Who of the CURRENT Guard could you see slaughting goblin kids?

[Alex Warlorn]

SoD: SEMI-SPOILERS:
Okay, Redcloak swears up and down that it was the Guard who murdered his entire settlement, and his flash back seems to support this (in spite of some inconsistencies which won't be discussed here).

Now here's a simple question: Who of the named Guard that we've seen so far, could you see killing goblin seniors and pre-schoolers?

Miko: Duh. Yes. No questions asked. She clearly played hooky on "Redeeming Evil Beings 101" during her paladin training.

Lien: She's stated that her parents were run off the mill fishermen, and she knows how to perform mundane labor and is not ashamed to. I don't see her falling into the same hubris, or being able to kill civilians of the enemy.

Hinjo: No. Not really. Nothing in his personality suggests he could do such a deed. He's clearly believes in order, but at the same time he has a sense of humor, was willing to forgive Miko and find redemption for killing their only other family up until she tried to kill him too. If he was willing to forgive her for THAT, I can't see him trying to kill a innocent enemy child just cause.

O-Chul: Good question. I think it might cause a lot of internal conflict if he was ordered to. It might depend on whose there with him to help him decide if his orders are just or not.

Thanh: Maaaaybe. He clearly considers the Hobgoblins to be all criminals for their invasion and occupation of Azure City. And and has a harsh expression on his face when facing the wights and Tsukiko, not trying to debate her point of view that soulless undead were still people.
He's up in the air.

What do you guys think? Or paladins really less than robots as Redcloak so firmly believes?

Might be interesting if Redcloak met an Inevitable.. and see what REAL cold indifference to situations and circumstance is.

[FujinAkari]

All of them. There were under divine mandate, and none of them strike me as the sort who would ignore the command of the 12-Gods. The entire PURPOSE of the sapphire guard is to protect the gates.

[David Argall]

We can also state that as none of them. They would all refuse to do an evil act [tho, as we see with Miko, they can end up doing one.] So if the killing of the kids is an evil act, they would not do it, orders from the gods or not.
We conclude that we suffer from a Redcloak-centered view, and the reasons why the actions were not evil were not stated since he really didn't care.

[Gargor]

All of them. Sadly, i believe in the Oots world killing goblin innocents is perfectly acceptable simply because they are goblins and therefore an evil race. They were created to be destroyed and therefore killing any goblin would be considered a good act and none of the Sapphire gaurd would have any problm with it

[Eita]

Wait, what were they ordered to do? Kill everyone, or make sure that the gate was safe by killing the previous holder of the redcloak?

[TigerHunter]

All of them. Sadly, i believe in the Oots world killing goblin innocents is perfectly acceptable simply because they are goblins and therefore an evil race. They were created to be destroyed and therefore killing any goblin would be considered a good act and none of the Sapphire gaurd would have any problm with it
You clearly haven't read OtOoPCs. Examine Roy's backstory.
Not to mention that in SoD itself, we see clear examples of Good goblins, notably Right Eye (Redclock's brother).

[Squidmaster]

Right eye wasn't good. at the best he was neutral.
Anyway, with the exception of Miko, I cant see any of the other SG members killing innocent goblin children/unarmed old goblins for merely setting of there evil radar.

[Surfing HalfOrc]

Hard to say...

Miko, probably. She seemed to see the world in absolutes. A goblin is evil, therefore any and all can safely be put to the sword.

Kore is definately willing to kill goblin children, or even a child who has been with an evil race for a peroid of time. Oh, wait, wrong comic (http://www.goblinscomic.com/)! :smallbiggrin:

The rest, not so sure. I'd say it would probably depend on if the individual paladin saw a goblin/hobgoblin warrior strike down a human child in cold blood or not. Some things push individuals over the edge.

So now I wonder what Miko might have had happen in her own past... :-/

[EvilElitest]

none, i think there is more to the goblins story then we have seen
from
EE

[Lerky]

actually in SoD one of the paladins looks like a young Miko. On pg. 10 it shows the paladins swarming around Goblin Hills. They seem to be in 2 layers, on the top layer at the left next to the girl with short hair and the guy with long hair and dark clothes is what looks like a young Miko with short hair! She even has an expression Miko would have on. However no one currently seems to be in the attack that we know of except for young Miko.

