this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Back in 3rd Edition D&D there was a spell called "Holy Word" that could kill non-good creatures within a 40 foot radius of the caster, if the caster was sufficiently high level relative to the creatures. Good creatures were completely unaffected.
When tightly packed you can fit about 2000 people into a 40-foot-radius circle (total area is 5000 square feet). So one casting can deal with the population of a good-sized town. My gaming group speculated for a while about a society where it was a routine ritual to round up all the peasantry and nuke them with Holy Word to keep the population clear of evil. Never incorporated it into any campaigns, though. It's a bit of a sticky philosophical puzzler.
This is a weird one because despite being a "good" spell, it entails the mass murder of innocent neutrals. It really doesn't seem like a good action to me.
It seems like anyone who was okay with this would fall to neutral or evil simply by virtue of being okay with mass murder, and in turn fall victim to the Great Neutral Purge.
Indeed, hence the sticky philosophical puzzler. I would think that the clerics themselves would start getting affected by the spell. Fortunately (for them), the effect of the spell when cast on someone of the same level as yourself is only deafness for 1d4 rounds. The Church could probably cover that up.
There was another interesting related situation that came up in an actual campaign I was in, involving the Blasphemy spell (a variant that only kills non-evil targets). My party and I were in our "home base", a mansion belonging to an allied NPC noblewoman, planning out our next excursion. A powerful demon we'd been tangling with attempted to scry-and-fry us, teleporting in and nuking us with Blasphemy. Unfortunately there were a lot of low-level NPC staff working in the noblewoman's household and the spell wiped them out instantly... except for one guy, who happened to be of evil alignment. He survived the encounter because of that.
Even though his alignment was evil, though, he'd never done anything wrong and didn't seem like he had any reason to do anything wrong in the future. So we weren't sure if we should fire him or what. It wasn't illegal to simply be evil, you had to actually do something evil before you could be punished. We just warned him we'd be keeping an eye on him, in the end, and kept him on staff.
I'm pretty sure if you aren't a creature from a celestial plane of evil or good, only your actions define your alignment, not the other way around.
Okay, he hadn't done anything wrong to us. I guess we could have paused the main campaign to spend a while investigating him, but we were doing one of those save-the-world things so we didn't have the time. :)
I feel like there might be interesting ways to deal with it. Perhaps the mass killing of neutrals only ever happened the first time, which could have been many generations ago and under singular circumstances. Since then, only the odd one here or there ever dies during the purge. Perhaps it's been decades or centuries since anyone died to the purge, reinforcing belief in it's effectiveness as a basis for a pure society. It may have been so long that people wonder whether the purge is even real, or just a traditional ceremony carried out annually based on old myths. Then one year, it wipes out half the city. The party investigates?
The ritual could have been real, but was quietly faked so that a corrupt leader could avoid facing their fate.
Or, the ritual was always fake but used as a cover to assassinate specific targets without consequences.
Yes! And the ambiguity means the DM doesn't have to decide which it is until the players have deduced certain facts.
whoever is casting that spell into a crowd of peasants will definitely turn evil
Followed by 3 quarters of the party dying to the ritual, most likely.
If they're high enough level relative to the caster the spell doesn't do insta-death, it just hurts a bit.
Otherwise the clerics would probably nuke themselves the first time they tried this. Maybe. The ethics of this spell are confusing.
What is being good except having self-imposed restrictions to avoid doing something evil? This spell seems perfect. There will rarely be a time where a good aligned character could justify using it in an overpowered way. If it were inverted then you would see evil characters using it all the time. It's a self-imposed balance. You have a very powerful tool, but you must avoid using unless absolutely necessary.
Ah, but there is an evil equivalent, Blasphemy. It affects non-evil creatures instead of non-good creatures, and as such has no self-balancing properties. There are even equivalents for Law and Chaos, which are... worryingly abstract.
Hmm, yeah. That doesn't seem like a great idea to give to people...
Almost as if the whole objective good vs bad system is kinda poorly thought out...
Only good? What about neutral alignment? (if that was a thing)
I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.
Here's the SRD entry for the spell. It definitely nukes the neutrals.
The evil equivalent is Blasphemy, which nukes all non-evil creatures. Yes, the neutrals get it from both sides.
Then there's Word of Chaos and Dictum, the Law and Chaos equivalents of those Good/Evil spells. Neutrals, believe it or not, death!
Pick a side, you neutral scum!
Good.
What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?
Clinical depression
I have a sunny disposition that’s balanced out with depression. True neutral.
All I know, my gut says maybe.
Well, my parents were worshipers of Ishtar, so I was kind of born into it...
My favorite characters are TN Wizards or Clerics
Which is kind of horrifying because most of the population of any given setting is supposed to be neutral. The average commoner isn't so greatly committed to following airtight moral codes that they'll ping on a detect whatever spell, whether that's good, evil, law, or chaos. Cast that on a crowd of randoms and you've probably wiped out three quarters of them.
It was a bit different back in the 3rd edition days, "good" and "evil" were slung around a bit more liberally. I believe it wasn't until the 5th edition when they introduced the "unaligned" state, which is sort of "neutral but without the commitment", and assumed most average folk were unaligned.
