The 'Wonderland'-Inspired Faces of the RAGE OF DEMONS

Take a peek at some of the art from D&D's upcoming Rage of Demons storyline. This art is by Richard Whitters, who is the art director for D&D and used to work as a concept artist for Magic: the Gathering. WotC's Chris Perkins has indicated that one of the influences on Rage of Demons was Alice in Wonderland, and I think the influence is clear when you look at the characters below.

OUGALOP, kuo-toa cave cricket catcher extraordinaire.

YUK YUK and SPIDERBAIT, goblin adrenaline junkies.

THE SOCIETY OF BRILLIANCE, the Mensa of the Underdark.

GLABBAGOOL, awakened gelatinous cube.

RUMPADUMP and STOOL, myconid followers.

PRINCE DERENDIL, a quaggoth who thinks he's elven royalty.

TOPSY and TURVY, svirfneblin wererat siblings.

THE PUDDING KING, svirfneblin devotee (i.e., flunky) of Juiblex the Faceless Lord.

D&D's "Legion of Doom." What a wonderful bunch of malcontents.
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[Trickster Spirit]

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[Shasarak]

But why would you cast any of those on yourself and then detect your own alignment?

Because you are CN?

 

[pemerton]

Alternately, you could be claiming that the contentious part is "without regarding that as inherently admirable or undesirable,"

Correct. Generous is a term of commendation. To commend something without regarding it as admirable is not an easy thing to do.

"He made a generous donation to our cause": clearly admirable.
"She is certainly generous with her affections, the trollop.": clearly undesirable.
"Be careful with your generosity, my love, lest we go hungry on account of it.": more ambiguous.

These examples are a little hard to engage with, consistent with board rules. That said:

The second example is probably ironic - it's analogous to Satan saying "Evil, be thou my good".

The third example concerns a weighing of goods. Generosity doesn't cease to be a good when someone is overly generous - the issue is that the person is neglecting other goods - in your example, providing for those to whom duties of support are owed.

Notice that nothing in your example precludes the 1st and 3rd examples being descriptions of exactly the same act!

All three express generosity as a liberality or willingness to give, but have very different judgements on whether that liberality or willingness to give called generosity is admirable, undesirable, or somewhere a little in between.

Putting the ironic case to one side - in general, if something is a virtue, and hence admirable (in this case, generosity) it doesn't follow that every manifestation of the virtue in action is a good thing. Both real life and literature are replete with examples where virtue leads to trouble due to naive enthusiasm.

That doesn't mean that the virtue ceases to be one.

The force of good in PS doesn't exist outside of the consensus deeming something to be good and ascribing to it that force, so there can be no other source of Bahamut's goodness as determined by alignment spells and talismans and whatnot.

As far as I can see, Bahamut's goodness here doesn't denote any actual property of his (eg his propensity to generosity, to humility, to righting wrongs, etc). That is to say, this instance of the phrase Bahamut's goodness has no deep resemblance to the phrase Percival's goodness (used to explain why he succeeded in the Grail quest) or The goodness of the person who donated a kidney to a stranger, used to refer to a person's generosity and willingness to aid a stranger.

It simply refers to a game-construct that governs the operation of a relatively small handful of magical effects that are in the game as legacy consequences of a different conception of alignment.

I don't see the point.

Suppose that (for whatever reason) a majority of the NPCs in PS decide that Demogorogn is "good" and Bahamut "evil", and so the polarity of all those magical effects is reversed. But Bahamut is still noble and generous, and Demogorgon still a vicious brute. Why would that be important?

In this example, you're not being delusional by denying your goodness, you're asserting that the consensus view of "good" - what powers the talisman - is not what it should be, if it includes you. Because words have multiple meanings, and you're out to change what "good" means.

If the word "good", by social consensus, denotes X; then what reason can I have for saying that it should denote Y.

Consider a real world example. Tree, in English, denotes trees. Refrigerator denotes fridges. Someone who though that trees should be called fridges, and that fridges should be called trees, would be pretty weird. What possible reason could s/he have? Suppose, via mass mail-outs, or mind control, or whatever, this person actually succeeds, so now English speakers call fridges trees and trees fridges. What meaningful thing about the world has changed?

 

[pemerton]

And that just brings me back to my confusion over what LN actually means. If it creates misery, then in Mechanus LN is the "chump" alignment, for people who just do what they're told even if it makes them unhappy and doesn't appear to make anyone else happy except their leader. That means Primus is really LE for not caring that His subjects are miserable

<snip>

you can't have any LN leaders, people who are champions of their alignments, because anyone who tries to make people adopt the alignment of slaves, robots, and (worst of all??) bureaucrats who isn't doing it in service to some greater power is just taking advantage of them, or at the very least taking away their freedom in exchange for nothing, and that would make them lawful evil, not neutral.

