Imho, defiling is evil. Athas is already damaged so badly, and I think that no good guy would damage the planet even further.
Preserving, otoh, is not necessarely good. I can envision an evil preserver who’s simply pragmatic.
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If a defiler had his own supply of trees of life, and he didn’t damage nature or the property of others, I don’t see how that could be evil.
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I suspect a preserver would ask if you would feel the same if the defiler had a supply of slaves and an obsidian orb or 10.
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That’s quite different. Dragon magic 90% of the time involves outright murdering people to fuel your sorcery (or at a minimum killing all sorts of animals for magical power which is morally questionable at a minimum and outright evil if you consider animal lives as precious as sapient lives). Exploiting trees of life for sorcerous power is if anything less evil than normal defiling since the tree of life isn’t guaranteed to be destroyed if our defiler is being careful with his spell choice. Especially if the defiling taps into multiple trees of life, ensuring no single tree dies, a wise tactic given the sheer value these trees possess.
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Is leeching all life-sustaining force from a parcel of land an evil act, in a world with little arable land, just so you can use supernatural abilities? Yeah.
Are all defilers evil? No, some are probably just neutral.
Is preserving magic inherently good? No, it depends on what you use it for.
How about this - a defiler using the energy of living beings to cast a prolific vegetation (or forestation) spell to restore the environment?
NB4U say “but its evil to kill people”, the defiler could be using livestock like kanks, erdlus, and the like. Lay waste to a few hundred erdlus for over half a mile of restored land that can be used for grazing for more edlus.
Defiler’s can’t cast prolific vegetation or forestation. At least in the original ad&d rules.
Only really powerful defilers can take energy from animal lifex so they’d have killed a lot of plants by then.
Defiler’s are not good, but they can be neutral.
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I think the assumption in 2E was that the defilers would be using plant life to fuel profilic vegetation (forestation), and thus the spell would be a wash. There should be no reason why animal energy couldn’t be used to fuel plant growth at epic levels.
Makes for an interesting moral quandry - there is a defiler bringing back grass and forest, but is killing people to do so.
Making up ridiculous scenarios doesn’t show defiler can be good, it only highlights how far from good they really are. If a defiler wishes to cast spells to heal the land he learns to preserve.
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I will say that this discussion of defilers stealing life energy from animals/people to reforest their territory does touch up on how I chose to depict Lalali-Pui. Basically human sacrifices are offered to her and she uses her dragon magic to slowly grow her forest, though this was done through a complex ritual rather than a simple spell. Naturally these sacrifices are almost exclusively criminals, prisoners of war, and disfavored slaves. I had toyed with the idea of this actually winning evil druids over to her side and perverting the nature of Gulg’s forest, making the trees twisted with bloody sap and terrible spirits haunting the woods.
The Oba is a fun one. In my opinion all the SMs were kinda sold on the idea of having to choose when to defile for the greater good and slowly grew addicted to the extra power. With the Oba she’s completely addicted to both the power of defilement and the adoration of her subjects.
I once had an avangion try to “save” her and teach her the ways of the preserver, reminding her of how she first learned wizardry (she failed miserably and got nearly the entire party killed). She was the group’s best bet at converting the SMs since she was the forest goddess.
Turns out she while she wants to spread the forest it’s so she has an unlimited source of power. Unlike the other SMs in my campaign, she only allows preserver magic in her city and has been using trees of life to hide the fact that she’s the most powerful defiler any of them have ever seen. She works with druids to create the trees of life (to protect the forests). Enslaving “evil” spirits and elementals bent on destroying Gulg, it’s people’s, and it’s Queen is just par for the course. The poor things have been driven mad by the rampant defilement and must be controlled until a cure can be found.
In truth, I believe she could easily be convinced to become an avangion like Oronis, but only if she could do it without giving up the extra power she gets from defilement and even better if she could gain more out of the bargain.
I just thought that perhaps a defiler could be good if they didn’t know about preserving and if after every spell they cast, they spend hours working the defilied soil. Fertilizing and planting to repair the damage they did.
