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[Pedigree Linkage: A previous, and more chatty, post on the topic is here. This current thread ("Alignment, Morality, and Gods") overrules and replaces anything I said in that thread.]
Note: References to Greek gods Hephaestus and Hermes below are me nerding-out as a pagan; they are not an indication that Greek gods exist in our game.
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Alignment
D&D alignments are pretty controversial in a lot of circles, and this is partly because morality isn't easy to cut and dry. Is murder "evil" if it's for a good cause? Is helping a little old lady across the street really "good" if you're doing it for all the wrong reasons? Isn't it convenient that the people you want to smack in the face with a mace worship an Evil god? What are the Evil gods' planes like and did my character's death feel like Christian hell when they went there? If worshiping Wee Jas sends you to hell, why does anyone do it?
Et cetera.
The 5th edition of the game has limited the scope of alignments in order to sidestep a lot of this; they aren't used for spell restrictions, clerics all have access to the same pool of spells (within GM discretion), and the Player's Handbook doesn't mention alignments anymore. This is probably for the best, but there's a couple areas we're still stuck with them and that's Gods and Death.
When a mortal dies, their soul goes to the plane of their deity. If they are non-religious or they refuse to go to their deity upon death (the "refuse to go to their deity" is a house-rule and should be viewed as a remarkably rare occurrence), they bounce to the Alignment Plane which best fits them. Got that? At death, you go to your God's Plane or you go to a non-religious Alignment Plane. Your call.
So if you worship Wee Jas all your life, then on your death you either go to her plane or you have a dying epiphany renouncing your religion and end up in, for example, the Non-Religiously-Affiliated Chaotic Good Plane. [Do you reunite with your loved ones if they had different gods or alignments? Probably not 100%, no, but let's say there are visiting arrangements between the astral planes. Conjugal Tuesdays, and that sort of thing.]
Alignments also matter for resurrection purposes: Souls are informed the name, god, and alignment of whoever is trying to resurrect them. So while you may willingly allow Evuul the Chaotic Evil Cleric to rez you (because hey, free rez), it's more likely that your corpse would need to be handed off to an alignment-similar cleric in order to coax you into coming back from the dead. [The nice thing about the Brilight Temple compound serving all the gods in one close locale is that it's easy enough for Evuul to tag out with Honore Priestess of Pelor if the rez spell isn't working.]
Morality
If we're stuck with "good" and "evil" gods, what does that mean? Am I evil if I worship an evil god? Will no one ever worship Wee Jas because Lawful Evil has to be the worst alignment in the history of alignments?
Here's my controversial ruling as GM and I'm allowing myself a controversial ruling because I don't believe it really matters or affects anything in-game: "good" and "evil" in the alignment grid are (to me) about whether you put helping others first vs. helping yourself first. [Inspired by this reddit post, although I don't think he got all his examples right. Still, it's worth a read.]
Now this is tricky because this framework can lead to the demonization of healthy selfishness and of self-care, and I don't want that. Self-care is great. Selfishness is great. We are literally alive because we took care of our selfs; well done, us. So when I say "evil" is about putting yourself first, I'm not talking about "I spent an hour in the bubble bath for self-care when I could have been volunteering at the orphanage, therefore I am evil." I'm talking about the kind of lifestyle where someone is putting themselves first consistently over-and-above any consideration towards others.
"But, Ana, is that really EVIL?" Well, the bigger issue is that (a) we're stuck with an alignment framework that uses that word already and (b) it's probably not... not-evil? Someone who regularly puts his wants and needs over others, not caring if it fucks them over or if they deserve better from him... is probably a pretty sucky person to be around? That able-bodied guy who pushed past the pregnant woman to be first on the bus and claim a seat, then refused to offer her his seat despite her being pregnant... that's a kind of banal evil?
