How to impress your goddess? - Lawful Evil

[EdenNotRaven]

Dear Everyone!
I'm playing on a fantastic campaign called "The Organization".
I play as Human, Half-Red Dragon, who got Paladin of Tyranny LV 6, and Blackguard LV 3, of Tiamat.
I'm a Lawful Evil character who likes to go after his goddess and try to be like her, Tiamat.
In the last session, I stole from one of my party members. I stole 5 gold from him.
Because of that, I got 100 bonus EXP.
Now, I want to do other stuff that can make Tiamat see me more as her favored Paladin / Blackguard.
I'm out of ideas,
I want to hear from you guys, what do you think I should do to impress Tiamat, as her believer.
I have so many goals, but this is for later.
I want little things like what I did.

Thank you everyone!
Best Regards,
Eden

[Inevitability]

Have you considered investing in local infrastructure? Buy struggling businesses, send a portion of your adventuring wealth to get them up and running again, buy out or sabotage their competition, keep accumulating capital and infrastructure while reducing the power of rivals, then start increasing prizes as you monopolize the market. You're a half-dragon, it shouldn't be hard for a few of your competitors to 'mysteriously' burn down after they refuse to sell to you.

("Well obviously nobody is going to try and burn down a building that has a half-dragon guarding it" works well enough if you need plausible deniability for why your own possessions are being spared the arson campaign)

[EdenNotRaven]

Have you considered investing in local infrastructure? Buy struggling businesses, send a portion of your adventuring wealth to get them up and running again, buy out or sabotage their competition, keep accumulating capital and infrastructure while reducing the power of rivals, then start increasing prizes as you monopolize the market. You're a half-dragon, it shouldn't be hard for a few of your competitors to 'mysteriously' burn down after they refuse to sell to you.

("Well obviously nobody is going to try and burn down a building that has a half-dragon guarding it" works well enough if you need plausible deniability for why your own possessions are being spared the arson campaign)

This is an interesting way... But I'm in the middle of the desert...
Anything else? Lol

[Inevitability]

This is an interesting way... But I'm in the middle of the desert...
Anything else? Lol

Find a blue dragon and toady to them? Alternatively, find some desert kobolds and make them toady to you!

(tiamat is a bit of a one-note deity, in my opinion)

[EdenNotRaven]

Find a blue dragon and toady to them? Alternatively, find some desert kobolds and make them toady to you!

(tiamat is a bit of a one-note deity, in my opinion)

What do you mean by "one-note deity"?

[Inevitability]

What do you mean by "one-note deity"?

Tiamat has one thing she's really about 'Evil dragons tyrannizing and exploiting everyone else' and very little other than that. She's the evil dragon goddess, doing evil dragon stuff, and it's really hard to come up with thematically resonant acts that don't tie back to evil dragons in some way. Most gods can be approached from a lot more sides.

[EdenNotRaven]

Tiamat has one thing she's really about 'Evil dragons tyrannizing and exploiting everyone else' and very little other than that. She's the evil dragon goddess, doing evil dragon stuff, and it's really hard to come up with thematically resonant acts that don't tie back to evil dragons in some way. Most gods can be approached from a lot more sides.

I see, but as her Paladin, what should I do to impress her?
The first idea, I will try to do when I get into a normal city.

[Inevitability]

I see, but as her Paladin, what should I do to impress her?

Accumulate wealth, intimidate and rule over those weaker than you, serve evil dragons if you can find any, raise dragon wyrmlings with proper god-honoring LE values, smite paladins of bahamut.

Like, you're in a desert, what is there even to interact with? What is your party trying to do here? Who or what are nearby, or what do you expect to encounter on your future travels?

[MonochromeTiger]

I see, but as her Paladin, what should I do to impress her?

Well, really that does come down to how your DM interprets her. As Inevitability mentions she's fairly one note, most of her personality and goals can be summarized as "Evil Dragoness, hates Good Dragons and her Brother and/or kind-of-sort-of-ex-Husband-depending-on-which-version-of-the-story, really wants to have more power and stop being confined to Avernus."

Going off how she's typically characterized you don't get much to work with on actually impressing her. She's backstabbing, power hungry, will absolutely ruin the day of anyone she can if it benefits her including and especially her own followers and children. She largely expects blind fear and worship from her followers because she was written in a way that "Evil" equates to "everything and everyone revolves around me or is a way of getting what I want." She has on multiple occasions done some horrible things to Chromatic Dragons that got too successful and became a risk of her own worship and power being split but at the same time she has no use for anyone who doesn't actually have something to offer her in terms of power and influence.

Essentially her usual portrayal puts worshipers into the same balancing act as you get from Lolth worship, jump through hoops with any reward offered actually being for the deity's benefit instead of yours but also don't do too well or they get suspicious and start sending orders to kill you and don't do too little or they think you're useless and send orders to cut the weak link. Also don't exist in a way that makes them bored, angry, jealous, annoyed, sad, too entertained, or really any emotion or sensation from happy to hungry or they may arbitrarily decide their plans work best if the person who managed to get their attention is dead.

With how one note most Evil is in D&D playing the alignment and Gods as they're written isn't very good for long term health.

