I'm wondering about the ciphers instincts toward neutrality. On a couple sites I've been to (none of them as well lahnned as PW) I've noticed a more gray coloring of the transcendent order, that and the fact of their factol being N puts a wrench as it were into one of my campaign histories.
In said campaign there is a supreme deity (although no one knows about him, of course) that created good, evil, and neutrality before loosing its cosmic war with the Baernaloths. He's now hiding out in random planes (a little bit of essence in a bunch of them) and acting sparingly through 2 primeval agents. 2 cosmic entities that equal Demogorgon, Asmodeus, or Primus in their power, but show up only for a generation or two before once more becoming one with oblivion. That and the fact that they immerse themselves in disguise, subtlety, and deception keeps them pretty well hidden from planar politics. What does this have to do with Ciphers you ask? Well, I want to use both as unknown members of the Transcendent order. As if both balance the scales of neutrality upon the other. My question is does this stretch the Ciphers tenets too much?
Oh, and for the record they hate each other but understand enough of their master not too kill the other, are NE and NG, and believe the source of the cadence to be the echoing symphony or dissonance of that maker deities work. (Though this is just one interpretation, and may or not be right as far as we know)
I've played around with fallen Ciphers as it might be called, before. Ask yourself. At what point do you stop hearing the voice of the planes themself and only hear your own voice and your own goals speaking through your actions.
Ciphers will eventually all go N, however up to a point in their heirarchy you can still have a non neutral componant of your alignment, so you could indeed have a NE or a NG Cipher. Eventually if they followed the cipher credo they'd fall into N. Rhys herself started out as evil.