im speaking specifically about the gods of the forgotten realms.
do evil and good gods get along?
do chaotic and lawful gods get along?
I know that there are God rivalries but I'm not quite sure if it is based off of alignment. if that's not the case is there a place where I could find the rivalries all in one place? thanks in advance!
Good and Evil, not really; there's a reason older edition exclusively LG Paladins specifically had Smite Evil and Detect Evil powers. Law and Chaos are more "it depends" on the deity side of things; deities are more broadly widely along that spectrum rather than tending to the far ends, as entities like the Modrons and Slaadi cover the extremes of that axis.
Good and evil people get along just fine. I don't see why their gods should be any different.
I mean, provided there's justification. They won't precisely seek each others company out for kicks - but say there's a pottery crisis, and the evil people have the pottery, and the good people have coin to pay: They'll get along just peachy.
Same for gods, except gods rarely need pottery.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Good and evil people get along just fine. I don't see why their gods should be any different.
I mean, provided there's justification. They won't precisely seek each others company out for kicks - but say there's a pottery crisis, and the evil people have the pottery, and the good people have coin to pay: They'll get along just peachy.
Same for gods, except gods rarely need pottery.
I mean, the gods aren't all constantly and openly at each others' throats, but on the cosmic level Good and Evil are more directly in conflict with each other than Law and Chaos are in the FR. Cyric's worshippers raid a village, paladins of Tyr ride out to slay them, the Cyricists move to counterattack, and on and on they go. Or a priest of Talona brews up a really nasty curse and tests out on a temple to one of the gods of Good before planning to deploy it on a massive scale. Again, in the older material where alignments- particularly Good and Evil- could have more mechanical relevance, you have things like the Always Lawful Good Paladins being specifically empowered by their deities to track down and slay the agents of Evil, and you had Good Clerics channeling Positive Energy while Evil Clerics channeled Negative Energy with a lot of "equal and opposite forces" connotations. Very rarely is one side going to have something the other wants, and even then they're gonna be a lot more inclined to take it by force over negotiation.
Good and evil people get along just fine. I don't see why their gods should be any different.
I mean, provided there's justification. They won't precisely seek each others company out for kicks - but say there's a pottery crisis, and the evil people have the pottery, and the good people have coin to pay: They'll get along just peachy.
Same for gods, except gods rarely need pottery.
I mean, the gods aren't all constantly and openly at each others' throats, but on the cosmic level Good and Evil are more directly in conflict with each other than Law and Chaos are in the FR. Cyric's worshippers raid a village, paladins of Tyr ride out to slay them, the Cyricists move to counterattack, and on and on they go. Or a priest of Talona brews up a really nasty curse and tests out on a temple to one of the gods of Good before planning to deploy it on a massive scale. Again, in the older material where alignments- particularly Good and Evil- could have more mechanical relevance, you have things like the Always Lawful Good Paladins being specifically empowered by their deities to track down and slay the agents of Evil, and you had Good Clerics channeling Positive Energy while Evil Clerics channeled Negative Energy with a lot of "equal and opposite forces" connotations. Very rarely is one side going to have something the other wants, and even then they're gonna be a lot more inclined to take it by force over negotiation.
Well - agreed. As long as we're talking that specific example. But we can't just extrapolate from that to everything else.
In every real world pantheon that I know of, good and evil gods get along just fine. There may be more to it than that, but it's not like Hel or Hades or Kali is constantly fighting all the ... somewhat less evil gods of the rest of their respective pantheons.
You could propably say that I'm against alignment based conflict as a concept. You may feel your neighbor is evil - but you don't go over there and smite him in the name of good. No, the way it works is, you discover your neighbor is rich, and you go over there and take his stuff - then claim to be smiting him in the name of good. Maybe, occasionally, the Grand Heirophant of All Things Good and True decide to gather up a posse and duke it out with the Sovereign Overlord of All Things Evil - but the guys who sign up for the crusade? They do it for the loot.
