Summon Monster Template and Character Alignment Question.


Rules Questions


OK, I am playing a summoner and his alignment is chaotic neutral.

This creature is summoned with the celestial template if you are good, the entropic template if you are chaotic, the fiendish template if you are evil, or the resolute template if you are lawful; you may choose any if you are neutral.

Based on this what template do I apply to my summoned creatures when I summon them via my SLA.


I believe it would be entropic, as the "Chaotic" component of your alignment is specific as to the more general "Neutral". That is how I would rule, anyway.


Phntm888 wrote:
I believe it would be entropic, as the "Chaotic" component of your alignment is specific as to the more general "Neutral". That is how I would rule, anyway.

That really doesn't make much sense, because if we went by that reasoning, that means a chaotic good character could only summon monsters with the entropic template and lawful good characters could only summon monsters with the resolute template. That means only vanilla good and evil aligned characters could summon monsters with the celestial and fiendish templates.


There are two ways to read this. The first, which is the most accurate as far as the text goes (but that doesn't make much sense), is that you go in order of the description. Whichever template you qualify first for is the one you get. I this case it means the order is celestial < entropic < fiendixh < resolute.

The other option, and the one I think makes more sense (but is a little looser in the text), is that you can pick whichever template you meet the requirements for. For example, if you were lawful good you could summon with the lawful or celestial template. If you were chaotic evil you could summon entropic or fiendish.

Additionally, based on the wording of the rules I think its clear that the neutral option (that allows you to pick any) only applies when you are true neutral, as the rules line lists out every other alignment possibility beforehand.

The Exchange

celestial or fiendish are the normal 2. being CN, Means you could summon either one. than there is the newer 2 for law and chaos. this lets you add entropic. so you get to choose from those 3.


I am with Phntm888.

From the SRD for Simple Template: Entropic:
"Creatures with the entropic template live in planes where chaos is paramount."

Since there is no neutral template, and your alignment is CN, your chaos alignment would pair with Entropic.

If you were CG, you could then pick either the Good template of Celestial or the Chaotic template of Entropic.


"Neutral" is often used by the rules, confusingly, to mean "True Neutral". In fact the phrase True Neutral comes up only rarely, and the only way to determine whether "Neutral" means "morally neutral", "ethically neutral", or "true neutral" is in regards to context on a case by case basis.


Alright, after some searching I found this thread quote from James Jacobs, Creative Director at Paizo, concerning the matter.

As written, no; those spells only allow for the summoning of celestial or fiendish creatures. Obviously that's because the entropic and resolute templates were invented a few years AFTER we published the Core Rulebook.

Allowing for these two templates to work with summoned creatures is a great house rule if you don't want to use feats or the like.

And no, you can't apply more than one template to a summoned creature.

So, from his point of view, it's not unreasonable to allow those templates to be applied as a house rule, but since the books came on different times, they simply couldn't replace what was written on the core rulebook to allow you to summon creatures with the entropic or resolute templates.

So I guess this answers my question. Again, thank you guys for replying to my post.

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