Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Neonivek]

For those who may not be aware of it good and evil lands are on their way out as spherical lands, magic lands, are going to take over. This has definate possitives over our current set up including much more variety in landscapes and the creatures that inhabit them. The elimination of good and evil is to make room for more ambigous morality no longer painted infront of you as "Good" or "Evil" but rather to present good and evil as individual cultural values and personal viewpoints.

There is however something to be missed in the removal of good and evil as a whole especially when spheres not only represent intrinsic power but also how others are to precieve such a creature.

Evil and Good may be subjective however in terms of gods, especially fake ones, and the way certain people tend to present themselves or how other people wish to present them. Even if Good and Evil are not real spheres anymore, and I wouldn't mind it, they still make sense as a fake sphere gods and creatures can have.

Some Precident
-Set: The Egyptian god of Evil
-Loki: The Norse god of evil, trickery, and magic (Best yet Loki isn't all that evil)

Extra suggestion:

Other nations when defeating and interacting with others should adopt the pantheons of the other. In fact, assuming my research is correct, African Voodoo (which isn't called Voodoo) worked exactly like this where the victors would take on the gods of the previous tribe.

[Dakk]

Erm, mind rephrasing your suggestion, your argument seems far too vague and its hard to find a direction for it other then "good and evil spheres make sense, so we could just keep them".

In my personal opinion, I aggree with toady. Good and evil spheres are rather limiting, as he seems to want good and evil to be set by a civilization's customs rather then general concepts of good and evil. To goblins, demons are powerful and valorous leaders, while other races may despise them, while some are completely indifferent. Its just a matter of semantics really, all aspects that good and evil spheres had on older versions will be kept, just not nescessarily tied to general ideas of good and evil. Undead will gather in death aligned lands, unicorns and elves prefer nature aligned lands, etc.
Me thinks we're not losing anything apart from generalistic, preset definitions of good and evil.

Also, define "fake sphere gods".

[Neonivek]

Sorry what I mean is

Good and Evil are subjective, however when we often reference these traits we give them to others.

or rather

Gods who guise themselves, or are labled, as good or evil should have "Is associated with Good or Evil" in the description EVEN if it isn't a sphere that you can see in the world.

In otherwords Good and Evil should remain as a sphere in association even after its destruction as an actual force.

As for "Fake Sphere Gods" it was "Fake Spheres" and for some reason I didn't add "That"

Of course I could probably take this suggestion another way

Afterall Good and Evil are often a cosmic force and if a world is generated with "Sides" so to speak. It doesn't need to be objective, just because the Head God is considered the beacon of all things good and holy it doesn't mean that god is objectively good, as far as real life morality and ethics is concerned.

[Rowanas]

The problem with gods disguising themselves as "good" or "evil" is that if they say they're the "good" god of nature, and a species defines anything about nature as vile and untouchable, they're not a "good" god to those people, while others that revere nature would define that god as good whether they called themselves good or not.

I've argued against objective morality my entire life (the bits that I could hold cogent discussions for, anyway) and I'd happily argue it ad nauseum.

[Virex]

but a god that identifies itself as good would manifest itself to them in their view of good, wouldn't he? (That is, assuming gods even manifest themselves to all civilizations)

[Misterstone]

The thing is, evil denotes sentience.  How can a plot of land be "Evil"?  How can, for that matter, an animal be evil?  Even if a specific animal is the most horrendous thing and creation and it slaughters everything that moves, is that really evil, or it is just an accident of nature that this thing is so dangerous and that it kills and eats everything else.

Moreover, if undead are mindless, can they be evil?  Their creation might be a perversion of nature, but the undead itself isn't necessarily evil.  If it has a mind and is intent on causing harm, it can be said to be evil, but there are plenty of evil humans out there, and they don't live on "evil" land surrounded by gloomy trees and evil animals, etc.  It is the individual creature that is evil.

So to have an "Evil" area you'd have to have some kind of sentient force that exerts its will over the place and inflicts evil upon it somehow.  I think it's easier to handle this simply with entities (demons, sorcerers, etc.) rather than an "evil" zone that just makes so-called "evil" stuff spontaneously appear.

Having zones for "death", "chaos blight", "faeries" and so on makes more sense I think.  If a place is going to be evil it should be so because a nasty creature came out from the underworld and set up shop there, or a wicked sorcerer, or a demon, maybe enslaving people and teaching them to slaughter outsides and present their heads as sacrifice, possibly spawning nasty or dangerous creatures through magic or twisted genetic propagation of some kind.  In this case it would simply be a product of the local entities making evil things happen.

Something like "death" or "chaos blight" would be more in line with properties of the land, I think.  Faerie as well- if the particular area is some how connected with other realms of existence, or there is something weird in the soil that affects the ambient life there, then that works as a zone, not the result of an entity.  Perhaps "good" and "evil" entities can tend to gravitate towards areas that foster that kind of behavior more, but I think it is a bit too clumsy to tie a single area to these concepts.

[Virex]

In an evil zone, the area itself would be sentient and actively trying to be evil

[Arkenstone]

Think of Mount Redhorn, Caradhras.  In the book it was not the will of Sauron that opposed their crossing, it was the mountain itself.

Also of note is that the veins of mithril came out in spokes from Caradhras, underneath which the turned downwards, just like 40d adamantine did.....

[KaguroDraven]

In an evil zone, the area itself would be sentient and actively trying to be evil

The plants themselves trying to kill your dwarves? I like the sound of this.
Plants, Animals, Water, the Air itself, all trying to kill your dwarves from the get go. The Ultimate challenge mode.

[Neonivek]

I meant more about keeping Good and Evil as symbolic spheres given to others or undertaken by them.

Loki wasn't really evil but he was the god of evil anyway because that was the role others gave him.

Though I admit the other ideas on this topic are interesting as well. Good and Evil Spheres as a sort of "Motivation" paint, afterall it is one thing to do evil believing it is good and another to do evil knowing that it is evil. Like for example someone cursed with "Good" cannot go against their morality no matter the justification.

Or the idea with "Evil" or "Good" lands being sentient lands that actively attempt to act out their motivations either on their own perspective or that of the others.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

-Set: The Egyptian god of Evil
-Loki: The Norse god of evil, trickery, and magic (Best yet Loki isn't all that evil)

no.

set was even less evil than loki, he was the guy that protected the sun during the voyage through the underwold every night, and was even the patron god of some dynasties.

[KaguroDraven]

I think he meant, or atleast I hope he meant, Seth. Who while a jackass, like many many many ancient gods, still did have some good points.

[Neonivek]

Also ignoring how evil or not evil Loki and Set were...

They were still labled "God of evil"

Which was supposed to be the point of my point. A sphere of "Evil" without it needing to have an actual effect.

As for Loki, while Set actually has some "evil" things he has done (namely the whole chopping a god up into peices and stuffing it into a chest). the Bulk of Loki's villainy never actually happened.

It is like being the god of goodness because you were voted "Most likely to donate to charity".

Though yeah Loki was more of a jerk then an outright evil god.

[KaguroDraven]

Once again, it was SetH who chopped up osirus and he didn't stuff him in a chest. He spred him all over the world.

[ungulateman]

In an evil zone, the area itself would be sentient and actively trying to be evil

The plants themselves trying to kill your dwarves? I like the sound of this.
Plants, Animals, Water, the Air itself, all trying to kill your dwarves from the get go. The Ultimate challenge mode.

Australia?