The Gray Areas
Leave it to a fancy noble lady to make a big dramatic scene at a mixer. Necromancer is only out here trying to meet people and make new connections. She hears that somebody else in the room works in the undeath industry, offers to talk shop, and BAM! Initiative out of nowhere! If only Van Helscion understood the difference between necromancy and white necromancy I imagine that reactions like this are what drove Necromancer to start up her PR campaign in the first place.
Of course, if we’re going to hop in the Wayback Machine and revisit our previous discussions on alignment, I still agree with the original thesis. It is always possible to invent a reason for the Evil characters to adventure beside Good ones. You just have be a little flexible on both sides.
As Necromancer’s teardrop mascara recedes from whence it came and Paladin slowly but surely bends Handbook-World cosmology in favor of love, we are watching the principle play out. These characters wanted to find a way to make it work. They’re both putting in the effort. Now we just have to sit back and see if everything ends happily… or hilariously. Either way, I just hope they can hold on long enough to get a badass costume change.
This of course brings us to our question of the day! When you’re out there adventuring, you sometimes have to make questionably ethical calls. When were you required to justify your dubious morality? Did you come up with a solid excuse for your latest heinous act, or was it more of a handwave and a “let’s just not dwell on it?” Tell us all about your own wiggle room between light and dark down in the comments!
SACANIME: The Handbook’s own Laurel Shelley-Reuss has just checked in at SacAnime! If you happen to be in the Sacramento area, stop on by! Festivities start Friday, September 1st. Laurel will be at booth AA63 all weekend, arting her art and hawcking her wares. If you should seek her out, remember to let her know that you’re a friend of the comic. That’s how you earn the special secret goodies for Handbook fans only!
ADD SOME NSFW TO YOUR FANTASY! If you’ve ever been curious about that Handbook of Erotic Fantasy banner down at the bottom of the page, then you should check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Thrice a month you’ll get to see what the Handbook cast get up to when the lights go out. Adults only, 18+ years of age, etc. etc.
I have a Good Aligned character in one game who is working with a group of Necromancers and Undead against the Church of Pharasma, because the Church is using an artefact to remove Negative Energy from the world, and she is not willing to stand back and let that Genocide happen. Because Dhampirs have a spark of life that is Negative Energy and as a race they do not all deserve death.
I was midway to saying these two had chemistry when I realized it’s probably harder to put two ladies onscreen and *not* have me seeing chemistry. I just like overly posh adventuring lesbians.
Hard same, bro.
Can’t break the Geneva conventions if Geneva doesn’t exist in this universe!
Also, a devout Sigmarite (priests and/or witchhunters) could be (forcibly)”escorting” an “untrained magic user” to Altdorf to get the proper training so they can become a proper wizard instead of an evil, flammable witch without burning them en-route, right? And maybe you get sidetracked fighting evil for a while and the not-yet-licensed magic user wields their unholy powers in the service of fighting a greater threat. Surely Sigmar would understand the necessity of the situation warrented a detour of a few years, ridding the land of evil? If anything, it shows how willing they are to serve the Empire, just like the corpses he reanimated as undead slaves were merely continuing their duty to protect the Empire, even in death. You understand, right? A little necromancy is a small price to pay for seeing off those damn Norscans, right? Please put down the torches, we can talk about this!
I play a paladin in my current campaign. It was very funny to see the other player’s reaction to my encouraging things like sneaking around, stealth kills, theft, and the like. I mean, yes, I’m a paladin… but there are several oaths available in 5e, mine’s not redemption or devotion (it’s ancients), and also, I’m from Luskan. Y’know, the city of pirates. So I tend to be pretty chill when it comes to regular skullduggery. The only time there was friction with the other (decently murderhobo-y) party members was when one of them decided to execute a guy we had captured and interrogated, without consulting the rest of the group. Because while there are no tenets against killing hostile people in the oath of the ancients, there IS one about mercy… and killing an unarmed prisoner didn’t sit well with me. But hey, we ironed out that wrinkle, and now everything’s peachy.
Did Laurel change her name from Reuss to Ruesse?
Motherfucker…. It was 1:00 in the morning! 🙁
Fixed in any case.
Val Helscion must the be fan of many parties with how much leg she has to reveal when undead show up.
It wouldn’t surprise me if organisers started to discreetly arrange for undead to show up if she’s on the guest list.
lol. Gotta be fun at Halloween. Trick-or-treating becomes a can can dance! 😛
I imagine Necromancer’s mascara might start to drift/pattern above her eys as she and Paladin slowly get together proper.
I haven’t had to defend my enchanter’s screwy morality yet, but I have an justification locked and loaded already; the party already knows his backstory of being fused with an aberration/eldritch horror. Those things have screwy morality at the best of times, and outright incomprehensible at the worst.
