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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3610822" data-attributes="member: 30001">Thanks for pointing out the "spending time in hell" situation.  While monsters that live there (like the saytr example) are an easy call, I've always like the idea that PCs that went adventuring there would pick up a faint whisp of something.  Here's my current campaign practice, updated to 3E terminology:ALIGNMENT AND PLACESSpending time in hell causes you to give off a faint lawful evil aura.  Using a spell like "Detect Evil", the third round of concentration is sufficient to establish that the aura doesn't come from the character, but is merely about him (as if splashed with a flask of unholy water).  The aura persists for roughly one hour per day spent in the strongly-aligned place.Yea, and it just so happens that the people most likely to gain an alignment descriptor (spell casters) are also those most adept at hiding them.I think of it as the relationship between air and Elemental Air (or Good with a capital 'G' as you point out - the philosophy of Plato).  It's theoretically possible (another note I should make) that a persons behavior would be of such vile evil (or pure good) that they could earn an alignment descriptor without divine involvement.  I've never used the rule in my campaign though, just said it was there - it's something on par with divine ascension but not dependant on power/level.IMC there is a looser coupling between alignment and cleric behavior.  I'm not sure if it's loose enough to get the "corrupt officer of the church" - at least as implemented in my campaign.  The reason is probably that my deities tend to be involved enough that long-term behavior of their clerics is judged - and while 'deity ethos' and alignment aren't in 1-1 correspondance, extreme differences would be noted.  It would be hard (I think impossible) for a Lawful Good cleric IMC to sacrifice a person and keep his powers/alignment descriptor - being as that such an action goes against the ethos of each of my good deities.  "Jerky" behavior though, probably falls through the cracks.  For this reasons NPCs view a [good] descriptor with more skepticism than good alignment, and having such is not a mandate to be trusted implicitly.But there is the chance that unaligned members of the church (fighters, and such) are not as picky, although I think their cleric superiors would eventually catch on to their behavior.  It would be possible for a corrupt, non-cleric person to serve a Lawful Good church for some period of time until his actions were found out.  It certainly wouldn't be a simple matter of detecting him with a spell.The clerics of my neutral deities tend to be more in conflict with good PCs for political reasons - not so much "corrupt" as they just have other priorities.  A cleric who would be LN in the RAW can associate more freely with persons that were LE in the RAW without having issues because only the cleric would have an alignment - so the strength of the relationship would depend more on how well the LE people suited the cleric's ethos.  Not so different from the RAW in it's implementation, but without the "Lawful Evil" sign blinking over the heads of the fighters to make the cleric feel uneasy about his choice of companionship.</blockquote>

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