The difference is not that significant. The chances of the invisible person being a pixie, mage, or other non-extraplanar creature were better than the chances of it being a fiend on the Material Plane. The invisibility still served to deceive the party and made the agreement dubious to begin with; if it had been something less sinister behind it, it would not have caused as much trouble as it did, and the party would certainly forgive a fragile pixie or hideous critter for not wanting to reveal itself to potentially-dangerous humans (who have a distinct tendency towards violence -_- ).
The paladin had to do SOMETHING once it was revealed as a fiend. And he could not have known how long the invisible creature had observed them beforehand or anything; he could not have known if it was purposely scheming to try and destroy his paladinhood or not, but given its fiendish nature and its hiding earlier, he could not just ignore the possibility that it was there specifically to try warping or manipulating a champion of good like himself. It's what fiends DO for eternity; corrupt mortals so they can add them to the fiendish ranks. Well, it's what they do when they're not out to just cause suffering among mortals.
Rystil Arden said:
No, not really. Though I am greatly interested by your analysis of the situation and its repercussions for your game, it is only screwing over Paladins in your game, but not mine, and it seems not Hyp's and several others.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Most folks in this thread, except for me and a scant few others, seem to be saying that the paladin is supposed to have lost his powers for having slain the imp, when he would have lost them anyway if he had not carried out his duty in service to Good. The imp's agreement would have required him to continue associating with the fiend, helping it out in accomplishing its goal in the building. The paladin is explicitly incapable of doing so unless he becomes an ex-paladin. And if he just stops going along and leaves, he'd be breaking the agreement too.
But he cannot just let the imp go. His duty as a paladin is to fight evil. The imp is a fiend, evil incarnate, and even if it is one of the rare few that is flawed and not quite entirely evil, it is still very heavily evil. It would have been more honest with the group if it had good intentions, to garner their trust. Therefore it is most likely not up to any kind of good, not even the kind that fiends do only to gain the trust of mortals they are trying to corrupt. If it were just a human or even a goblin, there would be fair reason to believe it might not be up to any evil, but it was instead an imp, which is universally a minion of evil by its very nature. There was no reason given to doubt that it wasn't up to the usual fiendish acts of evil; all the paladin knows is that it hid itself from him to avoid being smited or turned away in the first place, and that it has some (probably evil) designs on an item to be found within the building, and schemed to get the humans' help in finding that item.
I think for some of these situations, it isn't the person that is coming up with the situation who is screwing the Paladin (after all, in my game, there are palatable options to the dinner date scenario like going to dinner) but rather it is you who are screwing the Paladin in that situation by virtue of an extremely draconian interpretation of 'associate' and 'grossly violate' (Based on the definitions of associate I posted from the dictionary, I think it would be very hard to say the dinner date grossly violates that clause, hard enough to claim it violates at all without choosing a low priority definition). Though I do agree with you that the seemingly most human choice in the Percival situation, to keep the family together, is definitely a falling offense.
Err, is this all in reference to your own examples, or the original poster's responses? You're rather unclear on that.
And let's take a look at some dictionary definitions of the word "associate."
OneLook online dictionary said:
* noun: a person who is frequently in the company of another
*verb: bring or come into association or action
*verb: keep company with; hang out with (Example: "He associates with strange people")
Webster's dictionary said:
1. To join with one, as a friend, companion, partner, or confederate; as, to associate others with s in business, or in an enterprise.
4. To accompany; to keep company with. [Obs.]
1. To unite in company; to keep company, implying intimacy; as, congenial minds are disposed to associate.
1. A companion; one frequently in company with another, implying intimacy or equality; a mate; a fellow.
2. A partner in interest, as in business; or a confederate in a league.
Syn. -- Companion; mate; fellow; friend; ally; partner; coadjutor; comrade; accomplice.
Far as I know I'm not interpreting "associate" too 'draconian'-ly. If the paladin's hanging out with the fiend for a while for dinner, or joining the fiend on a venture for mutual gain, he's associating with the fiend. Not the same as just meeting them, mind you; I'm not saying that just encountering it and trading a few words will break the paladin's code. It's having a prolonged contact of a nonviolent, nonthreatening manner, which having dinner together certainly qualifies as.
Meh, I disagree. Though BoED logic does tell you that using Evil means to prevent Evil is a good way to fall, it wasn't selfishness that made Anyiel fall. It was her extreme Lawful feeling of duty to protect the nexuses. (Some of this is not expressly spelled out, but it was my intention) She initially lost her angelic powers for using extreme means to protect the nexuses, and then she stuck around as a Lawful Neutral fallen angel doing her best until she was fighting a battle she couldn't win, at which point the powers of Hell offered her a return to power on the spot and a guarantee that she would keep her old task of guarding the nexuses with no extra random evil soul temptations or the like added to her job requirements. Hell couldn't let those Lawful nexuses fall any more than Celestia could, after all. She only accepted their offer rather than the alternative of letting the demons win. It was a sacrifice she made, and in some ways selfless, but still an Evil choice that damned her.
