By "God" I mean the Judeo-Christian deity... It seems obvious that He should be classified as "Lawful", since He is mighty touchy about folks that don't follow His rules, but is He Lawful Good, Lawful Evil, or Lawful Neutral, in your opinion? I can see lots of things that would point in each direction... For instance, killing every living person except Noah in the Flood would be deemed an Evil act by many, and He's also commanded His followers to commit genocide (in the Old Testament), but He's also punished selfish people who've neglected the poor, and ordered His followers to care for orphans and such - Good things. On the third hand, He apparently sends non-believers to Hell no matter how many Good deeds they've done in live, suggesting that for Him, Law - not Good - is paramont... what do the rest of you berks or bloods think? My bone-box is sore trying to puzzle Him out...
God's alignment
If we are talking about the Omnipotent (all powerful), Omnipresent (everywhere/everything) and Omniscient (all knowing) creator of all that is, it would have to be True Neutral. It is all evil and good and law and chaos (and everything else) in existence.
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This being one of the more touchy subjects out there please remember that this thread falls under the 'off topic' rules of this forum. So long as all posters are polite and civil to each other, and keep this thread firmly under the context of *Planescape* - I will allow it to remain open but should they not remain so, I hope all of you will understand when I close it.
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In case you were wondering, I consider myself to be chaotic good.
But in terms of the game, there would be a lot of me about, simply because there are several different versions of me. Or I would have to be bipolar.
There is a big difference between god being shown in the old testament and in the new testament.
In the NT god is good, there is not much indicating otherwise.
In the OT it's harder to tell. He cares only for his followers and nothing about everyone else. Whoever is in the way for his "chosen ones" has to be crushed. He even uses his powers to avoid the possible peaceful settling of conflicts. He hardens the heard of the egyptian pharaoh, and then punishes him with the plagues for being hardhearded.
I think this god is mostly shown as neutral with heavy shifts towards good and evil.
He is always shown as being lawful. There a a lot of rules especially in the OT, but in the NT Jesus says something like "no one will enter paradise but through me". So there are still quite strict rules his followers have to obeye.
"God" - that is, Elohim, which is a plural word - is actually two Sumerian gods with very different opinions on how to interact with mortals.
There's Enlil, the stern patriarch, who destroyed most of the human race through a great deluge.
Then there's Enki, who told one favored mortal (Utnapushtim) about the flood in advance so that he could build an ark and be saved from it.
If this pattern holds, it was Enlil who rained plagues on Egypt, while it was Enki who parted the waters so that the Israelites could get free. It was Enlil who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, while it was Enki who spared Lot and his daughters. It was Enki whose avatar died on the cross, while it was Enlil who required him to sacrifice himself that other mortals be forgiven. It was Enlil who rejected the sacrifice of Cain, but it was Enki who put his mark on him so that none could harm him. It was Enlil who required that Isaac be killed, but it was Enki who intervened to save him at the last minute.
According to AD&D and Planescape, Enki is lawful neutral, while Enlil is neutral good. Figure that out. Perhaps it should be the other way around.
Also, Enki's dead in Planescape. I thought of writing a complicated story where Nergal and Anshar kill him specifically to prevent Christianity from taking hold on a certain world and driving out the worship of the other gods, but that might be a bit much.
Enki makes killer rims too. That's how you know he is good.
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He'd be Lawful Good. He is consistent through the Old and New Testament, a God of Mercy and when necessary punishment. Ever hear of Annias and Saphira? Or Agrippa I? Ever read the Book of Revelation? It's the same God as the one in the Old Testament. It the same time the God of the Old Testament was definetly Good. He gave people many chances to turn from they're sins. He could've destroyed Israel completely for it's sins, but didn't.
As for Elohim supposedly meaning God being Enki and Enlil, no, that's not true. It likely means that God is three in one, a trinity.
Haha, I'm not talking about what's "true." We're talking about a game here, I hope.
