Topic: Are the Dark Gods and Demons of Essaence evil?

[Cormac Doyle]

To My Mind ...

Essaence = Essaence ... there's no such thing as "dark essaence"; rather, a someone who has succumbed to the attraction of the "Dark side" is someone who has pursued power to the expense of their humanity. (Remember the phrase "Power corrupts"?).

Unlife is the antithesis of Essaence, and if the two come in contact both are destroyed (Think matter/anti-matter). Thus the Unlife seeks to destroy the source of Essence, which is Life.

Does detect evil automatically detect someone using "Dark Magic" that is powered by Essaence ... depends on the intent and nature of the user. A follower of the God of Sigils/Runes/Magic from Charon (can't remember the name off-hand - he's not capable of maintaining a humanoid form for long) will detect as "Evil" to a cleric of one of the gods of Orhan, becuase they dislike him; he will only detect as evil to a "nutral god" if he starts to act evil.

Unlife will always detect as Evil.

You can go further, tho'...

The Antimagic and detect magic spell lists all have gaps ... I fill those gaps with Detect/block/cancel Unlife spells ... why? because if "Detect Mentalism" does not detect Psionics; then "no existing "Detect" spell should detect magic powered using Unlife; but in a world where Unlife is "in play", there would be spells to detect/counter it ...

btw - there's 4 or 5 articles in the Guild companion that I wrote back in 2000 on the differences between essence and unlife; on how the Unlife taints you, and how to categorise the undead (are they all unlife or not)

[rraarrgghh]

Hm,

I think that what Lynn called Dark Essaence is what is called "Chaos" in amthorian terminology - essaence that is more or less corrupted (as far as I remember, by the Unlife). I think that the Lords of Charon and the Demons of Essaence originate from the Chaos Planes. So, it's not totally of the hook to assume that there is some "Dark Essaence".
What struck me originally was if the power source of these Chaos Creatures was the Unlife or this Chaos force. It obviously couldn't be pure Essaence, since that came from other (the Higher) Planes. In the Master Atlas or Atlas Addendum there are some remarks about Chaos and that at the end of it lies the Unlife - but that didn't clarify the relationship for me.

At the beginning, I thought that the Dark Gods and Demons of Essaence were simply beings of Essaence that were using the Unlife as a power source - much like mortal followers of the Unlife. But now I must say, that I like the notion much more that Chaos is actually a sort of tainted Essaence, and that that is the source of power for the Chaos Demons and the Lords of Charon.

Now, to the detection problem. If we take Chaos as a tainted Essaence, then it would be clear that other spells could detect the taint - detect evil. It wouldn't be necessarily an evil spell as such - Let's say some Witch (follower of Andaras) clears up her kitchen with it. It depends if your detect evil spells can detect magical evil (=chaos) or moral evil (bad intentions).

Concerning detecting the Unlife however, I always liked the picture that the unlife is so strange and alien to all Essaence that it can't be detected as evil (perhaps not be detected at all). I would rather say that the Unlife should be detectable as absence of all Essaence - which could work as well for most PCs -and by certain spells an Unlife-follower casts. Dark Absolution again would be a good example.

[yammahoper]

My lunch break is ova' in about 12 minutes, so I will comment in full when I get home this afternoon.

lynn

[yammahoper]

Worked overtime   Tired.

lynn

[mocking bird]

To simplify our ideas - the Unlife is more of a philosophy than a religion.  Hence it will usually show up as evil but may show up as Unholy as well depending on the circumstances as it usually utilizes traditional 'Dark Forces'.

[dutch206]

I hesitate to mention the Forgotten Realms here, but is the difference between Essaence and Unlife like the difference between the Weave and the Shadow Weave?

[metallion]

I've never liked the treatment of "Evil" in SW. It's simplistic.  My wife the philosophy major leads cavalry charges through the holes in it. 

Shadow World defines capital-E evil as "the drive to destroy -- and feed on that destruction." 

Let's think about that for a moment.  By that definition, every living being is Evil.  To live is to destroy and feed on that destruction.  The Unlife feeds on the soul as well as the body -- what of it?  Food is food.

In the real world, and in well-constructed fantasy, no one but the insane take themselves to be evil.  Sauron was Morgoth's faithful servant.  Morgoth, in turn, felt quite justified in his rebellion against Illuvitar.  Who knows?  Perhaps if we ever got to hear Melkor's side of the story, we'd think he had a point.  (For those who want to remove a layer of abstraction and consider that Satan thought he had a point, and perhaps he did, I recommend Steven Brust's To Reign In Hell. 

