The Order of the Stick

Rich has been clear that he doesn't care. Oot S paladins of the Twelve Gods exist and that's the end of the conversation as far as he's concerned.

Edited by Resileafs on Apr 25th 2024 at 1:09:53 PM

He doesn't care now, but he followed the rules when he was writing book 2.

Seems the way it works is that while individually they're True Neutral, when they act together as The Twelve Gods, they're Lawful Good.

It would explain why all Paladins of the Sapphire Guard are Paladins of the Twelve and not, say, Paladins of Tiger, Paladins of Dragon, Paladins of Rat, etc.

It would also explain why when Miko is judged and deprived of her Paladin abilities, all twelve are the ones passing judgement.

Edited by M84 on Apr 27th 2024 at 3:08:35 AM

Disgusted, but not surprised

By the 3.5 rules a paladin doesn't need any connection with a deity. They basically get their powers from their devotion to righteousness and following the paladin code. The "must be within one alignment step with your god" rule only applies to clerics.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

Except here they clearly do. The Twelve could not have depowered Miko otherwise.

Did you forget that whole scene with the Twelve showing up and blasting Miko?

Edited by M84 on Apr 26th 2024 at 10:16:49 PM

Disgusted, but not surprised

The core 3.5 rules are deliberately vague about what sort of forces sponsor divine spellcasters because that's supposed to be part of the world-building that the DM does. There's no reason why there couldn't be different orders of paladins, each following a different deity or cause.

It so happens that the majority of paladins in OOTS-verse appear to follow the Twelve Gods, and since they're the ones providing the powers, they get to call the rules.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Right. Because Stickworld paladins clearly do not follow the 3.5 rules.

Sapphire Guard paladins, at least, get their powers from the 12 gods of the Southern pantheon, and it is those gods who determine when they have violated the paladin code enough to fall.

Edited by Bense on Apr 26th 2024 at 8:19:36 AM

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

This implies an explanation for why Sapphire Guard Paladins have a lot of leeway, a lot of shit they can get away with before they Fall.

Needing a consensus vote from a dozen guys with various conflicting agendas to determine whether or not you suck is a much higher barrier than having this one Good guy go "Nope, not about that."

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I have to imagine gods can deliberate faster than mortals though

I mean, the gods of this setting's ability to negotiate and debate being a little lacking is a fairly major plot point...

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I think the Giant has said that the 12 aren’t normally personally involved in a member of the Sapphire Guard falling, Miko just fucked up so bad she didn’t just get fired, the entire board of executives came down from the top floor to throw her our on her arse.

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Rat: Ugh, I'm on judgement duty? Just throw them all on the good pile, I have stuff I need to do...

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There are two different perspectives on this: one is that the paladins are worshipping True Neutral deities in a Lawful Good way and consequently their gods accommodate that by acting more Lawful Good towards them specifically, and the other is that an institution, by virtue of being an institution, has an intrinsically more Lawful alignment than any of the individuals who compose it, and I love the implications of both of them.

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Or they just know how a Lawful Good person is expected to behave and hold paladins to that standard, even if they don't do it themselves. I mean, I don't have to be a saint to know that I shouldn't stab people or judge whether someone broke the law or not.

The more I think about it, the less the 12 gods being True Neutral makes sense. A major city like Azure City would lean strongly Lawful just by the nature of a city, and Eugene called it one of the oldest bastions of Good in the world.

While the Southern Pantheon may act collectively in a Neutral way, individual members have their own alignments and can presumably sponsor divine class members.

It was stated earlier that paladins often follow a nonspecific cause rather than a specific deity, but it makes no sense for the Sapphire Guard to be sponsored by a Neutral pantheon, certainly not in terms of how their oaths are administered.

Presumably the Lawful Good god(s) normally handle things without fuss but when really big issues come up, such as world-ending artifacts of doom or regicide, the whole pantheon weighs in.

Edit: The whole point of what we’ve learned about the cosmic order is that the gods have settled into a… “routine”, for lack of a better word, that screws over the people of the worlds they build in order to serve the more essential purpose of keeping themselves alive. This is at the heart of Redcloak’s grievance, only he and his patron are operating on incomplete information.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 27th 2024 at 6:38:35 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

The Twelve Gods aren’t only worshipped by the Azurites, but by the whole Southern Continent. Look at all these varied cultures.

It was posted in #62668 that, because each god is worshipped by the people born under their sign, and people can be of any alignment, and Gods Need Prayer Badly, each god is True Neutral by law of averages, in the same way Loki is a pathological liar because his worshippers believe he is.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Apr 27th 2024 at 6:53:02 AM

The whole Pantheon regardless of alignment had a vested interest in the Paladin's mission in keeping that reality going as long as possible.

Edited by dcutter2 on Apr 27th 2024 at 12:20:35 PM

That’s right. I forgot about the True Neutral thing. Still, they must sponsor Good and Evil clerics as well as paladins, so somehow they are able to enter that mindset.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Yes, the gods have become complacent. As a whole they are happy to use the "create new world, get about a thousand years of worshippers, destroy the world just before the Snarl can completely escape, wait for the Snarl to calm down, build new world to imprison it, rinse, repeat," method which has already worked well enough from their perspective billions of times before. They don't really care about trying to find a permanent solution to the Snarl.

We know Redcloak is operating on incomplete information. What the Dark One actually knows may be very different from what he tells his high priests.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

If the Twelve Gods are True Neutral because they are worshiped by all alignments equally, it follows that each worshipper may believe the gods (or at least his god) share his alignment. How this is possible for intelligent people who share their beliefs in a coherent religion boggles the mind, but perhaps the gods really do act differently for each of their worshippers. How this is possible for a coherent deity is also mind-boggling, but eh, they’re gods. They contain multitudes.

Edited by HeraldAlberich on Apr 27th 2024 at 10:17:04 AM

Or they do know their gods don't share their alignment and worship them anyways. There are religions that are less about good and evil gods and more about appeasing powerful forces.

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The second seems the more likely. Historic paganism in general was less, "I worship Poseidon because I think he's the best god ever," and more "I give Poseidon the worship he asks for because I want him to refrain from smiting my ships."

It's entirely possible that most people in Azure City worshipped the 12 gods mostly because that's who the gods of Azure City were, and if you didn't worship them you wouldn't get any blessings from them or might provoke their wrath.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

There's nothing ahistorical about general pantheon worship, although usually individual members of a pantheon would have dedicated priesthoods, and (in OOTS terms) the "devotion" of said priesthood would synergize with the deity's portfolio to push them towards a more specific representation/idea. Was Poseidon always the god of the sea or did a bunch of humans decide to associate him with that and it became his portfolio as a result? Heck, real life mythology has plenty of examples of gods' portfolios evolving over time as their worshippers changed.

That this did not happen at all with the Twelve Gods is at least somewhat unusual. There aren't any clerics of Rat or disciples of Tiamat per se. Well, the fact that the latter is the patron of dragons seems to have shaped her a fair bit, but even the High Priest of Azure City was "of the Twelve Gods". Presumably this is a position that is meant to be highly Lawful, if not Lawful Good... if so, it plays around with core D&D rules a little, but it is Rich's world to build.

Edited by Fighteer on Apr 28th 2024 at 3:35:05 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Tiamat is Western. Dragon of the Twelve Gods is his own creature.