Sorry if I posted this discussion at the wrong spot, and I wasn't trying to offend anyone, I was just thinking along the line of what if the real world (Earth) were part of the game (say, with adventures taking place in Earth's "middle ages" or the Rennisance...) I figure Earth could be reached via the Plane of Shadow... What is interesting is trying to figure out why the other Pantheons worshiped on Earth were gradually uprooted by Christianity... did they flee in the face of a Power greater than theirs? Will the Christian God show up on other campaign worlds, and if so, could the native Powers possibly fight back? I see lots of campaign possibilities in this kind of senario... Of course, if the Judeo-Christian God really IS omnipotent, then it would seem that Mystra, Shar, Boccob, Pelor, etc... would be doomed! A (heretical) possibility would be that He is in fact only an Overpower with control over His own Material plane only... or perhaps He is actually a Greater Power who found a powerful artifact and used it to overthrow the other Patheons of Earth... and then there's that pesky Satan...
looks in at thread
quirks eyebrow
One of these days I really do need to GM that In Nomine/Planescape crossover.
I don't think god really "overthrew" the other pantheons. The believe in the old gods ebbed away over time. Sure, in some places, especially throughout America, the worshippers of the old pantheons were just killed by the newcomers. But in other regions like the roman empire the new god just managed to get enough worshippers. Most important, the roman emperor coverted at some time in history. While the old roman gods had a "we are many, doesn't matter if there is one more"-attitude, the christian god has a quite strict "no other gods but me"-rule. Thus making a decision for christianity as a religion of state was quite a blow for the rest of the pantheon, leading to a decline. And as those gods are still around in the multiverse they just decided to look elsewhere and ignore this small blue planet. I doubt there had to be real fighting between the gods, it's just a matter of gaining the right followers at the right time. You don't need to stress yourself with constructions of a "beard of pantheonsmiting" or something like that.
So I would not make him omnipotent, especially not outside one crystal sphere. Simple reason: There is no omnipotent being in the multiverse - at least none that shows itself.
I'd not even make him an overpower. God is not as distant as overpowers in D&D normally are. They don't meddle with mortals, they are more like "god for the gods". And overpowers don't need worship, god does a lot to gain worshippers, especially when he starts to become a god not only for his own people. So giving god the status of a greater power will fit really good.
There is another thing you'll find on the net, saying in the creation myth of the bible a plural word for gods is used (elohim), while the garden eden story refers to the work of a single (thus local) god. This is backed up with the story of cain, who was cast out and found a wife somewhere else, thus there had been other humans who are not descending from those created in the garden of eden.
This god (with the help of the 3 major sects worshipping him - jews, christians and moslems) rose from a small lokal power of a single (selfmade) nation to a greater power over time.
Satan could be any lawful evil being of pit-fiend status or higher.
The other gods mostly disappeared because their worshippers were forced or pressured to convert, or outright killed.
Say, if the Athar were to discover the existance of the Judeo/Christian God, would they consider Him to be their "Great Unknown", now FOUND, or do you think they'd dismiss Him as another pretender?
He'd be another pretender. The Great Unknown is unknown by definition; the Great Unknown is unknowable, incomprehensible, beyond mortal or immortal understanding. Something that could incarnate on the Material Plane in human form could not, from an Athar's perspective, possibly be divine.
And why exactly would they leap to that conclusion, anyway? There's nothing about the Judaeo-Christian deity that sets him that far apart from the gods of other faiths, other than his popularity on one world. I mean, looking at this from the perspective of an atheist from another plane, what are they supposed to be impressed by? The stories about the Christian god aren't that different from the stories of many other gods known on Earth - for example, the Mesopotamian deities. Marduk battled Tiamat and split her in half to create the world and the sky. Yahweh battled Leviathan and split in half the primal waters to create the world and the sky. Christ hung on the cross to liberate the virtuous dead from the underworld, while Odin hung on Yggdrasil to discover the true runes, the syllables of the Language Primeval from beyond the veil of death. There are differences, of course, but no more than you'd expect.
There are other worlds where other monotheistic gods hold sway, I'm sure.
I agree with Mask; the Christian god didn't "overthrow" the other pantheons, he just gradually outcompeted them. It has nothing to do with the power of the deity and everything to do with the appeal of the religion and the geopolitics and technological development of those who championed that religion.
Now, if you'll indulge me, let me explain my own theory.
A curious - really, bizarre - thing about the Sumerian and Babylonian pantheons in D&D (in the first edition of Deities & Demigods and later in On Hallowed Ground) is that they're considered separate from each other. While Ishtar and Inanna are virtually the same deity, D&D exaggerates their differences, and exaggerates the differences between the pantheons they belong to. On Hallowed Ground claims the Sumerian pantheon birthed the Babylonian gods as the people of Mesopotamia grew more orderly and urbanized. This is, however, a unique thing in D&D, and I wondered why the pantheons split so dramatically instead of simply evolving along with its rituals.