And you know ... your mileage may vary. I'm pretty sure I have the minority view here =D
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I don't know that any of those examples really qualify as "Evil" based on their actual mythological representation (Hades is really one of the most chill major Greek deities with a Y chromosome, Hel was unpleasant but doesn't actually crop up much in the myths I know of, and Kali is really complicated), and the question was specifically about the Forgotten Realms setting in any case, where there's tons of examples of clashes between the forces of Good and Evil by proxy via their mortal followers. Good and Evil are not questions of pure moral relativism in that setting; most of the Evil gods want their followers to go out, hurt people, and destroy stuff, which the Good gods then empower their followers to attempt to prevent. Once more, look at the older iterations of Paladins. They were very specifically built to go out and hunt Evil, including judging the souls of humanoids (which, I will admit, is an aspect that I appreciate 5e rolling back, although even in the older books you'd see distinctions between "foot soldier who needs to be stopped but not killed out of hand" and "guy who enjoys ripping hearts out while the victim's still alive that needs to be put down"). Mortals are a whole spectrum on the moral alignments, but the FR deities are a lot more rigidly stratified between the three points on that line.
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im speaking specifically about the gods of the forgotten realms.
do evil and good gods get along?
do chaotic and lawful gods get along?
I know that there are God rivalries but I'm not quite sure if it is based off of alignment. if that's not the case is there a place where I could find the rivalries all in one place? thanks in advance!
Good and Evil, not really; there's a reason older edition exclusively LG Paladins specifically had Smite Evil and Detect Evil powers. Law and Chaos are more "it depends" on the deity side of things; deities are more broadly widely along that spectrum rather than tending to the far ends, as entities like the Modrons and Slaadi cover the extremes of that axis.
Good and evil people get along just fine. I don't see why their gods should be any different.
I mean, provided there's justification. They won't precisely seek each others company out for kicks - but say there's a pottery crisis, and the evil people have the pottery, and the good people have coin to pay: They'll get along just peachy.
Same for gods, except gods rarely need pottery.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I mean, the gods aren't all constantly and openly at each others' throats, but on the cosmic level Good and Evil are more directly in conflict with each other than Law and Chaos are in the FR. Cyric's worshippers raid a village, paladins of Tyr ride out to slay them, the Cyricists move to counterattack, and on and on they go. Or a priest of Talona brews up a really nasty curse and tests out on a temple to one of the gods of Good before planning to deploy it on a massive scale. Again, in the older material where alignments- particularly Good and Evil- could have more mechanical relevance, you have things like the Always Lawful Good Paladins being specifically empowered by their deities to track down and slay the agents of Evil, and you had Good Clerics channeling Positive Energy while Evil Clerics channeled Negative Energy with a lot of "equal and opposite forces" connotations. Very rarely is one side going to have something the other wants, and even then they're gonna be a lot more inclined to take it by force over negotiation.
Well - agreed. As long as we're talking that specific example. But we can't just extrapolate from that to everything else.
In every real world pantheon that I know of, good and evil gods get along just fine. There may be more to it than that, but it's not like Hel or Hades or Kali is constantly fighting all the ... somewhat less evil gods of the rest of their respective pantheons.
You could propably say that I'm against alignment based conflict as a concept. You may feel your neighbor is evil - but you don't go over there and smite him in the name of good. No, the way it works is, you discover your neighbor is rich, and you go over there and take his stuff - then claim to be smiting him in the name of good. Maybe, occasionally, the Grand Heirophant of All Things Good and True decide to gather up a posse and duke it out with the Sovereign Overlord of All Things Evil - but the guys who sign up for the crusade? They do it for the loot.
And you know ... your mileage may vary. I'm pretty sure I have the minority view here =D
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I don't know that any of those examples really qualify as "Evil" based on their actual mythological representation (Hades is really one of the most chill major Greek deities with a Y chromosome, Hel was unpleasant but doesn't actually crop up much in the myths I know of, and Kali is really complicated), and the question was specifically about the Forgotten Realms setting in any case, where there's tons of examples of clashes between the forces of Good and Evil by proxy via their mortal followers. Good and Evil are not questions of pure moral relativism in that setting; most of the Evil gods want their followers to go out, hurt people, and destroy stuff, which the Good gods then empower their followers to attempt to prevent. Once more, look at the older iterations of Paladins. They were very specifically built to go out and hunt Evil, including judging the souls of humanoids (which, I will admit, is an aspect that I appreciate 5e rolling back, although even in the older books you'd see distinctions between "foot soldier who needs to be stopped but not killed out of hand" and "guy who enjoys ripping hearts out while the victim's still alive that needs to be put down"). Mortals are a whole spectrum on the moral alignments, but the FR deities are a lot more rigidly stratified between the three points on that line.