The Gaming Den

The Eberron Sucks article slightly drifted into DL territory, and I decided to make a new thread to prevent from going further off-topic.

Basically, my question is why DL alignment is so different than traditional D&D alignment without being obviously advertised as such?

It said nothing in the 3rd edition DL Campaign Setting alignment section that Lawful Good can allow you to punish innocent peasants for the actions of a religious nutjob over 300 miles away (if you're a God), or that it's okay to be "all others are lesser animals" racist if you're an Elf, but is Evil if you're a Nerakan Knight.

What gives? Are Elves the "master race?"

A lot of the morality is incoherent, plain and simple, but here's my take.

There was a real strong emphasis towards 'balance' being considered the true 'good,' in the DL stuff, to the extent that even Paladine, chief of the Good gods, wanted balance.

The elves and the Kingpriest are evil in the clothes of good. They have fallen into the trap of good vs evil thinking: it often leads to fanaticism and brutal intolerance.

This comes to the biggest weird edge of Mormon morality. In Mormon theology, Satan is actually part of the same family as God and Jesus. They are literally a family of people from another planet who were rewarded with godhood and their own planet by their heavenly father.

So in Mormon theology you can actually be totally fucking evil and be part of a family that has a very good patriarch and be rewarded and elevated to godhood anyway. So the reason why the gods in Krynn act like a dysfunctional family is because they literally are a dysfunctional family. Paladine is literally just some dude, possibly a stand-in for the actual father of one of the authors or someone they know.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:This comes to the biggest weird edge of Mormon morality. In Mormon theology, Satan is actually part of the same family as God and Jesus. They are literally a family of people from another planet who were rewarded with godhood and their own planet by their heavenly father.

So in Mormon theology you can actually be totally fucking evil and be part of a family that has a very good patriarch and be rewarded and elevated to godhood anyway. So the reason why the gods in Krynn act like a dysfunctional family is because they literally are a dysfunctional family. Paladine is literally just some dude, possibly a stand-in for the actual father of one of the authors or someone they know.

-Username17

That explains a bit, but what is your take on the Elves being "good" racists?

Frank wrote:In Mormon theology, Satan is actually part of the same family as God and Jesus.

Yes and no. It's not only Mormon mythology that Satan (Lucifer) was a favored of God up in the pre-life. Other mythologies place Jesus and Satan as God's creations; Mormonology goes one step further to say that those creations are sons.

Frank wrote:They are literally a family of people from another planet who were rewarded with godhood and their own planet by their heavenly father.

Yes and no. God supposedly was, but Jesus and Satan weren't. They were sons who were supposed to undergo the same earthly experiment as the rest of us - only Satan (and his fellow siblings) fell before he could begin the process.

Frank wrote:So in Mormon theology you can actually be totally fucking evil and be part of a family that has a very good patriarch and be rewarded and elevated to godhood anyway.

I don't know that "godhood" includes the restrictions of never having a body, never seeing your family (or having one), and only being able to do your work on earth indirectly, but hey...

Really, it's a lot like that family down the block that has the one kid who turned out to be a murderer who went to prison and has to manipulate people on the outside from inside the cell.

It occurs to me that DL would have been a great setting to ditch conventional D&D alignments entirely. You could still have the "good" gods acting in a mostly benevolent manner, and the "evil" gods promoting disease and undead and bed-wetting, but without hard lines to back it up, the setting becomes much more believeable.

Racist elves enslaving others "for their own good?" Sure.
Honorable minotaurs serving the forces of darkness? Why not?
An order of "evil" knights beinging order and law and a smidgen of tyranny? Okay.
Three wizards' orders divided by philosphy, yet united by magic? Absolutely.

Although that still doesn't get Paladine off the hook for the whole "Cataclysm" issue. Hmm...

***
Oh, and I like how Jerry opened a new thread to keep this tanget from derailing the old one...and this thread sprouted an entirely new tanget on the 3rd post.

The Mormon mythos is kind of interesting with that Jesus/Satan brother thing, though it's alway confused me why some people consider that as some kind of blasphame that makes the entire religion non-Christian.

It kind of reminds me on the Hindu mythos, and the fact that even the active enemies of gods like Vishnu will still receive blessings/boons of essentially whatever they want from them.

Talisman wrote:Oh, and I like how Jerry opened a new thread to keep this tanget from derailing the old one...and this thread sprouted an entirely new tanget on the 3rd post.

Such is the way of the Gaming Den.

Talisman wrote:Oh, and I like how Jerry opened a new thread to keep this tanget from derailing the old one...and this thread sprouted an entirely new tanget on the 3rd post.

I think the unstated connection between the original post and Dragonlance is that one of the creators of Dragonlance is Mormon, hence the relationship of Mormon mythology to the Dragonlance pantheon.

But I don't know that Mormonismnessity explains everything in the Dragonlance universe.

Just the Hickman bits