Discuss

Lawful Good Villian

So-
A Zealot
A Benevolent Dictator
A Utopian
A Racial Deity

A Firm believer of LG who defends it as a conceptual force and does not stand for grey area bullshit because it undermines what people sacrifice for it.

He must be a visionary. He must not want anything for himself. He must belief tah his actions are justified. No man is more dangerous than a man who wants nothing for himself.

Anything taken to extremes can be bad. Kinda like what was getting at- Someone so bent on creating the perfect society that everyone who doesn't fit their narrow definition of what a "proper citizen" looks like is going to have a bad time. Bonus points if they're SO LG that they can't really comprehend individuals with differing views, seeing them as sick and in need of rehabilitation.

>So-
>An Ideologue
>An Ideologue
>An Ideologue
>A Spook

Is there a problem?
All are examples of a possible lawful good antagonist.

So Javert?

>No man is more dangerous than a man who wants nothing for himself.
If argue that this is more an example of a man who believes he is doing The Right Thing, and that anything in the name of said Right Thing is inherently justified

I'd argue that javert, in being confronted with the evidence of valjean's goodness/evil of the system and refusal to accept said evidence, falls to at least neutral

I like the idea that the gods decide what is good, and the decisions they make aren't always what a reasonable person would. So you could have a villain who has "lawful good" written on his character sheet, even if any reasonable person would consider him evil, and "evil" characters who are the other way around.

...

It's easy if you examine the assumptions of what a good alignment means. Typically altruism and compassion, both of which have been used as justifications for horrible things in the past.

>falls to at least neutral
Yeah, off a bridge. I feel the fact that he'd rather kill himself than see the law in which he's placed all his faith for so long be incorrect ties him to the stereotypical lawful good character. Besides, after that the narrative shifts away from jean valjean anyway, so for the parts where he's actively affecting the story/jvj, he's a LG antagonist

Alignments are based on what you do, not what your intentions are in the vast majority of cases.
There are a handful of settings where intent is the primary motivator, but they are a minority by far.

Alignments aren't clearly based on any specific moral premise. They're an odd mix of virtue ethics, deontology, and consequentialism. This is why they're such a shit-show that attract arguments; they're not given a sound philosophical basis, and basically require either not looking at them too hard, or a GM ruling to not be a mess (evidence can be found in the fact that every fan of paladins has a very specific idea of the proper way to play them, incompatible with all others).

A being of complete law and good. It can and will destroy any being that it perceives as being capable of evil, which is all mortal life.

That wouldn't be Good.

Javert is LN to the core. He believes in just the law and doesn't give a fuck about whether this law is helping the world become a better place. A LG character would have seen that Valjean was not the man he used to be and rationalized that "prisoner 24,601 is dead" in the face of the mayor and gone on to try and stop the filthy revolutionaries.

There is a lawful good paladin stuck in Ravenloft, she's a basic outline for how to run a Law/Good character as a villain, RAW dictates that prescriptively they're probably Lawful Evil, but they portray and have full belief that they're a good and moral person.

I thought LN was all about strict adherence to a personal code, which may or may not align with the laws of the land. I've personally always regarded valjean as LN for this reason

>He believes in just the law and doesn't give a fuck about whether this law is helping the world become a better place.

That's not entirely true. Javert firmly believes that law IS the only source of good, that they are one and the same rather than the law helping make a more good world. That without law firmly enforced, humans are no better than animals and will do horrible things.

He's pretty much the philosophy of Legalism in human form.

>lawful

...

A lord of the fleshwarpers who wants to turn everyone into the same, beautiful monstrosities. because if everyone was the same, there'd be no wars or anger towards eachother (hurp durp)

Of course while still being total, absolute lord over them.

One races lawful good leader is anothers most terrible enemy.

Give the goblins or orks a noble god-king, set about in securing the existence of their people and a future for greenskin children.

The issue is that at that point the various alignments are entirely arbitrary constructs with no necessary relation to modern societal conceptions of what any of those terms might mean. Instead of using Lawful-Chaos/Good-Evil, you might as well use RGB/XYZ, and just list what the gods have decreed each of those represent.

Not to say any of that is inherently bad; could make for a very interesting setting. However, might be a bit difficult for most people to intuitively grasp.

Reminds me of another Veeky Forums alignment discussion where someone proposed that alignment was something entirely cosmic, beyond mortal morality, which was an indication of where you stood on the cosmological scale. IE you could arbitrarily choose your alignment, and it was just a decision of how you wanted different things to affect you. You could kindly run an orphanage and choose to be NE without any baby-murder on the side, etc.

Sibyl is LN at best. Its goal is stability, and it tends to be fairly apathetic to the plights of individuals, especially individuals which jeopardize the stability of the society. What good it does it does out of pragmatism, not actual benevolence.

Have a party of chaotic neutral/evil PC`s then.

A high inquisitor of the crown, tasked with tracking down the party that has most likely committed more than a few heresies and unintended consequences.

A robotic or very strict paladin trying to release the sealed away ancient evil because by the law of the gods, the ancient evil has technically served its time in prison. Releasing it would be the only good thing to do.

It understands law and good, but not the subtext needed.

>I know nothing about alignments

Sibyl starts out LE with LG ambitions and ends up as LN.

>good

We had a decent one in the last set of Planeforger threads. The idea was that creation was unfinished, and angels, who were meant to help with the world's creation were suddenly left with no idea what to do after the creator vanished.

So one angel looked around at the half-finished mess where people are fighting and bad things happen, and decided that clearly, it was her duty to wipe it all clean and start again, properly this time. After all, everyone is suffering in this world, and clearly if it was done right the first time they wouldn't be! So she's going to gather together the fragments of the Worldsong and then sing creation anew, fixing this whole mess, no matter how much people don't want her to.

She's the party's mentor character, sending them on their quest to find the fragment of the worldsong. The final confrontation with her involves her breaking down into tears mid fight because why can't they just let her do this, they'll be happy! This will make the world better! Why can't they see that?

A villain that is so hellbent on the good of the majority that his actions have disenfranchised various minorities who live oppressed and suffer. The way that law is written condones their actions.

>End of Days has come
>World HAS to end or bad shit will start creeping in from the edges of reality and corrupt every living thing
>Gods got soft hearted and let this reality go on a bit to long
>Humans got just a bit top advanced, free spirited, and optimistic and now not only think they deserve to keep on existing, but also have the tech and the numbers to challenge the Gods and try to take on the outer beings.
>God has to carry out his duty and snuff out this existence or risk every previous, current, and future soul in the entire multiverse being corrupted.

Gods also can't just explain the situation and save the hassle because humanity doesn't have the six dimensional sense of understanding of the universe they would need to even get the 411 on why shit is as fucked as it is.

>Lawful Good Villian
I immediately thought of the antagonists in Nimona.
Although, the Director was probably LE in LG clothing and Goldenloin here was just... stupid.

The best example I can think of in an alien race I came up with that was basically a kinder, gentler Borg.
They genuinely believed they were saving the rest of the universe by assimilating and controlling them all.
Safety and Order at the cost of Freedom.
They would sincerely apologize for having to destroy your ship or kill anyone if it came to that.
They preferred to "help" anyone they came in contact with by assimilating them.

>inb4 lol art is bad
It's a cute read.

The book was written about 19th Century France for 19th Century France, and in 19th Century France, where the common idea was that a criminal is a criminal, irredeemably evil, until he dies not a criminal. Things like letting Valjean live at the end would have been seen as letting a murderer not suffering the punishment of God. Victor Hugo was writing a subversion and a critique of society's ills and morals of the time.