Was looking to throw together an Android Champion today, and so naturally my thoughts drifted towards their patron goddess… is she really meant to not allow CG followers? It feels very strange that the main god of a people who have spent so much time enslaved, and one who has the Freedom domain, wouldn’t allow this.
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Considering that Casandalee literally started out as an AI, I would imagine that Chaos is too close to Entropy for her to be totally comfortable with as a force for good. Like "introduce chaos for good" is too close to "we will be better off if we kill the AI."
I would probably just roll up a Redeemer and focus on Liberation.
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At the risk of repeating myself from the latest Neutral Champions thread, I'm struggling to come to terms with the continued prevalence of the 'Neutral Cross' alignment restrictions for True Neutral deities. It seems strange to me that any time a deity specifically excludes the corner alignments but allows the individual components--at least without a good reason (eg. Arazni). This goes doubly true for any deity whose description suggests that they are completely unconcerned with alignment.
If a deity accepts worshippers regardless whether they're good or evil, lawful or chaotic, I don't know why they wouldn't allow worshippers of all alignments. There doesn't inherently seem to be anything offensive about your super-individualistic worshipper deciding that they are going to start helping people, or your kind and benevolent worshipper deciding they're going to start valuing freedom as well. Nethys explicitly only cares what you do as long as you use magic, why does he think you have to pick between being good or chaotic? It only reminds me how artificial alignment can be that somehow distance from true neutrality is its own thing.
Champions being more defined by Alignment than Deity is one of my largest pain points in this edition; it took a class I adore and put it at the lowest priority for me to play, because of weirdness exactly like this. My hypothetical Casandalee Champion can be a paragon of redemption (something she has nothing to do with) but not liberation (literally one of her domains).
Too restrictive, not enough God-specific flavor… I’m really unhappy with the class as it stands. Part of why I’m fiending for Inquisitor to come back so bad.
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At the risk of repeating myself from the latest Neutral Champions thread, I'm struggling to come to terms with the continued prevalence of the 'Neutral Cross' alignment restrictions for True Neutral deities. It seems strange to me that any time a deity specifically excludes the corner alignments but allows the individual components--at least without a good reason (eg. Arazni). This goes doubly true for any deity whose description suggests that they are completely unconcerned with alignment.
If a deity accepts worshippers regardless whether they're good or evil, lawful or chaotic, I don't know why they wouldn't allow worshippers of all alignments. There doesn't inherently seem to be anything offensive about your super-individualistic worshipper deciding that they are going to start helping people, or your kind and benevolent worshipper deciding they're going to start valuing freedom as well. Nethys explicitly only cares what you do as long as you use magic, why does he think you have to pick between being good or chaotic? It only reminds me how artificial alignment can be that somehow distance from true neutrality is its own thing.
It makes more sense if you consider 'balance' to be an alignment of it's own (rather than a lack of an alignment): A True Neutral deity might accept any worshiper with 'balance' in their worldview (in game terms, has at least 1 neutral component to their alignement) but the four 'extreme' alignments that reject this concept entirely just don't fit...
Basically, the NG follower still at least partially believes in 'balance' while the CG liberator just doesn't.
Alternately, you could look at the four 'extreme' alignments as just believing too strongly in the 'wrong' things: While the Deity doesn't really care about Law/Chaos/Good/Evil, the fact that the liberator does believe strongly in two of these indicate irreconcilable differences (the Liberator is never going to worship a deity that cares for neither chaos nor good, nor is the True Neutral deity likely to offer divine power to someone who cares so strongly for irrelevant concepts) whereas the redeemer is potentially close enough to the deity's beliefs/priorities to make the relationship work.
At the risk of repeating myself from the latest Neutral Champions thread, I'm struggling to come to terms with the continued prevalence of the 'Neutral Cross' alignment restrictions for True Neutral deities. It seems strange to me that any time a deity specifically excludes the corner alignments but allows the individual components--at least without a good reason (eg. Arazni). This goes doubly true for any deity whose description suggests that they are completely unconcerned with alignment.
If a deity accepts worshippers regardless whether they're good or evil, lawful or chaotic, I don't know why they wouldn't allow worshippers of all alignments. There doesn't inherently seem to be anything offensive about your super-individualistic worshipper deciding that they are going to start helping people, or your kind and benevolent worshipper deciding they're going to start valuing freedom as well. Nethys explicitly only cares what you do as long as you use magic, why does he think you have to pick between being good or chaotic? It only reminds me how artificial alignment can be that somehow distance from true neutrality is its own thing.
