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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ppaladin123" data-source="post: 5474917" data-attributes="member: 60923">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.</blockquote>

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