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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[Rejuvenator]

Second, the Olympians shape their home plane in the sense of determining its geography. But can they make it true that,on Olympus, free self-realisation is a necessary condition of achieving wellbeing?

Yes because Olympus is the utopian incarnation of well-being via free self-realisation. Just like the Seven Heavens is a utopia of well-being via social order. They make it true because there it IS true. And it is true because it's a utopian ideal that many mortals believe in.

Now it you convinced a billion chaotic good mortals to embrace social order, perhaps then Olympus would change: become a pale shadow of itself like American Gods.

Does a paladin come knocking on Heaven's door, demand an audience with the Lord in order to abolish an outdated sin? Or might Heaven be different now because billions of people evolved their Judeo-Christian beliefs over a thousand years?

If they can, then their alignment choice is basically arbitrary (because had they woken up on the LG side of the bed, they could equally have made it true that social order is a necessary condition of achieving wellbeing. There would be nothing actually at stake in the disagreement between LG and CG.

Can someone recall which D&D edition had an Alignment section where for each of the Good entries, it wrote something like "[XG] is the best alignment to have because...". I think it was 2E, not sure. Anyway, IOW, it drew a moral equivalence between LG/NG/CG; they were just different paths to goodness, with different pros and cons. This is how I took it to play traditional D&D as well. Planescape took it farther by staking disagreements between the different paths to goodness and the meaning of life, but I don't find the execution compelling enough to ascribe to that.

To me, the campaign set-up seems to offer more prospect of engaging play if the disagreement between LG and CG over the necessary conditions for human wellbeing is treated as a real one, and actual play then permits this to be settled one way or the other (eg by finding out what, in play, follows from the PCs rebelling against the social order, or alternatively what follows from the PCs imposing social order on those who (at least initially) reject it).

In the prime worlds, well-being is a fluctuating balance of self-realization, social order, and other sometimes overlapping sometimes conflicting ideals. Where individual liberty leads to chaos and discord, the paladin might persuade the king to restore order. When social order is rife with corruption and bureaucracy, the champion might reform the nation-state. This happens plausibly to me at the level of villages, cities, and kingdoms.

The Outer Planes, however, are incarnations of ideals, in classic D&D. You don't convince Zeus that Lawful Good is the way to go to well-being, any more than you convince Satan to stop being the Devil.

 

[pemerton]

Can someone recall which D&D edition had an Alignment section where for each of the Good entries, it wrote something like "[XG] is the best alignment to have because...". I think it was 2E, not sure. Anyway, IOW, it drew a moral equivalence between LG/NG/CG; they were just different paths to goodness, with different pros and cons. This is how I took it to play traditional D&D as well.

That is 3E.

But I've always taken those comments to be spoken from the perspective of an adherent of that outlook. I've not taken it to be the case that they are all true. If you do go that way, then you are correct that LG, NG and CG become morally equivalent. But I don't think that is very interesting - it means there is no conflict between law and chaos, anymore than there is conflict between people who wear shoes and people who wear boots. They just prefer different footwear.

 

[pemerton]

Sauron's evil is obscure, but probably best seen in his servants and how they treat each other. The Orc dialogue is some of the most interesting in the book: they demonstrate values of friendship, courage, loyalty, but also distrust, betrayal and murder. They are held together by fear, not love or any other positive force.

I think it's fairly clear that he is evil and his orcs are nasty.

I just don't really understand his motivations. Except perhaps that he hates the elves and the dunedain - perhaps it's all about revenge.

 

[pemerton]

Every version of X in Planescape might not be able to say, literally, "it's not really good" (because it clearly does gather that alignment-mana and a character can prove this with the right magic), but they can say, literally "we should not regard this as good" (as in: it should not gather that alignment-mana, it should gather some other or none in particular), and by that mean largely the same thing as someone in the real world who says "it's not really good."

But what reason can they point to for saying that "We should not regard this as good"?

The reason that biologists gives us for not regarding whales as fish is that they are not fish (they are physiologically mammals - have lungs, don't lay eggs, etc - and are descended from mammalian land animals).

When I engage in political argument, the reason I tell people that they shouldn't regard so-and-so as good, or shouldn't regard such-and-such policy as bad, is because so-and-so isn't good (and here are some reasons . . .), or that such-and-such policy isn't bad (and here are some reasons . . .)

Should is a verb that is begging for reasons. But what reasons can the person in Planescape bring to bear, given that the evaluative vocabulary that would normally be used to provide the reasons has already had its reference determined by consensus?

 

[Hriston]

It's all a bit obscure, because Mordor is presented as a barren wasteland, but one gathers there are farms SE in Nurn. But did the Southrons and Easterlings not have functioning economies before they came to serve Sauron? My general impression is that they did, but the details are sparse.

