On Conflicting Alignments on the Deities

In general, it's very difficult to fit historical gods neatly into the alignment system. Many gods from real-world mythology perform good deeds and wicked deeds, and perform deeds that uphold order and other deeds that undermine it. Set is an excellent case in point.

Set rides with Ra through the underworld every night to help him defeat Apep, and in this way he's definitely an upholder of cosmic order. Set, as the older son (he ripped his way out of Nut's womb early), actually had the better legal claim to the throne than Osiris did, and after Osiris's death Ra agreed that Set was the rightful successor; Horus had to trick Set out of it. As god of the desert, Set symbolizes the harsh limits put upon the bedlam of nature's fertility. Finally, Set represented the government during the period when he was patron of Lower Egypt and during the reign of the Hyksos kings over all of Egypt.

On the other hand, Set was a god of storms and wild beasts, which is arguably chaotic, and his role as the murderer of Osiris and the child who couldn't wait until his appointed time to escape the womb establishes him as something of a rule-breaker (or, at least, rule-stretcher). I think seeing him as lawful evil is reasonable, though there are arguments for chaotic evil, chaotic neutral, lawful neutral, or true neutral depending on what era of Set's mythology you're talking about.

3rd edition Deities & Demigods was a major revision from what had come before in the game, though. Planescape and Forgotten Realms (and the original Deities & Demigods and 2nd edition Legends & Lore) have him as lawful evil, and when in doubt I generally lean toward Planescape.

1e Deities & Demigods simply stated that gods don't always behave according to their listed alignment, and aren't required to.

Tyr was lawful good in 2nd edition whether he was being worshiped in the Forgotten Realms setting or not. I'm fine with that interpretation, for the sake of maximum continuity.

Sure, and generally that's a safe place to go with dichotomous deities, but the Aztecs are really pretty crazy. Like, Tlaloc demands his worshipers sacrifice babies and torture youths to placate him, but at the same time he's built up this idyllic paradise for victims of accidental drowning. D&D convention has it that good deeds don't really make up for atrociously evil deeds, so he's listed as lawful evil... but that doesn't really capture how his worshipers think of him. He's the benevolent bringer of rain, He Who Makes Things Grow, essential to the survival of humanity and all of nature.

And you see that kind of dichotomy with most Aztec deities. Like, Quetzalcoatl was tricked into embarrassing himself, so he razed an entire city to the ground to make sure there were no witnesses. Yet he's often held as one of the "good guy" in the Aztec pantheon. And the Olympians are really no better. Artemis was the goddess women prayed to to ease the pain of childbirth, but she murdered men who accidentally saw her naked, and she kills Bellerophon's daughter just because the gods were mad at Bellerophon, and she kills Ariadne because Dionysus was mad at her, and she kills Oeneus because he failed to sacrifice to her properly, and the list goes on and on. And yet she's good in many respects, an easer of pain and a protector. You can call her neutral, but it doesn't really encapsulate what she means. Hera was horrible to her husband's bastards, but she was also the goddess of marriage and the patron of the hero Jason.

It comes down to this: the gods, all of the gods, are good by definition. They define what goodness is for their cultures. They're the highest authority when it comes to morality, and enforce their view of right and wrong ruthlessly. And everything that's good comes from them. Everything you like, everything you value and honor, descends from the gods (even if it requires a divine trickster or cultural hero to steal it from them). But mortals know they live in a capricious universe in which even good people suffer inexplicably, so the gods must be just as capricious, and seemingly wicked at times. But all that capriciousness and wickedness doesn't mean the gods aren't good.

In Planescape, of course, there is a morality higher than the gods in the form of the planes themselves, which define morality objectively regardless of what the gods say or do. An action is good not because Zeus says it is, but because it resonates with the themes of the plane of Elysium. An action is evil not because Zeus declares it anathema, but because it resonates with the themes of the Gray Waste. But the gods who dwell on the planes are still maddeningly contradictory. While they may fit better on one plane than another, they can live wherever they want. They dwell on the planes, but they aren't of them. And the cultures who worship them and believe in them probably pay more attention to what their gods say than what planar geography says. So what if the plane of Arborea thinks Artemis is being evil? The Greeks know she's good. And this is true for Hextor and Takhisis and Ilsensine and Maglubiyet and Kali and Hecate as well.

So it's complicated. We can argue about what alignment a deity fits best in D&D terms, but there's often going to be a lot of mixed evidence and several possible interpretations. And in the end, it doesn't matter much. I'm fine with calling Gruumsh chaotic evil but having him still live on Acheron. He happens to be mostly chaotic evil but he's a god, not a demon, and he doesn't personify that alignment. He's as complex and contradictory as a mortal, or more so. To the orcs, he personifies cosmic order, even if that order is wild and untamed by the standards of the planes at large.