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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hellcow" data-source="post: 1637272" data-attributes="member: 15800">I've actually addressed this in great detail in another post, but I can't seem to track it down. For shorter views, you can check out:<a href="http://www.coveworld.net/eberron/rules.html#alignment" target="_blank">http://www.coveworld.net/eberron/rules.html#alignment</a>and<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=92370" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=92370</a>The quick point, though: Eberron encompasses both pulp and noir themes. In pulp, good and evil usually are black and white: Indiana Jones doesn't have to say "I wonder if theose Nazis are really such bad guys." In Noir, you may know that someone's a bad guy, but what are you going to do about it? In the Maltese Falcon, the best you get away with is neutral; there are no good guys. The point to this is that alignment shouldn't give you an absolute to work with. A "good" person may be inclined to be generous and honest. An "evil" person may be selfish and ruthless. But either one can still perform actions that will help or hurt you personally. Just because King Boranel is good does not mean that his decisions will always help you, or that his opponents are necessarily evil; two good people can still have differing opinions about what the greatest good is. In the case of the Silver Flame, the extermination of the lycanthropes including killing many "good" people -- but lycanthropy itself was deemed to be a greater evil, and the sacrifice was made. Detect evil may tell you if someone is trustworthy. But people do not see the quality detected by detect evil as being some sort of demonizing, inhumanizing stain; it's part of human nature, and there are an awful lot of evil people out there. Looking to the organizations, they follow the same spectrum. The Order of the Emerald Claw is intentionally designed to fill the role of obvious villain: these are the people the players know they can feel good about fighting. When you want a black and white conflict, these are the go-to bad guys. Then you have the Lord of Blades, who is ruthless and evil but has a righteous cause and is fighting for his people -- who should at least get warforged PCs questioning their own actions. The Lords of Dust and the Dreaming Dark are about as evil as they come. But they are never going to appear to the players and say "Ha ha! We are EVIL!" They will use subtlety and treachery, seek to trick PCs into doing evil when they think they are doing good. The group itself is black and white -- the shades of grey come in the implementation of their plans. Then there are groups like the Chamber and the Aurum, whose goals may change with each adventure. The Chamber is interested in the secrets of the Prophecy. Sometimes this may be a great good, something the players want to help with. But the very next scheme of the Chamber could require hundreds of innocents to die. The Chamber is not concerned with the morality of their actions, and they may oppose the party as often as they work together; they do what they need to do according to the dictates of the Prophecy. Detect evil is mentioned briefly on page 250 of the book. Alignment in Eberron is what you make of it; the shades of grey element is a matter of you needing to let go of some of the hard-edged ideas about alignment -- judging evil by action as opposed to character alignment. "Good" can do evil and "evil" can do good -- people who rely on detect spells should run into many surprises.</blockquote>

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