"But, Ana, isn't that what Chaotic is?" No, actually! Lawful and Chaos (to me) are about whether you prioritize following the law or if you either (a) don't care even a little bit what the law says because pfffft or (b) actively anti-care about the law and are working to tear legal structures down. Incidentally, and somewhat tangentially, the idea that "evil" is about selfishness and unrestrained individualism--and that people might even consider it good to follow that "evil" path--is kinda sorta the theology of the Church of Satan. Which is hardly an endorsement (I'm not a fan), but I mention it because, well, other people have had this idea and it's not unique to me.
"But, Ana, I hate this idea no matter where it came from." Well, hear me out because now we have gods to talk about.
Gods
[Brilight information here.] The city of Brilight has a pantheon of mixed-race gods which they call "the Blessed Eighteen". These are 18 gods and goddesses who divide out evenly in the city's mind into the 9 possible alignments: 1 god and 1 goddess per alignment square. [Note: Some of the gods are agender or genderqueer, but they still have a title of "god" or "goddess" which their followers use. Since the gods are real and in direct communication with their followers, you may assume that these titles are how the gods desire to be known.]
The gods and their alignments are as follows in alphabetical order:
- Boccob, god of magic, arcane knowledge, balance, and foresight. [agender] [True Neutral]
- Ehlonna, goddess of forests, woodlands, flora, and fauna. [Neutral Good]
- Fharlanghn, god of land horizons, distance, travel, and roads. [Chaotic Evil]
- Heironeous, god of chivalry, justice, honor, war, daring, and valor. [Lawful Good]
- Istus, goddess of fate, destiny, divination, future, and honesty. [True Neutral]
- Kord, god of athletics, sports, brawling, strength, and courage. [Lawful Neutral]
- Lastai, goddess of pleasure, love, and passion. [Chaotic Neutral]
- Lirr, goddess of prose, poetry, literature, and art. [genderqueer] [Lawful Neutral]
- Moradin, god of metal, forges, and hearths. [Lawful Evil]
- Nerull, god of death, darkness, murder, and the underworld. [Neutral Evil]
- Obad-Hai, god of nature, freedom, hunting, and beasts. [Chaotic Good]
- Olidammara, god of music, revels, wine, rogues, humor, and tricks. [genderqueer] [Chaotic Neutral]
- Osprem, goddess of sea voyages, ships and sailors. [Chaotic Good]
- Pelor, god of sun, light, strength and healing. [Neutral Good]
- Sehanine, goddess of illusion, love, and the moon. [Neutral Evil]
- Umberlee, goddess of anger, wrath, storms and tidal waves. [Chaotic Evil]
- Wee Jas, goddess of magic, death, vanity, and law. [Lawful Evil]
- Yondalla, goddess of protection, fertility, and family. [agender] [Lawful Good]
You will notice that these are not necessarily their "canon" alignments. I wanted to map the Blessed 18 to the 9 possible alignment combinations, with 1 god and 1 goddess for each. Here they are by alignment grid and my reasonings why:
1. Lawful Good
- Heironeous. Canon alignment, and fits with his chivalry and justice domain. Fierce justice dad who will protect his children and pretty much anything else that looks like it might need protecting. Puts others first and values the law.
- Yondalla. Canon alignment, and fits with her fierce protection of family. Fierce justice mom who protects her family, only it turns out the whole world is her family. Puts others first and values the law because otherwise you'll spoil your supper if you have all those cookies.
2. Neutral Good
- Pelor. Canon alignment, and fits with a god of the sun who sees all. His alignment is also (by house-rule) a mirror alignment to his lost love Sehanine, Goddess of the Moon (Neutral Evil). She left him and the day-sky to love the God of Night. Though the choice to let her go alone pained him, Pelor remained in the day-sky because the people needed his light.
- Ehlonna. Canon alignment, and fits with a goddess of flora and fauna who live under Pelor's warm light. She protects the people and creatures of the forest.
3. Chaotic Good
- Obad-Hai. House-rule, placed here as god of freedom and wild beastly nature.
