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    Canonfire :: View topic - Good Scarlet Brotherhood?
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    Good Scarlet Brotherhood?
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    Apprentice Greytalker

    Joined: May 30, 2004
    Posts: 107


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    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    On another forum, a poster mentioned an unpublished 3e Greyhawk deity sourcebook and made an odd comment.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?
    Encyclopedia Greyhawkaniac

    Joined: May 29, 2018
    Posts: 1470


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

    Armitage wrote:
    On another forum, a poster mentioned an unpublished 3e Greyhawk deity sourcebook and made an odd comment.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?


    Never. The SB has always been evil from Gygax's introduction of them.
    Apprentice Greytalker

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    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.
    Sage of Canonfire

    Joined: Jun 28, 2001
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    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
    GreySage

    Joined: Aug 03, 2001
    Posts: 3310
    From: Michigan

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    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.
    Adept Greytalker

    Joined: Sep 20, 2001
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    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.
    Apprentice Greytalker

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    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
    Apprentice Greytalker

    Joined: Nov 22, 2007
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    From: Denton, Tx

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    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.
    Encyclopedia Greyhawkaniac

    Joined: May 29, 2018
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    Sun May 17, 2020 7:49 pm  

    Armitage wrote:
    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


    Did Anna give Book of Vile Darkness a good review? I'd certainly weigh her opinion with greater weight than the combined total of rpgnet.
    Adept Greytalker

    Joined: Apr 26, 2002
    Posts: 538
    From: Canada

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    Mon May 18, 2020 9:12 pm  

    Armitage wrote:
    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


    The poster makes it sound as though the Scarlet Brotherhood being a Lawful Good society being left on the cutting room floor was a bad thing. Never mind that it completely flies in the face of everything that was published about the Brotherhood before that, it's just a plain stupid idea in of itself.

    The Brotherhood having a few good-aligned citizens I could accept, but whose bright idea was it to make the entire Brotherhood good? How do you even justify such a drastic change in-universe?
    GreySage

    Joined: Aug 03, 2001
    Posts: 3310
    From: Michigan

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    Mon May 18, 2020 9:37 pm  

    CruelSummerLord wrote:
    The Brotherhood having a few good-aligned citizens I could accept, but whose bright idea was it to make the entire Brotherhood good?


    RPG.net user Littleredfox made that up, as far as I can tell.

    My guess is he might have been confused by the three-tier organization of the Scarlet Brotherhood (thieves, assassins, monks) and mixed it up in his head with the unsupported idea that they had three different alignments? Or it was something his DM introduced that he mistakenly thought was canon, perhaps. Or maybe it just amuses him to fabricate things to be upset about. He didn't claim the Scarlet Brotherhood thing was in an unpublished book.
    Apprentice Greytalker

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    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.
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