What went wrong?

I thought it was retty cool

>"dirty/gross = evil" bullshit

Oh yeah, I hate this so much.
Just like Paizos weird "undead = evil" bs.
Undead are made from negative energy, which is not even evil in itself. It's not like healing magic is inherently good either.

Once, our party met a paladin who swore to protect the people of his village until the end of time. So after he died, he became an undead champion, who sacrificed his afterlife in the upper planes to fulfill his duty.
How the fuck is this guy evil?

I was thinking on working on something similar to the concept.

I think one flaw is that the book doesn't recognize that being good is really, really tough. I think such a book should show good but flawed people who make mistakes and not just purely good people. There shouldn't be an archetype of Exalted Good Person but instead Really Good Person Who Mistakes Along the Way. If the hero doesn't have temptations and flaws that he must master along the way then he is not really a hero is he?

A came up with a list of morally ambiguous archetypes which I was thinking of making into classes.

Here's one example:

* The Bandit
He is a former soldier from a war 10 years ago still fighting a
personal rebellion from the highways and the wild. He's an outlaw
now, telling travellers to stand and deliver, but he has no respect
for the law of the unjust state.

** Compromises
The Bandit fights an impossible war and to allow for any success at
all he has adopted some compromises over the years.

- Robbery. When you are an outlaw it is hard to make ends meet in an
honest way. The Bandit has taken to robbing the innocent.

- Reckless Vengeance. All who profit off of an unjust institution
must answer to its deeds. The Bandit has taken to killing even
those who aren't directly involved in the kingdom's crimes.

- Cruelty. It is not enough that the evil are punished. The Bandit
feels that they must suffer as well.

- Press Ganging. The Bandit cannot fight the war alone and feels
compelled to drag the innocent into it.

Other examples would include the Leper (basically Jesus), the Whore (untouchables and other outcastes) and the Monastic (ascetics who refuse to actually interact with the world.)

It was just a bunch of random "this is good because we say so" shit, that didn't really gel or accomplish much. Book of Vile Darkness was a bunch of edgelord stuff that normally wasn't supported, but the default assumption is your party is some kind of good and paladins already exist, so Exalted Deeds was just sort of aimless.

If Exalted Deeds wanted to rock, it needed to double down. Have content strongly themed around virtues, like self sacrifice for the good of others. Or a class that starts off weak as shit but as a follower-esq based mechanic where they slowly build up a group of people that believe in them, and the collective hope of the people they protect grants them power.

A relatively low level spell that lets you multi-rez a bunch of people, but doing so means you die permanently with no way back even by miracle or wish. Or a prestige class that lets you permanently reduce your HP to grant immunity to certain effects/resistances/buffs to others for as long as you remain alive.

You know, stuff like that.

Yeah pretty much this.

A small village priest beseeches Pelor to save the village from a group of slavers, six generations of buried peasants rise from their graves to save their ancestors from a horrible fate. How fucking horrible.

I can't speak for Deathless as they're presented in BoED, because who would drop actual money on BoED, but I do like the implementation of Deathless in Eberron, at least.

And at least by reckoning, it's kind of a wash IRL between stories of righteous, wise, and holy spirits animating the dead, and the bad juju/eternal grudge sort of shit. Especially once you discount le epic zombie meme.

One thing the book really fails to talk about is that Lawful Good =/= Paladin. It basically means you'll try to do the right thing when you can, but it doesn't make you a saint.

It touches on it briefly, there's a little section on alternate paths to becoming a paladin. Like a small town crime boss that had to rally the militia to defend against an orc raid and had an epiphany while fighting. But it basically goes on to say he became a great guy that always did the right thing from then on.

Also it poses some odd questions like there's two succubuses banging and a Paladin has to make "difficult" choice between smiting them because they're evil, or letting them go because of "love." I mean let them bang, then smite them I say, but still you're going to be facing tougher morale quandaries than that I'd hope.

>Matt Cavotta is generally great as a MtG artist.
>Matt Cavotta is absolute shit as a 3.X artist.

Why is this?

Even in Eberron, Deathless seem like a cop-out. Undead are always evil for [arbitrary reason], but we want our elves to have undead, and we can't have our elves be evil...I know! Let's make something that's the exact same thing as undead, only these ones aren't evil because [another arbitrary reason].

> A paladin must choose between destroying evil and honoring love

The absolute fuck? Have you SEEN Love? Love can be some evil, twisted shit sometimes.

Smite those fuckers. Removing evil has priority.

If I come across a chain devil shredding an orphanage like a blender on legs while screaming "I HAVE A SYMPATHETIC BAAAAACKSTOOOORY" That doesn't stop me from putting that fucker down.

But negative energy is inherently evil.