- Osprem. House-rule, placed here as goddess of the wild sea and her rowdy sailors. Her alignment is a mirror to her twin sister / dual nature Umberlee, goddess of ocean storms (Chaotic Evil). In-universe, they are depicted together in statues as twin sisters, but some of their followers will insist that they are two people but also the same person. (Not unlike how the Christian Trinity is three-but-one.)
4. Lawful Neutral
- Kord. House-rule, placed here because you bet your ass the god of athletics cares about rules. While most gods accept people from other alignments, Kord actively recruits from a wide variety of philosophies, sports being something of a great equalizer in this universe.
- Lirr. House-rule, placed here because the goddess of literature cares about rules. (Even if your art breaks the rules, you need to know them first!) Like Kord, Lirr keeps an open mind about followers from other alignments, just as long as they follow her rules.
5. True Neutral
- Boccob. Canon alignment, as god of secrets and knowledge.
- Istus. Canon alignment, as goddess of fate and divination.
Both of these gods deal in secrets and knowledge and arcane magic and fate. As such, they don't take sides on the Lawful/Chaotic or Good/Evil question. Fate rolls her dice and they report the results without bias. In-universe, these two are worshiped as siblings.
6. Chaotic Neutral
- Olidammara. Canon alignment, as god of thieves and revelry. Olidammara is actively a trouble-maker and enjoys pranks and good fun. His clerics are known to sometimes pass themselves off as clerics of other gods. This is considered, by Olidammara, to be a delightful joke and an extremely good disguise whilst thieving.
- Lastai. House-rule, placed here because the goddess of love follows her own path. While she has a mischievous streak, she isn't actively a prankster in the way Olidammara is. As goddess of passion, some of her followers practice "holy sex" as part of their worship, but she has celibate and sex-nope followers who pursue other sensual passions beyond sex.
7. Lawful Evil
- Moradin. House-rule, placed here because... well, frankly because I have a lot of feels about both this character and adjacent-god Hephaestus. Declaring Moradin "evil" is an extreme departure from his canonical alignment of "good", but Moradin demands his followers genocide orcs and penalizes his people for fleeing from combat, even when things aren't going well for them. Which is... prioritizing his own wants and agendas over the needs of others, in my opinion. So by my "evil isn't Bad, it's just selfish" paradigm, Moradin is Evil even if he's not Bad. The in-universe reasoning for him being "evil" (i.e., selfish) is that he makes his swords at the hearth out of pleasure for his craft, not caring who uses them or how.
- Wee Jas. Canon alignment, but note that in addition to being "evil" she is also literally the goddess of law. Which, unless we think law is inherently evil, is another point in the Evil is not necessarily Bad bucket. In-universe, Wee Jas is not a cackling evil witch who wants to kill everyone via legal means; rather, she's someone who cares about the law and places her wants and desires above other people's needs. She's the patron goddess of asshole attorneys, yes, but you can worship her and consider her philosophy worthwhile without being puppy-kickingly evil. Wee Jas is thoughtfully selfish; she pursues her wants like a chessmaster pursues a win.
8. Neutral Evil
- Nerull. Canon alignment. Nerull has often previously been used as the god of the "evil races" like orcs and goblins. He's also the god of murder and night and darkness. If we agree that races aren't inherently evil (because race doesn't work that way), and that murder and night and darkness aren't either, then why is Nerull "evil" in this game? Well, he's selfish. He and his followers would prefer to kill you in order to take what they want, rather than respect your rights as a person. In this sense he's not the god of murder because no other god murders from time to time (I'm pretty sure all the gods have resorted to murder at some point in their near-infinite lives); rather, he's the god of murder because it's the first thing he reaches for from his problem-solving toolkit. Nerull's philosophy is murder fixes almost everything, so why deviate from what works?
