D&D General The Role and Purpose of Evil Gods

[pemerton]

Dozens of people have written about Vecna, bringing their own beliefs and misconceptions about him.

I took @Chaosmancer's point to be that they can't be misconceptions, and doubly can't all be misconceptions, because they are acts of invention and so they tell us all that there is to be known about Vecna. (And also, I guess part of the point was that they can't be misconceptions that Vecna is happy with outside the context of someone authoring something about Vecna which is treated as true rather than a misconception.)

You haven't actually demonstrated any sort of redundancy.

In reality, there are either no canon differences between evil gods and archfiends, or there are lots of differences that have been presented in one book or another over the editions or that people have made up for themselves. Both of these statements are true, depending on which edition you're using, how you define god and archfiend (perhaps Orcus is a actually a god but everyone incorrectly thinks he's an archfiend), and how you want spells to be granted.

I don't think what people make up for themselves can count as canon, can it, more-or-less by definition?

But putting that to one side, here is the redundancy: the cleric of Asmodeus in the 2nd ed AD&D scenario To Slay A Hierarch (which comes with the City of GH boxed set) and the "infernal cultists" in the 3E module Speaker in Dreams, who are described as "diabolic" but are said to worship Hextor, play exactly the same role in the fiction.

The role played in the fiction by Lareth the Beautiful (in module T1) does not change one iota whether Lolth is thought of as a Demon Queen, a "lesser god", or both.

Tiamat can be presented as a super-powerful dragon who lives on the first level of the Nine Hells (AD&D MM; 3E MotP) who "spawns" evil dragonkind (AD&D MM) or is "revered" by them (3E MotP); or can be presented as a god (AD&D DDG; 3E DDG) and it doesn't change her role in the fiction. It doesn't make it easier or harder for any individual D&D player to place a cleric of Tiamat in a scenario.

These being are all supernatural entities of great power. They are at the core of cosmological struggles. In the context of D&D play, they serve as opposition for high-level PCs. They have cultists.

That doesn't make them pointless or worthless. To my mind, though, it does suggest three possibilities (which don't have to be mutually exclusive):

* As 4e did, make the cosmology and the role of various entities in it more systematic;​

​

* As @Chaosmancer has done (and presumably many others too, including posters in this thread), thin the list down to a more manageable number of entities;​

​

* A REH did, use whatever strikes your fancy at the time but don't expect your cosmology to carry too much fictional weight - just treat it as colour/flavour.​

I guess Planescape also counts as a version of my first option, but I think 4e is far superior.

 

[Mirtek]

Does Kossuth have clerics? Worshippers? From that entry, we can't tell. He is certainly less interesting as a character than Imix is! To the best of my knowledge, the working up of Kossuth as a god in the more typical sense is a 2nd ed/FR thing. That impression is reinforced by this webpage: Canon:Kossuth - Dungeons and Dragons Wiki

But we are clearly told in subsequent supplements like Faith & Avatar (FR), On Hallowed Ground (PS) and The Inner Planes (PS)

 

[Maxperson]

I don't think what people make up for themselves can count as canon, can it, more-or-less by definition?

I agree with that. Canon is official. What we make up is not.

But putting that to one side, here is the redundancy: the cleric of Asmodeus in the 2nd ed AD&D scenario To Slay A Hierarch (which comes with the City of GH boxed set) and the "infernal cultists" in the 3E module Speaker in Dreams, who are described as "diabolic" but are said to worship Hextor, play exactly the same role in the fiction.

That's not redundancy. That's overlap. Hextor is a god of war. Asmodeus is not. There is no redundancy between them. However, both are LE and will have some similarities because of that, so there will be a bit of overlap. That those clerics in those bits of fiction play the same role speaks to the limited capacity of the modules. Their actual roles differ.

The role played in the fiction by Lareth the Beautiful (in module T1) does not change one iota whether Lolth is thought of as a Demon Queen, a "lesser god", or both.

Tiamat can be presented as a super-powerful dragon who lives on the first level of the Nine Hells (AD&D MM; 3E MotP) who "spawns" evil dragonkind (AD&D MM) or is "revered" by them (3E MotP); or can be presented as a god (AD&D DDG; 3E DDG) and it doesn't change her role in the fiction. It doesn't make it easier or harder for any individual D&D player to place a cleric of Tiamat in a scenario.