>weird "undead = evil"

Desecrating the dead is evil in literally every culture on the face of the earth

Nope. Its a neutral elemental force, no more evil than fire or good than earth.

Negative energy is entropy. Too much of it is deadly, but too much positive energy fucking kills you just as dead (your body turns to a mess of cancers, and when your HP hits twice its normal value you pop like a balloon).

That has never been universally true and positive energy doing shit like mummies in earlier editions makes it clear it can be used for shady shit.

Positive and negative energy being good and evil is dumb because there are plenty of evil applications to healing (permanent torture being the obvious one) and casting Harm is in no way more evil an act than fucking disintegrate

Undead are inherently evil in D&D because a bunch of grasping evangelical nerds from bumfuck Wisconsin decided it was thus in the 70s.

Eberron does a lot of moral greying, sure. But a lot actual of cultures venerate and hold sacred the dead that are supposed to active agents in both the real and spiritual realm.

I like my shambling zombies, voracious ghouls, and imperious Liches that are fundamentally terrified of oblivion. But I'm also intrigued by the concept of, say, lonely or enlightened spirits that dwell to provide guidance or fulfill oaths or some higher spiritual purpose.

If you want to enjoy things then you should leave, this isn't a place for enjoying things.

In 3.5, using negative energy is described as inherently evil. Casting a harm spell or raising undead is an inherently evil act. Since all undead are fueled by negative energy, all undead ping as evil.

Enthropy is chaos. Negative energy is pure, distilled evil. Read the fucking book.

Eberron undead are not alignment restricted. Blood of Vol following vampires could easily be neutral or even good. Mindless, negative energy powered undead are aligned with Mabar, which means their instinct is to destroy and bring ruin.

It attempted to tautologically define good as good, without any further qualifier and then added a bunch of shit that was considered evil if it was done by anything that wasn't good, but in this case is good because it's done by something that is good (because good is good you see).

Seriously, how fucking hard is to just borrow from a smattering of classical Greek philosophy or something?

Yet for some reason negative enrgy elementals are listed as neutral, and the plane itself is an elemental plane rather than one tied to an aligment. So it's not exactly consistent.

Negative energy pretty much is fantasy radiation, and harmful to all living things, so it makes sense that using it is generally considered a bad thing (although why burning somebody to death with fire magic is less evil than killing them to death with negative energy magic I don't know), but negative energy itself doesn't seem to have an alignment any more than any other element.

I actually find that the BoED works better for creating villains (well, antagonists) than it does for any kind of player character options.

Can't vouch for the elementals, but every other thing that comes from the negative energy plane is evil.

>Negative energy pretty much is fantasy radiation
No, it's not. Negative energy is not harmful the way fire is harmful. It is not harmful the way a sword can be harmful. It is literally the antithesis to life. Not "a substance that happens to be harmful to life under the wrong circumstances," but literally, objectively the opposite of life energy.

>negative energy itself doesn't seem to have an alignment any more than any other element.
Clerics are the obvious, ironclad counterexample. Neutral clerics can choose to channel either negative or positive energy, affecting undead appropriately, and gain the ability to convert prepared spells to their raw positive or negative energy equivalents. However, this choice is permanent. Good and Evil aligned clerics don't get a say in the matter, they're physically incapable of channeling their opposite elements.

This seems to suggest a rather strong correlation between positive and negative energies and alignment.

Negative energy is not an energy of distilled evil. That would be the stuff the lower planes are made of.

Negative energy is an elemental energy and thus the plane is neutral. Just like positive energy.
Negative energy is the power of stagnation, nothingness, the void.
Positive energy is the power of life, growth, development.

This is why lifeforms who are powered by positive energy grow and turn into adults. They develop their personality, dropping old thoughts and accepting new ones. In the end, they die and go to the afterlife, which is just the next step in the cycle of life.

Undead are powered by negative energy, so they stay the way they are. Their bodies may rot, but they do not really die and go to the afterlife. On the other hand, undead lack the spirit of life. They stagnate, often sitting hundreds of years on a chair, without any urge to do something. Many undead are also stuck ni time in a mental way. The only thing they do, are the things they did in life. A ghost may relive it's last hours forever, while a lich may study his library over and over, without ever making something out of his knowledge.
They do not adapt, because they do not live. They just exist.

Explain?

Not a lot- but if I had to generalize, it's probably because it really didn't offer decent parallels to BoVD.

Like- you didn't really get Good alignments having their own form of 'Corruption' or in effect, enlightenment or anything table-based and interesting.

It did set the whole Order of the Stick Vampire's are mostly not the same people they were in life sthick though.

Also, 'Good' Poisons- despite the idea of poison use being evil in D&D being BS.

Like bitch, exterminators must class as fucking Elder Evil if one ousts poison in such a manner.