<snip>

I guess I'm saying that the Lawful Neutral alignment is a pyramid scheme created by Lawful Evil creatures?

I can see the argument, and I think that would be an interesting thing to explore in a game. (Think of a game where we try to find out whether Kafka or Orwell was right about totalitarian bureaucracy.)

But I don't think the analysis you put forward is inevitable. (If it was, then there would be no game to play, because we'd already know that Orwell was right.)

Evil (as defined by Gygax) is about pursing self-interest with disregard for the well-being of others.

But in your scenario, the chief bureaucrat need not be pursuing self-interest. If s/he is a genuine order fetishist, then s/he is pursuing something external to him/her, which s/he accepts as a limit to his/her will, and hence is not evil. It's just that the thing s/he's pursuing is not wellbeing - it's social organisation per se. So s/he's making people miserable, but not because s/he's evil.

(For an example, in literature, of someone who makes people miserable but at least arguably isn't evil in Gygax's sense, consider Pyle in The Quiet American.)

I think that, if Alignment is used at the gaming table, then the DM and players accept the premise of Good/Evil/Law/Chaos as universal truths.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "universal truths".

I think that the table has to accept that LG describes a person who thinks that order promotes wellbeing; that CG describes a person who thinks that freedom promotes wellbeing; that LE people create exploitative hierarchies through which they can exercise power; that CE people are immoral self-aggrandizers; etc.

But I don't think the table has to accept that LG and CG people are all true in their beliefs. That is what leads to incoherence, because to be LG means to deny that CG beliefs are true (and vice versa), which means that if the gameworld begins from the premise that both LG and CG beliefs are true, it has a contradiction built in on the ground floor.

As long as you don't build that contradiction into your game, I think alignment is, while not perfect (because Law and Chaos are not very well-defined and the notion of Good covers a range of potentially conflicting theories of wellbeing), serviceable enough.

To give another example (this time hypothetical rather than from actual play): dwarves are LG, meaning that they pursue wellbeing through social order; elves are CG, meaning that they pursue wellbeing through self-realisation. It would be interesting to play a game in which these rival political and social conceptions are put to the test - whose social structure really conduces to wellbeing?

But if the game stipulates from the outset that both social orders do so - that dwarves flourish under orderly conditions, and elves flourish under conditions of flighty freedom - then there is no alignment disagreement. The difference between the social structures would have no more significance than the fact that schools in Australia make the children wear hats when the play outside, but schools in Scotland (I imagine) do not.

 

[pemerton]

Evil cares nothing for well being

Evil people care nothing for the wellbeing of others. They certainly care about their own wellbeing, though! They care about it so much that they are prepared to do anything to achieve it, even if that means running roughshod over the wellbeing of others.

Why is this incoherent since we are not stating that either has been proven to be 100% true... all we are stating is that the possibility exists that social order can maximise human well being and that the posibility exists that the best route to well being can be self-realisation largely free of social constraint

In that case, there is no interesting conflict between LG and CG, and in fact NG has turned out to be the correct account of how to maximise wellbeing!

Gygax states in the 1e DMG... "However, the "outer planes" show various alignments. This is because they are home to creatures who are of like general alignment."

But this doesn't entail that the outer planes manifest the truth of their alignments. For instance, this tells us that people in Olympus believe that the path to good is freedom. It doesn't tell us that they are correct.

I don't know what Gygax pesonally believed about these matters in play, but his framework as he writes it, it is possible to have a game in which a paladin goes to Olympus and explains to Zeus that in fact the lack of social order in Olympus is making everyone miserable (eg they keep getting into pointless arguments because there are no rules to settle when it is or isn't OK for Zeus to sleep with cows, for queens to compare their beauty and skill to the various godesses, etc). And for Zeus to then say, "Yep, you're right, we were wrong all along. Please help us right a sensible set of social rules that we can implement."

In the campaign, the paladin (and his/her players) would have vindicated the truth of LG by showing the Olympians that social order actually makes life better. (It would be roughly the opposite of the campaign I described upthread, where the PCs had to depart from the rules laid down by heaven in order to bring an end to human misery. In Gygaxian terms, that was a campaign in which CG (or perhaps NG) was shown to be true and strict LG false.)

 

[Hussar]

The point is that you can never be sure whether you are or are not operating under the Misdirection spell cast by someone else when you cast detect "whatever" on yourself... and thus it is not infallible.

Sorry, but, while Misdirection would affect a "Detect Evil", it has no effect on Know Alignment, since it only affects spells that detect auras. ... That being said, isn't there a Know Alignment spell in 3e? I just checked the SRD, and couldn't find one. Was it removed since 2e? Jeez, learn something new every day.

