Post originally by Kobold Lord at 2004-07-19 10:58:31
Converted from Phorums BB System

Not many people are very helpful, are they? Not that I'm likely to be helpful, either, but...

In the standard D&D cosmology, they use a table of elements roughly drawn from the old four-element system used thousands of years ago back when we had alchemy instead of science. However, some designer somewhere decided to add "evil" as an elemental force along with the big four, and other designers followed suit... So now we have elemental evil, elemental good, elemental shadow, etc. ad nauseum.

Mix water, earth, and evil, and somehow you get various varieties of ooze. Mix good and air and you get that snazzy lightning bolt spell you use to kill orphans. Oh, sure, they've renamed it "positive energy" and "negative energy," but it's the same concept.

While the logical integrity of the system may be open to question, there's no particular reason to think that eliminating evil will result in more good, any more than gating air to another place results in more earth, or lighting things on fire results in empty oceans. It is not a good act to kill an evil dragon that would have sat in its lair blowing smoke rings for the rest of its life, and your role in a good dragon's life may simply be that of an appetizer, as you are a foodstuff in the perspective of that species.

So there's room for greyness about what YOU should do. Sure, there's a cataclysmic eternal battle between good and evil. But you have no clear way of influencing it, and in the mean time you have to deal with the material plane and the here and now. Dealing with a bad guy isn't so unpalatable when you consider that everybody is a bad guy. The question becomes, "Which bad guy should I deal with, and how much?"

If Eberron is grey, it may be because most of the adversary groups presented have some sort of core justification for what they're doing. The fascist warforged nation, the city of monsters, the necrophiliac elves, etc, all have potential to be allies and enemies even in a single campaign. There's room for compromise and peaceful coexistence, but people being what they are, that's not going to happen.