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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6330035" data-attributes="member: 42582">Evil priests have always got power, but that leaves it up for grabs how/why this is. Mabye they've been tricked or seduced by forces of darkness. Maybe they've sacrificed an eternity of paradise for the thrill of power during their mortal lives. The mere fact of their power doesn't mean that they are cosmologically validated. It can be true that they have power, yet are fundamentally at odds with the meaning/purpose of the universe.But once you put in the cosmological machinery in which the lower planes are as real as the upper planes, their gods as real, their afterlives as real, etc, then it becomes much harder to write off evil priests as "invalid" or otherwise in error. (I can think of ways to do this, drawing on some modern readings of Socrates, but they are very - maybe overly - intellectual - and I've never seen D&D hint at them - but D&D definitely hints at the cosmological ideas of mediaeval religious people in which the universe has a purpose and evil is not part of it.)Planescape takes this logic to its limit, with angels and fiends fraternising with one another in Sigil - something like the Christmas truce of 1914, and in the same way driving home the apparent lack of fundamental warrant for their opposition to one another.To me it makes sense for a sword-and-sorcery style campaign. I guess it's possible to frame relativism non-cynically ("liberalism for the liberals, cannibalism for the cannibals" can be a view about respect and toleration, rather than mockery), but I find that that tends to head in a very different direction from the typical D&D approach to matters of value.</blockquote>

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