[EvilElitest]

we don't know how Rich uses the paladin code in his world, however we do know that in real games paladins can't do this. However in the D&D game they can't do this, so i suspect their is more to the story then Redcloak lets on
from
EE

[David Argall]

actually in SoD one of the paladins looks like a young Miko. On pg. 10 it shows the paladins swarming around Goblin Hills. They seem to be in 2 layers, on the top layer at the left next to the girl with short hair and the guy with long hair and dark clothes is what looks like a young Miko with short hair! She even has an expression Miko would have on. However no one currently seems to be in the attack that we know of except for young Miko.

The age is wrong. The attack happened 34-35 years before the party met Miko, and her estimated age is in the twenties, certainly not around 50.
Now if you want to suggest this was artistic error, and it was intended to be Miko, until the time problem was discovered, I am not going to disagree with you. But by the official time line, this would have to be Miko's mom or such if there is any relationship.

[Querzis]

Well Miko is not actually in the current guard anyway so I dont think it matter.

That being said: Lien? Maybe. We havent saw much of her so we cant really tell.

Hinjo? Nah. He was ready to forgive Miko after she killed his defenseless uncle after all. If the gods order him, he might capture them or imprison them thought.

O-chul? He was a fighter before being a paladin. Since he has been a fighter for 12 years, it seems quite obvious to me that he became a paladin because he was LG and he liked the paladin moral code, not the other way around like with many paladins. Beside, we already saw that he wont hesitate to do chaotic act, like lying, to protect defenseless people. So, as far as I'm concerned, he would prefer to disobey an order then to put innocent childrens in danger and hes much less likely to kill them himself.

Thanh? We dont know much about him either but I really dont think he would.

But anyway, I dont know why some of you are still surprised that the paladins didnt fall when they killed goblins childrens in SoD. Who can make a paladin fall? The gods. And those gods arent LG so why would you expect them to make their champions fall because they are killing a race they created for the sole purpose of getting killed?

[Renegade Paladin]

So far as we can tell, none of them, because any who did participate in the attack would be quite advanced in years if they're still alive at all.

[Remirach]

It depends on what the rationale was for mopping up the goblin kids after finishing off the adults and the real threat. Whatever it was, it seems to have been pretty convincing, because none of the paladins in the attack ever hesitated or expressed doubts. Why would that rationale have changed over 35 years? If there was a problem with the attack, it was clearly that it wasn't thorough enough because if they'd managed to kill everyone including Redcloak and Right-Eye, he wouldn't be threatening the very fabric of the universe today.

The attack paints an ugly picture of the Sapphire Guard of yesteryear, while the current members are developed characters with many sympathetic traits. But nothing's changed in 35 years that would have made whatever logic worked back then not work today. The paladins that attacked the village might have been very like Hinjo on every other day of the week. They were Lawful Good, so they must have had some of those attributes that are associated with Lawful Goodness -- compassion, selflessness, and so forth. They didn't show mercy to the goblins, but that didn't reflect on their alignment, because they were not penalized for it.

We want to think whatever logic worked on those paladins would not have swayed Hinjo because we've gotten to know him, seen how likable and noble he is, and would hate to see him doing what we saw the paladins of SoD do. It's not impossible that Hinjo WOULD reject such logic, but there's no evidence yet that his mindset is different than the one of an average pally back in Goblin Hills. It's not about goodness or selflessness or nobility, it's about what attitude he has towards humanoids, and that's what would have to be radically different about him. And we don't know just yet what his attitude is nor do we have specific reason to think it would be different.

I strongly suspect Hinjo will learn the details of the attack in a strip someday so we will witness his beliefs. I would not be surprised if they were different -- but they might not be.

[Mr._Michael]

Any and all.

The SG are Lawful Good, AS WELL as a military order. They do what their leader is told, and if they are told that killing evil goblins is mandated by their Holy Oath and their Twelve Gods... slice-slice-slice! The responsibility for determining good/evil is laid on the lap of their leader.

I forget whether their leader at the time was a Paladin... my copies of SoD and OotPCs are "in the mail". Or so they tell me... I can't wait to get 'em.

IN any case; your basic Adventurer has no problems killing gobbos in an underground maze... certainly I'VE never stopped to see whether the greenie I'm killing while playing is 'good' or 'evil'. Old goblin carrying a sword? Hey, come back my little chunk of XP!