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In all fairness I do think that argument has some merit, but I think a lot of this also depends on what people believes qualifies for being “good” aligned in Dark Sun. My general consensus has been if you’re willing to risk your well being and happiness for folks who aren’t your friends or family on a consistent basis then you are being good aligned. Neutral and even many (if not most) evil folks still value their friends and family unless they are a special breed of crazy.
In Dark Sun managing to maintain that good alignment is particularly difficult and lets not forget that very little in Athas actively rewards characters for being good aligned aside from the local populace likely being far more invested in you.
Now the way I’m seeing it, if a defiler doesn’t know about preserver magic he still knows what defiler magic does. Water and fertilizer can help mend the damage more quickly, but this is still a supernatural power they know is actively making the world a worse place for their own ends. Now if a defiler’s ends are relatively just (protect my buddies, kill the kaisharga that murdered everyone I know, etc) then the defiler is probably neutral. Just ends using unjust means imo is almost a textbook example of neutral, though it certainly can spiral down into evil, but that almost goes without saying.
Otherwise we have someone who is essentially using unjust means for an unjust end, which is pretty solidly evil. Being a DM that’s had half my campaigns revolve around evil aligned PCs I’d say this is pretty okay since there are all different kinds of evil, ranging from the selfish dick that would be neutral if it weren’t for the fact he doesn’t really ever do any good acts to offset his evil acts, to the insane sorcerer king bent on eradicating all non-humans.
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i would agree with you, Rajaat99, except defiling magic kills the soil in a way that can’t be mended except by basically getting rid of it and replacing it. it doesn’t just kill the plants and microorganisms, it destroys anything produced BY life, which would include fixed nitrogen and a variety of different complex organic compounds. the defiler could not just tend to the defiled patch of land and make it live again; if that were the case, Athas wouldn’t really have the problems it does. don’t think of it like pollution; it’s more like your wounding the world and drawing on it’s life’s blood like a mosquito.
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I don’t disagree with either one of you.
That is simply the only way a defiler could ever be close to being good. If every spell were a moral conundrum, and hours of work to try and repair.
I was just thinking of an NPC along those lines, who would be glad to turn to preserving, if the PCs would just not kill him outright and take the time to teach him the perserving arts.
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One option we haven’t discussed is “a mindbender did it.” What if instead of justifying a good alignment on a defiler it was forced on a defiler against his will?
You mean if a defiler had his alignment forcibly changed?
Yup. Plenty of ways to tamper with a mind below the crimson sun.
One interpretation would be a defiler forced into being good aligned probably wouldn’t use defiler magic anymore. However it’d depend on if the DM considers it possible for a defiler to be good aligned. Another approach (assuming they know nothing of preserver magic) is to take a page out of 3.5’s book and have the defiler incapable of advancing in defiler levels while remaining good aligned.
Wow, here I am commenting on another older thread… and this time I had put out old game notes essentially presenting the same question. I feel silly for not having seen this before doing that, and for being this morbidly interested in the topic.
In response to the question I’d probably have to voice the minority opinion and say no, there is no built-in alignment association with being a “defiler” or a “preserver”. There likely isn’t even that much of a difference between the two, depending on what version of the setting you prefer. We’ve essentially been presented at least 3 official permutations on the same setting in the pre-PP novels setting, the post-PP novels setting, and the 4th Edition setting. For me, 4th Edition stopped “counting” in these discussions as soon as it mentioned that the Feywild was very much connected to Athas… A world where the title “Pixie Blight” actually applies, and Wyan succeeded in wiping the entire race out apparently by depriving them of their homes.
So, in both earlier versions preservers were described as drawing their power from life-energy just as defilers do, but having a philosophy that they should try to minimize the scorching of the land by spreading out the damage as much as possible and never reducing things to ash. However, in either the first or the second PP novel Sadira, a card carrying preserver, Sorcerer-King assassinating member of the Veiled Alliance doesn’t hesitate to draw power directly from the man she loves when the situation calls for it, aging him in the process. If you hold to that, it is strictly a matter of personal philosophy where the acceptable line is in regards to defiling, and it becomes a very subjective matter when alignments are, more or less, supposed to be roughly objective.
