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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Badjak" data-source="post: 4658319" data-attributes="member: 58103">One thing about evil in dungeons and dragons is that there are really more then just one kind of evil, and evil, even in the crunch mechanics of dungeons and dragons doesn't necessarily fit cleanly into the alignment axis of 3.5. Take for example the evil of orcs and hobgoblins as opposed to the evil of cultists. Most cultist and orcs would be placed in the alignment of CE, but the difference between the two is quite large, so large in fact that, though it is possible for me to imagine playing the role of an orc in a campaign, (in fact I did so in an evil campaign a DM once ran, and it was a blast); it is almost impossible for me to imagine playing the role of a death cultist. Death cult evil is either thematically nihilistic or demonistic, it is spiritual in the sense that it wishes to expose some sort of core trauma in the way the game world operates (with the laws of nature being rescinded, the dead rising from the earth, gigantic maggots devouring cities for instance). Orcs, on the other hand, rely on a marxist historicist understanding of the universe. I mean in almost all fantasy I've played orcs always exist as some sort of Balkan or Russian steppe other. They are always outside the community of nations that make up elves, dwarfs, humans. Orcs are evil like Neco Bellic in Grand Theft Auto 4 is evil, therefore orcs are much easier to subjectized, because we can easily shift our perspective into being that of the other, the immigrant, the abject, etc. Cult evil is incredibly hard to subjectivize. I mean how do you play a member of the ebon triad? The resistance that the cult member has to being a PC trope is interesting. You could probably write a very nice paper about that.</blockquote>

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