It makes more sense if you consider 'balance' to be an alignment of it's own (rather than a lack of an alignment): A True Neutral deity might accept any worshiper with 'balance' in their worldview (in game terms, has at least 1 neutral component to their alignement) but the four 'extreme' alignments that reject this concept entirely just don't fit...
Basically, the NG follower still at least partially believes in 'balance' while the CG liberator just doesn't.
Alternately, you could look at the four 'extreme' alignments as just believing too strongly in the 'wrong' things: While the Deity doesn't really care about Law/Chaos/Good/Evil, the fact that the liberator does believe strongly in two of these indicate irreconcilable differences (the Liberator is never going to worship a deity that cares for neither chaos nor good, nor is the...
This falls apart when you consider previous designer comments that have said balance is a Lawful concept, and that it’s not a good fit for a hypothetical Neutral Champion.
Considering that Casandalee literally started out as an AI, I would imagine that Chaos is too close to Entropy for her to be totally comfortable with as a force for good. Like "introduce chaos for good" is too close to "we will be better off if we kill the AI."
Like she allows CN worshippers to get spells, but I think that's more of an acknowledgment that "entropy is inevitable in systems and we have to learn to live with it" than an acknowledgement that it is in any way desirable or beneficial.
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At the risk of repeating myself from the latest Neutral Champions thread, I'm struggling to come to terms with the continued prevalence of the 'Neutral Cross' alignment restrictions for True Neutral deities. It seems strange to me that any time a deity specifically excludes the corner alignments but allows the individual components--at least without a good reason (eg. Arazni). This goes doubly true for any deity whose description suggests that they are completely unconcerned with alignment.
If a deity accepts worshippers regardless whether they're good or evil, lawful or chaotic, I don't know why they wouldn't allow worshippers of all alignments. There doesn't inherently seem to be anything offensive about your super-individualistic worshipper deciding that they are going to start helping people, or your kind and benevolent worshipper deciding they're going to start valuing freedom as well. Nethys explicitly only cares what you do as long as you use magic, why does he think you have to pick between being good or chaotic? It only reminds me how artificial alignment can be that somehow distance from true neutrality is its own thing.
It makes more sense if you consider 'balance' to be an alignment of it's own (rather than a lack of an alignment): A True Neutral deity might accept any worshiper with 'balance' in their worldview (in game terms, has at least 1 neutral component to their alignement) but the four 'extreme' alignments that reject this concept entirely just don't fit...
Basically, the NG follower still at least partially believes in 'balance' while the CG liberator just doesn't.
Alternately, you could look at the four 'extreme' alignments as just believing too strongly in the 'wrong' things: While the Deity doesn't really care about Law/Chaos/Good/Evil, the fact that the liberator does believe strongly in two of these indicate irreconcilable differences (the Liberator is never going to worship a deity that cares for neither chaos nor good, nor is the...
Aside from aeons and the concept of trying to preserve cosmic balance being lawful topics, I rather strongly do not consider neutrality to be about achieving balance, at least in the G-E respect. More to the point, I strongly object to the notion that somebody who cares about CG things like freedom cares about them more strongly than somebody who cares about goodness in general. With the exception of the Monad, I don't think there are any neutral deities who consider the balance of good, evil, law, and chaos to be an inherent virtue, and even the Monad is biased toward law in its followers.
I disagree with the premise that a deity who cares things such as the cycle of life and death (Pharasma), magic (Nethys) or nature (Gozreh), or even the value of artificial life (Casandalee) thinks that a person who believes in freedom is farther removed than somebody who cares about individuality or benevolence simply because freedom can be construed as a combination of those other two things.
It would be less offensive to me if the deity preferred a single line down or across the neutral alignments. This would be a statement of 'regardless whether you're cruel or kind, be neither too tradition-bound nor too mercurial' or vice versa, but allowing all four individual alignments but not their intersection is simply too artificial to me. It smacks of talking about alignment as an intentional and conscious decision one makes to align themselves with the game construct that represents sometimes impersonal cosmic forces in the world, when I imagine many more people think about their values and not whether those values are considered chaotic and good or only chaotic and neither too good nor too evil.
/rant
As for the topic on hand, I don't think Casandalee actually started out as an AI. This may be spoilers for Iron Gods (but then if you're talking about one of the actual iron gods, you're probably either read-in or not concerned):
Even more on-topic addendum: If you have the option of asking for GM leeway at your table (i.e. not playing PFS) I see the simplest fix for my pet-peeve neutral alignment cross simply being to allow TN deities who canonically don't care about alignment (or even the balance of alignment) to not care about alignment at all and have no restrictions on followers aside from their anathema.
