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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9858389" data-attributes="member: 18">Depending on the source, though, that's either for essentially "Lawful" reasons in that he was getting above his station and challenging the authority of the gods, or because of the "Doctrine of Balance", which is a very vague and wishy-washy Krynnian concept from the 1980s, one which is rarely mentioned and like all other TN ideas in D&D, never really explained, let alone fully explicated with reasons and conditions.As near as one can get, it seems like the Good/Neutral/Evil gods in Krynn did a sort of detente where they have this "Doctrine of Balance" to prevent them warring etc. (no sign this in any way works, so it's very odd that it's supposedly a thing, they fight constantly through proxies), but that's just tyrannical gods acting in their own best interests, really, isn't it? There's no depth to it and no justification on the basis of "this is needed by the people of Krynn". Further, the very conceit of the Doctrine of Balance seems to be inherently Lawful, which means it isn't really arguable as TN concept.Even people who are insane experts on Krynnian lore can't square the circle on the Doctrine of Balance without inventing tons of stuff that simple hasn't been suggested to be the case (hell even with inventions and additions not in canon, it's pretty shakey): <a href="https://dragonlancenexus.com/meditations-on-the-balance/#:~:text=who%20read%20it.-,Good%2C%20Evil%2C%20and%20Neutrality,valid%20and%20necessary%20for%20Krynn" target="_blank">Meditations on the Balance - Dragonlance Nexus</a>.I would argue that the Old Testament vibes here are merely superficial, underlying a weirder and more D&D-specific concept. Sure, it's a flashy-ass meteor and bazillions of totally innocent people are killed for "reasons" which vibes with a lot of 1700s and later conceptions of, for example, the Biblical Great Flood, but the core reasoning from the gods isn't the same - i.e. everyone is basically bad except for the few chosen people is the Biblical reasoning - indeed it's almost inverted! The Krynnic gods nuke the site from orbit to get rid of one guy who they feel is totally out-of-line, and it's not "the Good gods" alone who do it, either, it's the whole lot of them as far as we can tell - Good, Neutral, Evil together.The gods (or some subset of them, unclear) did also make a single more targeted assassination attempt on the Kingpriest via Lord Soth (who apparently would have been unstoppable if he actually tried to kill the Kingpriest), but that was so fragile and rubbish a plan that three annoying elf ladies taunting Soth (I'm not even exaggerating!) were enough to derail it by causing Soth to go home and murder his wife instead of the Kingpriest - talk about male fragility/toxic masculinity destroying the world!But the gods let this stuff get out of hand for FORTY YEARS without any serious attempt to stop the Kingpriest, and the gods were the CAUSE of the cataclysm, directly, it wasn't an inherent even caused by the balance being out of whack! Indeed, it seems like they launched the meteor basically as soon as the Kingpriest became a problem (because a guy had a vision of it happening less than a month after the Kingpriest said "I'm going to kill all the Evil dudes") and then just sat of their hands for forty years, perfectly happy to see most of the population of Krynn die in horror, perfectly happy to let the few "signs" they sent get misinterpreted. Just real zero effort don't care attitudes from the gods of Krynn.Are these deities or DMV workers?! Maybe they're more like tech support, because their only attempted solution to a very specific problem was turning it off and on again!There was also the hilarious retcon later-on that after the Cataclysm, it wasn't the gods weren't listening/were sulking, it was just that people didn't pray to them, which like, is quite clearly textually untrue in earlier Krynn works, given that people explicitly did, and that some of the gods basically apologise for sulking. But I imagine Hickman/Weis wanted to retcon that because it made the gods look real bad.TLDR: Like the FR, Krynn's "Balance" thing is never properly explained or reasoned or details, it's just sort of mindlessly assumed. Again I trace the fault back to Gygax/Arneson for extending TN to include Good/Evil without providing any actual reasoning for doing so.</blockquote>

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