If one does away with the double-talk that is almost always present in regards to alignment in D&D rules, like the requirement for Paladin to be LG even if their deity is not LG or Barbarians often living by strict codes of personal honor but at the same time being required to be of CG, CN, or CE alignment, and instead go by what the material describes… Well, most defilers would have to be preserving most of the time, as defiling causes so much obvious destruction, arcane magic is so loathed by the population (including monstrous humanoids and flat out monsters), and there is so little verdant land left that defiling your surroundings to ash with every spell likely isn’t possible, let alone logical. You wind up with a setting in which defilers are operating as preservers most of the time, and preservers are willing to defile if they think the situation warrants it. The whole debate boils down to a “potato or potatoe” type of thing before getting far enough to ask if a defiler’s magic missile is as harmful as a preserver’s scintillating sphere in regards to scorching the land.
In terms of game rules the difference seems so small that it could be settled by just building metamagic into Wizard, taking away the feature where metamagic always requires a spell to be cast in a higher level slot and replacing it with a defiling rule based on plant (or animal, or humanoid, depending on which flavor of Dark Sun you subscribe to) density and spell level. Preservers are more likely to try to not resort to “metamagic”, and defilers are less likely to hesitate. Use the alignment migration rules (with Atonement or the like as the remedy) and sure, more defilers will trend towards “evil” over time, but it isn’t necessarily a feature of being a defiler. Oronis likely had to have his alignment migrate to good before he could wyrm out of being a proto-dragon, but the SKs are a bad example to use because post Rajaat’s return/PP novels the 4 left alive change so much it begins to break the mold of the “evil defiler”. Even before the PP they’ve been retconn’d as ganging up on their own kind, sometimes with Borys, to stop another dragon from going insane and scorching Athas further… If anything, they’re kind of portrayed as being voluntarily stagnant because none of them want to go there (aside from Kalid-Ma, Dregoth, and Kalak, and things didn’t go well for any of them). Before Rajaat’s return arguably the 3 most powerful, dragons and dracoliches aside, were; Androponis, the SK who was actually elected (for life), insists his Templars at least go through the motions of being elected for terms, and somehow had the Black Lens in his backyard for eons without realizing it; Hamanu, who replaced Myron late in the Cleansing Wars game, managed to exterminate trolls (probably not the easiest race to root out), and spent power destroying Yaramuke instead of gaining power from wiping out a city (and then got spanked by Borys for doing it); and Gallard, who changed his name, got married (a lot), and locked himself up in his study doing… something… other than progressing towards full-on dragonhood.
Even if you count Borys, after he stops being insane and realizes what he has done, and how close Rajaat is to coming back… He doesn’t go to Draj, or Gulg, or the Crescent Forest, or the Kreen “Empire” and defile the areas that still exist to be reaped by high-end arcane magic, but settles on the levy system. Now, sacrificing people can hardly considered being good, but considering the sorry state of Athas and the danger Rajaat’s return would pose, it becomes a very arguable topic if it is the most evil option is to sacrifice a few thousand a year to keep an entire world alive. And Borys sticks to the levy system even after 3 city-states are leveled and 2 “fall off of the map”, extorting the difference from the surviving SKs as best he can but never resorting to large-scale land defilement that I’ve read about. Even if you look at Ur-Draxa, which was only built up after Hamanu leveled Yaramuke (to the best of my knowledge), the Dragon’s city is hardly a wasteland. Some depictions I’ve seen make it seem downright lush enough to put Borys right alongside Oronis in terms of revitalizing the land he calls home.
In my opinion if you set aside the 3 SKs that actually did massive gambits to become Dragons, Borys and the other SKs do so very little so much of the time they almost pass the litmus test for being more “preserver” oriented than “defiler”, especially given we have examples of just how powerful they all are and we have hints of just how wild they can run with their powers if they so choose, any time they choose to do so. Draj, Gulg, and Ur-Draxa seem to be very comparable to New Kurn in terms of environmental health… and to me preservers and defilers always seemed to be the same magic, the same “class” in terms of game rules, and certainly a fantastic element of the setting. The difference is often just based on perspective and storytelling, which is what makes it both great in terms of lore and vexing in terms of adjudicating if they are fundamentally different in a RPG context. One man’s good is another man’s evil, and someone can be of good alignment so long as they earnestly think what they are doing is right and good, at least as I understand the “objective” rubric on which alignment should be judged.
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