Their war-making capabilities seem to imply a robust economy, but this is long after they have taken on the yoke of evil. My understanding is that most of the peoples of ME had worshipped Sauron and/or Morgoth for thousands of years before the events of LR, so I doubt if any them would remember what kind of economy they had before that time. I think we can assume varying states of development throughout the world at the time of the War of the Ring. Gondor, on the other hand, seems to be somewhat underdeveloped and depopulated, thus the bringing in of the alien Horse-lords to secure the northern border. Perhaps one of Sauron's goals would have been to develop and increase the productivity of the lands of Gondor by increasing the population with settlers from the south and east, to which, I assume, he promised dominion.

We agree that the LotR doesn't reveal much about Sauron. It does make it fairly clear that he is in some sense modernist or "reforming" in his aspirations, but it is somewhat left as an exercise for the reader to understand why that would make him evil.

It wouldn't necessarily make one evil, but Sauron becomes evil because he uses the exercise of raw power as the most expedient means of realizing his reformist goals. Contrast this with the prohibition under which Gandalf operates against using his power. In Tolkien's book, power is reserved for the Valar.

The same issue doesn't arise for Aragorn, because the whole book is steeped in romantic notions of kingship - it is a fairy story, after all - and as long as Aragorn evokes those tropes, which he amply does, the reader can understand what it is that he promises.

Right, and yet we do see Aragorn struggling with the temptation to use the power of the ring, leading him to separate himself from the Quest of the Ringbearer. Boromir is like Aragorn's shadow in this, in that he gives in to temptation and falls at the same moment in which Aragorn makes his decision to leave, or split, the company. His path is to exercise temporal power as a mortal king, but to exercise such power as the ring would give him would transform him into a second dark lord. The same is true for Galadriel, another who would rule and order things to her will. Even Gandalf seems to find it difficult to reject the ring, and yet he does so knowing that although it may be the most expedient path to winning the war, the power of the ring is ultimately the power to dominate the will of other beings, and to use it is to turn one's back on what is good.

 

[I'm A Banana]

But what reason can they point to for saying that "We should not regard this as good"?

In short, their own internal value-judgements and estimations. Since what actually acquires the "Good"-mana is open to opinion anyway, their judgements are as worthy as the consensus. The more they get people to think like them, the more the consensus shifts to model their version of what their ideal world is, the more the planes rearrange themselves to be what they believe they should be.

Should is a verb that is begging for reasons. But what reasons can the person in Planescape bring to bear, given that the evaluative vocabulary that would normally be used to provide the reasons has already had its reference determined by consensus?

The reasons are particular and individual. The consensus is formed out of uncountable multitudes of particular and individual beliefs. As a PS character, you likely have reason to dispute this consensus that is particular and individual, and seek to change the beliefs of those uncountable multitudes to match your own.

For instance, a child on the streets of Sigil might grow up in the shadow of a serial murderer whose damaged mind results in a crime spree that terrifies this child's neighborhood. The murderer is eventually killed in the street by a band of enforcers. This seminal moment in the child's life becomes something they return to, to try and understand over and over again - why did this happen? How can it be prevented? You learn of the Harmonium and their efforts to correct the thoughts of damaged minds, to rehabilitate the mentally defective into functioning members of society. You understand that this would have prevented that serial murderer from terrifying the neighborhood, if he was just noticed early enough and given this treatment. Not only this murderer, but others, in the future, may be prevented by this. You join the Harmonium to advance this work, which you see as something unquestionably worthy of Good-mana, an act of compassion and a protection of innocents not unlike what the Archons and Guardinals are known for. So it surprises you to learn that the consensus disagrees - that this program has caused a layer of Arcadia to lose that Good-mana, because of the consensus that robbing someone of free will is not worthy of that Good-mana.

Thus, you set out to change that opinion, so that your view becomes the consensus. You fight demon cults who delight in madness. You convince reluctant eladrin who see this as eroding individual conscience that this is for when that conscience goes awry. You weed out the devils and the power-mad seeking to use the mind control for selfish ends from your own organization. Guardinals begin taking up the same techniques. Slowly, the view of coercive mind control begins to match what you believe it should be - as a tool for the betterment of all. Consensus shifts, the layer is restored to Arcadia (heck, maybe Celestia gains a few new layers!), angels being to use your tools to heal the mentally ill, fewer children suffer your childhood fate of being terrorized by madness, social order increases, and you are shown to be correct (because people believe you to be so).

Your reason for believing this is your own reason, personal to you. Because the consensus forms the idea of what is Good-aligned and what isn't, your desire to change that consensus needs no reasoning beyond your personal push. Much as happens in the real world, individuals decide for themselves, based on their culture, context, and experiences, what the world they're in should look like. In PS, as a PC, you then go out and shape the world to be that.