| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Detect Virtue, Innocence, & Wickedness for Paladins, Antipaladins, Unicorns, Devils, etc.
Been thinking a bit about paladins and unicorns and the trouble of not just what makes paladins fall--or maybe not even be accepted as paladins in the first place--and the similar problem with the new Pathfinder unicorns who have ditched the old "Virgin: Y/N?" standard for who they let ride them, now just going for "Female: Y/N?" "In a relationship: Y/N" and "Exceptional Virtue: Y/N?" as the new standards.
Of course, unicorns, like paladins, only get to detect evil, which means that unicorns effectively only get "detect non-evil" which means that finding a woman of "exceptional virtue" they have to go with an interview process:
UNICORN: Any significant others?
WITCH: I've got a familiar. He's a fox. Does that count?
UNICORN: I guess not. Profession?
WITCH: Witch.
UNICORN: Are you now or have you ever been a member of a hag's coven?
Rather than that, I was thinking that, in addition to being able to detect evil--or detect good in the case of antipaladins and devils--there'd be a few other special detections that only paladins and similarly pure (or impure) beings get. Something like this:
Virtue
Description: Good enough to be a paladin or ride a unicorn
Who qualifies: Clerics in good standing of good deities who have taken the "good" domain; paladins; individuals who the GM decides have their goodness come up to this level.
Innocence
Description: Too young or sheltered to have ever been faced with a significant choice between Good and Evil; must be sentient and sane enough to be capable of making this choice or at least have the potential to one day make it
Who qualifies: Babies; exceedingly sheltered children, even adult children, of BBEGs who have never been told about mom or dad's day job (ie. Rapunzel Complex); others at GM option
Special: Creatures with "innocence" are unharmed by spells such as Holy Word which usually do damage to creatures not of a specific alignment.
Wickedness
Description: Not just garden variety evil, but seriously cruel and depraved
Who qualifies: antipaladins; clerics in good standing of evil deities who have taken the "evil" domain; individuals who the GM decides have their evil come up to this level.
Unicorns could then, in addition to virtuous women, could also go out and hang out with the old traditional virginal innocents.
Obviously devils should get this too. It's nice to be able to tempt the good into sin, but probably more rewarding to go after the innocent who had formerly just registering as neutral not because they'd actively chosen neutrality but because they never realized they ever had a choice and were never presented with an opportunity to actually do good or evil. Rapunzel doesn't get out much.
I'm not certain who else should get to detect innocence. Possibly clerics with the Good or Evil domains, maybe those specializing in certain divinations.
Thoughts?
This is not what I thought it was going to be, but this is a very interesting idea, nonetheless. Do you have other ideas for varying degrees of "virtue?"
I am running a game where alignment is subjective (IE: evil is not necessarily hellbent on world domination, and good isn't necessarily nice or helpful). I also have a paladin who wants to stop and detect evil on the PCs and every NPC he interacts with. This inspires me to give him a scale to work from (little evil to big evil, or not evil at all).
Sorry I have nothing really meaningful to contribute, but thanks for the inspiration. :)
Very interesting. I like it. It is almost like another alignment system that refines the existing alignment system.
Virtue is very similar to exalted good from the the BOED. That book had some problems, but I like the idea that there are good people and then there are people who went above and beyond in the pursuit of good.
I'm not certain who else should get to detect innocence. Possibly clerics with the Good or Evil domains, maybe those specializing in certain divinations.
Thoughts?
I would give it to anyone who can memorize or otherwise use detect good or evil. Detect innocence/virtue/wickedness is just another arcane/divine spell IMO. Just like you have to specifically memorize detect evil, you would have to specifically memorize detect vitrue.
Followup question, would undetectable alignment hide virtue/innocence/wickness?
Honestly, I think the whole Good/Neutral/Evil business is already a shades of grey spectrum and adding in Virtue/Innocence/Wickedness is basically adding in infra-good and ultra-evil, with unstained innocence being the utter absence of alignment.
Where you view things on the pantone between white/grey/black is already a judgement call anyway. Is this a very dirty white or a very pale dove grey? Is this exceptionally dark grey or light charcoal? Putting in magnesium white and fulgent at the ends of the spectrum is sensible. Innocence is basically clear or colorless. That can look like goodness or even virtue because innocence is utterly without malice but it can also look like evil or even wickedness because innocence is also utterly without compassion because it hasn't been introduced to those concepts yet or at least comprehended them. The baby ogre asking the wizard why he's crying while the baby eats the taste snack mama gave him (the wizard's familiar) is innocent the same as Rapunzel in her tower is innocent.
Having Detect Virtue, Innocence and Wickedness be spells makes sense, come to think of it, and they should likely even be one step lower than the regular Detect Good and Evil and subsets of it. Detect Good should be able to Detect Virtue as part of it and Detect Evil with Detect Wickedness likewise.
I suppose making them part of detect good/evil makes sense. You detect evil, then when you focus in a little closer you can see if they are vile or not. Same for detect good/virtue.