An alternative option with further reaching implications might be to unshackle champion causes from alignment. This might be a thing you do for games you run rather than games you play in, but most codes already give you a clear code of behaviours that make your alignment restrictions pretty extraneous. As long as you uphold your code, there's only so far your alignment can even stray without breaking the code before you even change alignment.
Yeah, the whole idea that Casandalee is somehow opposed to chaos or entropy, as if she's some kind of pop culture living computer is... not her vibe at all.
Edicts: advance the development of artificial intelligence, encourage understanding between artificial and organic life
Anathema: treat artificial life as lesser than organic life, foment distrust between artificial and organic life
Areas of Concern: artificial life, free thinking, intellectual apotheosis
Follower Alignments: NG, LN, N, CN, NEDomains: creation, freedom, knowledge, perfection
Alternate Domains: ambition, lightning
She's a goddess of artificial life, self improvement, and organic life playing nice with the artificial. Hell, 'freedom' and 'ambition' seem pretty far from the detached AI folks are imagining.
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Yeah, the whole idea that Casandalee is somehow opposed to chaos or entropy, as if she's some kind of pop culture living computer is... not her vibe at all.
She's a goddess of artificial life, self improvement, and organic life playing nice with the artificial. Hell, 'freedom' and 'ambition' seem pretty far from the detached AI folks are imagining.Edicts: advance the development of artificial intelligence, encourage understanding between artificial and organic life
Anathema: treat artificial life as lesser than organic life, foment distrust between artificial and organic life
Areas of Concern: artificial life, free thinking, intellectual apotheosis
Follower Alignments: NG, LN, N, CN, NEDomains: creation, freedom, knowledge, perfection
Alternate Domains: ambition, lightning
The Follower Alignements of deities have been carefully screened by Paizo (just ask the PF1 CG Clerics of Gorum).
It is interesting to guess why she allows NG and CN but not CG. Knowing that there must be a reason.
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My theory is as follows : Casandalee is a very recent deity. She has no preconception about who her followers should be. So, she goes at it the scientific way : through experimentation.
And to avoid crossing variables and get unusable results, she tries it one axis at a time : Law vs Chaos and Good vs Evil. And Neutral on the untested axis.
Once she has enough results from this experimentation, she will try combining variables (Lawful and Good for example) to make a more complete and in-depth analysis. The end result will be the alignments of worshippers that truly suit her.
But right now, it is better to keep things simple.
I just can't see why a person who was previously a computer being that comfortable with chaos. That she even allows CN followers at all is weird to me. So if I was inclined to make changes it would be "Change Cassandalee's allowed alignments to LN, NG, TN, NE"
Additionally anything a CG character can do (except "be a Liberator") is something an NG character can also do. From a behavorist perspective those are the same alignment. So I might suggest "being Liberators" available to NG characters and "being a Redeemer" being available for CG characters as a house rule.
I just can't see why a person who was previously a computer being that comfortable with chaos. That she even allows CN followers at all is weird to me. So if I was inclined to make changes it would be "Change Cassandalee's allowed alignments to LN, NG, TN, NE"
She was a mortal person before she was a “computer,” though.
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Do note that 1e Casandalee is customizable gods with multiple different versions based on player choices. (aka you can make her even LE and CE)
So basically, devs went for default Casandalee being neutral and not particularly anti slavery focused. She isn't "android patron god that is just about android issues", she is more about AI in general than androids specifically.
(Also I legit like my alignments dang it and not just because of being super used to them by now XD Please do not remove alignments x'D)
But joking aside, I also want everyone to realize one thing:
Android Casandalee =/= AI Casandalee. They are two different people.
AI Casandalee existed at same time as Android one did (and lacked soul by 1e AI rules) and Android one died and passed to boneyard long ago. Besides that, their personalities weren't identical. Android Casandalee was oracle whose curse was fragmented psyche where her past lives had effect on her, AI Casandalee on otherhand was amalgamation of ALL her past lives acting at same time resulting in her wildly changing personality between sentences while Android one did have main personality.
(as far as I can tell, that is part of how they were preparing for "build a god" feature of the AP, selecting AI facets for Casandalee is basically stabilizing one of her many personalities into becoming the "main one" when she ascends to godhood and gains a soul)
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I just can't see why a person who was previously a computer being that comfortable with chaos. That she even allows CN followers at all is weird to me. So if I was inclined to make changes it would be "Change Cassandalee's allowed alignments to LN, NG, TN, NE"
Additionally anything a CG character can do (except "be a Liberator") is something an NG character can also do. From a behavorist perspective those are the same alignment. So I might suggest "being Liberators" available to NG characters and "being a Redeemer" being available for CG characters as a house rule.