I do actually have a few rules for how the screwy morality works; mostly based around not taking crap from anyone and doing what it’s within your “nature” to do (e.g it’s within an enchanter’s nature to manipulate, lie, and charm, so that’s what he does)
Oops, hit reply by accident. That was meant to be an original post, sorry
-50 DKP! 😛
Speaking for myself, I would buy the “eldritch monstrosity” thing more than the “it’s in my nature” thing. The latter permits literally everything, you know?
The “in my nature” thing was actually a holdover from the eldritch horror, though I think “instincts” might be a better word than nature. Or perhaps “what I evolved to do”, if you can say an eldritch horror that probably showed up fully formed out of a black hole or something “evolved”.
It was a rather small eldritch horror anyway, not the kind that can bash its way through anything, so that probably gives a bit of context. Less of a “stick to what you’re good at cause it’s morally right” and more “stick to what you’re good at cause it makes you feel better about yourself and stops you thinking about what you’re bad at”, if that makes sense.
Necromancer’s helpful cosmetics salesperson:
https://media.tenor.com/12SCEvN4Ab8AAAAM/rorschach-watchman.gif
I’d say Necromancer would’ve had better luck with Occultist, but she might have also been less than diplomatic (I mean ectoplasm is alot easier to clean than rotting brain juice).
Posted in the right place this time:
I haven’t had to defend my enchanter’s screwy morality yet, but I have an justification locked and loaded already; the party already knows his backstory of being fused with an aberration/eldritch horror. Those things have screwy morality at the best of times, and outright incomprehensible at the worst.
I do actually have a few rules for how the screwy morality works; mostly based around not taking crap from anyone and doing what it’s within your “nature” to do (e.g it’s within an enchanter’s nature to manipulate, lie, and charm, so that’s what he does)
We all know the classic “joke” about wizard’s and fireballs – “I said, I cast fireball… ”
Well, joke became reality in our game as a “simple theft” went decidedly, horribly, and game memorably wrong for our wizard player.
Long story short, what started as an almost comedic series of bad rolls and attempts at strategic spell casting foiled by initiative choices by the cosmos, ended in a fireball being cast inside a shop and annihilating the shopkeeper that was just trying to protect their simple wears (it was a bag shop, that is all, just bags, nothing expensive or worth a person’s life).
The laughs stopped as the DM set the scene for the horror of how it must feel to have some random wizarding event occur in the city in a public space where people live and work. “Cops” arrived (city guard), an investigator, and people were staring, crying, and shocked at the event…
Including our wizard AND her player.
The scene at the table became silent and sullen as our laughter turned to a sort of confusion at how this scene had gone so wrong and so serious all in a span of a few minutes. In game time mere seconds had passed for the poor shopkeep, now dead, burnt alive, but only for a few moments along with his entire shop and all his wares. The collected booty from the event was said shopkeeper’s one and only seeming prized possession, a bag of holding that was locked in a safe with a lock so poor it was probably all he could afford.
Our player, their eyes nearly in tears had to continue playing out the scene as they attempted to discern if anyone had seen them or would be able to place them and had their character come get some help from the rest of the group to determine if we were in any danger (we were not) and then, a character choice was made for their wizard in that moment. I full direction change for how they had intended to play a Kenku (raven folk) as a random bauble stealing bird like person into a more thoughtful and level headed bird wizard that would NEVER do something so foolish ever again in her life (and she never did for the rest of the campaign).
The consequences of the scene were played out more in a philosophical way and an alteration in the thoughts of a typical murder hobo group, rather than any specific in game situation, which in its own way, made the real world implications of the act even more horrific. We “got away with it clean”… but our lives both in game and out were forever changed by the moment.
I played a cleric (initially Chaotic Good, eventually Neutral Good, then Lawful Good) in a long-running campaign with rotating DM duties. Having played different campaigns with stereotypical vanilla clerics run by different players (all with white tabards and interchangeable fantasy gods with generic pseudo-Judeo-Christian ethics), the game night crew was conditioned to always lump the cleric with the milk-drinking morality police whenever questionable tactics were required.
At some point the question of torture came up in order to extract information from an evil priest bent on bringing about the apocalypse. As the other PCs debated whether and how to “send the ‘paladin’ out for coffee” while they conducted their interrogation, I interrupted with my in-character voice and pointed out that the cleric served the Greek pantheon. Citing Tantalus, Sisyphus, Ixion, Prometheus, and other examples from mythology, I pointed out that my priest of Heracles/Zeus would be perfectly fine with torture under the right circumstances.
“I have studded gauntlets and touch-healing,” I said. “What level of consciousness would you like him at?” Punch-healing that left the victim slightly healthier but briefly in a world of pain became the standard tactic of dealing with megalomaniacal-villains-that-won’t-tell-you-how-to-stop-the-ritual and assassins-refusing-to-give-up-the-name-of-their-employer and such.
I very often like to play a good guy while my friends like to play bad guys. For example, my friends and I were playing in a campaign themed around the Firefly series. I played a good doctor. They basically played space mafia.