Why should a military force blessed by the Gods be any less willing to smite evil as it is defined for them?

[warmachine]

Only those who aren't philosophers. As the goblins were made by the gods to be slaughtered and paladins are religious, regarding the slaughter of goblin children as good is the default morality. We, with our post-Enlightenment, humanistic philosophies, regard killing children as despicable but the paladins could do it and receive divine and human praise for being just. It would take a philosopher (amateur or not) to break from this and devise a different moral philosophy.

This leads to a judgement of who are probably philosophers.

Miko: Doesn't even check her conclusions against reality, let alone check her beliefs against her core values.

Lien: Someone from a fishermen family is unlikely to be highly educated or highly intellectual. Azurite working class culture could value education but it wouldn't be typical.

Hinjo: Most likely well educated, lack of a selfish ambition and unconventional ennoblement of peasant soldiers gives good odds.

O-Chul: Seems more pragmatist than idealist and not killing goblin children is a pretty radical idea. Nah.

Thanh: Too straight.


In short, only Hinjo might not do it and it wouldn't go down well with the rest of the Guard.

[VForVaarsuvius]

Interesting question... I think they would all obey though if they where commanded to. (Paladin)

\V/

[Estelindis]

Only those who aren't philosophers. As the goblins were made by the gods to be slaughtered and paladins are religious, regarding the slaughter of goblin children as good is the default morality. We, with our post-Enlightenment, humanistic philosophies, regard killing children as despicable but the paladins could do it and receive divine and human praise for being just. It would take a philosopher (amateur or not) to break from this and devise a different moral philosophy.
I disagree strongly. Intelligence is not the same as morality. You can be a good person without being smart. A "philosopher" may realise that killing innocents is wrong... or may find elaborate justifications for doing so. For the sake of the topic, let's not even look into the horrors perpetrated by post-Enlightenment societies...

[VForVaarsuvius]

I disagree strongly. Intelligence is not the same as morality. You can be a good person without being smart. A "philosopher" may realise that killing innocents is wrong... or may find elaborate justifications for doing so. For the sake of the topic, let's not even look into the horrors perpetrated by post-Enlightenment societies...

I must agree. Hitler, for example, (I am truly sorry to fulfill the prophecy that Hitler must be brought up on every forum topic online but I think it's a good example) was undoubtedly brilliant but all but a select, odd, very few find him very evil.

\V/

[Edna]

All of them.

The problem is that we are trying to apply moral standards from our world to the world of D&D. In our world, we can't imagine children of any species being inherently evil. Babies (or puppies) are thought of as innocents, with their moral compasses waiting to be formed.

In the the OotS world, the goblins were created as an evil race to be slaughtered by adventurers. Therefore, the goblin children are as evil as their parents, and are a legitimate target for the paladins.

Edna

[Kish]

It is, I think, unambiguous, both from Roy's encounter with the orcs in OtOoPCs and from the introduction to Start of Darkness, that Rich meant the slaughter of Redcloak's village to come across as a villainous action. It's also unambiguous that, for whatever reason, the paladins did not Fall for it. So the answer to "Who of the current Guard would do it?" is, the ones Rich wanted to treat as villainous. Not Hinjo. Almost certainly not Lien.

[FujinAkari]

It is, I think, unambiguous, both from Roy's encounter with the orcs in OtOoPCs and from the introduction to Start of Darkness, that Rich meant the slaughter of Redcloak's village to come across as a villainous action.

I disagree. Rich says in the introduction "You will see bad things done to bad people by good people acting bad."

To me, this means the attack isn't meant as a villainous action, but a tragic one. It is, to be sure, an unfortunate and regrettable affair, but villainous actions are actions performed by villains, which the SG rather clearly aren't (Rich explicitly calls them "good people."

Instead, it is meant to show the tragedy of just how far the Paladins will descend in the pursuit of their oath, at least in my opinion.

[warmachine]

At the risk of derailing this thread, arguments against philosophers not killing goblin children don't make much sense. That a person can be good without being smart doesn't mean much in a world where being good means killing goblin children. An unintelligent or mediocre person can follow the values of the current, good morality and, thus, be good. The idea that goblin children should NOT be slaughtered by good people is a radical idea in the OotS world. Being a philisopher does not necessarily lead to good morality but it's going to take one to see that the paladin morality just leads to more violence. Non-deep thinker types are not known for thinking up radical ideas. Can't see many paladins casually thinking the Twelve Gods' attitude to goblins and perpetual violence is a mistake and that peace with goblins and an end to perpetual war might be achievable. Can't see many paladins being radical thinkers.