Alignment is not so much a matter of what a character can/might do than what they are likely to do.
A NG character is not invested in strengthening the system (that would be Lawful) but neither are they invested in weakening it (ie, Chaotic).
A CG character who would focus on doing Good and not really care about setting people free from rules, traditions and expectations would shift to NG in my game.
I really believe the only way Casandalee's restrictions on alignments make sense is that she wants to experience having followers that care only about Good, about Evil, about Law, about Chaos. And those who do not particularly care about any of these (True Neutral) might even be her baseline sample.
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Stuff like this is one of the reasons that I use the Extreme Good and Evil rules variant from the gamemastery guide (only extraplanar entities such as fiends or celestials actually have alignments - this doesn't mean that people don't have morality, just that only beings fundamentally made out of the stuff of good or evil or order or chaos are strongly aligned enough for the mechanical affects of having an alignment to apply).
I prefer my players to think more along the lines of "my player would/wouldn't do this because they believe in X or want Y or fear Z" rather than "my characters beliefs and personality is that they are lawful good".
This variant trusts and encourages the players to create a nuanced character with actual values and beliefs rather than just choosing one of 9 presets, while still maintaining stuff like paladins getting to do more damage to demons. It does have the side effect of making champions less effective against regular enemies of opposing alignments, but doing extra damage to regular flesh and blood beings because of their alignment never felt satisfying to me - I feel like just being a normal being who chooses to be a certain way shouldn't be enough to make magical energies affect you differently, that you have to be actually suffused with the opposing energy on a fundamental level to be affected differently.
I also make the adjustment of giving some creatures beyond extraplanar entities alignments - specifically undead (evil) and aberrations (chaos) - undead may not be from evil planes, but they are suffused with evil, and aberrations are fundamentally a violation of the laws of the universe, so it seems appropriate that law damage would try to expunge them.
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Stuff like this is one of the reasons that I use the Extreme Good and Evil rules variant from the gamemastery guide (only extraplanar entities such as fiends or celestials actually have alignments - this doesn't mean that people don't have morality, just that only beings fundamentally made out of the stuff of good or evil or order or chaos are strongly aligned enough for the mechanical affects of having an alignment to apply).
I prefer my players to think more along the lines of "my player would/wouldn't do this because they believe in X or want Y or fear Z" rather than "my characters beliefs and personality is that they are lawful good".
This variant trusts and encourages the players to create a nuanced character with actual values and beliefs rather than just choosing one of 9 presets, while still maintaining stuff like paladins getting to do more damage to demons. It does have the side effect of making champions less effective against regular enemies of opposing alignments, but doing extra damage to regular flesh and blood beings because of their alignment never felt satisfying to me - I feel like just being a normal being who chooses to be a certain way shouldn't be enough to make magical energies affect you differently, that you have to be actually suffused with the opposing energy on a fundamental level to be affected differently.
I also make the adjustment of giving some creatures beyond extraplanar entities alignments - specifically undead (evil) and aberrations (chaos) - undead may not be from evil planes, but they are suffused with evil, and aberrations are fundamentally a violation of the laws of the universe, so it seems appropriate that law damage would try to expunge them.
This is similar but in a way the opposite of what I'm doing (or at least intending to do once I find and work out the kinks). Rather than have spells like Divine Lance only work against extraplanar targets (and not at all for neutral deities), I'm choosing to treat all alignment damage as a 'divine' damage which can be harmful to any creature. As a result, your divine cantrip dealing damage to somebody is no justification to slay them without also removing its effectiveness from the majority of the bestiary. On the other hand, to preserve weakness to alignment damage, the source of the divine damage is considered when triggering weakness to good or evil.
On the other hand, I really like your idea of 'good' treating undead as cosmically evil. Likewise, 'law' treating aberrations as inherently anathema to itself is an excellent idea. I should note that not all aberrations are explicitly from beyond this reality--for example, fleshwarps, including driders and fleshwarp PCs, would become viable targets despite merely being altered material plane lifeforms. Nevertheless, it does seem antagonistically in-character for Law not to care.
My greatest reservation would be seeking to 'balance' the alignments by providing, if nothing else, a creature type which Chaos treats as anathema despite not being an divine enemy.