My solution? I just said my character was insane. I’d use this justification to explain why a nominally good guy would ignore the shady stuff his companions would do.
So, I’d act in my good manner 80% of the time. But whenever my action collided with their more shady ones, I’d let them take lead and pretend like my character was totally oblivious to what was going on.
“When you’re out there adventuring, you sometimes have to make questionably ethical calls.”
I don’t understand. Either it’s ethical or it isn’t. If it isn’t ethical, you shouldn’t be doing it. If it needs to be done, and it’s still unethical, perhaps you should re-examine your ethics or whether or not it “needs” to be done, because one of those two is in misalignment.
Okay, breaking kayfabe for a sec…. I tend to play PCs who either have strong beliefs or are so morally flexible it doesn’t matter. So I’ll rarely, if ever, have a PC I’m playing that has a moral quandary. I don’t tend to see the enjoyment in that. Now, a PC forced to go against their moral/ethical code is different, but that tends to end up with long simmering IC resentment (or the PC gets over it if someone can eventually convince them of the morally superior position), as either the PC wasn’t strong enough to force their opinion on everyone else //and// suicide is not an option (IE “death before dishonour”) or magical coercion was used to make my PC fall in line… That can make for interesting rp, but I’m just not into the internal angstiness of the other route.
“When were you required to justify your dubious morality?
Now that’s an entirely different animal. Sometimes other’s ethics/morals do not align properly with the correct ethics/morals (IE my PC’s ethics/morals) and said PC is not in a position to force them to conform to the morally superior argument. In these cases one must find ways to make what is right and proper fit within their warped and incorrect moral viewpoint.
This is when you get arguments like “If you insist on carrying ‘er Royal Highness’ bloated corpse, I’ll return ‘er to being dead…” after raising said royal highness as a zombie because no way was my necromancer going to carry ‘Her Majesty’s Matched Luggage’ all the way back to the castle.
* Her Majesty’s Matched Luggage was an in joke with that group for anyone who was so corpulent they had difficulty moving under their own power… or for completely unnecessary baggage that someone was dragging along for no good reason.
Yes, it is a Spaceballs reference, that group was formed that long ago.
I’m pretty much always the goody-two-shoes in the party. Even my most recent character, who was intended to be a pastiche of morally-ambiguous shonen rival characters, wound up in a party ranging from scheming cultists to a cleric who just likes smashing barstools over people’s heads. Between that and my two levels of paladin (for the divine smite, you see), I wound up being the party goody-two-shoes again.
Sometimes that works out well. One time I was trying to play a snobbish noble and slid into being the Only Sane Man party leader for a bunch of quirky weirdos, that was fun. Sometimes, not so much. One time I was still working out the details of my quirky sea witch when my party decided to murder sahuagin noncombatants and joke about sahuagin caviar, which is…not great.
These weren’t even sahuagin noncombatants in a raiding camp or something. We found out they had treasure and decided to steal it, which is already pretty questionable even before you add war crimes on top.
I wish I had something to say about how I handled these problems. But for the most part, I just try to ignore them. Ugh.
My character: a Lawful Evil tiefling worshipping Abadar, god of law. We were clearing out a fortress that goblins have conquered (the early parts of Rise of the Runelords) when the party corners the goblin leader, I step up and use Enemy’s Heart, sinking my claws into his chest, tearing his heart out, and crushing it in my hand to receive a STR buff for a while.
The sorceror, watching this happening: “… Are you uh, are you evil?”
My cleric, who is banned from lying: *launches into a long spiel about the nature of the afterlife, souls, and the process by which clerics are sent to the personal planes of their god, to become divine servants.*
The sorceror: *just assumes this means she must be neutral, since Abadar is, and drops the question, satisfied, walking away.*
My cleric, watching them walk away: “… *did I just get away with that?*”
I have a NG Bard with Summon Undead – they take the form of allies that died fighting a death cult. He has bits of their skull wired together as a focus until he can find a caster with Resurect. Weirded out the priest of Pelor something fierce.
“Undead! Unacceptable! I must do something about this! Give me that skull!”
“Great! Will you resurrect them? I have the diamonds right here.”
“Ummm…I can’t yet. Not for 6 levels.”
“Too bad. I’m gonna have them fight evil then. They really hate these cultists.”
“Uhhhh….carry …on?”
His experience with moral issues are accidental AoEs. Like a fireball that blows through an open window. If you save a group of children from being eaten alive by ghouls but kill a couple grandparents in the process, what do you do with that?
I have to admit that this approach personally bugs me because it very much feels like a double standard. Why is it always the players who want to play Good characters that have to compromise, and never the ones who want to play Evil characters? Why can’t you simply have campaigns where the rule is “No, necromancy really is Evil in this world, and if you want to play a necromancer the rest of the party is free to kill your character?” I don’t necessarily say that every campaign and every group has to be like that, but I really do not like the implication that people who want to play paladins are always required to sacrifice their fun to accommodate people who want to play murderers or abominations.