D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....

[The Shadow]

Of course it goes both ways. The example "Unicorn" was not, I believe, an accidental one. Unicorns are creatures that have an existance that reaches far beyond D&D (for that matter Unicorns appear in Harry Potter) - and as such they are going to always, always have more resonance than a D&D exclusive monster. There are are about a dozen other mythological monsters on that list (of which the Succubus is one) which have more emotional weight than D&D mythology. If it had been a Hamatsu and someone had moved its alignment, or they'd declared a Yugoloth was a demon, not a devil, that would have helped define the D&D specific word far more than it would have defined the cosmology. (And had it been something that really really doesn't match the mythology, like the Erinyes/the Furies of Greek Myth then it just causes confusion).

Very well put!

None of that is even close to true unless you confuse "has no meaning" with "Is unremarkable". Such dualism is, as a philosophy, not just false but actively harmful (and doubly so when it becomes Balance Is King).

Quite right. I remember how shocked I was when reading the Gord the Rogue books (hey, I was young - and no, I can't recommend them now) and the protagonists were promoting 'Balance' between solars and demons. The sheer insanity of it took me aback.

And [MENTION=16760]The Shadow[/MENTION], is mathematical chaos chaos or in fact a very deep kind of order?

Sigh. Like I said, the analysis is more difficult in this case. I have degrees in chemistry and physics, so I'm aware of the information-theoretical issues...

Cosmological chaos (or D&D chaos, if you prefer) is assuredly not deterministic chaos as studied by mathematicians. It's more like entropy, regarded as a thing. Which I'm not at all sure is really a coherent idea, but it does exert a powerful mythopoeic influence. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and so on - we have to struggle to maintain the order we create.

Of course this raises the painful fact that D&D chaos is not at all well-defined - what does 'love of liberty' have to do with 'entropy', anyway?

I wanted to highlight this. The concept of symmetry in philosophy is primarily an eastern derived one, that has steadily influenced western literature over the last several decades. The concept of Yin and Yang.

Before that, the philosophy above was more dominant. Good was the standard, than evil got introduced and screwed things up/

I don't know nearly enough about eastern philosophies to comment in any substantive way here. But while they emphasize balance in many different respects, do they really advocate balance between good and evil? All the ones I have any familiarity with encourage good conduct.

I can certainly agree that balance is an excellent idea in matters of ontological indifference. That's just Aristotle's Golden Mean - virtue lies between two extremes, both of which are bad. But Aristotle also said there is no mean between virtue and vice. And while I could well be mistaken and am open to correction, I'm not aware that any eastern philosophers would fundamentally disagree.

Even if they did in theory, it's hard to see how they could in practice. Attempting balance between virtue and vice must inevitably lead to the ruination of any person or society that attempts it.

Yin, after all, isn't *evil*, is it? It's passive, cold, feminine - none of which are bad in themselves.

It's interesting that you bring up Star Wars. I hadn't thought of it in this light before, but you're right - the Dark Side is all about unbridled passions, lack of control. It's the antithesis of balance. Of course, Jedi philosophy is so utterly incoherent in so many different ways, it's probably best to leave it there.

One might also add that the Jedi of the prequel films are so amazingly stupid, they probably would have been shocked to see the sun rise in the east...

 

[Nivenus]

I think the key here is that both settings exist as static for a simple reason: replay-ability. If Evil was to be crushed by Good, barring a reset button, then their is limits as to what you can do next. No Abyss full of demons, no underdark with drow and mindflayers. This is true of the GW or WA systems; if one side truly wins, then the nature of the world shifts so radically that there is no where to go but back. A multiverse locked in static might not be dynamic, but it assures there will always be a new challenge. A new prince will aspire to be a Demon Lord after the last one is slain. A new Balor will be birthed when the last one falls. To Quote a Wise Man...[video=youtube;fm26rpFUdU0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm26rpFUdU0[/video]

Well yes, that's definitely a factor as well. That's also, of course, a difference between one group of players' campaign (where perhaps they can defeat evil once and for all) and canon as written in the sourcebooks. The former can allow good to triumph, because it has no consequences for other players outside of the group. The latter, however, cannot, because it prevents the existence of later, similar stories within the same setting.The same is true on a less cosmic scale. You can defeat the Zhentarim (or the Red Wizards... or the orcs of Many Arrows) in your own personal game of the Forgotten Realms if you wish, but they'll probably never be completely undone in the core setting, because somebody has to be the bad guy.