So......what's your point exactly? That since she didn't really go to Evil asking for power, she is somehow
not that Evil after accepting aid from Evil incarnate, which involved infusing her with raw Evil to the extent of turning her into an erinyes? I'm also not seeing how the celestials would've left her there to defend it herself if they're so damn intent on preventing demon apocalypse. She shouldn't have had to stay to protect the nexus. She should've been able to seek out the power to defend it while the celestials and devils continued to guard it against demons as usual.
I hardly believe that one fallen celestial is the only damn protector of the nexus at that point, and that she alone, despite having lost her power, would make the key difference when there should have been other celestials or devils around guarding the place if it's so dang important. She shouldn't have needed to accept the Baatorians' offer; if they could give her the power to protect the nexus, and had a vested interest in preventing their hated foes, the demons, from taking it over, then they damn well could have protected it themselves and she shouldn't have felt a need to stay and accept their offer. She could've allowed herself to perish in the battle or she could have left to find a new power for herself that didn't involve forsaking her heritage and kin among the celestial realms.
Okay, so what's my point? I don't understand these assertions.
Why? She finds Percival to be a kindred spirit and is, while somewhat jealous, also strongly attracted to him and what he stands for. They both hate demons and (as long as she's guiding his steps) they both guard the nexuses to prevent demonic plots. Also, she feels really good because someone Lawful Good loves her again, and she lost that when she fell--it's the one thing missing that the Devils could not replace, so now she takes great comfort in having it again. She cherishes that, and she is willing to bend a bit in order to keep it. It isn't just lust where she finds him attractive and wants to repeatedly mate.
Once Anyiel is suffused with raw cosmic Evil from Baator, she cannot rightly be called just a fallen celestial anymore. She has forsaken her goodly essence and been purged by Baatorians, suffused with Evil power to make her strong again in fighting to defend the nexus. No matter that she won't use that Evil power
now to do harm to non-fiends; it's still raw cosmic Evil from Hell itself, filling her in place of the Good that once filled the same portion of her essence.
Note that Outsiders are formed from the Outer Planes and do not have normal, pure-flesh-and-blood bodies. They are formed of raw extraplanar essences, like cosmic Evil or cosmic Good. When Anyiel fell from grace, she lost much of the Good that had previously composed a significant chunk of her being; now she has fallen further still to Evil, and her Good has been replaced with Evil. Evil is now a core, major component of her physical body (and Outsiders have no separate soul; their body and soul are one and the same, a soul with physical form). Evil will influence her whether she allows it or not, as she has accepted it as a major part of her essence. And she no longer has the essence of Good that she once possessed, or at least no longer possesses more than a small inkling of Good, which is far outweighed by the vast infusion of Evil.
Love is a 'good' emotion. It requires feeling certain things, like compassion, that cannot exist in D&D's monolithic, cosmic Evil forces that comprise part of reality, most notably the part that is Baator and the rest of the Lower Planes. Raw Evil cannot feel love; only lesser evil, of the sort that mortals may possess, can feel love because evil is not a major component of their very existence, just one small part of it alongside good and law and chaos. Fiendish Evil is far beyond mortal evil in its completeness; it is not a composite of other elements, unlike Material Plane natives; fiends are formed of Evil itself. Those who were not originally fiends are still infused with a great deal of cosmic Evil to replace the opposing forces that once existed within them.
Anyiel, like it or not, has accepted a great deal of Evil power, else she would not now be a fiend, but more like a half-fiend or something else. No, she is an erinyes now, and that means that Evil is part of her core essence at this point. It has replaced at least the vast majority the Good that once filled her body/soul. Evil will control her, and in time she will be willing to harm innocent mortals if they wander too close, regardless of her intentions at the time she made the decision to let Evil infuse her with so much power as to change her nature to that of a fiend.
A fiend cannot love. It is too thoroughly composed/infused of/with raw, primordial Evil. Anyiel forsook her Good for the sake of Law, and then went even further and accepted the power of Evil into her core essence, becoming an erinyes, a fiend of the Lower Planes. She has not only lost her Goodness from falling, but had the remainder of it, or at least the majority of that remainder, purged by the massive infusion of Evil that changed her very nature to the point of being considered a Native of Hell (despite not having formed there originally, she is now a Native of Hell since she became a devil, and gained the associated traits; she has been infused with a chunk of Baator's essence, bestowing her with fiendish power).
