Luckmann
Arcane
Book of Exalted Deeds
The Book of Exalted Deeds (and to a lesser degree Book of Vile Darkness) is absolutely horrid in the context of an alignment discussion, because much of what especially BoED states or implies do not jive with what has been said earlier and in other sources, and is incredibly inconsistent when it comes to both the stated intent of original writers such as Gygax and practical application and expression of alignment as seen in most actual works, and it implies especially ridiculous things such as pacifism being a virtue, which we all know empathically not to be true. It is a painfully ill-written book that has thrown a very much not needed wrench into alignment discussions for over a decade, unnecessarily muddying the waters of things that have been expressed very clearly time and time again both before and after. There's pages upon pages discussion just how ridiculous the rules for being "exalted" are, and the writers couldn't help but to insert their own (presumably, at least) moral stances as some kind of objective "Good" without any regard for what this did to the underlying idea of alignments and the cosmology it implies.The Book of Exalted Deeds ...
Much of this is probably because the authors tried to model the book after the Book of Vile Darkness, written primarily by Monty Cuck (which had issues too, because.. well.. Monty), but without any firm understanding of alignments and with multiple different authors, it probably became a "too many chefs"-situation.
I'll take the 1980's article discussing the meta and the why's and how's of alignment over BoED any day of the week (and if Prime Junta would dig out which article, I'd love to read it), but more importantly, I'll take the actual core books and the original author's word over it, too.
The dawn of time and the discussion of what is Evil, and what makes a virtuous life.Btw, this discussion is much older and bigger than "What is a RPG?" one . Let me summon our own little GM Infinitron , I think this all needs to go somewhere else and let this topic be for discussion of P:KM.
OK, where did it start?
You should just give up right now and fold all other threads on the Codex into this one.
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