Canonfire!

Sun May 17, 2020 8:43 am Good Scarlet Brotherhood?

On another forum, a poster mentioned an unpublished 3e Greyhawk deity sourcebook and made an odd comment. They were talking about their participation in playtesting and how the details of various clergy from 1e and 2e (behavior, vestment colors, etc.) were abandoned in favor of making the deities and their clerics more generic and letting the players play them any way they wanted. This led to them making this comment:

"A lot of stuff disappeared that way. The Scarlet Brotherhood being a Lawful Good society lead by a Lawful Neutral bureaucracy and a secretly evil cabal (Amulets of Nondetection of Alignment for the win!) of monks became a straight Lawful Evil state.

Apparently Paladins of the Goddess of Hive Insects was too much for WotC."

Lawful Good Scarlet Brotherhood? Does anyone know anything about this?

Sun May 17, 2020 8:46 am Re: Good Scarlet Brotherhood?

Sun May 17, 2020 8:55 am

That was my reaction. They've always been evil would-be world conquerors. I wondered if there had maybe been a brief plan to change that which someone knew about.

Now that I think about it, this same person commented in another thread that Wee Jas originally hated undead as a violation of the laws of death and always destroyed them, compared to later depictions, but her original appearance in Dragon #88 gave her the ability to summon and command Lawful undead.

Sun May 17, 2020 12:08 pm

My two coppers,

I agree that the overall ethos and culture of the SB is evil. But I think in any sufficiently large group of people you are going to have exceptions, especially if avenues of escape are largely foreclosed.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were some neutral and even a few good individuals inside the organization. The latter would have extreme pangs of conscious that might force them to act as a kind of fifth column within the SB.

More opportunities for roleplay...

-G

Sun May 17, 2020 12:17 pm

On the regional alignment chart in A Guide to the World of Greyhawk (page 44), the Scarlet Brotherhood is listed as lawful neutral, though that doesn't gel very well with the Brotherhood's description, "This order is purported to espouse the cause of the Suloise as the rightful rulers of all the Flanaess, claiming superiority of that race above all others, and embracing evil as the only hope of achieving its ends."

The idea that it's a lawful neutral society led by a secretly lawful evil cabal isn't an unreasonable interpretation of this, though I have no idea where they got the idea that it was lawful good.

Sun May 17, 2020 12:30 pm

I'd be really interested in reading the original posts. Where can I find it?

I wasn't aware of an unpublished 3rd edition deities sourcebook before.

Sun May 17, 2020 3:17 pm

It's at rpg.net, in the D&D/fantasy d20 subforum, in the "Let's Read" thread for the 3e Book of Vile Darkness. (A thread mainly discussing how terrible the book was.)

Post 1,188.

https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/lets-read-the-book-of-vile-darkness-3e-edgy-and-mature.862294/page-119#post-23255892

Sun May 17, 2020 3:19 pm

Possibly they got the lawful good bit from Dragon Magazin where diuring the 3e era they published a underground cabel of lawful good Scarlet Monks.

Sun May 17, 2020 7:49 pm

Mon May 18, 2020 9:12 pm

Mon May 18, 2020 9:37 pm

Sun May 24, 2020 8:08 am

In my game, there has been a lawful good Scarlet Brotherhood member who is an ally of the party. I've got a faction of the Brotherhood that is more focused on order and battling chaos, so they are more LN than the overall LE of the organization.

I kind of work with the idea that every single monk in the Scarlet Brotherhood has the belief that they can be the next Father (or Mother) of Obedience, except for the party's ally. He was assigned to help one of Furyondy's units to help battle against Iuz's chaos...and to quietly keep him out of the rest of the Brotherhood.