And while we're on the topic, why limit ourselves to Zoroastrian or Christian notions of polarized good and evil? 

From the perspective of those living on Kulthea, the Unlife is evil -- we call them that because they want to kill us and eat us.  But that's a subjective, not objective analysis.  "Detect Evil" spells would likely, then, be misnomered "Detect Unlife" spells.  Perhaps exactly what is detected varies based on the detector.  Zanarians, for example, might discover those who harbor heretic thoughts or Elven blood when they detect Evil. 

All of which, of course, is before we talk about Dragonlords and Demons, who are alien and simply don't fit into our polar models of good and evil no matter how much we try.

[mocking bird]

Shadow World defines capital-E evil as "the drive to destroy -- and feed on that destruction." 

Let's think about that for a moment.  By that definition, every living being is Evil.  To live is to destroy and feed on that destruction.  The Unlife feeds on the soul as well as the body -- what of it?  Food is food.

The difference here is in the source of food - the body vs. the soul.  Killing the body does in effect 'recycle' it in the normal food chain keeping the cycle of life going.  Killing the soul permanently kills the person preventing it from entering the afterlife which is counrairy to all gods - both 'good' and 'evil' ones.  You also have the fact that wanting to join the Unlife can in many cases be a conscious choice (become undead on purpose) rather than a necessary one for survival.  Then the situation becomes one similar to the difference between the need of killing for food/survival and the desire to kill for the sake of killing.

In the real world, and in well-constructed fantasy, no one but the insane take themselves to be evil.  Sauron was Morgoth's faithful servant.  Morgoth, in turn, felt quite justified in his rebellion against Illuvitar.  Who knows?  Perhaps if we ever got to hear Melkor's side of the story, we'd think he had a point.  (For those who want to remove a layer of abstraction and consider that Satan thought he had a point, and perhaps he did, I recommend Steven Brust's To Reign In Hell. 

Along those lines you could also look into some modern Luciferian thought (some of which is theistic, some atheistic but both add odds with 'standard' Christian theology) who compare Lucifer to Prometheus - both of whom rebelled against a totalitarian ruler who wanted to keep mankind in the dark - both spiritually and in the case of Prometheus, literally.  But in the end, to some extent, as has been mentioned elsewhere and in a lengthy thread that eventually got locked as entering too far into the 'real world', evil can indeed be subjective.

[yammahoper]

Nice thing about a game, things can be defined and quantified well beyond the boundries of our reality.

In my game, the void is everything and nothing, the ultimate contradiction.  Existince springs from and exist within the void, the void itself oblivious to anything existing at all. 

Reality is like a layered onion, made of esseance.  Esseance beings hypothetically exist in all locations as they are part of the esseance.  Souls are a complex pattern the esseance has evolved that generates more esseance, growing the universe/itself.

The esseance is powerful and by its very nature, highly mallable and supporting of life, since it is the orgin of life.  What I call Dark Essence is esseance with a reversed polarity, able to work very powerful spells, such as gate formation, summoning, undead creation, etc.  Dark Esseance is not anti life, but it is the stuff of madness.  Detect evil spells in my game were designed with this in mind, and they really are detect dark essence spells.  Sorcerers, Necromancers and other users of dark essence are evil in the eyes of those who refrain from using it and only use natural essence, though death from fireball or suffication is still death.

Undead souls are dark essence machines, converting normal essence to dark essence, a corrupting, cold energy.  Dark essence tends to twist whatever it intereacts with.

The unlife, and voidal energys, are as powerful as the "arcane" unfiltered esseance, even more so in theory.  Voidal energies consume esseance and convert it back to the voidal energies from whence it came.  Because of the nature of voidal energies, detect evil spells also detect unlife, though they do not discern between the deiferences of the two.  This leads to great confusion.

In my game, anyone who learns to tap into the energy of the void, or the unlife, gains a new source of power.  This power may be used to cast any spell the weilder knows, but only this power may be  used to cast certain types of spells.