The Forgotten Realms campaign provides us with an interesting possible answer. During ancient Sumerian times, the Imaskari empire of Toril invaded the world of Earth, its mages enslaving the people of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys and shipping many of them as slaves through portals back to Toril. This much is more or less canon. From here on, I resort to speculation.
The Imaskari were concerned that the local clerics and gods might object to this, so they cast an epic spell, a spell that had yet to be tested anywhere else. With this spell, they sought to banish the influence of the Sumerian gods from the face of the world.
The spell was, as it would later be on Toril (and that the spell worked this way on Toril is also canon), mostly successful. The gods themselves were banished, but they were still able to influence the world through avatars. These avatars were cut off from communication with the powers that birthed them, but they were extremely powerful in their own right.
So, my theory is this: while the Imaskari spell separated the avatars from their "parent" deities, they changed. They changed in response to the dictatorship of the Imaskari, to the immigration of new peoples from the mountains and other planes. They became, in short, the Babylonian pantheon, and when the power of the Imaskari was finally broken and the Sumerian gods free to return, they refused to reunite. They had, far more than the avatar-kings on Toril would millennia later, grown too different, too independent.
So was left for the Sumerian gods? There was no more place for them in their old haunts. They managed to gain the worship of the descendants of their followers on Toril alongside the Babylonian gods, and surely they set roots in other worlds as well. But what of Earth?
The answer came in the form of a man from the city of Ur, a man called Abram. Enlil asked Enki to choose a favorite among humanity, as he had done before when he chose Abram's ancestor Ziusudra to save from the Flood. From then on, both the Sumerian gods claimed Abram and his descendants, demanding he worship them as a single deity. While not very popular at first, eventually this faith would grow and schism and dominate much of the planet.
And when Enlil declared that the dead would remain in Irkalla forever, it was Enki who died on the cross to pay for the journey of the blessed to the realms of the gods.
Now, Earth isn't the only Earth out there. There's the nonmagical version of Earth, where none of the myths and legends have much basis in fact, which is hidden from the rest of the multiverse by the Plane of Shadow. The only magic on that world comes from planar travelers who bring magic there, refugees from beyond Shadow who have come, more often than not, to hide themselves in the relative safety of this mundane world. Shadow obscures them from divination, and here they're able to live secret lives untroubled by gods and demons. This world is so unmagical that occasionally artifacts have been hidden here so that the rest of the multiverse can never find them. This happened to the Mace of Cuthbert, as described in Dragon Magazine #100.
There's also the magical Earth, the fantastic Earth, the gothic Earth. This is the Earth described in the Masque of the Red Death campaign. It's also the world described in the various Historical Reference books for AD&D : The Vikings Campaign Sourcebook, The Celts, Charlemagne's Paladins, A Mighty Fortress, Age of Heroes, and so on. On this world, all the legends and myths are true. Magic is real and, while the world isn't as high-magic as Oerth or Toril, its heroes and magic-users are often as powerful as any on the planes. Reality on this world is a thin veil, beneath which powerful gods and entities stir and manipulate historical events. While many on this world profess Christianity, this Earth is thick with cults to elder gods and demons who lurk just beneath the surface, praying to Christ in public and to Baal and Nyarlathotep in private. The old gods still have all their power. This world is firmly a part of the D&D multiverse, not hidden behind shadow as the unmagical Earth is. Several peoples from the Mystara setting originated here, too: people came to that world from this world's analogues of France, Scotland, and England to settle the principalities of Glantri.
There are many other Earths besides that. There's Midgard, for example, a world where the Norse pantheon dominates, where the Midgard Serpent literally circles the flat planet and where the stars and celestial bodies are literal sparks from Muspelheim. There are worlds where the Olympian gods are the only ones known, river worlds where the Babylonian gods still rule, middle kingdoms where the bureaucracy of the Chinese pantheon runs all of nature.
And on some of these worlds the gods know what happened on one version of Earth, where so many of them were forgotten, their followers slaughtered, their idols cast into the sea. And so Anshar and Nergal of the Babylonian pantheon teamed up to destroy their forefather, holding down Enki and slaughtering him while he was still manifest in human form, ending him before he could die for the sins of yet another world.
