Dragonlance Dragonlance "Reimagined".

[Vaalingrade]

Argument's a strong word, I think this is just a healthy debate.

I'd hate to see what you would call a 'venting of hot cheese-flavored bile into one another's faces'.

 

[Velderan]

I'd hate to see what you would call a 'venting of hot cheese-flavored bile into one another's faces'.

Taco Bell's "cheese" menu items?

 

[DarkCrisis]

Taco Bell's "cheese" menu items?

I want a Chili Cheese Burrito from Taco Bell so bad…

 

[Faolyn]

Why doesn't Superman just fix everything? Because it would be a pretty boring story if the Gods just hopped down and fixed everything all the time. Helps go against that Free Will mortals are supposed to have.

It's been a while since I've read Superman comics, but most of the ones I've read have him either dealing with something that has a strong social or emotional cost or going against things that are much more powerful than he is, and neither of those are things that can be easily fixed.
Also, he has a day job.

And he's not a god. He's not Cosmically Good. He's good, so when he makes mistakes, he usually at least tries to fix them. There's been times when he's turned his back, sure, when it's gotten to be too much, but he always returns. But I'm pretty sure the only times that Superman has committed genocide or something akin to it has been in stories where he's actively turned evil. I quite like the Injustice series myself. At least the first run. Injustice 2 was pretty bad.

Countless versions of this tale and mythological gods through out history but Krynn's gods get put under the microscope.

Actually, they do get put under a microscope. It just happens on forums other than this one--forums dedicated to religion or atheism.

And in other D&D settings, I don't think that they've had any gods commit genocide and still be considered one of the Gods of Good.

I honestly question if people have imaginations anymore. Do we really need hard science to explain Superman's powers or can we just take it on storytelling and imagination that yes he can in fact fly?

Heh--in the Action Comics that introduced Superman, Seigal and Shuster did try to scientifically explain Superman's powers. 'Course, he couldn't fly back then.

 

[Faolyn]

I'm not sure if this has already been mentioned but what if the only way for the gods of Good to interfere (in the material plane) was with the blessing of the other gods. Perhaps the gods of Evil forced the gods of Good into this position. i.e. If the gods of Good did not agree to the Evil gods' terms, the Kingpriest would have become a god. What if this was the lesser evil than have another evil god in the DL pantheon.

Sure, that would be fine. I'll accept that allowing the kingpriest to become a god would be evil--but doing evil to prevent a greater evil is still pretty evil. It's not like they used precision strikes to only take out the bad guys, after all.

Since the neutral gods were, through inaction, allowing evil to occur, and the "good" gods performed evil to prevent a greater evil, then it stands to reason that every god on Krynn is at least an enabler of evil. Now, that could be cool, if you wanted to have a crapsack world and the PCs have to try to bring hope to a dark world. But we already have Ravenloft. Dragonlance is supposed to be about the war between Good and Evil, with dragons, not the war between Evil and Lite Evil, with dragons.

 

[Hussar]

Huh. So, the gods actually DID directly intervene, removed spells from clerics, and did pretty much everything short of directly coming down to kill the Kingpriest personally, but, that's still apparently not enough. The only way, for some people, for the gods to not be evil is if they literally come down from the heavens and personally kill the Kingpriest.

Yeah, I'm getting the feeling that there's some seriously bad faith arguing going on here. The goalposts keep shifting further and further along and nothing, and no evidence, is allowed to be valid.

I know I got accused pretty strongly of gate keeping, but, this is exactly the point I was making earlier about actually reading the material. I'll admit, I didn't know that about the clerics. Something I should have found but missed. It would have nipped a large swath of the argument in the bud. The argument is that the gods didn't do enough to avert the cataclysm. To me, it looks like they did every single thing that they could, short of directly dropping down and whacking the kingpriest, which the gods aren't allowed to do in the setting - they don't ever directly appear, they can only be summoned - and failed.

 

[pemerton]

I'm coming to the party a bit late, but does Krynn have disease, or infant mortality? Assuming that it does, then somehow there is a reconciliation of those events with the idea of there being powerful, somewhat active good gods.

Whatever form that reconciliation takes, why can't it also be deployed to explain the Cataclysm?

EDIT: I mean, in FR isn't the same sort of reasoning needed to reconcile feudal monarchy (eg Cormyr) with good alignment and good gods?

 

[Alzrius]

From what I've read, they didn't remove the magic--they actually removed the priests, who went to another plane or something. Which actually is kind of worse, since they both dropped a nuke on the population and took away people who would, most likely, have some mundane healing and counseling and leadership abilities. Or optionally, the priests chose to leave rather than tend to their flocks, which is not-nice of them.

The Night of Doom (which saw all of the true priests disappear from the world) was consistently presented in the novels as a choice those clerics made (or at least, the good clerics). In Time of the Twins, the ancient elf cleric Loralon offers to remove Crysania from the world when Raistlin takes her back to just before the Cataclysm, and she twice refuses to go. Yarus Donner similarly refused to leave the world when given the choice, deciding instead to stay and die in the Cataclysm out of guilt for not openly opposing the Kingpriest.

 

[DarkCrisis]

The Night of Doom (which saw all of the true priests disappear from the world) was consistently presented in the novels as a choice those clerics made (or at least, the good clerics). In Time of the Twins, the ancient elf cleric Loralon offers to remove Crysania from the world when Raistlin takes her back to just before the Cataclysm, and she twice refuses to go. Yarus Donner similarly refused to leave the world when given the choice, deciding instead to stay and die in the Cataclysm out of guilt for not openly opposing the Kingpriest.

In ToTwins, it mentions that the Kingpriest lost his magic but was keeping it secret. Then all the Clerics got taken out (if they wanted to go) (which they pretty much all did).

 

[Faolyn]

The Night of Doom (which saw all of the true priests disappear from the world) was consistently presented in the novels as a choice those clerics made (or at least, the good clerics). In Time of the Twins, the ancient elf cleric Loralon offers to remove Crysania from the world when Raistlin takes her back to just before the Cataclysm, and she twice refuses to go. Yarus Donner similarly refused to leave the world when given the choice, deciding instead to stay and die in the Cataclysm out of guilt for not openly opposing the Kingpriest.

Out of curiosity, what was the choice like? Stay and die in the Cataclysm?