Now my question is this:
Does this rule concern the followers of the dark gods and summoners of demons of essaence, too ?
Or are they exempt from the rule, since their spells are based on essaence and not the unlife ?
Well, for me, the followers of the dark gods who weild the power of the unlife will in time be consumed and become followers of the unlife, not the dark god, though few may know or sense this for a long while. In my game mechanics, the dark gods weild dark essence, which is seen as evil, but is not evil, just very corrupting (i.e. drives you mad, makes you lust for power, etc). Voidal powers are anti essence, anti life, which destroys and unmakes the fabric of our universe, turning it back into the voidal energies from whence it came (or God wove it, etc. The unlife desires to destroy the cancer that devours voidal energy and weaves it into esseance...I have developed a rather detailed doctrine for my SW game, lol...).
Unlife and dark essence detect as evil, which confuses people, but serves the unlife well enough. Only true masters of esseance know the difference.
lynn
I believe the philosophical basis for the Unlife's belief structures was spelled out in one of the Companions, but I'm not going to read all seven of them to find out which one it was. ;D
I believe the philosophical basis for the Unlife's belief structures was spelled out in one of the Companions, but I'm not going to read all seven of them to find out which one it was.
The explination of the Unlife as super racist pro immortal oraganization is just another lie woven by the unlife, or a poor interpretation.
The unlife is much more instinctive, elemental even. It has a purpose, and It drives to achieve that purpose in all It does, unmake it all, invade the ulcer of esseance with the void, and restore the balance of nothingness, thus even destroying even the painful realization of Themselves and Their previously unknown existence, which They became of aware of via the massive cataclysm that ripped a hole in reality and exposed it to the void.
Shadow World defines capital-E evil as "the drive to destroy -- and feed on that destruction."Â
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.
...
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.
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
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.
So the source of the food is the soul rather than the body. What of it? It's still food.
Until we can agree on definitions of 'good' and 'evil,' it's meaningless to apply those terms to gods.
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?
Kabis, you MUST write a new module...SOON.
Quote from: metallionUntil 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.
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.
That's no help either from a perspective within the game or outside the game discussing it. Inside the game, all gods say they someone's good and someone else is evil, such that (for example) a Phaonite and a Xanarite have mutually exclusive definitions of the terms. Outside the game, "the gods themselves" don't do anything we don't make them do, being fictional creations, bringing it back to us to define the terms so that we can put those definitions into the gods' mouths.
Both lions and liches choose to do what they do because the alternative is death. If that doesn't make both choices a survival need, then you're using a definition of the term "survival need" with which I'm unfamilar
Really? The Azerate strikes me as much more unified than the Charoni are desribed.
Yes it is a help as it solves the problem for us to define good or evil for ourselves, we do however define it for the gods. In other words we do not need to define absolute Good or absolute Evil (or have an all encompassing definition of Good & Evil) as from the variuos deities perspective it is all relative. While indeed we are doing the work of putting the definitions into the gods' mouths, we already have a perspective to draw from in that the gods desires are defined in the game - the GM just needs to fill in the blanks.
You are missing my point. Lions & leeches eat what they do as a need for survival - no alternatives. If you make the conscious choice to join the Unlife fully realizing that in order to survive after that point, while it is a survival issue that you need to eat souls you had made that choice beforehand. In other words eating souls was never a survival issue, it was completely a choice.
The problem that leaves you with is that if good and evil mean nothing more than "$Diety likes it" and "$Diety doesn't like it," saying "The Unlife is Evil" reduces to "Orhan doesn't like the Unlife." Setting this beside "Scalu likes the Unlife" leads us to "The Unlife is Good." Once you're there, "The Unlife is Evil" means nothing more than "I worship the Lords of Orhan" rather than being any sort of commentary on the Unlife itself.
Which is fine for defining the belief structures of Orhanians in the game, but leaves no meta-game basis for saying "The Unlife is Evil."
Actually, I think you're missing my point. Lions and leeches (and Liches, which was not a typo) do have an alternative to eating what they do: death. If you want to restrict the analysis to the sentient, you and I choose to kill every time we eat, and we do have the alternative of choosing to die. We make that choice knowing that if we choose to kill to live we will have to continue to make that choice in order to survive after that point. This is exactly the situation someone who is deciding whether to die or to join the Unlife is making. If they are evil for choosing to live even if it means they must kill, then you and I are evil for making the very same choice.
But I think we agree now that Hitler was evil: he turned one people against another, and in a classic political maneuver, made a race into a 'threat' to unite Germany (sound familiar?). Was it a coldly calculated maneuver? Yes. But I bet he rationalized to himself that it was necessary to save his country
Consider the gods as bankers. Souls are the currency used as deposits in these banks that keeps them running. The Unlife in effect burns the money eliminating it from circulation. This from either side would be considered detrimental to the survival of the banks and therefore would be considered 'evil' by both sides.