Anyiel's capacity to love has been quashed by her drastic change in nature to a creature of primordial Evil; there is not enough Good left in her to so seriously disrupt the vast selfishness and powermongering that Evil compels her toward. No tiny shred of Good within a thoroughly Evil-infused creature could manage to generate strong feelings of love. Anyiel would care only about herself. She is far more likely to feel contempt for the paladin, as a sign of what she was once like, of how she had to obey the pathetic laws of the celestials previously when they did not put the nexus' defense at a higher priority, then was cast aside by those same celestials when she refused to cooperate with their poor judgment, as she sees it. Evil is Anyiel's companion now, and Evil will shape her thoughts whether she wants it to or not; she accepted the devil's deal, now she has to live with it.
The child, as a half-fiend, could feel love because it is half mortal, and thus possesses some essence of cosmic Good within it from birth, unlike Anyiel who forsook it. Though the child's fiendish side compels it to be evil, the child at least has a chance to have its inherant Goodness nurtured and strengthened to overcome some of the Evil that suffuses a significant chunk of the child's essence.
Why not? Her main job, the sole purpose of her existence to which she sacrificed everything she had, including her immortal soul, is to guard those nexuses. And her dark masters in Hell have tasked her to guard those nexuses, with no requirement for soul reaping or the like. Her purpose for living with the Paladin is guarding the nexuses and killing the demons, stopping the demonic threats. Why should she corrupt him towards Evil? His holy powers are better against demons than Blackguard powers would be, plus if she makes him fall, she loses one of the main things that attracts her in the first place, the love of a pure champion of good, though if he
does lose his powers over the deal in the story, she knows these guys...
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
She sacrificed her Goodness too. She was an Outsider to begin with. Her body is her soul. She is now comprised of Evil and Law, no longer Good and Law. Her newly Evil essence will compel her to harbor nothing but contempt or lust for others; at best her shred of remaining, non-perged Good inkling will make her uncomfortable around a mortal that reminds her of what she once was, and how she abandoned it and threw it all away, yet this mortal does not yield to such temptations himself, that smug righteous bas***d.
This is how she will think. The majority of her very being is now composed of Evil drawn directly from Hell, Baator, itself. The paladin is a useful tool against the demons, at best, as far as a devil of Baator will be concerned. She may want to turn him into a more direct and willing servant of the infernal powers, to pledge himself to the Blood War as a soldier of Hell, to fight the Tanar'ri eternally as she herself will do. Though he's more immediately useful as a paladin, so she may've wanted to wait longer before corrupting him. But at most her actions up to that point would have been a fraud to make the paladin fight demons at her side. Until she could find a suitable time to turn him fully toward the side of Baator.
She didn't find a middle ground because she didn't have to in order to maintain the status quo.
She didn't have to accept the fiends' deal. If the nexus were so important, they would have guarded it themselves if she left, and she knew full well that the devils of Baator would never let the demons win if they could do anything about it. The devils would protect the nexus from Tanar'ri if she left. And once she found a neutral or Lawful source of power, or just advanced enough in level, she could resume guarding the nexus herself.
What I don't understand is why you're so mean to poor Erin. Templates are an interesting thing because they can't give an 'Always' 'Sometimes' alignment so they list a change, but actual half-fiends we know about have always been in the 'Usually X Evil' category (For instance, Alu Fiends, the daughters of succubi, had a respectable chance of being Chaotic Neutral in the Planar Compendium Appendix 1, and Cambions were sometims not evil as well). And in any case, Erin may very well already not be evil. She might be Lawful Good. She'll still detect as Moderate Evil due to being an Outsider with that subtype though. Happens to redeemed fiends all the time.
Note that the half-fiend entry in the 3E/3.5E Monster Manuals says "Alignment: Always evil (any)". They don't gain the Evil subtype (though the 3E MM shows a half-fiend medusa with the Evil and Lawful subtypes for some reason), but they're still heavily inclined towards evil. It takes some generations of further breeding with mortals to produce Tieflings, who have less significant Evil in them and more of the usual mortal mixing of Good with that Evil. Half-fiends have a very tough time overcoming their evil nature, and that's assuming that they actually
want to overcome it.
Erin can be redeemed or raised up as good, but it would not be easy; one half of her heritage is raw Evil.
She initially lost her angelic powers for using extreme means to protect the nexuses, and then she stuck around as a Lawful Neutral fallen angel doing her best until she was fighting a battle she couldn't win, at which point the powers of Hell offered her a return to power on the spot and a guarantee that she would keep her old task of guarding the nexuses with no extra random evil soul temptations or the like added to her job requirements. Hell couldn't let those Lawful nexuses fall any more than Celestia could, after all. She only accepted their offer rather than the alternative of letting the demons win. It was a sacrifice she made, and in some ways selfless, but still an Evil choice that damned her. 
