Missed opportunity? Core cosmology, gods, primordials and the law/chaos divide

[ppaladin123]

Just a a thought experiment. The great conflict of the core cosmology in 4e is between the chaotic primordials and the great proponents of order, the gods.

The primordials are beings of chaos, continually creating and destroying at a whim. They are not necessarily evil but they are capricious and always ready to scrap their creation in favor of something new.

The gods are the champions of order. They live in the (initially) ordered harmony of the astral sea. They want to preserve the world. Some want to lord over it and some want to nourish it but all agree that the universe must be protected against agents of chaos.

That is a pretty clear dichotomy right? Except that there are two wrinkles: Gruumsh and Lolth.

Gruumsh and Lolth are chaotic evil deities. They are the only two currently*. It is not clear to me that they need to be deities or that they need to be chaotic evil. Whenever the two are mentioned in the context of the dawn war or the imprisonment of Tharzidun (see below), the writers always take pains to write little asides that say things like, "Of course Gruumsh would side against the primordials if push comes to shove. After all, he doesn't want the world to be destroyed," or "It is said that Lolth provides the web that ensnares Tharzidun for she seeks to protect the world against the annihilation his release would herald." This just appears to me to be a tacit admission that these chaotic evil deities don't mesh with the cosmology or with its motivating struggle. It seems that they represent a bit of a flaw in an otherwise well-balanced cosmology. Maybe they were included as gods out of legacy/sacred cow issues. Maybe they were left as chaootic evil because they always have been so. How about some alternatives?

1. Gruumsh could very well be a particularly powerful and evil primordial that craves destruction (or even a demon lord). His eternal struggle with Bane and his run ins with Corellon still make perfect sense. He could, in this capacity, rise to prominence as a major villain instead of occupying his current position as a god that nobody but orcs appears to give much thought to.

2. Lolth could go either way. She could be a chaotic evil primordial. A seductress who courted Corellon in an era when the gods and the primordials coexisted in balance and perhaps fraternized. As she is known as the "demon queen" and currently resides in the abyss this makes sense. Alternatively we could drop the 'chaotic" part and just switch her to evil. She has always struck me as a tyrant more so than as a creature of chaos. Spiders, after all, construct intricate, perfectly ordered webs; it is dragon flies that fly around at random bumping into things and destroying such webs.

*So now the obvious question is, "what about Tharzidun?" He certainly is chaotic evil but he wasn't always that way. The big T was corrupted by the shard of evil into a being of pure chaos and evil. That was a huge seismic shift in the balance between order and chaos and the event that eventually set off the dawn war and led to the current state of the universe. For a god to become chaotic evil is a major, universe shaking, event. I am perfectly comfortable with his state as an insane CE being because the transformation is considered both anomalous and worthy of considerable attention as it goes against all that the gods stand for.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Well, I'm not sure about Gruumsh--I kind of like him as a chaotic evil deity--but I'm sort of with you on Lolth. I don't really like the fact that Lolth is a god at all.

When Lolth was first introduced, way back in the days of 1E, she was a demon. The drow worshiped her as a god, but she wasn't one. "Demon Queen of Spiders." Frankly, I thought she was much more interesting as a demon than as a deity.

But then, I feel the same way about most of the "deity creep" througout the editions. Tiamat? Much more interesting, to me, as the Queen of Dragons but not a goddess. (Ditto Bahamut.) Vecna? Much more interesting, to me, as history's most powerful lich and the source of several artifacts than as a god. Asmodeus? I'd prefer an infernal being on par with the gods, rather than a god per se.

Ultimately, I just don't feel the need for the game's great villains to necessarily be deities, and I think many of them are cooler as non-deities.

 

[I'm A Banana]

This just appears to me to be a tacit admission that these chaotic evil deities don't mesh with the cosmology or with its motivating struggle.

I dunno bout that.

No alignment is monolithic. There are competing factions and viewpoints, different perspectives, debating philosophies. The difference even between two Lawful Good paladins can be deep, severe, and brutal, even leading to holy wars and crusades. The difference between two entities of Chaos, despite their broad philosophical underpinnings, can be just as powerful, and just as severe.

Heck, there's probably Lawful Good primordials out there drifting somewhere, and they only haven't been referenced or statted up because of 4e's "if it exists, you can stab it with a sword" early standpoint being biased against statting up Lawful Good anything.