- Sehanine. House-rule, placed here because I wanted her to mirror Pelor (Neutral Good), but also because it felt right for the Goddess of the Moon to run with the God of Darkness and Night (Nerull). In-universe canon is that she was Pelor's lover, then impulsively ran away to love the God of Night. She's still bright and beautiful and kind-hearted (remember: "evil" isn't Bad), but she's selfish and capricious like the waxing and waning moon and she puts her wants and needs first before all other considerations. Sehanine is carelessly selfish; she pursues her wants the way a child would chase a butterfly.
9. Chaotic Evil
- Fharlanghn. House-rule. Placed here partly because I needed someone to fill this slot, but partly because... well, if Olidammara is the delightful fun good parts of Hermes, Fharlanghn is (in our universe, not in D&D canon) the bad parts of Hermes. He's the god of travel and roads, which means he's also the god of everything that goes wrong on a journey. Diarrhea. Dehydration. Bandits. Maps that turn out to be wrong. Prices that are always too high. He's the god of chaotic bad luck, the unpleasant things which are always coming down the road or over the horizon. In-universe, he's worshiped in the hope that he'll pass you by with a wink and go bother someone else. Somewhat quixotically, many of his followers are genuinely good people who consider it their job to lighten these burdens--inn-keepers who charge less than their competition, or traveling mendicants who give their clerical services to those they meet on the road. His other followers tend to be folks who make their living on the roads, such as messengers and caravan leaders.
- Umberlee. Canon alignment, placed here as goddess of the tempestuous sea and her storms. Her alignment is a mirror to her twin sister / dual nature, Osprem. Her temper tantrums are what sink ships and drag sailors to their dooms; a very few lucky ones are kept in her sea-palace as lovers, their bodies never found by their families. Sailors tend to worship Osprem for protection, while Umberlee's followers are usually landlubbers who worship Umberlee in the hopes that her storms will stay safely out on the sea and not ruin their homes, crops, and livestock. Umberlee also has a fair few worshipers in Brilight politics, her followers having found that having a religious justification for displays of righteous temper is often a draw card. Umberlee is cruelly selfish; she pursues her wants with bursts of passion and anger, not caring what she crushes in her temper.
Final Thoughts
Okay, so it's possible after all that this Good/Evil system still isn't your cup of tea and/or I've horrifically slandered your favorite D&D god in my interpretation of how I plan to play them. The good news is: Alignment is actually not going to come up at all in game if I can help it. There will be good people and evil people, yes, but it's not going to be a matter of what god they praised before breakfast, and I don't really expect the gods to make a big showing either.
So if you want to just close this thread and never think on it again, we can work within those parameters. However, you should be aware that there are followers of all the Blessed Eighteen within Brilight and someone saying "I worship Wee Jas" is, culturally, more like someone saying "I'm a New York City police detective" and less like someone saying "mwuahahahah, I eat puppies". You can still recoil and distrust them because you dislike the police, but it's not going to be acceptable for you to murder them in plain daylight and say "but they were Evil!" when everyone looks at you funny.
ALSO, it should be clear at the end of all this that, no, the planes of the Evil gods are not similar to the Christian hell. Wee Jas' plane would probably be a sophisticated place where rich lawyers have fun screwing each other over in complicated games of rules-lawyering, then they all laugh and drink and start over fresh with a new game. Nerull's plane is probably one of cool darkness and night and okay maybe the occasional back-stabbing but it's not like it's permanent, so you might as well be playing with water balloons. Umberlee's plane would be beautiful sea storms and that feeling of electricity in the air when you're full of power and you could crush your enemies with a single thought. People go to these planes because something about that god appeals to them; it's not a Dante-fest of torture and regrets.
Your character, despite having been dead, doesn't really remember the afterlife super clearly. But they know they were with their god (or on their alignment plane, in the case of characters who died without having a god) and they probably remember being happy? Because, really, they had a good idea of what their chosen afterlife would be like and they worshiped their god knowing what was to come. If they didn't like their afterlife at all, your character should feel some urgency to change their religion before they die again.
