What does Lawful Neutral versus Chaotic Neutral divine interplay look like?

[Scalenex]

In terms of law versus chaos the D&D version tends to work on the basis of LN kind of being an absolutist judge type character. Functional at a divine level if the LN and CN deities are not in agreement they are definitely working at odds to each other. If they were neighbours then LN would be constantly filing complaints with the local ordnance council about CN doing anything, while CN would then be ignoring everything, playing their music really, really loud, and stealing LN's cat.

Best way to treat it is probably like LN being Mr Wilson and CN being Denis the Menace. Without Denis necessarily seeming to like Mr Wilson.

That's a pretty good metaphor...

Basically both Khemra and Nami are gods of free will. They want their followers to choose to follow them, not be coerced into following them It’s a war fought with bribes and gifts not the sword and manacles.
An example of low level shenanigans would be in the aftermath of a disaster for Nami and Khemra’s supporters to organize relief supplies. But for Nami’s supporters to secretly stencil “A gift from Nami” onto all of Khemra’s supplies.
They’ll be like 2 divorced parents who get on OK, but can’t live with each other trying to woo the affections of a child. Khemra’s the “I’ll help you with your homework” parent and Nami is the “Who’d like to go out for ice cream?” parent.

That's actually a really good metaphor...


I also like the idea of scheduled debates that Nami's followers may or may not participate in or the idea of Nami's followers taking credit for the good deeds of Khemra's followers.



Maybe in another world, a Lawful Neutral deity would create a flood or other catastrophe to kill all but a select few mortals, but I cannot picture Khemra or Nami doing that. I cannot even picture my Evil deities doing this.

At least in my universe, no one, good evil or neutral is doing a world flood thing. Even the Evil deities gods don't want to destroy everything because they want to have a sandbox to play in.

My world almost got destroyed twice because a mortal messed with forces beyond his/her ken. The First Unmaking occurred when a dragon sorceress accidentally triggered millions of elementals to randomly run amok. This killed about 90% of all living things and destroyed 95% of all artifacts of civilization. The surviving dragons went from being civilized cooperative power to a bunch of loners squatting over their personal hoards.

The elves took over after the dragons failed, but and an elven wizard accidentally triggered an invasion of millions of otherworldly horrors that wanted to eat the souls of all mortals. This killed about 92% of all mortals, 70% of all animals, and 80% of all artifacts of civilization. This was called the Second Unmaking.

Both of these disasters happened despite the Nine's wishes, not because of the Nine's wishes.

Both mortal and deity alike are nervously watching the human race, concerned that some idiot with delusions of grandeur will accidentally trigger a Third Unmaking. A few of my evil deities are toying with the idea of using a Third Unmaking to their advantage and hope that maybe if hypothetically 90% of all mortals died but only 50% of their followers died, they could come out ahead, but this is not something they would enact casually. They are more likely to allow an Unmaking to happen rather than try to trigger one themselves.

I prefer "Save a village" or a "Save a kingdom" plots, so I'm not planning to have the PCs prevent a villain from causing the Third Unmaking. At least not anytime soon.