Before changing into Unlife soul suckers, the person does not have to eat souls to survive but unless a vegan, killing to survive is natural.
It is not a survival issue to eat souls - it is a simple matter of choice. Consider a rancher who owns several cattle - and has no problem eating beef. One day this person decides to turn to cannibalism as his only source of food - even though cows abound to an alternate food source is readily available. Would you consider this an evil act? That to me is the Unlife - the choice to become so for reasons other than survival.
[Ack - Godwin's Theory strikes again.Nope -- no one has been called a Nazi or compared to Hitler.
Banks spend all kinds of effort doing all kinds of things to regulate the rate at which the supply of money increases. Unrestricted growth of the supply of money leads necessarily to inflation. There was even a country a few years back that simply made everyone trade their old money for new money at a rate of 1000:1 in order to curb inflation. Mints burn cash every day in order to release new, less worn bills, without destabilizing the economy. Quite the opposite of being considered detrimental, it's considered vital to the survival of banks and the economy they serve! (Now that I'm thinking about this, I think my Lorgalis is going to start using the analogy to explain why the Unlife is a necessary part of existence!)
Even vegans kill each and every time they choose to eat rather than die.
Your analogy is close, but not quite there. Consider a rancher who owns several cattle and has no problem eating beef. He's running out of cattle. (i.e. he's mortal) He can either die of starvation after he eats the last beefsteak fro m the last bull, or he can turn to cannibalism to survive. You can make the argument that he should choose to die rather than resort to cannibalism, but you cannot argue that the choice to resort to cannibalism in that case is not necessary to survive.
Nope -- no one has been called a Nazi or compared to Hitler.
Are you referring to people or in nature?
I recall a story of one of the lives of Buddha where he, as a rabbit, came across a starving monk. The Buddha threw himself into the fire so that the pacifist monk may live.
No, he ate his neighbor before eating the last cow hence cannibalism was not necessary to survive as of yet.
I didn't take the analogy anywhere, the analogy simply doesn't work. You gave banks destroying currency as analogous to what the Unlife does, and that all banks could agree it was detrimental to all banks. This simply isn't true, as banks destroy currency as part of their normal operations.
Remembering that in this analogy, cows are breaths/heartbeats/whatever keeps a mortal alive, if the mortal waits until the last one is exhausted, the mortal dies. What you can't get around is that unless the mortal employs the Unlife, they will die, and that makes it a survival need. As I said, you can try to argue that survival is not always ethical, but you can't argue that it's not needed for survival.
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.
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.
What you can't get around is that unless the mortal employs the Unlife, they will die, and that makes it a survival need.
Banks do destroy money, mints print more. What if there aren't any mints to print more money?
Agreed that cows do indeed have a heartbeat. However I am saying that there is an ethical difference between killing a cow to survive and killing your neighbor because you want to.
I completely agree with you on this point.
This would be a good point, if it weren't for the fact that undead are not living being. They are dead.
And they also do not need to feed on souls/other being to continue existing (also vampires don't "die" if they do not feed for long times, they just become inactive). Undead can exist forever even without seeing a single living being in their whole unlife.
They destroy living beings (and souls) either because they choose to do so or because their mere presence drain the life-force out of the living around them (and in this case they could simply choose to stay away from them bu they don't do that).
If they were dead, they wouldn't need the term "undead" to describe them. They are neither alive nor dead, but a third state.
That third state clearly involves the process of feeding.
I'd dispute that. It seems to me that far more people go to places where the Undead are (Thanor, Vour, Catacombs, etc.) than the other way around.
Saying there's an ethical difference between things is very different from saying that one of those things is a survival need. It seems that you're saying survival is not always an ethical choice. That's a legitimate position to stake out, but it's by no means universally agreed. We're left again without Capital-G-and-E Good and Evil, and instead left with good=my ethic; evil=not my ethic.
Terry didn't stick us with an Illuvatar (And as a Wiccan, I'm really glad he didn't because it saves me the effort of taking it back out), but part of the price for not having such a foundation is that we don't have a basis for objective Good and Evil, only subjective good and evil.
No, I am not saying that survival is an ethical choice. What I am saying is that undead feeding on souls (or destroying them if you will) is not a survival choice. It becomes killing for the sake of killing or even because they enjoy it which under virtually all belief systems is considered an evil act. I am not sure what flavor of Wiccan you would be but several I have corresponded with would agree.
However he did put in gods with different personalities and different requirements of its worshippers. As such the objective G & E is already put into the game. Just because you don't have a Judeo/Xian/Muslim or even gnostic Demiurge/Yaldabaoth running aroung does not mean Good and Evil are not present.
Is Klyssus good or evil? He requires a human sacrifice every day, but if he doesn't get it, he can't make the sun rise and the world dies in cold and darkness.
Given Kulthea's ties to SM (i.e. real world cosmology), this 'sunrise' thing is more myth than truth.