But, also, since spells like Misdirection only affect detection spells, there are easy ways around that. Place Evil Bane on the crown (after all, who wants an evil king) and every day the king puts his crown on. If his head doesn't melt, then he's still good. An Evil Bane Pin, prick the finger of the king and know for sure. Heck, Glyph of Warding can be set to Good alignment triggers. If the king puts on the crown, and his head explodes, guess he wasn't good anymore, and I hope the king's days are short since Non-detection doesn't last that long.

IOW, for everything you could try to make the test fallible, there are a dozen ways to get around it.

But, again, this is really not my point.

----------

Caveat: The following is purely my own opinion and ONLY APPLIES to me, Hussar. It is not meant to apply to anyone else. Only me. I hope this makes it perfectly clear that I am only speaking for myself and not any greater or broader truth. All that lies after this point is solely the opinion of Hussar

((I hate that I have to put that caveat on there, but, sheesh, I've been accused like three times so far of trying to claim badwrongfun when that is not my point.))

For me, D&D is a game of Heroic Fantasy. It says so right on the tin. And D&D does this extremely well. If I want to do Conan, or Tolkien, or Cook's Black Company, D&D would be my go to game. OTOH, there are things that I don't feel D&D does really well. If I wanted to run a court intrigue game, for example, I would not use D&D. Say the PC wants to influence the court in order to pressure the king to do X. D&D's skill system is too simplistic for my purposes, and the magic system is too pervasive. Trying to abstract D&D's skill system across several weeks of effort just doesn't work for me. 4e comes close with its skill challenge system, but, again, that's really clunky compared to other games out there. For another example, if I wanted to do Call of Cthulu, with its descent into madness and PC's that will inevitably always fail and fall (hopefully in spectacularly interesting ways) I would not use D&D. The trajectory of a D&D character is opposite to what I want to happen to a Call of Cthulu character. CoC characters don't get more powerful as they progress, they get weaker and usually a lot deader.

Which rolls me back to Planescape. The idea of using an RPG to explore morality is an interesting one to me. I did it a couple of years back using another system called Sufficiently Advanced. I think it succeeded. Although it did get a bit silly at the end with the PC's saving the galaxy through the use of a very stretchy invisible whale scrotum. Sigh. So much for serious toned gaming. But, again, Sufficiently Advanced, for me, is a much better system for something like this. Using the above example of someone convincing a group of people to change their beliefs and thus causing the area to shift to another plane, would be, again IMO, better handled by a skill resolution system that can scale between minutes, hours, days, months and even years. There are games out there that do have systems that can do this.

Am I saying that you cannot do it in D&D? No, of course not. Obviously that's not true since lots of people like Planescape and it does what they want it to do. For me, it doesn't. I would be fighting the system every step of the way, either as a player or a DM. To me, D&D doesn't come with that particular toolset. There are other games that do. As I've stated already, I would be interested in the Planescape setting if it was ported into another system that wasn't designed for heroic fantasy.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I repeatedly stated that this was all for me. I was in no way trying to claim that this isn't D&D. It's just that I would never use D&D for this. Again, 100% for me, D&D is a terrible fit for this type of gaming.

I guess I don't understand why you would use D&D to play in a game without hobbits (for instance), but not in a game with consensus alignment. I don't understand why the latter is DEFINING of D&D to you to the extent that if you want to do that you are better off not doing D&D and the former is more open to being done in D&D.

I mean, you can decide whatever's out or in of D&D for you and I'm not really disputing it, I just can't see the logic in there myself (and maybe I don't have to!).

 

[Beleriphon]

Which rolls me back to Planescape. The idea of using an RPG to explore morality is an interesting one to me. I did it a couple of years back using another system called Sufficiently Advanced. I think it succeeded. Although it did get a bit silly at the end with the PC's saving the galaxy through the use of a very stretchy invisible whale scrotum. Sigh. So much for serious toned gaming. But, again, Sufficiently Advanced, for me, is a much better system for something like this. Using the above example of someone convincing a group of people to change their beliefs and thus causing the area to shift to another plane, would be, again IMO, better handled by a skill resolution system that can scale between minutes, hours, days, months and even years. There are games out there that do have systems that can do this.

Am I saying that you cannot do it in D&D? No, of course not. Obviously that's not true since lots of people like Planescape and it does what they want it to do. For me, it doesn't. I would be fighting the system every step of the way, either as a player or a DM. To me, D&D doesn't come with that particular toolset. There are other games that do. As I've stated already, I would be interested in the Planescape setting if it was ported into another system that wasn't designed for heroic fantasy.