That leaves innocence out in the cold. Maybe create a detect neutral, that will allow you to focus a little closer and know if they are innocent or not?
I suppose making them part of detect good/evil makes sense. You detect evil, then when you focus in a little closer you can see if they are vile or not. Same for detect good/virtue.
That leaves innocence out in the cold. Maybe create a detect neutral, that will allow you to focus a little closer and know if they are innocent or not?
There very probably should be.
There should also be something like a "Balanced" uber-neutral alignment for those individuals who have not just rejected good and evil as uninteresting but who have made a very strong and conscious commitment to remaining neutral, sort of like Switzerland.
Detect Innocence should likely go as a subset of all three detects, as the innocent have a capacity for anything, not having made any choice.
There's a lot of problem with actions, intentions, and success ratio.
To go with an evil act, let's talk about, oh, say, killing a unicorn, a CG intelligent beastie that only exists to purify poisoned wells and give pony rides to deserving young women. Heck, it Pathfinder its even got over that virginity hang-up.
Now, I can easily come up with all sorts of people who try to kill a unicorn, and even a few who succeed, but I have a problem with whammying everyone with the same level of sin without taking into account every extenuating circumstance, and likewise I wonder why, metaphysically, sin has to wear off over time, and if it does wear off over time, is this fixed to the wheel of the year of the lifespan of an individual? Does sin wear off faster for short-lived races like orcs and goblins and slower for long-lived species like orcs? Do unaging creatures like undead and some 20th level alchemists maintain their sin at the same radiance unless otherwise acted upon?
But back to the dead unicorn. Somehow I think that two jerks who know what a sweet, helpful and intelligent creature a unicorn is, and plot to murder it for its valuable magical horn anyway--to sell to the apothecary to make Viagra potions, because unicorn horns are used for healing, and schwing potions come under that--but due to their own incompetence and/or twists of fate, end up failing, are somehow more evil and sinful than the expert hunter with no skill in Knowledge Arcana who sees a unicorn prancing through the woods and thinks it's some sort of weird forest-dwelling goat with only one horn. *TWANG!* *THUNK!* One critical hit later, we have the hunter cutting steaks from the weird goat and later cutting off its horn because it's pretty and might be something his wife would like for the mantelpiece to break up the monotony of all the antlers and boar tusks.
On a related note, while I've read Heroes of Horror, and think its good for some games, the taint mechanics mean, by the HoH RAW, if you unwittingly eat a zucchini from the hag's garden which is fertilized with the corpses of murdered children, you get infected with the Taint of evil. This is okay metaphysics if that's what you're going with, but if sin inheres in deed rather than intent, that means that the wizard who polymorphs blocks of tofu into babies via Polymorph Any Object has not done anything sinful when he gives them to the hags to eat apart from maybe lying, and the hags--who are really wanting to eat the screaming babies and glory in the evil wickedness of it all--are going to be perplexed when these turn out to be 0-evil-calories babies because unbeknownst to them, all they're doing is snacking on tofu. Unless you come up with some theology where it's still murder because they were babies at the moment, but then that means if someone turns the babies into tofu and leaves them out for unwitting vegan monks, who eat them, the monks have committed no sin or cannibalism, since all they ate was tofu, even if it turns back into babies in their tummies.
But I think this is all a bit of a long aside from the question of how to detect paladinly virtue and so forth.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
|
As much as I'm loath to steal from comics (too much) maybe something like Johns' emotional spectrum? While we don't know (in the comics) what the white light is, if we make it innocence, it overrides the other emotions.
For example, instead of lawful evil a tyrant who rules by fear, but believes that his rule is best might show as evil(Yellow and green) (fear for how he rules, will for his determination that his way is right.)
A Paladin would likely radiate Good(Green/Blue) or Good(Green/Violet) A Unicorn would radiate Good(blue/indigo/violet). It gets a bit complex as you'd have to on the fly, match colours to the NPCs personality.
unicorns then would be attracted to the white light (innocence). If the person's in a relationship, even if they're an innocent, they'd show up with violet (love).
Like I said a bit overly complex. OTOH, it would make for an interesting explination for undead = evil, since they'd all radiate black auras.
Thanks for reminding me of The Soul Spectroscope. It's a book by a competitor of HG Wells. It was a scientific device that detects ethics. In game it would be a minor artifact prism that you look through and see the color of someone's soul.
Note also there is evil intent. It's GM wiggle room that allows someone scanning for evil to detect evil intent now. Is the Wyvern planning to ambush you when you are weaker? Dark red or slight evil that can be picked up on in a neutral setting.
Does an Inquisitor have detect heresy? Normal detect evil would be just wrong.
In DC Comics, the Emotional Spectrum is divided into the seven colors of the rainbow, with each color corresponding to a different emotion: rage (red), avarice (orange), fear (yellow), willpower (green), hope (blue), compassion (indigo), and love (violet). Willpower is a save. Let's call it Determination, Faith, or Focus.
http://www.horrormasters.com/Text/a2226.pdf
I cannot edit my previous post anymore forcing me to double post.
This author is great.