Incidently, this makes Roy a radical thinker. In Origin of PCs, Roy avoids unnecessary violence towards a member of an evil race, much to the annoyance of a paladin. A pacifist by OotS standards. Roy wouldn't slaughter goblin children.

[Lissibith]

I guess I always just assumed that the attitude of humans toward Goblins in OotS ws a little like that of humans in our world to the various animals out there, only moreso. We just kill say a cow for phyical reasons, whereas their reasons are more theological. But at the end of the day, they don't apply the same standards to killing goblins because they've been brought up to think of them as lesser beings. Therefore, I'd say any one of the guard could kill those kids when told by the gods, with a possible exception of Hinjo, and then only because he's been around Roy a bit and might have picked up that there are other ways to think.

[Qov]

While a goblin bay being held to its goblin mother's breast--are goblins mammals?--is clearly a child, we may be making assumptions about how easy it is for humans to identify goblins by age group. Recall that it took a leap of logic and shared experiences for Haley to realize that the goblins inside the trap door were teenagers. Perhaps a goblin child is about as distinct from a goblin adult as a baby spider is from any other spider, when you're stomping on everything with eight legs.

[Fuzzypaws]

All of them would do it. Some above have argued that goblins were created by the gods to be killed by adventurers, and to some extent that's true. But even more specifically, goblins and other humanoids were specifically created by the gods to be killed BY CLERICS. And paladins are just clerics with swords, really. So a paladin can butcher helpless, innocent children, and if they're humanoids he won't fall for it.

[hanzo66]

I'd agree with the idea that all would kill goblin children if given the command, but I have a feeling that at least with people like Hinjo it's not a task that they will exactly enjoy (save for Miko, who will likely just rule them as being Goblins and not think twice about it). Perhaps the Paladins that are parents themselves (This includes the otherwise nameless NPC Paladins of the Sapphire Guard) would be left with a bad taste in their mouths figuratively speaking.

[RedWizard]

Keep in mind that, in the real world, one can't look at someone and determine whether or not they're Evil. Paladins can. A lot of ethical quandary stalls when you can know, for sure, what sort of person you're planning on killing, in a world of moral absolutes.

[monty]

IN any case; your basic Adventurer has no problems killing gobbos in an underground maze... certainly I'VE never stopped to see whether the greenie I'm killing while playing is 'good' or 'evil'. Old goblin carrying a sword? Hey, come back my little chunk of XP!

In my opinion, that is absolutely horrible roleplaying. In my campaigns, I never kill random creatures unless they're
a) Mindless undead, mindless constructs, oozes, etc.
or b) Attacking me
Even if I have reason to believe that I should kill them, I try to make sure that they're my actual target and not just some innocent that happens to be in the way.


Your "basic adventurer" is not a good example of D&D morality, because the basic adventurer is only concerned with XP and loot.

[Dark Matter]

...a paladin can butcher helpless, innocent children...Can creatures that show up as "EVIL" on their detect evil radar be "innocent"?

[Iranon]

Imao, a resounding yes.

Many paladins - and many players - seem to have the misconception that evil and deserving punishment are the same. Executioners who take excess pleasure in their job, cynical moneylenders or even moral philosophers who argue that the 'softer' virtues hold a society back might be Evil in D&D terms.

[Dark Matter]

None of those would be "Innocent".

[Fuzzypaws]

And neither would any of them deserve the slaughter. If you are a fundamentally selfish person who always puts yourself above others and won't help others even if it's easy to do so, unless they're your friends or you're getting rewarded for it, you will qualify in D&D as evil and thus show up on a paladin's radar and be subject to Smiting. But it's a very different kind of evil from the murderer or the rapist.

[Remirach]

Recall that it took a leap of logic and shared experiences for Haley to realize that the goblins inside the trap door were teenagers.
They had trouble distinguishing the teenagers from children, not children from adults. Goblins are human-sized and the children were half-pints.

[Dark Matter]

I'll re-phrase the question/issue.

Can non-human creatures that show up on the evil-radar be innocent, especially if the gods designed them to be evil and therefore worth killing? Is killing a non-human evil creature *always* a "good" act by definition?