I'd actually argue that Planescape isn't about morality, or even the fight between Good and Evil. Its about Belief. That's the whole point of the Factions, they Believe in something. The Dustmen genuinely believe that death isn't True Death, and that only through denial of emtion and want can one achieve True Death and escape the Turning of the Wheel. The Fated are the ultimate social darwinists, to the point that their leader honestly believed that he could take Sigil from the Lady of Pain.

The Harmonium caused and entire layer Arborea to shift to Mechanus through belief (not that they meant to). Planescape isn't about morality or ethics. Its about belief at both the smallest and grandest scales. No where else in D&D can you believe a person into being by getting enough people to believe in them. I'm not even sure most of the things that Planescape are about actually require a skill system, it does require willing players, and a DM that is looking to explore those kinds of events. Most of the stuff Planescape is about is really about the players exploring the world, rather than the characters.

 

[Hussar]

I guess I don't understand why you would use D&D to play in a game without hobbits (for instance), but not in a game with consensus alignment. I don't understand why the latter is DEFINING of D&D to you to the extent that if you want to do that you are better off not doing D&D and the former is more open to being done in D&D.

I mean, you can decide whatever's out or in of D&D for you and I'm not really disputing it, I just can't see the logic in there myself (and maybe I don't have to!).

To me consensus alignment makes no sense. I mean heck, you gave an example where the beliefs of a group shifts a part of one realm into another. But that's not consensus alignment. They were wrong. If they were right then why did they get booted to another plane? If they were right, shouldn't they have been able to stay?

You can't have objective consensus. To me alignment is objective. It doesn't work if it's not. I loathed the old 2e take on alignment that tried to be relative but never actually did it.

For me, Planescape pretty much hit everything wrong with 2e. Playing without Hobbits? That's easy. But tring to have a game about morality where the game itself predefined that morality is pointless.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Putting the ironic case to one side - in general, if something is a virtue, and hence admirable (in this case, generosity) it doesn't follow that every manifestation of the virtue in action is a good thing. Both real life and literature are replete with examples where virtue leads to trouble due to naive enthusiasm.

If it is not a good thing in a particular instance then how can it be said to be a virtue? If there are instances when it is not a good thing, then only by ignoring those instances can we say that it is a virtue. It clearly isn't at all times a virtue.

This seems so nakedly obvious to me in the common use of language and value judgments that I'm having a hard time believing you truly don't understand this.

As far as I can see, Bahamut's goodness here doesn't denote any actual property of his (eg his propensity to generosity, to humility, to righting wrongs, etc).
...
It simply refers to a game-construct that governs the operation of a relatively small handful of magical effects that are in the game as legacy consequences of a different conception of alignment.

That's fairly true in PS - Bahamut's goodness is a property of what people believe to be true about him, not a quality of his that exists without others there to place it upon him.

Suppose that (for whatever reason) a majority of the NPCs in PS decide that Demogorogn is "good" and Bahamut "evil", and so the polarity of all those magical effects is reversed. But Bahamut is still noble and generous, and Demogorgon still a vicious brute. Why would that be important?

It probably wouldn't be. I'd question why a character in PS would want to flip those definitions, aside from semantics.

If the word "good", by social consensus, denotes X; then what reason can I have for saying that it should denote Y.

This might be a more nuanced position. One might believe that "good" should be compatible, say, coercive mind control in the interests of social unity, because one believes that this goal is consistent with one's conscience (others are suffering without our society!), with one's duty to society (those who can't participate participate in it should be convinced to participate in it!) or with helping others according to their needs (those people aren't better off without our civilization...this is for their own good) - that the angels and the archons should support coercive mind control just as they support charity and self-sacrifice and all the other things people ascribe to "good."

If that then becomes the case that the consensus believes coercive mind control to be "good," you will dramatically change the planes (at least drawing many of the Lawful planes into some of the Lawful Good planes, probably!), and coercive mind control will be another instrument in the tools of the angels and societies will likely become more peaceful and orderly and such. The exact ramifications are open to individual table interpretation.

Consider a real world example. Tree, in English, denotes trees. Refrigerator denotes fridges. Someone who though that trees should be called fridges, and that fridges should be called trees, would be pretty weird. What possible reason could s/he have? Suppose, via mass mail-outs, or mind control, or whatever, this person actually succeeds, so now English speakers call fridges trees and trees fridges. What meaningful thing about the world has changed?

It would in large part depend upon this person's reason for being pretty weird like that. At the very least, people would have a deeper understanding of the arbitrariness of language and the power of one person to influence it.

But this also seems like theorycraft - there's no explanation for why someone would believe that these words should mean different things. Given a strong enough motivation, maybe there would be other effects, but that would depend on the core element of a PS character that you've left out here - their belief in why this should be.