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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5474990" data-attributes="member: 2067">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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />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.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.</blockquote>

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