These being are all supernatural entities of great power. They are at the core of cosmological struggles. In the context of D&D play, they serve as opposition for high-level PCs. They have cultists.

Not all cultists are the same. A cultist of Tiamat will have different goals than a cultist of Lolth.

 

[pemerton]

But we are clearly told in subsequent supplements like Faith & Avatar (FR), On Hallowed Ground (PS) and The Inner Planes (PS)

I don't own any of that material, and I've never read it. It doesn't change what is written - or not written - in the MotP.

For someone like me, who in the latter part of the 1980s owns the A&D hardbacks and a dozen or so Dragon Magazines, who is more compelling as a figure to be worshipped by appropriate NPCs: Orcus, or Kossoth? I know what my answer was!

Where in the texts would I find the least suggestion that Orcus is not able to have cults, grant spells etc but Kossoth is? Nowhere.

It's always possible to write later stuff that attempts to impose order and consistency on earlier material. That doesn't change what was said in the earlier material, though. And while it might create a consistent idea, it doesn't mean that everyone's ideas are consistent.

Which goes back to my core assertion in this thread: over the lifetime of D&D, when one reads the published works, there has been no consistent contrast drawn between evil gods and entities such as Orcus, Tiamat in her AD&D MM/3E MotP version, etc.

That's not redundancy. That's overlap. Hextor is a god of war. Asmodeus is not. There is no redundancy between them. However, both are LE and will have some similarities because of that, so there will be a bit of overlap. That those clerics in those bits of fiction play the same role speaks to the limited capacity of the modules. Their actual roles differ.

The redundancy is in respect of their position, in the fiction, as gods and cults - ie nothing turns on any supposed difference between Hextor being a god and Asmodeus being an archdevil. We could choose for Hextor to be a devil and Asmodeus to be a god and nothing in those scenarios would need to change. (And indeed, in those two scenarios, we could swap the two beings and nothing would need to change either.)

Not all cultists are the same. A cultist of Tiamat will have different goals than a cultist of Lolth.

Tiamat and Lolth are, indeed, a bit more different than Hextor and Asmodeus. But my point is that nothing turns on whether they are fiends, gods, unique lords of dragonkind, or whatever other label one wishes to attach to them.

Which I think puts me in agreement with @Chaosmancer, and the OP, and maybe @Faolyn (? I'm not sure about that last one, as Faolyn seems to have agreed with Chaosmancer about functional overlap/redundancy but still seems to be disagreeing about stuff that I'm not sure I fully follow).

 

[Rob Kuntz]

They better hope not. Old Mother Hubbard would rip them a new one.

Of course they should be wary of her +5 frying pan and other repurposed Culinary Artifacts! But at least her range is not daunting, being consonant with the dimensions of her kitchen...

 

[Chaosmancer]

Let's unpack this a bit.

"All settings are homebrew." With the possible exceptions of the recent M:tG-based settings, this is universally either true now or has been at some point in the past.

"We can't discuss them." Sure we can; and I disagree with those who might be saying or implying we can't.

"The Realms are the baseline..." Obviously the system authors need to have an example setting of some sort to show how everything ties together, and that's fine; but I don't necessarily see that setting as the baseline. Rather, FR is one setting that happens to include a bunch of factors either universal to all settings or easily made so.

I also fully subscribe to the theory (and by random chance it seems Planescape agrees with me - yay!) that all Prime Material settings ever created exist on the same Prime Material plane and in the same universe; that looking up at the night sky from somewhere on Greyhawk you might see the star around which orbits Toril, while in a different part of the sky you might see the galaxy somewhere within which the world of Eberron orbits around its star, and so on.

While this is a well-thought out post, I'm not sure why you are breaking down my statement like this. You seem to agree with my perception that restricting our discussion to only "core" DnD and not discussing settings is misplaced, and you also seem to agree that having the realms as the baseline, while saying the core is setting agnostic is a bit weird.

Ownership of the IP has nothing to do with it. TSR/WotC can drag in stuff from the public domain and make it core just by putting it in a rulebook, and have done so many times particularly in the early days.

For example, the Norse and Egyptian etc. pantheons (public-domain material all the way) were officially written up and published by the game's producers back in the 1e days and thus were then established as part of the game's core lore.