[hamishspence]

I've seen it said that even in 1st ed, when orcs were portrayed as rather more evil than they are now, killing baby orcs was considered an Evil act by the rules (was it Keep on the Borderlands?) Then there is Exalted Deeds, another source which takes the same approach.

[Quaalsten]

Only those who aren't philosophers. As the goblins were made by the gods to be slaughtered and paladins are religious, regarding the slaughter of goblin children as good is the default morality. We, with our post-Enlightenment, humanistic philosophies, regard killing children as despicable but the paladins could do it and receive divine and human praise for being just. It would take a philosopher (amateur or not) to break from this and devise a different moral philosophy.

I think that you may have a few assumptions that are upside-down from reality.

You point out what is obviously a philosopher's question: are things good because the gods commend them, or do the gods command things because they are good? The question is raised by Socrates, in Plato's rather funny dialogue, Meno, about 2 millennia before the Enlightenment.

The first assumpton you made is this: that O-Chul, being a fighter, would be too practical, and not have enough education. Socrates, however, fought at the battle of Marathon, and was said to have been "forward" in the fight. Translation: Socrates, personally, killed quite a lot of people, and watched them die. He was really quite eminently practical.

The next assumption is that one has to be a philosopher in order to understand the problem. I think that Euripides' Trojan Women and its consequences largely point out that this is not quite so.

The play Trojan Women was first performed in 415 BC, during a war between Athens and Sparta. The ancient town of Melos had defected to the Spartan side: when the Athenians retook it, they passed an order to kill all the men, and sell the women and children into slavery. While the fleet sailed, the festival of Dionysisus -- and its tragic plays -- began. Euripides is said to have changed his third play out for Trojan Women, which focuses on the destruction of Troy: in which the Greek throw the son of Hector from the battlements "because they were afraid." The great council of Athens met the next day and rescinded the order of destruction, but it reached the fleet too late to stop the slaughter.

Euripides, accounted a playwright and not a philosopher, "got it." The great council of the Areopagus also "got it." The next generation of Athenians also "got it" -- a generation which included Plato. Plato's thinking on ethics and religion, in fact, is best viewed as part of a generational response to the horrors of the Pelopponnesian War. With Meno, he enshrined both the question and the response to it in traditional morality -- which meant that everybody got it for the next 2000 years.

This take on morality lasted until the Enlightenment. The courtier philosophesof that period were largely concerned with promoting, and currying favour with, the absolute monarchies of the day. Also, they were concerned with defending European expansion and the slave trade against the increasingly vociferous objections of the Church -- especially as represented by the Society of Jesus.

As it happens, the Enlightenment won -- at least for a while. The reducciones of Uruguay were given to the openly slave-trading Portuguese, and the Jesuits were forcibly disbanded. The philosophy of the courtiers displaced traditional moral thought in the universities. This more "scientific" train of thought permitted the sort of systematic, race-based chattel slavery we saw in the United States until the 1860s, and the Jim Crow laws after.

The last assumption, then, that our current stand on what is good and bad dates from the Enlightenment, is probably quite false. the ancients had a very good handle on it, and their view was largely adopted into the dominant traditional morality of Christianity. The Enlightenment represents a sort of deliberate forgetting.

The paladins - with their very traditional religious morality - are more likely to have understood the wrong they were doing than an Enlightenment philosophe. I think that real morality is learned on the battlefield -- not in the salon.

But then, I'm a philosopher.

[Estelindis]

The paladins - with their very traditional religious morality - are more likely to have understood the wrong they were doing than an Enlightenment philosophe. I think that real morality is learned on the battlefield -- not in the salon.

But then, I'm a philosopher.
QFT! *applauds*

[Dark Matter]

I've seen it said that even in 1st ed, when orcs were portrayed as rather more evil than they are now, killing baby orcs was considered an Evil act by the rules (was it Keep on the Borderlands?) Then there is Exalted Deeds, another source which takes the same approach.What I remember of 1st ed's take on this issue was that it was suggested that the ST should not put Pals in the position where they have to decide whether or not to kill baby werewolves.

Implicitly this points out the problem here, which is that there are no "good" actions available as menu options.

As for the ancients getting the morality right, IMHO if in RL we had to share the planet with a non-human race that was "usually evil", we'd be doing our best to exterminate them.