Does that... make sense? Wow, this thread got way longer than I'd intended, but I have a lot of feels about morality and gods.
Note: References to Greek gods Hephaestus and Hermes below are me nerding-out as a pagan; they are not an indication that Greek gods exist in our game.
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Alignment
D&D alignments are pretty controversial in a lot of circles, and this is partly because morality isn't easy to cut and dry. Is murder "evil" if it's for a good cause? Is helping a little old lady across the street really "good" if you're doing it for all the wrong reasons? Isn't it convenient that the people you want to smack in the face with a mace worship an Evil god? What are the Evil gods' planes like and did my character's death feel like Christian hell when they went there? If worshiping Wee Jas sends you to hell, why does anyone do it?
Et cetera.
The 5th edition of the game has limited the scope of alignments in order to sidestep a lot of this; they aren't used for spell restrictions, clerics all have access to the same pool of spells (within GM discretion), and the Player's Handbook doesn't mention alignments anymore. This is probably for the best, but there's a couple areas we're still stuck with them and that's Gods and Death.
When a mortal dies, their soul goes to the plane of their deity. If they are non-religious or they refuse to go to their deity upon death (the "refuse to go to their deity" is a house-rule and should be viewed as a remarkably rare occurrence), they bounce to the Alignment Plane which best fits them. Got that? At death, you go to your God's Plane or you go to a non-religious Alignment Plane. Your call.
So if you worship Wee Jas all your life, then on your death you either go to her plane or you have a dying epiphany renouncing your religion and end up in, for example, the Non-Religiously-Affiliated Chaotic Good Plane. [Do you reunite with your loved ones if they had different gods or alignments? Probably not 100%, no, but let's say there are visiting arrangements between the astral planes. Conjugal Tuesdays, and that sort of thing.]
Alignments also matter for resurrection purposes: Souls are informed the name, god, and alignment of whoever is trying to resurrect them. So while you may willingly allow Evuul the Chaotic Evil Cleric to rez you (because hey, free rez), it's more likely that your corpse would need to be handed off to an alignment-similar cleric in order to coax you into coming back from the dead. [The nice thing about the Brilight Temple compound serving all the gods in one close locale is that it's easy enough for Evuul to tag out with Honore Priestess of Pelor if the rez spell isn't working.]
Morality
If we're stuck with "good" and "evil" gods, what does that mean? Am I evil if I worship an evil god? Will no one ever worship Wee Jas because Lawful Evil has to be the worst alignment in the history of alignments?
Here's my controversial ruling as GM and I'm allowing myself a controversial ruling because I don't believe it really matters or affects anything in-game: "good" and "evil" in the alignment grid are (to me) about whether you put helping others first vs. helping yourself first. [Inspired by this reddit post, although I don't think he got all his examples right. Still, it's worth a read.]
Now this is tricky because this framework can lead to the demonization of healthy selfishness and of self-care, and I don't want that. Self-care is great. Selfishness is great. We are literally alive because we took care of our selfs; well done, us. So when I say "evil" is about putting yourself first, I'm not talking about "I spent an hour in the bubble bath for self-care when I could have been volunteering at the orphanage, therefore I am evil." I'm talking about the kind of lifestyle where someone is putting themselves first consistently over-and-above any consideration towards others.
"But, Ana, is that really EVIL?" Well, the bigger issue is that (a) we're stuck with an alignment framework that uses that word already and (b) it's probably not... not-evil? Someone who regularly puts his wants and needs over others, not caring if it fucks them over or if they deserve better from him... is probably a pretty sucky person to be around? That able-bodied guy who pushed past the pregnant woman to be first on the bus and claim a seat, then refused to offer her his seat despite her being pregnant... that's a kind of banal evil?