Presumably before the high cleric casts Holy Word there'd be a festival ahead of time in which people are given plenty of opportunity to donate to good causes (ie, the Church) to crank up their good meters before being "tested."
I feel like the average townsperson would sit between neutral good/lawful neutral.
Implementing a system like that would kill a lot of innocent people and the occasional guilty person.
Accidental realism
Tell my wife I said... hello
Upvoted purely for the Futurama reference.
The 'both sides are the same' idiots certainly deserve it
I now want a campaign based on those 4 spells, as swords.
Another aspect of the puzzle is that not every evil deserves death. A bum who does minor theft almost as a habit, a hateful bitter man who antagonizes everyone but obeys the law, a teenager, a greedy business person who employs half the town but makes everyone's life a bit worse, and so on.
Good should have the self restraint to not go straight to murder.
The system in question relied on a hard Alignment metric. So addressing each of your examples:
One of the things that everyone everyone forgets about this system is that Alignment has nothing to do with morality, but rather which prime plane the individuals soul was aligned with. Good is aligned with the Positive Energy plane, Evil with the Negative Energy plane, Lawful with Mechanus, and Chaos with Limbo. Each alignment also had a Power Word spell.
Right, so anyone who is just somewhat selfish and more concerned about their own well being than others would die, even if they are not actively harming people.
Does the "harm evil" spell affect the now clearly evil cleric who is taking part in genocide?
If the caster is not of the alignment of the power word spell then yes they are effected by it, but since it's based off of HD vs CL they would likely only be afflicted with the lowest effect.
On the first cast he's fine, after that and he's responsible for breaking up a few families who insist that their loved ones "could never be evil", he's wrapped up with the local magistrate for months, maybe it even makes it to the Duke himself.
The second time, after his resentment to the people who caused him suffering, his internal wish that they go as well. He's fucking gone and you need a new priest.
*Edit- NVM, since the cleric/priest/whatever is the same level as the caster (the same cleric), it's just making him deaf for a few minutes, that'll be more of a wakeup call for him maybe.
As one of those hateful bitter people in the eyes of others who still is lawful, I emphatically tell you that we are evil and absolutely would and should be killed by Holy Word and other such spells.
Wait, what?
Actually everyone on your list should be killed by that spell, even the teenager though I vehemently disagree with that.
Like you can sit there and quibble about what is actually evil or not but this is magic, and what matters is what the majority of people consider evil, and they all hit the mark. Most adults are ageist bigots who'd wipe out all teenagers on a dime if they could, for example, even though that's pretty evil.
Good and evil are honestly pretty meaningless.
That's what he's saying, the spell can't discern between the mass murderer and the lowly thief, the user of that spell should have the restraint to not jump straight murder. Not all evil beings deserve death.
Did you seriously say a bum who commits a minor theft deserves the death penalty? Or should I have more coffee?
Having used to be that bum, yes, I can say emphatically what they're doing is evil by conventional standards. I agree wholeheartedly with what they do, but that doesn't change the fact that it's evil and by that game's standards they should die.
Items like that go by the standards established in the game and that means that homeless dude is gonna die. Conventional western morals dictate he be jailed, at least, and most Americans do want people like that exterminated because they dehumanize the homeless. Even restorative justice types don't actually view or treat homeless people like humans let alone peers. Homeless populations are pretty universally reviled, and as good and evil always boil down to our feelings and popularity contests, that's what makes them evil in the eyes of others.
I am not agreeing with the notion, just saying what it is. Personally I think humanity is inherently evil so all humans should die from such an item or a spell. But no one would take my opinion into account so this morality-is-relative crap people are pulling to dispute the veracity of the sword doesn't hold water either.
One problem with the strategy is that Blasphemy, Dictum, and Word of Chaos all exist as well. If the Cleric's Alignment/Faith changed they could sacrifice the town with a single cast.
Not to mention being evil does not necessarily mean deserving capital punishment.
A lawful evil farmer might be a dick, but if you stab him the guards are going to have questions.
I'd say "kill 'big' evil, stun 'normal' evil" would be a better spell.
Situations like this give me the inclination to treat D&D Good™ and Evil™ as physical properties rather than moral tendencies. D&D Good™ that is a little too eager to murder beings labeled as Evil™ falls short of what I would consider good. If someone used such power to kill someone who is a pathological liar and petty thief, that wouldn't seem good to me even if that person could be classified as Evil™ as the system defines it.
Then again while to me such act seems evil, I don't think I could call the caster Evil™ because D&D explicitly endorses killing Evil™ creatures as a Good™ act. Since the 1st edition, the purest paragon of Good™ that is the Paladin wields a weapon to kill.
5th edition has done it better with the addition of "unaligned" to the mix, IMO. In order to have an alignment - even a neutral one - you need to explicitly dedicate yourself to that alignment, or be supernaturally bound to it such as with angels and demons. I would rule that these spells don't affect the unaligned.
It is definitely more convenient for players, especially now that they dropped class alignment requirements, but there is so much worldbuilding tied to Good and Evil and such, it feels a little strange to treat it like something most characters ignore.
Chaotic good Santa Claus?