[Torchlyte]

If you kill a child's parents, that child will hate you. That's a threat to the gate.

Killing of goblin children is distasteful, but was necessary because of typical blood feud mechanics.

[NENAD]

But the odds of actually killing every last man, woman, and child in an attack are rather slim. I'm actually surprised that the paladins got as high a percentage as they did.

Actually, if they set up a perimeter and performed multiple purgings of the village afterwards, they'd probably get them all, but that would only be done if they intended to kill the village to a man without any exceptions under any circumstances, as opposed to just killing as many as is convenient (which is what appears to be happening in the SoD massacre).

[Torchlyte]

But the odds of actually killing every last man, woman, and child in an attack are rather slim. I'm actually surprised that the paladins got as high a percentage as they did.

Actually, if they set up a perimeter and performed multiple purgings of the village afterwards, they'd probably get them all, but that would only be done if they intended to kill the village to a man without any exceptions under any circumstances, as opposed to just killing as many as is convenient (which is what appears to be happening in the SoD massacre).

I agree with you. If they were going to do it in the first place, it was dumb that they didn't do it properly.

[MasterofMockery]

Of the Current Guard... that is a pretty narrow selection. So far of the Sapphire Guard only 3 are left, Hinjo, Lien, and O-chul. Let me explain my thinking. Hinjo is only alive because his duties as a lord removed him from the slaughter in the tower. Lien was assigned to protect the waterfront. And O-chul
was the only paladin who survived the explosion and the symbol of insanity.
That leaves a pretty small number.

O-chul- I think that he would slaughter goblins if it would save more lives than he took. I am also pretty sure there is some sort of propaganda or something in the sapphire guard that would help him look past it.

Hinjo- I doubt that he would do it as he probably had a pretty jaded view of the world from being a lord-to-be.

Lien- needs more character development before I go one way or another

Still we have to remember that savagery ls accepted between mortal enemies.
-Just my to copper pieces

[EvilElitest]

O-chul- I think that he would slaughter goblins if it would save more lives than he took. I am also pretty sure there is some sort of propaganda or something in the sapphire guard that would help him look past it.

THat is evil using ends justifies the means to kill innocents. However i doubt the goblins in redcloak's story were as innocent as he claims
from
EE

[Jayngfet]

Of the Current Guard... that is a pretty narrow selection. So far of the Sapphire Guard only 3 are left, Hinjo, Lien, and O-chul. Let me explain my thinking. Hinjo is only alive because his duties as a lord removed him from the slaughter in the tower. Lien was assigned to protect the waterfront. And O-chul
was the only paladin who survived the explosion and the symbol of insanity.
That leaves a pretty small number.

O-chul- I think that he would slaughter goblins if it would save more lives than he took. I am also pretty sure there is some sort of propaganda or something in the sapphire guard that would help him look past it.

Hinjo- I doubt that he would do it as he probably had a pretty jaded view of the world from being a lord-to-be.

Lien- needs more character development before I go one way or another

Still we have to remember that savagery ls accepted between mortal enemies.
-Just my to copper pieces

thranh? and there are probably a few others we don't know about.

[brant167]

I think the question that needs to be asked is "would character x kill a innocent to save very existence of every being on the planet." Because that is what the paladins felt they were doing when they attacked the goblins. They felt it was necessary to sacrifice a town of goblins in order to maintain the universe. Now if you look at it like that then yes every paladin in the story so far would have done this with a very heavy conscious. They willingly corrupted their souls with the blood of the innocents in order to save life and afterlife as they know it...their justification might have been "at least their souls get to live on in the afterlife."

[Timberboar]

Might be interesting if Redcloak met an Inevitable.. and see what REAL cold indifference to situations and circumstance is.

I picture Redcloak running into an Inevitable, and the Inevitable walking away a few minutes later muttering, "Wow, I never thought of it like THAT before."

[Kish]

I think the question that needs to be asked is "would character x kill a innocent to save very existence of every being on the planet." Because that is what the paladins felt they were doing when they attacked the goblins. They felt it was necessary to sacrifice a town of goblins in order to maintain the universe.
You're giving them way too much credit. They treated it like good fun. "Check it out, three in a row, I get to use my Great Cleave feat!" They felt it was appropriate to mow down all the "monsters" they saw without moral qualms. For some reason, likely related to the Twelve Gods, they did not Fall.