It is implied that the divide between unliving and living in PoLand is stronger than any divide between alignments. Elemental life is a fundamentally different kind of life, inherently destructive to fleshy mortal life. Gruumsh wouldn't side with the elemental forces any more than your political enemies would side with an invading army. He and Bahamut don't agree on much, but they do share a desire for mortal existence. Gruumsh may want it to be nasty, brutish, and short (weeding out the weak!), while Bahamut prefers a community that works together to make everyone stronger, but they both like living things.

The primordials -- even the unaligned ones, even the Good and Lawful Good ones -- favor the unliving. They are fans of rocks and oceans and skies, not of the vermin that cling to them. A CE primordial might see them as weak creatures to be crushed beneath the grinding process of nature, while a LG primordial might see them as dangerous and alien, a risk to elemental life by their very natures.

Imagine it in the context of the Far Realm: different sorts of life. For all her evil and chaos, Lolth still doesn't want squamous horrors from beyond space and time menacing anything in her purview, and it's something she and Pelor and wild-and-stormy Kord and the Raven Queen of winter and shadow can all agree on. Even though the Far Realm isn't exactly evil or even necessarily chaotic per se, it's just dangerous.

Likewise, with the primordials. It's not a philosophical battle, it's a battle born out of competing natures, out of the fact that a world where fire elementals can live is not a world where halflings can also live. It's not personal, it's just the way things are.

The idea of the Elemental Chaos being...well...Chaotic...might come from the destruction wrought during the Dawn War (it broke apart kingdoms, and mingled empires), or it might be the influence of the Abyss (whirling and sucking down there, it has roiled the once-orderly elements into a soup). Beings of chaos would, of course, be drawn to the place, due to that chaos, but beings of law are more common in the Astral Sea.

That's not a monolithic exclusivity, though. The highly ordered monestaries of the Githzerai in the Chaos, and Gruumsh's presumably chaotic, brutal realm in the Astral. These things mean that it's not a zero-sum war of mutual Law vs. Chaos Annihiliation, where everything needs to pick one side and stick to it.

I like that the forces aren't monolithic. It makes them much more interesting.

Ultimately, I just don't feel the need for the game's great villains to necessarily be deities, and I think many of them are cooler as non-deities.

I think the distinction, from a flavor perspective, is largely academic. Is the great wyrm red dragon worshiped by those cultists a god, or do they just think she is a god, make churches for her, and evangialize her philosophy of burnination all over the countryside? Six of one, half dozen of the other, sport. For certain outside-in worldbuilding exercises it might matter, but if you treat the idea of, say, a world creation, as just one story told amongst many (rather than having a monolithic THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED, OKAY cosmic origin story), it doesn't matter so much who actually created the world as much as it matters that the world exists.

From a rules perspective, you can have more ambiguity than there currently is. The problem lies in "deity" being a rules-defined entity. If it wasn't -- if it was just a word used in story, not in mechanics -- it wouldn't matter if you cast these things as "true gods" or just "insanely powerful nongods." It intersects with the divine power source in D&D a bit, but if you leave it vague, with prayers giving you divine power, period, you don't need to muck about with it too much. Clerics pray and they get spells, mages study and they get spells, everyone has a way of getting their mojo, and no one is quite sure how any of it works.

When I was running my monotheistic campaign setting, thinking like this really helped emphasize the conflict between the civilizations of the Triptych and the heathens on the outside. One side thinks they're worshiping gods, another things they're worshiping demons, a third just thinks they're deluding themselves, but our clerics and their shamans all get spells somehow. What the truth is should be mysterious. We don't need to separate entities into distinct "yes it is a god" and "no it isn't a god" camps.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Pretty much what Kamikaze Midget said, I was going to give xp but can not.

To add, there are mythlogical precedents for traitor gods, Loki for instance and as for Asmodeous et al. Well if it quacks like a god then it pretty much is a god. I also really like the idea that if you kill a god you can take its stuff including its godhood, very D&D that.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I do not see the cosmology as so strongly Chaos vs Law(order) and I like it that way.

Too often D&D has been bogged down with good vs evil, law vs chaos shenanigans.

I see the different power groups in 4E cosmology, as overall, unaligned, and looking out for their best interests.

The Primordials live to create and destroy.
The gods prosper when the world is stable.
The nature spirits want to keep the world and what lives there alive
The Far Realm wants to totally change everything, but not destroy it.

Yes, I know that is very simplistic.

But having each major power group more interested in their own goals makes for a far mroe satisfying game, in my opinion.