 

[Elderbrain]

The reality of evil

I must object to (some) of what Permeton and The Shadow said. Evil is not merely the absence of good, nor it it less real than good. If it were, it couldn't hurt us... it'd be illusionary. If evil isn't really real, why fight it? I would argue that a belief that evil is real provides a strong motivation and reason to oppose it. Evil is no more the privation of good than pain is the absence of pleasure. If someone stabs me, I'm not in pain because of a lack of pleasure - say, not having an ice- cream cone in my mouth. I'm in pain because of the injury. In addition, there exists a middle state where I am neither experiencing pleasure or pain. The same holds true for good and evil.

I must also point out that Aramis Erak's quote, if in fact from Planescape, would only reflect the viewpoint of a minority of characters, mostly petitioners from the Outlands and the Rilmani, who indeed are guilty of believing that good cannot exist without evil, etc. But the folks on the other sixteen planes of the Great Wheel sure don't agree. The Archons of Mount Celestia certainly don't think evil is a necessary part of the multiverse, or else they wouldn't bother striving again it. They fight because they think winning is a genuine possibility, and that the Multiverse doesn't need evil to exist. (For the record, I have never subscribed to the idea that good needs evil to exist. I agree, it's as screwy to me as to Permeton and The Shadow.)

 

[Nivenus]

I don't know nearly enough about eastern philosophies to comment in any substantive way here. But while they emphasize balance in many different respects, do they really advocate balance between good and evil? All the ones I have any familiarity with encourage good conduct.

Well, it's a little bit more complicated than that (and condensing all of Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, etc. philosophies into one amorphous blob is probably ill-advised). But basically, both interpretations are kind of correct.

Some Eastern traditions, like Taoism, don't really believe in good and evil per se. Yin and yang are not good vs. evil, but neither's really wholly good either. Additionally, one of the primary principles of Taoist philosophy is non-action or "effortless doing," which basically advocates acting naturally and spontaneously, without planning or any kind of effort to control consequences. According to Laozi, the founder of Taoism, all actions result in negative and positive consequences no matter what we do so it's best not to stress/struggle over it to much; just do what comes naturally, because you can't really shift the cosmic balance one way or the other anyway - you can only fundamentally affect yourself.

On the other hand, Confucianism, which emerged about the same time as Taoism, has a radically different view of things. According to Kongfuzi (Confucius), there is a natural order and harmony to things, which people are best served by adhering to. The universe is hierarchical in nature; you respect and obey your parents, who respect and obey your rulers, who respect and obey your gods. The relationship is also reciprocal - in return for the obedience of their social inferiors, rulers (or parents) are expected to act justly and charitably, or else the legitimacy of their rule comes into question and can be overturned (the Mandate of Heaven is the best-known example of this). In this sense, good is equated with order and social harmony and is opposed by discord and selfishness.

Buddhism meanwhile basically says evil is the world's default, not good. Life is suffering and all pleasure is basically the (temporary) absence of suffering, rather than an independent experience. The goal of life then is to reduce suffering (but not to eliminate it) by recognizing the impermanence of all things, detaching oneself from the material world, and denying the ego which is (in Buddhist philosophy) an illusory concept with no bearing on the fundamental metaphysics of reality. The core ethos of Buddhist is actually kind of annihilationist in nature - the ultimate goal is to have no ego and to basically fade from existence into the cosmos (Nietzschie actually accused Buddhism of nihilism).

And then you have polytheistic religions like Hinduism and Shinto, which don't really have the same concept of good or evil that religions like Christianity or Islam do. Sure, Hindus believe in karma and Shintoists believe in ritual impurity, but neither religion has a central conflict of good vs. evil or even really order vs. chaos. A destructive god like Kali is certainly dangerous and someone you don't want to attract unnecessary attention from, but they're not really evil either - they just serve a particular purpose in the cosmic order that happens to be at times quite vicious (and indeed, Kali's one of Hinduism's most popular goddesses). Likewise, there's not really a distinction in Shinto between benevolent and malevolent kami - they're both spirits and/or gods and both require veneration in the proper circumstances.

Complicating all of this is that a lot of people in Asia (East Asia in particular) adhere to more than one philosophy at a time. The focus may change at different points in a person's life (in China, Confucianism is stereotypically for the young, while Taoism is for the old; likewise Shinto is for the living and Buddhism for the dead in Japan), but the fact that all philosophies are considered somewhat valuable by a majority of people is something we don't really do as much in the West (although I expect that's changing).

 

[The Shadow]

I must object to (some) of what Permeton and The Shadow said. Evil is not merely the absence of good, nor it it less real than good. If it were, it couldn't hurt us... it'd be illusionary. If evil isn't really real, why fight it?