"But, Ana, isn't that what Chaotic is?" No, actually! Lawful and Chaos (to me) are about whether you prioritize following the law or if you either (a) don't care even a little bit what the law says because pfffft or (b) actively anti-care about the law and are working to tear legal structures down. Incidentally, and somewhat tangentially, the idea that "evil" is about selfishness and unrestrained individualism--and that people might even consider it good to follow that "evil" path--is kinda sorta the theology of the Church of Satan. Which is hardly an endorsement (I'm not a fan), but I mention it because, well, other people have had this idea and it's not unique to me.
"But, Ana, I hate this idea no matter where it came from." Well, hear me out because now we have gods to talk about.
Gods
[Brilight information here.] The city of Brilight has a pantheon of mixed-race gods which they call "the Blessed Eighteen". These are 18 gods and goddesses who divide out evenly in the city's mind into the 9 possible alignments: 1 god and 1 goddess per alignment square. [Note: Some of the gods are agender or genderqueer, but they still have a title of "god" or "goddess" which their followers use. Since the gods are real and in direct communication with their followers, you may assume that these titles are how the gods desire to be known.]
The gods and their alignments are as follows in alphabetical order:
- Boccob, god of magic, arcane knowledge, balance, and foresight. [agender] [True Neutral]
- Ehlonna, goddess of forests, woodlands, flora, and fauna. [Neutral Good]
- Fharlanghn, god of land horizons, distance, travel, and roads. [Chaotic Evil]
- Heironeous, god of chivalry, justice, honor, war, daring, and valor. [Lawful Good]
- Istus, goddess of fate, destiny, divination, future, and honesty. [True Neutral]
- Kord, god of athletics, sports, brawling, strength, and courage. [Lawful Neutral]
- Lastai, goddess of pleasure, love, and passion. [Chaotic Neutral]
- Lirr, goddess of prose, poetry, literature, and art. [genderqueer] [Lawful Neutral]
- Moradin, god of metal, forges, and hearths. [Lawful Evil]
- Nerull, god of death, darkness, murder, and the underworld. [Neutral Evil]
- Obad-Hai, god of nature, freedom, hunting, and beasts. [Chaotic Good]
- Olidammara, god of music, revels, wine, rogues, humor, and tricks. [genderqueer] [Chaotic Neutral]
- Osprem, goddess of sea voyages, ships and sailors. [Chaotic Good]
- Pelor, god of sun, light, strength and healing. [Neutral Good]
- Sehanine, goddess of illusion, love, and the moon. [Neutral Evil]
- Umberlee, goddess of anger, wrath, storms and tidal waves. [Chaotic Evil]
- Wee Jas, goddess of magic, death, vanity, and law. [Lawful Evil]
- Yondalla, goddess of protection, fertility, and family. [agender] [Lawful Good]
You will notice that these are not necessarily their "canon" alignments. I wanted to map the Blessed 18 to the 9 possible alignment combinations, with 1 god and 1 goddess for each. Here they are by alignment grid and my reasonings why:
1. Lawful Good
- Heironeous. Canon alignment, and fits with his chivalry and justice domain. Fierce justice dad who will protect his children and pretty much anything else that looks like it might need protecting. Puts others first and values the law.
- Yondalla. Canon alignment, and fits with her fierce protection of family. Fierce justice mom who protects her family, only it turns out the whole world is her family. Puts others first and values the law because otherwise you'll spoil your supper if you have all those cookies.
2. Neutral Good
- Pelor. Canon alignment, and fits with a god of the sun who sees all. His alignment is also (by house-rule) a mirror alignment to his lost love Sehanine, Goddess of the Moon (Neutral Evil). She left him and the day-sky to love the God of Night. Though the choice to let her go alone pained him, Pelor remained in the day-sky because the people needed his light.
- Ehlonna. Canon alignment, and fits with a goddess of flora and fauna who live under Pelor's warm light. She protects the people and creatures of the forest.
3. Chaotic Good
- Obad-Hai. House-rule, placed here as god of freedom and wild beastly nature.