For those who just use dark essence, or essence and dark essence, there is no gain in power because the energy source is the same, it is the methodology of spell weaving that determines light versus dark essence.  I do use the arcane/realms division, so there is Esseance, Dark Esseance, essence, mentalism and channeling, in a ddition to dark essence, dark menatlism and dark channeling.  I make use of the handy RMCIII tables when i have "evil" spell users, with corruption points resulting in various mutations (sometimes good, sometimes not, I let the dice do the talking...and maybe some GM fiat ).

So in my game, if your warrior slaughters the village, he aint evil, just very mean, or dispicable, or whatever.  The Dark magics are only weilded by the power hungry, and weilding unlife is insane.  Unlife is, by its nature, truely evil to life.

lynn

[Koraq]

I think this discussion highlights something I consider I problem with SW and RM. Game mechanics have slipped in where it doesn't belong and now it's not clear whether RM is just a framework for adventures in SW or if it actually described its metaphysics. The main problem is that some spell lists and other game artifacts have been labeled as "evil". I condider that ICE's biggest mistake

Now. I really like Lynn's metaphysics. It start to make sense. The "evil" gods are like all essaence (how ever you feel like spelling it) related beings, part of the natural world. Voidal beings are the antimatter of SW and their existence and the energy that fuels it is the antithesis of the natural world, of spirit and matter.

-----------  The question about good and evil --------------

Evil acts are acts that a moral system judges to be wrong. There might be a external source or basis for the judgement like a Orhan God, or not.

Evil energy is the energy that is fundamentally opposed to all things living. I guess you could call this just a natural phenomena light night and day, but since one can (and want) to destroy the other it is judged as "evil" by all the moral systems in existence. Let's say this is the Unlife, and spell it with a capital E as Evil.

Then the Evil of Unlife can be detected as a lack of existence. It's the sucking away and destroying of life (essaence) that you notice with your Detect Evil spell.

Then there's the possibility of different kinds of essaence. We have canon sources describing mentalism using one kind of essence and channelling another. Let's say they have different polarity or "flavour" or whatever. Why not let the essence of the Dark Gods be such a flavour? It can be detected as existence of energy, thus differing from the Unlife, and when it's used for spells those acts can be judged by others as "evil". If a spellcaster detect these acts  with power from a god it's probable that the moral standards of that god decide if those acts detect as evil or not. Do I make sense?

------- game mechanics and how to use this ----------

Now for some game mechanics. Let's say the ability to detect the lack of natural energy is hard, then detecting Unlife would require an Arcane Detect Evil spell (or something comparable, if you're not using Arcane). Detecting Evil is the first sense (i.e. moral) is something everyone can do whose detecting spell is powered by a god, i.e. channelling users. They might all get different results, mind you.

How about corruption? Well, I don't see how anyone could use Unlife to power their spells without being softly devoured from the inside of the antimatter they are using. The so called "evil" lists are probably just propaganda from some followers of the Orhan gods and while the reversed polarity and different flavour of essence from a Dark God is probably going to turn you into their likeness, so is the essence from the so called Good Gods. Most consider the latter to be a virtue, not a calamity.

That's a way to utilize the metaphysics Lynn wrote about and I reshaped a bit. I think the only way to make good and evil work in SW is (like metallion noticed) to ignore the stamp of evil upon some of the game mechanics since they are actually a mistake by the author and to simplistic to explain the workings of Shadow World.

In this way we get three axis of good/evil/unlife and a proper definition of the values of "good and evil" work, and who and what corrupts who.

Damn, now I really wish I had someone to play RPGs with here in Canada!

[yammahoper]

Great post Koraq.  The "flavor" thingamicbob is exactly what I try to achieve in game.  The Evil versus evil was also a great point that, not surprisingly since I find it great, I also agree with.

Ah, nothing beats like minds huddled together for overbearing self congratulations

lynn

[mocking bird]

Carrying on the point of good vs. evil as a point of view...

You have good gods and evil gods.  Each has their own set of rules to follow and thing that run counte to them would be labeled as 'evil'.  Dependant coarising - good/evil can only define itself with respect to evil/good.

To quote George Sands - the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.  This is where the Unlife steps in.  If you equate good and evil with positive and negative, then the Unlife would be zero - not opposite to either yet counter to both.  With this in mind, the Unlife would indeed show up as 'evil' as it runs counter to both good and evil as defined by the respective deities.

[Old Man]

...