If you really want to win points with her then finding a way to get her a presence in the Material Plane is certain to work. Issue then being that if you do that she no longer needs you and you've displayed the power necessary to get her or one of her avatars there and by extent likely have the power to send them back making you a threat. If you can't tell most of the answers that would actually get her attention also end up squarely in the ballpark of "but then she also has reason to consider you a threat/liability/loose end."

[Bohandas]

Stealing metallic dragon eggs to use in black magic rituals*. (or stealing them, holding them for ransom, and then coming up with odd legalistic reasons not to return them after the ransom is paid)

*Especially if you subscribe to Tiamat=Takhisis

[EdenNotRaven]

Accumulate wealth, intimidate and rule over those weaker than you, serve evil dragons if you can find any, raise dragon wyrmlings with proper god-honoring LE values, smite paladins of bahamut.

Like, you're in a desert, what is there even to interact with? What is your party trying to do here? Who or what are nearby, or what do you expect to encounter on your future travels?


Okay so, now we're in the desert.
This is because we're on our way to destroy Bane temple, that served by Dark Nagas.
We're ECL 12, This is because we are on a mission to get "the flute of the undead" that hides there.
We're around Yuan-tis, and in the middle of the desert, there is Guardian Naga's city.

About Wyrmlings, so you tell me that I should pick up "dragon familiar" and raise up a dragon? I already have dragonnel.

[Bohandas]

Tiamat has one thing she's really about 'Evil dragons tyrannizing and exploiting everyone else' and very little other than that. She's the evil dragon goddess, doing evil dragon stuff, and it's really hard to come up with thematically resonant acts that don't tie back to evil dragons in some way. Most gods can be approached from a lot more sides.

You could potentially flesh this out by looking at Tiamat's portrayal in other media (Such as the Diablo games, which had the primeval prime evil Tahamet, who was a sort of cross between D&D Tiamat and Ogdru Jahad from Hellboy, and the monster movie Behemoth where Tiamat was a kaiju) and in mythology (which I am forbidden to expound on here but you can look up)

[EdenNotRaven]

Well, really that does come down to how your DM interprets her. As Inevitability mentions she's fairly one note, most of her personality and goals can be summarized as "Evil Dragoness, hates Good Dragons and her Brother and/or kind-of-sort-of-ex-Husband-depending-on-which-version-of-the-story, really wants to have more power and stop being confined to Avernus."

Going off how she's typically characterized you don't get much to work with on actually impressing her. She's backstabbing, power hungry, will absolutely ruin the day of anyone she can if it benefits her including and especially her own followers and children. She largely expects blind fear and worship from her followers because she was written in a way that "Evil" equates to "everything and everyone revolves around me or is a way of getting what I want." She has on multiple occasions done some horrible things to Chromatic Dragons that got too successful and became a risk of her own worship and power being split but at the same time she has no use for anyone who doesn't actually have something to offer her in terms of power and influence.

Essentially her usual portrayal puts worshipers into the same balancing act as you get from Lolth worship, jump through hoops with any reward offered actually being for the deity's benefit instead of yours but also don't do too well or they get suspicious and start sending orders to kill you and don't do too little or they think you're useless and send orders to cut the weak link. Also don't exist in a way that makes them bored, angry, jealous, annoyed, sad, too entertained, or really any emotion or sensation from happy to hungry or they may arbitrarily decide their plans work best if the person who managed to get their attention is dead.

With how one note most Evil is in D&D playing the alignment and Gods as they're written isn't very good for long term health.

If you really want to win points with her then finding a way to get her a presence in the Material Plane is certain to work. Issue then being that if you do that she no longer needs you and you've displayed the power necessary to get her or one of her avatars there and by extent likely have the power to send them back making you a threat. If you can't tell most of the answers that would actually get her attention also end up squarely in the ballpark of "but then she also has reason to consider you a threat/liability/loose end."

You right.
This is exactly what I don't want to happen as an Evil Character.
I would like to hear more from your knowledge.
Can you tell me how to solve this issue? :)

[MonochromeTiger]

You right.
This is exactly what I don't want to happen as an Evil Character.
I would like to hear more from your knowledge.
Can you tell me how to solve this issue? :)

How to avoid that specifically? Easy answer would be don't worship Tiamat. She and Lolth are both in a weird space where the three biggest threats to their worshipers are adventurers, other worshipers, and the goddesses they worship. The first because they usually do something that attracts heroes trying to stop it. The second because their Deities value power and loyalty and consider chopping other worshipers to bits a perfectly acceptable way to display that power. The third because at the end of the day Tiamat and Lolth both want that power and control to be held by them alone and while worshipers get more useful the more powerful they are they also become a bigger liability the harder it becomes to intimidate and control them.

As for how to avoid things blowing up in your face while still having your character worship Tiamat? That's entirely down to how your DM interprets her, for all I know at your table she's treated like a completely reasonable deity and completely lacking the cartoonishly short sighted self sabotage that D&D tends to stick to every Evil aligned character.

[Bohandas]

They could perform acts of submission to the goddess, such as taking a bunch of feats that depend on staying with her to work, having a bunch of Marks of Justice cast on them, and dressing like Steve Hibbert's character from Pulp Fiction