- Osprem. House-rule, placed here as goddess of the wild sea and her rowdy sailors. Her alignment is a mirror to her twin sister / dual nature Umberlee, goddess of ocean storms (Chaotic Evil). In-universe, they are depicted together in statues as twin sisters, but some of their followers will insist that they are two people but also the same person. (Not unlike how the Christian Trinity is three-but-one.)
4. Lawful Neutral
- Kord. House-rule, placed here because you bet your ass the god of athletics cares about rules. While most gods accept people from other alignments, Kord actively recruits from a wide variety of philosophies, sports being something of a great equalizer in this universe.
- Lirr. House-rule, placed here because the goddess of literature cares about rules. (Even if your art breaks the rules, you need to know them first!) Like Kord, Lirr keeps an open mind about followers from other alignments, just as long as they follow her rules.
5. True Neutral
- Boccob. Canon alignment, as god of secrets and knowledge.
- Istus. Canon alignment, as goddess of fate and divination.
Both of these gods deal in secrets and knowledge and arcane magic and fate. As such, they don't take sides on the Lawful/Chaotic or Good/Evil question. Fate rolls her dice and they report the results without bias. In-universe, these two are worshiped as siblings.
6. Chaotic Neutral
- Olidammara. Canon alignment, as god of thieves and revelry. Olidammara is actively a trouble-maker and enjoys pranks and good fun. His clerics are known to sometimes pass themselves off as clerics of other gods. This is considered, by Olidammara, to be a delightful joke and an extremely good disguise whilst thieving.
- Lastai. House-rule, placed here because the goddess of love follows her own path. While she has a mischievous streak, she isn't actively a prankster in the way Olidammara is. As goddess of passion, some of her followers practice "holy sex" as part of their worship, but she has celibate and sex-nope followers who pursue other sensual passions beyond sex.
7. Lawful Evil
- Moradin. House-rule, placed here because... well, frankly because I have a lot of feels about both this character and adjacent-god Hephaestus. Declaring Moradin "evil" is an extreme departure from his canonical alignment of "good", but Moradin demands his followers genocide orcs and penalizes his people for fleeing from combat, even when things aren't going well for them. Which is... prioritizing his own wants and agendas over the needs of others, in my opinion. So by my "evil isn't Bad, it's just selfish" paradigm, Moradin is Evil even if he's not Bad. The in-universe reasoning for him being "evil" (i.e., selfish) is that he makes his swords at the hearth out of pleasure for his craft, not caring who uses them or how.
- Wee Jas. Canon alignment, but note that in addition to being "evil" she is also literally the goddess of law. Which, unless we think law is inherently evil, is another point in the Evil is not necessarily Bad bucket. In-universe, Wee Jas is not a cackling evil witch who wants to kill everyone via legal means; rather, she's someone who cares about the law and places her wants and desires above other people's needs. She's the patron goddess of asshole attorneys, yes, but you can worship her and consider her philosophy worthwhile without being puppy-kickingly evil. Wee Jas is thoughtfully selfish; she pursues her wants like a chessmaster pursues a win.
8. Neutral Evil
- Nerull. Canon alignment. Nerull has often previously been used as the god of the "evil races" like orcs and goblins. He's also the god of murder and night and darkness. If we agree that races aren't inherently evil (because race doesn't work that way), and that murder and night and darkness aren't either, then why is Nerull "evil" in this game? Well, he's selfish. He and his followers would prefer to kill you in order to take what they want, rather than respect your rights as a person. In this sense he's not the god of murder because no other god murders from time to time (I'm pretty sure all the gods have resorted to murder at some point in their near-infinite lives); rather, he's the god of murder because it's the first thing he reaches for from his problem-solving toolkit. Nerull's philosophy is murder fixes almost everything, so why deviate from what works?