To quote George Sands - the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.  This is where the Unlife steps in.  If you equate good and evil with positive and negative, then the Unlife would be zero - not opposite to either yet counter to both.  With this in mind, the Unlife would indeed show up as 'evil' as it runs counter to both good and evil as defined by the respective deities.

Interesting. I would have put normal good-evil on the X axis and Unlife on an intersecting Y-axis. But then my view of the Unlife, as I would use it, would be as extra-Universal energies out side of the base game Universe's good and evil.

Ciao,
Old Man

[Koraq]

Great post Koraq.  The "flavor" thingamicbob is exactly what I try to achieve in game.  The Evil versus evil was also a great point that, not surprisingly since I find it great, I also agree with.

Ah, nothing beats like minds huddled together for overbearing self congratulations

lynn

Yeah, isn't it great!

[Kabis]

As a qualified expert, Masters from the Institute of Applied Chaos: Unlife basks in those distant places where matter and energy is unraveled and absorbed. A place of tumultous cascades of draining forces, rippling and twisting against the boundries of the Inner Planes. The dwellers of the Outer Void, sailing through the anti-creative violence in comfort.

Any thought that the Inner Planes exist certainly make us irate. Why not undo creation and convert it all into Void and exploit everyone to that goal?

The powers of the Void are open to all to abuse, including mortal and immortal alike. We can't wait for everyone to corrupt themselves and succumb to an unintentional demise of their own making. lol

Yes the Dark Gods and Demons of Essence are evil.

[yammahoper]

Kabis, you MUST write a new module...SOON.

lynn

[metallion]

The difference here is in the source of food - the body vs. the soul.  Killing the body does in effect 'recycle' it in the normal food chain keeping the cycle of life going.  Killing the soul permanently kills the person preventing it from entering the afterlife which is counrairy to all gods - both 'good' and 'evil' ones.

Until we can agree on definitions of 'good' and 'evil,' it's meaningless to apply those terms to gods.

So the source of the food is the soul rather than the body.  What of it?  It's still food.  That which feeds on it still has to feed in order to survive.  Saying it's a conscious choice provides no escape, either -- we consciously choose it every time we eat.  We make a choice to live at the expense of someone else's life.  For that matter, who is to say there isn't some greater "cycle of life" in place that Life and Unlife participate in?  Neither the Lords of Orhan or Charon are gods in any sense real world theology would recognize, so how much reliance can be placed on either of them?

[DonMoody]

So the source of the food is the soul rather than the body.  What of it?  It's still food. 

While I see this perspective, I though that, when soul vs body concept was put forth, there was an implied difference of:
body = a substance that, when consumed, is not lost forever
soul = a substance that, when consumed, is lost forever

If I eat a body, but the soul lives on to inhabit another body at some other time, that is rather 'trivial' compared to I devour a soul, it is gone and will never inhabit another body.

DonMoody

[mocking bird]

Until we can agree on definitions of 'good' and 'evil,' it's meaningless to apply those terms to gods.

No we don't.  The gods themselves have made that definition already and is represented in the worshp in their various churches.  There is no transcendence beyond good and evil because the gods haven't done so.  Simply put good is beneficial and approved for the god, evil is prohibited and bad for the god.   

For that matter, who is to say there isn't some greater "cycle of life" in place that Life and Unlife participate in?  Neither the Lords of Orhan or Charon are gods in any sense real world theology would recognize, so how much reliance can be placed on either of them?

In SW, there is no greater cycle of (Un)Life unless the GM has added one.   Eating of the soul breaks the cycle of life, i.e. nothing to recycle. 

As for choice and taking an extreme example - if you chose to go through some transformation to become immortal but the cost is to eat newborn children, is that a survival need?  I would say no.  Lions eat children because they may have to, those who chose to become Unlife do so because they want to.  The need for survival has been removed from the equation.

For real world analogies, the Gods of Charon remind me (or vice versa really) a little of the 11 anti-cosmic gods from the MLO (the destroyers who run counter to the Architect you might say).  The Lords of Orhon likewise equate to various archtypes in many ancient and modern pagan pantheons.

[Kabis]

Kabis, you MUST write a new module...SOON.

Thanks, but, I am uncertain that 2.3 fans is enough support for another work by yours truly.

Besides, I am a vapour. A shadow. An empty whirl of disruptive thought and whimsy. Manifesting only upon occasion to spam these forums.

:: vanishes into the nether ::