote>

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