- Sehanine. House-rule, placed here because I wanted her to mirror Pelor (Neutral Good), but also because it felt right for the Goddess of the Moon to run with the God of Darkness and Night (Nerull). In-universe canon is that she was Pelor's lover, then impulsively ran away to love the God of Night. She's still bright and beautiful and kind-hearted (remember: "evil" isn't Bad), but she's selfish and capricious like the waxing and waning moon and she puts her wants and needs first before all other considerations. Sehanine is carelessly selfish; she pursues her wants the way a child would chase a butterfly.
9. Chaotic Evil
- Fharlanghn. House-rule. Placed here partly because I needed someone to fill this slot, but partly because... well, if Olidammara is the delightful fun good parts of Hermes, Fharlanghn is (in our universe, not in D&D canon) the bad parts of Hermes. He's the god of travel and roads, which means he's also the god of everything that goes wrong on a journey. Diarrhea. Dehydration. Bandits. Maps that turn out to be wrong. Prices that are always too high. He's the god of chaotic bad luck, the unpleasant things which are always coming down the road or over the horizon. In-universe, he's worshiped in the hope that he'll pass you by with a wink and go bother someone else. Somewhat quixotically, many of his followers are genuinely good people who consider it their job to lighten these burdens--inn-keepers who charge less than their competition, or traveling mendicants who give their clerical services to those they meet on the road. His other followers tend to be folks who make their living on the roads, such as messengers and caravan leaders.
- Umberlee. Canon alignment, placed here as goddess of the tempestuous sea and her storms. Her alignment is a mirror to her twin sister / dual nature, Osprem. Her temper tantrums are what sink ships and drag sailors to their dooms; a very few lucky ones are kept in her sea-palace as lovers, their bodies never found by their families. Sailors tend to worship Osprem for protection, while Umberlee's followers are usually landlubbers who worship Umberlee in the hopes that her storms will stay safely out on the sea and not ruin their homes, crops, and livestock. Umberlee also has a fair few worshipers in Brilight politics, her followers having found that having a religious justification for displays of righteous temper is often a draw card. Umberlee is cruelly selfish; she pursues her wants with bursts of passion and anger, not caring what she crushes in her temper.
Final Thoughts
Okay, so it's possible after all that this Good/Evil system still isn't your cup of tea and/or I've horrifically slandered your favorite D&D god in my interpretation of how I plan to play them. The good news is: Alignment is actually not going to come up at all in game if I can help it. There will be good people and evil people, yes, but it's not going to be a matter of what god they praised before breakfast, and I don't really expect the gods to make a big showing either.
So if you want to just close this thread and never think on it again, we can work within those parameters. However, you should be aware that there are followers of all the Blessed Eighteen within Brilight and someone saying "I worship Wee Jas" is, culturally, more like someone saying "I'm a New York City police detective" and less like someone saying "mwuahahahah, I eat puppies". You can still recoil and distrust them because you dislike the police, but it's not going to be acceptable for you to murder them in plain daylight and say "but they were Evil!" when everyone looks at you funny.
ALSO, it should be clear at the end of all this that, no, the planes of the Evil gods are not similar to the Christian hell. Wee Jas' plane would probably be a sophisticated place where rich lawyers have fun screwing each other over in complicated games of rules-lawyering, then they all laugh and drink and start over fresh with a new game. Nerull's plane is probably one of cool darkness and night and okay maybe the occasional back-stabbing but it's not like it's permanent, so you might as well be playing with water balloons. Umberlee's plane would be beautiful sea storms and that feeling of electricity in the air when you're full of power and you could crush your enemies with a single thought. People go to these planes because something about that god appeals to them; it's not a Dante-fest of torture and regrets.
Your character, despite having been dead, doesn't really remember the afterlife super clearly. But they know they were with their god (or on their alignment plane, in the case of characters who died without having a god) and they probably remember being happy? Because, really, they had a good idea of what their chosen afterlife would be like and they worshiped their god knowing what was to come. If they didn't like their afterlife at all, your character should feel some urgency to change their religion before they die again.
Does that... make sense? Wow, this thread got way longer than I'd intended, but I have a lot of feels about morality and gods.
