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Neutral champions are tricky. Since like "Champion of Civilization", "Champion of Nature", and "Champion of Freedom" are all pretty sensible things to have. But like Magdh (LN) is not really an advocate of Civilization, Neither Nethys nor Brigh (TN) are not really advocates of nature, and Groetus (CN) doesn't seem to have anything to do with freedom.This problem seems to already exist with the current causes, though. You can have Redeemers of Nethys and Desecrators of Achaekek. Leaving it for the player to explain how their cause and god interact seems to be fine to me.
Even if Kurgess doesn't have any particular focus on redeeming people, a players interpretation and focus on certain aspects of the god can explain why a redeemer would follow them.
So for me, the thing unifying good champions is that their whole deal is "do good" modulated by the other alignment component, and the thing unifying evil champions is that their whole deal is "do evil" modulated by the other alignment. Then the deity thing is largely flavor on top of that. Like you'd spot the difference between a Paladin of Torag, a Paladin of Iomedae, a Paladin of Erastil, and a Paladin of Shelyn by their weapon, some of their focus spells, but mostly by specific RPing flavor; they're all going to be morally upstanding people who do things by the book. The tenets are the most important thing about the class.
But there's no real way to "do neutral", and I can't fathom what the "tenets of neutrality" would be. I know Mark Seifter has mentioned on a stream the idea of doing like "the Tenets of the Green Faith", or "the Tenets of the Prophecies of Kallistrade" or "the Tenets of the laws of Mortality" as a way to do other kinds of Champions, and that's how we might have to cover some of the neutrally aligned Champions.
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For some reason, this thread makes me really want to see an LE worshipper of Abadar who is obsessed with finding the "optimal" level of poverty and oppression within a city. Their argument being that some level of poverty is necessary to ensure the city always has an available workforce desperate enough to rapidly accept any job opening, regardless of conditions, so that the economy can work at maximum efficiency without pause. At the same time, they don't want to overdo it since too much poverty would breed hopelessness and encourage the poor to resort to crime rather than accept a bad-paying job with working conditions a normal person wouldn't accept.
Could also be interesting for such an LE worshipper to argue for the elderly, disabled, etc. to be put to death if they cannot productively contribute to the economy anymore - stating that it is harmful to the overall well-being of society to waste resources on someone who cannot produce.
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It is possible to do Neutrality as Balance. Which gives you things you can do to preserve balance.
EVen neutrality can have multiple facets.
Neutrality as Balance just doesn't work that well for all the neutral deities, when they themselves are not particularly interested in Balance.
Like Nethys is balanced purely because he is EVERY EXTREME AT THE SAME TIME, and his worshippers are about "using magic to reshape the world" not "use magic to reshape the world in specific ways."
There's absolutely a place for neutrality as balance, but it's not especially appropriate for a huge number of the deities who allow neutral followers. A lot of neutral deities are neutral because their purview is itself a thing that is balanced, but does not serve balance in any greater sense.
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Yes precisely it is a different type of neutral. But your argument works in reverse as well.
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Nethys is worshipped as a dualistic god of creation and destruction. Obviously his good followers will emphasize his nurturing aspect and the evil ones will focus on the blow-everything-up side, but neutral ones venerate both sides and try to balance between them.
Nature deities like Gozreh have an obvious aspect of balance and cycles to them, since nature requires both life and death. One other significant group of neutral deities are the Psychopomp Ushers and their boss Pharasma, who are also concerned with balancing the flow of the River of Souls, with some of them helping nurture life when its needed and others orchestrating extinction events when people are not dying in time.
I think balance as a concept gets a bad rap because it brings to mind the old druid-laws of D&D that obligated people to kill a baby for every one they saved, but to me that's kind of like the neutral equivalent of the lawful stupid paladin stereotype.
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Neutrality as Balance just doesn't work that well for all the neutral deities, when they themselves are not particularly interested in Balance.
Like Nethys is balanced purely because he is EVERY EXTREME AT THE SAME TIME, and his worshippers are about "using magic to reshape the world" not "use magic to reshape the world in specific ways."
There's absolutely a place for neutrality as balance, but it's not especially appropriate for a huge number of the deities who allow neutral followers. A lot of neutral deities are neutral because their purview is itself a thing that is balanced, but does not serve balance in any greater sense.
I HAVE NO STRONG FEELINGS ONE WAY OR THE OTHER!!!
Is "I am selfish/selfless in equal measure" actually a fun character to roleplay or be in a party with?
Like one of the problems with "Tenets of Neutrality" is that alignment is one part descriptive and in another sense aspirational- there is narrative pressure on PCs to "be good", and "help people", and "save the day" (and to avoid the opposites). IMO, the character who says "okay, I saved a dozen orphans from the cult so now I have to do an equivalent amount of evil to balance it out" is a maniac.
Even on the law chaos axis, I am reminded about how many characters where I could not tell if they were NG or CG without looking at their character sheet, since both manifest practically as "I aim to do good, but I will sometimes break the rules in pursuit of even more good." When we're not talking about like cosmic beings, but people, I'm not really convinced there's a difference between NG and CG (or LE and NE).
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Worth noting that are a handful of Neutral deities have tenets that are to some degree goodly-seeming and I think that's very much on purpose.
I think there's a tendency to sort of gamify alignment and view Neutrality as something that needs to sit right between two diametrically opposed forces and from that perspective I can see why some of these tenets feel weird.
But there's plenty of room for Neutral characters who are more than willing to act in casually altruistic fashions. What separates them from Good is that they're probably likely to put themselves at risk altruistically (especially if it's outside their area of concern) and probably more likely to consider doing bad things in furtherance of their agenda.
The "it doesn't cost anything to be nice" school of neutrality rather than "exactly halfway between good and evil."
For most Neutral deities I think it's more accurate to say that they aren't really concerned with Good or Evil more than that they exist in between it.
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I've found it's more N largely obeys the law but isn't afraid to break it, C goes out of their way to break the law because they can.When we're not talking about like cosmic beings, but people, I'm not really convinced there's a difference between NG and CG (or LE and NE).I find that the line between NG and CG is that a NG person will say "Well, I did what I could." and a CG will say "There's got to be a way."
The Chaotic Good character doesn't deliberately break the law, but shows complete disregard for the law if it misaligns with their principles. If the law says Thou Shalt Not Steal, the CG character suddenly forgets how to read as she goes about her day handing out food stolen from the lord's manor. Where the Paladin might be conflicted on that, the Liberator doesn't even second guess herself.
So he's basically a god of capitalism.
I don't know that I would go that far, because unregulated capitalism would be harmful to the overall health of the economy.
Then you have to have a complex conversation about various forms of economic policy.
Like even the US isn't a full unrestricted capitalist country because we know business will take advantage of us if they can.
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The issue is that Abadar views an economy from outside of that economy, whereas everybody making decisions about the economy views it from inside of the economy. Abadar's preference for something is never going to be viewed from a lens of "this helps me personally, so is preferable" which is where a huge number of economic inefficiencies come from.
If real world human economies had some sort of arbiter who exists outside the system, they would be very different.