I didn't say it was the absence of good, I said it was a privation of good = a subtle but important difference. Evil is the lack of a perfection that ought to exist. It has no positive character. An evil man pursues good things in the wrong way or to the wrong degree. Nobody pursues evil for its own sake; it isn't even possible. They are pursuing pleasure, or power, or something else which is good, so far as it goes - they just pursue those things without proper regard for other good things, like the dignity of other people.

Disease is a privation of health. A tumor in your body is trying to stay alive, which is fine so far as it goes, but it's compromising your life, which isn't. There is no state of Disease as such, with a capital D. There are only ways in which a person fails to be healthy. That doesn't mean disease can't hurt you - it certainly can! Likewise, there is no Evil with a capital E. There are only ways in which people fall short of virtue. It certainly can, and does, hurt them and other people.

It would make no sense to talk about disease without reference to health. If we didn't have an idea of health, we wouldn't even be able to articulate what we meant by disease. In that sense, the concept of disease depends on the concept of health; but the reverse is not true. If there were no such thing as disease, people would still be healthy.

(The analogy isn't perfect, because disease organisms like bacteria and viruses do have an actual nature of their own. Cancer is a better example, because it's your own body gone haywire.)

I would argue that a belief that evil is real provides a strong motivation and reason to oppose it. Evil is no more the privation of good than pain is the absence of pleasure. If someone stabs me, I'm not in pain because of a lack of pleasure - say, not having an ice- cream cone in my mouth. I'm in pain because of the injury. In addition, there exists a middle state where I am neither experiencing pleasure or pain. The same holds true for good and evil.

Oh, it's real, all right, and not an illusion. It's just a real privation, not a real thing in itself.

 

[Nivenus]

I didn't say it was the absence of good, I said it was a privation of good = a subtle but important difference. Evil is the lack of a perfection that ought to exist. It has no positive character. An evil man pursues good things in the wrong way or to the wrong degree. Nobody pursues evil for its own sake; it isn't even possible. They are pursuing pleasure, or power, or something else which is good, so far as it goes - they just pursue those things without proper regard for other good things, like the dignity of other people.

Disease is a privation of health. A tumor in your body is trying to stay alive, which is fine so far as it goes, but it's compromising your life, which isn't. There is no state of Disease as such, with a capital D. There are only ways in which a person fails to be healthy. That doesn't mean disease can't hurt you - it certainly can! Likewise, there is no Evil with a capital E. There are only ways in which people fall short of virtue. It certainly can, and does, hurt them and other people.

It would make no sense to talk about disease without reference to health. If we didn't have an idea of health, we wouldn't even be able to articulate what we meant by disease. In that sense, the concept of disease depends on the concept of health; but the reverse is not true. If there were no such thing as disease, people would still be healthy.

Not necessarily. I mean, there is some sense in talking about the fact that all life inevitably dies and that healthcare is really just "delaying the inevitable." And likewise there is (as CAH likes to point out) the inevitable heat death of the universe, so on a cosmic scale one could argue that entropy (and chaos... and death) always win. Good is just an impermanent thing which comforts us against the cosmic universality of our inevitable suffering and demise.

Note that I don't personally subscribe to this philosophy - I believe good is not futile and that there is a point to combating evil/disease/etc. But it's not at all true that the opposite argument doesn't exist - that evil is more prevalent and primordial than good. And it's not simply a product of artificially balanced tabletop RPG cosmologies.

Again though, I'm not sure how much relevance this all has to Planescape, which never does (to my knowledge) establish any kind of mathematically-enforced balance between good and evil. Good and evil just happen to be equally prevalent/powerful; how different peoples of the planes interpret that (whether that's a desirable equilibrium, whether it can be changed, etc.) is part of the setting's fun.

 

[The Shadow]

Not necessarily. I mean, there is some sense in talking about the fact that all life inevitably dies and that healthcare is really just "delaying the inevitable."

True. Like I said, the analogy between disease and evil wasn't perfect. Though the fact of entropy, decay, and death does raise other interesting questions that I can't go into here.

And likewise there is (as CAH likes to point out) the inevitable heat death of the universe, so on a cosmic scale one could argue that entropy (and chaos... and death) always win. Good is just an impermanent thing which comforts us against the cosmic universality of our inevitable suffering and demise.

What a materialist would do with that, I don't know - though he could know the good without being able to account for it. I'm not a materialist.