Klyssus is no more able to stop the sun rising on Kulthea than Sauron could on Middle Earth when he attacked Gondor (although Sauron did create/control enough clouds/smoke/dust that the sky was very overcast and little sunlight shown through around Minas Tirith).
At this point, I need you to define your terms. I'm defining a survival need as something that must be done in order to avoid dying. If that's your definition, too, then the undeed feeding on souls is a survival need -- if they don't derive sustenance from acts that require the destruction of souls, then it's not feeding. If that's not your definition, what is?
I don't know any Wiccans who would argue one should not enjoy eating, even though killing is a necessary part of eating.
If you want to condemn the unlife as evil because they kill for reasons other than sustenance, that's certainly valid, but the unlife would be no different in that from anyone else.
Is Klyssus good or evil? He requires a human sacrifice every day, but if he doesn't get it, he can't make the sun rise and the world dies in cold and darkness.
You can have a consistent definition of good and evil, or you can have Lords of Orhan who are consistently good and Lords of Charon who are consistently evil. You can't have both.
I made the distinction several posts ago. The diffrence is that while eating souls is indeed a survival issue they made the choice to make the change to become undead and therefore need sould to survive. As such is was a choice to need souls to survive as they did not need to before hand. In other words they made the conscious choice to kill when it was still a choice, not a necessity. In effect they chose an unnecessary mode of survival. If a person gave up all money and decided to live off of stealing from others, does that absolve the person from stealing as it would be for survival or are they held accountable because they made the choice to make stealing mandatory?
Kabis, you MUST write a new module...SOON.
lynn
He may not have time.
KABIS: THE DAUGHTER OF DARKNESS IS COMING. YOUR TIME DRAWS TO A CLOSE.
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.
But then, I always have problems with these Void-discussions.
To me (yes, physics... ;)) the Void is simply characterized by the absence of matter/energy, i.e., the presence of nothing.
This leaves room neither for evil, be it with capital or small e, nor for its antithesis.
Bringing the matter-antimatter analogy for life(essaence) versus unlife(antiessaence) into play, ...
Yes, a really interesting discussion - which leaves me in a state of confusion! ???
I think matter anti-matter analogy doesn't fit very well.
I think a better analogy for 'the Void' and 'Unlife' is dark matter.
Of course, dark matter that is self aware and seeks to destroy life but I think you get the idea.
DonMoody
P.S. FWIW, I think of 'the Void' as a different place, not of this universe but perhaps of a parallel one that is quite different from our universe (or the SW universe if you prefer).
Sorry, I was referring to the Curse of Kabis campaign adventure that I am using in my SW RM game.
Because of the confusion it generates, I try to stay away from the life/unlive, matter/antimatter (or darkmatter) discussion. It hurts my little brain. Plus by not defining it, I leave it as the big unknown that I believe it should be for the characters. Each of them can define it their own way - just like they would in RL.
Though as for the Dark Gods and Demons of essaence: yeah they are evil (or Evil). As they are NOT for flowers and bunnies, they are evil. If you are agianst flowers and bunies YOU ARE EVIL. ( ;D)
But then, I always have problems with these Void-discussions. To me (yes, physics... ;)) the Void is simply characterized by the absence of matter/energy, i.e., the presence of nothing. This leaves room neither for evil, be it with capital or small e, nor for its antithesis.No, no, this was the part of the forces of Order ;)
Bringing the matter-antimatter analogy for life(essaence) versus unlife(antiessaence) into play, one could imagine that the Void provides a driving force that tries to unite the two - leading to said total annihilation. But then why would this be the goal of one of the "partners"?
QuoteBut then, I always have problems with these Void-discussions. To me (yes, physics... ;)) the Void is simply characterized by the absence of matter/energy, i.e., the presence of nothing. This leaves room neither for evil, be it with capital or small e, nor for its antithesis.No, no, this was the part of the forces of Order ;)
Now, that?s a nice thought - the Void, the Elder Force. Ancestor to all cumbersomly themes and concepts of "live" and "unlife". Primal Force, in it?s casual cruelity incomprhensible beautiful! I start to admire it!!
Also, Chaos does not always mean evil, but evil things can happen in moments of Chaos.
Look at what Japan did to China when they invaded during WWII.
They considered themselves better then the Chinese, superior in every way and they could justify the things they did.
In the case of WW2 imperial Japan, there were many who had doubts about what was being done.
They invaded Manchuria and various other places for the sake of conquest and power - kind of like the Dark Gods & Chaos.
Are "Good" and "Evil" absolutes?
My point about Japan was things do not happen in a vacuum.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing."
Almost all humans have within them a moral compass (there are exceptions - sociopaths and psychopaths, for example - but the exceptions are the vast minority).
When one does not follow ones conscience, one usually finds some (often rather flimsy) way to rationalize the choice of not following it.
DonMoody
P.S. The 'good men to do nothing' quote is allegedly attributed to Edmund Burke.
But it is found in none of his papers nor in any contemporary source about or regarding him.