The Good Elemental Lords


Lost Omens Campaign Setting General Discussion


If we ever get a book on the Elemental Lords do you think the good Elemental Lords should be free from there imprisonment

Dark Archive

Be one heck of a Mythic adventure, to storm one of the Elemental Planes, hook up with some renegade / underground resistance elements of the old good elemental regime, and find and free one of the good Elemental Lords, changing the balance of power on that particular plane, so that evil isn't completely in charge, but now has a new front of elemental good-guys to keep them in check.

That said, it sure shouldn't be easy, and perhaps, not even advisable. These were the same good elemental lords that couldn't get their ducks in a row and work together against a coordinated and lockstep joint action by their evil counterparts. Perhaps some time in the penalty box has taught them the error of their ways (that evil will always triumph, if good is dumb), or perhaps some *new* good elemental lords (capable of working together against evil, just as the current evil elemental lords proved capable of putting aside differences and outmaneuvering their fractious good counterparts) are just what is needed.

I'd love to see what sort of good elemental forces might remain, hidden away and avoiding the dominant evil regimes, in the various elemental planes. A city full of good-ish celestial fire giants, on the plane of fire, led by some advanced to huge and with the half-celestial template and class levels in Paladin, could be an awesome unbroken bastion of the old good regime...

Scarab Sages

"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King Jr.

In the real world, at least, Evil is Evil because it is stupid. Its MO is easier and pays off far more quickly than Good can, but it sows the seeds of its own inevitable doom at the outset. Evil is paranoid and wants to control, while Good is curious and wants to learn. The net result of this is that Evil wins round 1 by way of "shock and awe/blitzkrieg" tactics, but Good wins round 2 because it bothers to learn how the universe around it works. From this knowledge comes a cornucopia of power that Evil, with its one-track mind, never bothered to investigate.

It should be noted that the justification given in the Inner Sea World Guide (in which Golarion's Elemental Lords are introduced) is that since there are no rules or higher powers to intervene, Evil supposedly wins because "survival of the fittest" - but it's really precisely because there is no order that Evil cannot survive ("It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." - Charles Darwin). Evil's focus on being the absolute best at winning wars leads to it being extremely specialized and inflexible, and when Chaos in whatever form comes a-knocking, it discovers it is powerless against the countless challenges it has no way of overcoming. When all you have is a hammer, you find yourself SOL when a rust monster shows up out of nowhere and eats it.

What this all means, then, is that Good defeats Evil with resilience, patience, intelligence, and knowing things Evil can never fathom. Think of a battle between Elves and Orcs: The Orcs are way stronger and tougher in a straight-up fight, but the Elves beat them by running around, hiding in the underbrush, and picking them off with bows and magic. Another good metaphor is judo: Simpletons think that being strong means being invincible - aren't they shocked when some dainty willow shows them how their precious strength is actually weakness?

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