Note that I don't personally subscribe to this philosophy - I believe good is not futile and that there is a point to combating evil/disease/etc. But it's not at all true that the opposite argument doesn't exist - that evil is more prevalent and primordial than good. And it's not simply a product of artificially balanced tabletop RPG cosmologies.

It may exist, but I think it is assuredly wrong. Moral evil (as opposed to physical evil like entropy and death), as I said, is always directed toward good ends. Nobody seeks intrinsically evil ends - nobody. It's impossible. In order even to exist, evil needs goodness; while the reverse is not true.

Whether or not evil is more prevalent, it is necessarily ontologically anterior to the good.

That's one thing I liked about 4e's cosmology: that devils were corrupted angels, and demons were corrupted elementals. (I don't insist on them being elementals, but for purposes of discussion, corrupted *something*.)

 

[Elderbrain]

Why Planescape is a canonical addition to Great Wheel material

O.K. Here is my best argument for the canonical status of Planescape and the reason references to the Blood War and such in the Fiend entries in the monster manual would not be unwarranted. Let's start by looking back at the 1e material about the Great Wheel and the fiendish races in the AD&D monster manual, monster manual two and Manual of the planes. Who produced them? TSR. Who wrote them? Gary Gygax wrote the 1st monster manual, he, Jeff Grub, and David Cook wrote the 2nd monster manual, and Jeff Grub wrote the Manual of the planes. (There were other contributers, naturally, but these are the ones that will make my case.) Now, nobody, including Hussar and Kamikaze Midget, disputes the canonical status of those books. With me so far? O.K, now there was only a seven-year gap between the release of Manual of the Planes (in 1987) and the debut of Planescape (in 1994). Did Planescape concern the Great Wheel? Yep. Did it use the same material as the MM1, MM2, and Manual of the planes? Yep. Was it an unlicenced, third-party production? Nope. It was produced by TSR, the very same company that produced the previous material. Now, who was the lead director in charge of Planescape material? David "Zeb" Cook, the same guy who wrote the Yugoloth and demon material in the MM2! Surely he had the right to add to what he had written before! Nor were Jeff Grub and Gary Gygax out of the loop; on the contrary, Jeff Grub was consulted frequently on planar matters, and Gary Gygax contributed a new monster to the mythology: the Goristro. So claims that Planescape material is not Great Wheel material, and that there should be a distinction between them, are pure balderdash! TSR and the original writers put their stamp of approval on it, and that's all it takes for it to be canon. The fact that some people don't like some of the additions, such as the Blood War and Yugoloths being master schemers, no more makes it uncanonical than a person disliking Vader being Luke's father makes "The Empire Strikes Back" uncanonical. Should such a person be allowed to demand that all references to "Empire" be kept out of the Star Wars role playing game? Of course not!

 

[Remathilis]

It may exist, but I think it is assuredly wrong. Moral evil (as opposed to physical evil like entropy and death), as I said, is always directed toward good ends. Nobody seeks intrinsically evil ends - nobody. It's impossible. In order even to exist, evil needs goodness; while the reverse is not true.

You may have a point as to mortal opinions (nobody does evil for Evil's sake, but then again I hold nobody does Good purely for good sake's either; a certain selfish element is necessary for both).

However, in the context of a Fantasy RPG, I certainly CAN believe in Evil for Evil's sake (and Good for Good's sake) when it comes to supernatural creatures. A demon is far more evil than an orc despite both being CE; the orc reflects a certain sociopathic mindset while the demon is an embodiment of evil; it cannot think in ways that does not spread evil. Nor would it want to. Evil permeates its every fiber. It seeks evil just to further evil's cause. It delights in pain and suffering not for any personal pleasure, but because it knows it's making the multiverse a worse place by doing it. The demon has not twisted sense of righteousness, it seeks no "greater good." It seeks evil to spread evil; something even an orc could not fathom doing (and they're pretty corrupt).

In the context of the game, its as easy to conceptualize a creature made of pure evil as it is to conceptualize one made of pure fire.

Moral gray areas are fine for kobolds and dragons, but I like my demons nonredeemable.

 

[Remathilis]

O.K. Here is my best argument for the canonical status of Planescape and the reason references to the Blood War and such in the Fiend entries in the monster manual would not be unwarranted.

While I agree with your conclusion (and feel PS is the natural extension of MotP); author intent I find isn't a sufficient rationale for many people. Just because the original author(s) were consulted, gave blessing, or even made the changes/additions themselves does not alone justify the change. For further proof, see "Han Shot First" and "Riddles in the Dark, 1931"