Okay, let me ask you this. What do we know about the Egyptian Pantheon in DnD that makes it in anyway different than just taking a list of Egyptian Gods from a Middle School History text book and putting them in the game?

Marvel took Thor, Loki, Odin and others and made them a core part of their IP, but they also changed them and you can discuss the Marvel versions without once having to reference the source material. Many other IPs that use these things pre-suppose that they take place in our world and that those historical facts are real.

DnD does neither of these things. It is just a list of names maybe a reference to mummies, and that's it. Norse and Celtic are just name lists. They aren't "core" to DnD, they exist as an option because sometimes people want to make fantasy Not!Egypt et all and listing out names isn't hard.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This is wrong. We can discuss sorcerer-king dragons from Athas, because those are actually tied to a setting. We can discuss the blood magic from Birthright, because that is actually tied to a setting. We can discuss the Time of Troubles, because that is actually tied to a setting.

There are lots of things that are actually tied to settings. The 5e core is not.

Then Helldritch wanting to shut down discussion of anything that isn't core DnD, like the example I used involving Orcus and Kelemvor was inappropriate, because we can disucss those things. But he claimed "that's homebrew, we shouldn't take about it"

There are differences between gods and archfiends as well.

No, there aren't. We've been discussing this for nearly 500 posts. We have found evidence that Archfiends grant clerical spells, up to and including 7th level and higher. We have them answering prayers. We have them served by clerics. We have them just as powerful as various gods. We have them creating new species. These are all the things we have been told only gods can do.

Across the editions we have found rules for both sides, which indicates strongly that the text of the whole of DnD that this distinction does not have a solid foundation. It has been contradicted and proven false time and time again. @pemerton has done an amazing job citing multiple sources, that I notice you have largely ignored.

There is no discernible difference, unless you stick to only certain passages, instead of looking at the whole. And, obviously, if you select only certain portions of the game and its history to follow, you can make any position seem irrefutable.

You haven't actually demonstrated any sort of redundancy.

Yes we have. Repeatedly.

And here is the thing Max, I think you are making the same mistake that Faolyn has been making. You assume I have some purpose beyond this. You assume I'm going to take an admission of redundancy to advocate for removing something from the game. Or for changing something in the game.

I'm not. I don't care if you want to say "in my game they aren't redundant because Archfiends are clearly weaker" or "in my game I keep both because I find it more interesting" or anything else. I'm not advocating for abolishing clerics. I'm not advocating for destroying warlocks. None of it.

All I am doing is showing that in the history of DnD, taken as a whole, and across editions, Archfiends and Evil Gods have been practically identical. There has not been a consistent distinction made, and narratively they fill the same roles. That's it.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This is a bit disingenuous. Orcus did not start out as mortal in the same way Kelemvor did. He died and became a larva like all evil people who end up in the Abyss. Then he climbed the ranks as a demon. Then he gained followers. He did not start as a mortal who got followers and then used that power to become a demon lord like your post implies with the comparison to Kelemvor.

Well, you were reading into it an implication. So maybe you shouldn't do that. Because, Kelemvor ALSO didn't get followers and use that power to become a god, therefore, I wasn't implying that was the case for either.

Also, it is interesting that we want to say that Orcus being a mortal first because he became a larva and then a demon is somehow notable, if that is how all Demons are made. Additionally, you are implying he kept his personality, which is not normal for larva.

So, your assumptions about my post seem to have caused issues that were not in the original post, by bringing in a factor I never brought in. Followers were not part of the example for a reason.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

Aside: It has always interested me, and sometimes left me wondrous, while observing an unrelenting cross-bombardment of words that essentially end, almost every time, at détente.

 

[Maxperson]

The redundancy is in respect of their position, in the fiction, as gods and cults - ie nothing turns on any supposed difference between Hextor being a god and Asmodeus being an archdevil. We could choose for Hextor to be a devil and Asmodeus to be a god and nothing in those scenarios would need to change. (And indeed, in those two scenarios, we could swap the two beings and nothing would need to change either.)

The problem with that is that you are looking at a very small snippet of fiction. In a setting the fiction is very different between the two. So you can interchange them in the snippet. That doesn't mean that they are redundant in the setting in which those snippets take place. As two very different beings that snapshot you are using not only doesn't really tell you anything about them, it is deceiving you since to you they appear to be the same, but aren't.