Free simplified pantheon: Alignments as gods!

[Thoughtbot360]

Not another alignment thread!

Yes, but this is to explore an idea for making alignments more useful as a setting concept than as a source of pointless arguments around the table. It also doubles as a simplistic pantheon for when you are homebrewing your own adventures and you need one that's easy to explain.

1. A brief history of alignment:

Whenever a discussion of alignment crops up, the topic of how nobody cares about Law vs. Chaos (at least, nowhere near as much as Good vs. Evil) will arise. However, in bygone eras of D&D, it used to be that Law, Chaos, and Neutrality (with regards to Law and Chaos) used to be the ONLY alignments, being based on popular Fantasy novels at the time using Law and Chaos as stand-ins for Good and Evil/Peace and Warfare/Creation and Destruction. (I'm not even going to start about Alignment languages...) True, there was a "Protection vs. Evil" spell, and Clerics could turn into "evil" (and also Chaotic) Anti-Clerics by abusing their Finger of Death Spell in Whitebox, but it seemed more like Good was to be a subdivision of Law (all good clerics were Lawful) while Evil was a subdivision of Chaos.

(In other words, it was exactly the opposite of how 4e handled alignment: Lawful Good, Lawful, Neutral, Chaotic, Chaotic Evil)

But then, they came out and said you can be Lawful AND Evil, like alignments were Pokemon types. And then the Planescape setting came out and immortalized this tomfoolery! (So, everytime a DM helps a new player to fill out the character sheet, the subject of the NINE Alignments and how little they really matter has to come up eventually.)

The problem with this 3x3 alignment grid, aside from being a clunky way to try and condense human morality, is that it also creates problems for classes like Paladins who might lose their powers because of a DM judgement call over a nebulous issue, or Clerics who have to pick a particular alignment-specific god to use a domain. If the DM didn't make a pantheon and leaves gods up the player, then...the whole religion thing feels tacked on and unimportant.

I'm sure nobody here knows what that feels li-


2. GET ON WITH IT!:

ahem.

So, rather than requiring the homebrewing DM to make a huge pantheon of gods that will still restrict Domain choices because there are no gods of X Alignment with Y Domain, why not just make the major Alignment Forces as gods, since even outsiders are categorized by alignment.

Law and Chaos, as they exist right now, feel like the sort of Blue-and-Orange Morality that mortals would follow for dogmatic convictions, rather than personal ones. So, a setting could use the "ethical" axis of a character's alignment to show devotion to one of three gods based on the Old-school alignments, which are self-centered but reward devotion in ways which can be exploited by good OR evil people. But we are going for 5 gods.


Law- The Law god wants to bring about a Light Age, where the world is more united and connected than ever before, under a single banner. This could be an evil oppressive empire, or something like the Star Trek Federation. Both work. Conformity and Hegemony are the ORDER of the day. ....c wut i did der?

Neutrality- Do we even need a neutral god? Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral mortals will simply worship the lawful and chaotic gods, respectively. We are NOT using "philosophically" neutral as the dogma here. The neutral god encourages that followers side with the WINNING team, not the losing one. The "balance" can fall in a sewer and die, although the neutral god does prefer peaceful isolation to war. The temple of Law, by contrast, will mobilize to keep an empire from losing power if the Law god thinks that the empire will help bring about a "Light age".
This is because the neutral god only cares about the flock growing and surviving to worship and exalt the god another day. The god is not inherently malignant, but given to fits of narcissism and greed, that make it pliable by the other gods.


Yet, in recent centuries, it has become known that the chaotic god, the one who DOESN'T want to take over the world and the least power one of all, has somehow secured the neutral god's cooperation, due to what MUST be some form of debt. There are times when the clerics of the neutral god experience their magic weakening, their communities falling into sickness and decay, and these periods always end with a sudden alliance of the neutral and chaotic temples for a time, the neutral god sending believers on "holy missions" that benefit chaos. And these events are the only time that neutrality will save chaos from being crushed by law (or anyone else who's sick of chaos' ****), yet this wasn't always the case and the other alignment gods get no such treatment.

Chaos- Now, THIS is the god who "upholds the balance." Chaos is never worshiped out in the open, but its many shadowy cults ally themselves with assorted organizations of thieves, cutthroats, assassins, political underdogs, and even the second (or thirteenth) sons of nobles. Schemers and mischief makers of all stripes receive the chaos god's blessings, but sometimes small and fragile cultures will receive boons from the chaos god, just to keep the world map a riotous patchwork rainbow of strange and exotic peoples. The god doesn't want to conquer the world or overthrow society, because then they will be nobody left to manipulate and outsmart, no arrogant overdogs for the plucky underdogs of chaos to outmaneuver. Instead, Chaos revels in the dissolution of ideologies and the proliferation of unlikely victories. Whenever one side, particularly the Law god, starts to take over, Chaos moves to ensure that "Lodoss will not be unified NOR conquered..." ...because where's the fun in that?

Good and Evil- I wish I could come up with something clever for these gods, but these alignments' reputations preceded them. One thing of note, however, is that because these deities represent all of good/evil instead of simply a ethical subset. Their tenets are very broad, but mostly involve directly interfering with the other counterpart god.


I...don't actually remember where I was going with this. Have I made a complete topic? It was saved under the auto-saver, and it loaded this instead of the thread that I thought was saved, so now I'm posting it.

Should this be in Homebrew? It doesn't really feel like proper Homebrew...

So, um....Discuss!



Edit: Also, I haven't really used this forum in um, a decade? Does anybody know how to change signatures? I can't seem to edit that part of my profile. That petition is long dead by now, Rich took down the articles, so no newcomer will even know what this is about.