I prefer this interpretation because - well, I guess Occam's Razor: "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." Planescape already has the Sumerian gods, and (mis)using them in this way means I don't have to worry about assigning an alignment and homeplane to new, extremely complicated, extremely can-of-wormsish deity that Planescape doesn't already have.
Also, it's fun.
I deleted my post because threads such as these never fail to piss me off. I do not wish this to become a flame war. I ask people to please consider droping this topic.
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[mod] This thread is being closely monitored, specifically because it Does run very close to being over the line. So long as everyone can keep it civil, non-personal, and firmly on Planescape, the thread will stay open - once it crosses that line it won't.
I've been very impressed by the folks on this forum for the last year or so for having the remarkable ability to prove that being nice isn't impossible over the internet.
In this case, this sort of thread is something of an inevitability given the nature of Planescape, but it's also not required reading. 
Feel free to let it alone if you like, I've got my eye on it in case it gets ugly. [/mod]
Actually, the official D&D magazine has broached the topic at least once, in an article about playing the game in Earth's Dark Ages, I believe (the article was 2nd edition; I can't remember the issue of Dragon (Dungeon?) it was in... It features two Christian clerics, one Lawful Neutral and the other Lawful Good. It did shy away from providing any details about Jehovah/Yahveh/Christ as a "game" deity, though (no listed power level or alignment, though by implication He is Lawful, since He has two Lawful clerics!) I assume you are worried that someone is going to suggest that Jehovah's alignment should be listed as "Lawful Evil" or some such, but Pholtus of the Blinding Light has been running an inquisition in his home country on Oerth for some time now, and I still see HIM listed as "lawful Good" nonetheless... or is he not considered responsible for the action of his clerics/followers? If some people are having problems with this whole discussion, you're certainly free to "kill" it... but it seems to me that it would be kind of hard to set a D&D game in the real world and just leave out real-world religions as if they didn't exist! Anyway, that's MY two cents...
Oh, almost forgot to mention the monotheistic Goddess Talia (I think!) from the 3E Edition of Deities and Demigods. She, too, insists on being worshiped as the only God, but in her case she is definitely only a Greater Power, since she is given stats and everything... clearly not the supreme being she claims to be...
If you want to use Jehovah in a game, in the end you'll probably just need to decide on an alignment, based on the interpretation you want to use. Everything that people do in the name of a god doesn't need to be actually approved by said deity. Partially because the Abrahamic God is the deity of a monotheistic pantheon, people of all different alignments worship him, and generally interpret his myths to make him match their alignment, but that doesn't have to mean that he approves all alignments. Evil people do Evil deeds and justify it by claiming God's support, and good people do Good deeds and also claim God is on their side. Chaotic people also do this, though I agree that from the Bible, God seems to be Lawful.
You don't necessarily need to determine his alignment. If God is truly the Almighty creator and ruler of the entire multiverse, maybe he considers the Outer Planes to be afterlife enough, and doesn't have specific heavens and hells for good and evil people who worshiped one of his religions. Maybe those people just go to the plane of their alignment.
However, if you want to allow DnD Clerics of an Abrahamic religion to have actual magic, I guess you do need to choose an alignment.
One difficulty with making the Abrahamic God the almighty creator and ruler of the universe in a Planescape game is that the Multiverse is Neutral overall, while God is at least Lawful and arguably also Good. A universe created by a Lawful deity would presumably favor the Law side more than the Multiverse does, or reward Lawful souls more than Chaotic ones. Same with Good and Evil in a multiverse created by a Good deity. But in Planescape, it has been argued, no alignment is really rewarded above the others. The Upper Planes are more pleasant than the Lower Planes, but LE and CE petitioners can become powerful fiends, while of the Good petitioners it seems only LG can attain such power.
First of all I want to say all this stuff about God conquering the other religions is bunk, and I think a couple billion Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Shintoists, and practicioners of other religions would disagree. Sure Judeism, Christianity, and Islam are powerful religions, but they're hardly the only ones, and I don't see why God should be treated any differently than the real world Pantheons that have already been established. Probably he'd be LG, and you could have Jesus and the Holy Spirit be aspects if you wanted (although that would be implicitly stating that Christianity is more right than the other two Abrahamic religions).
Honestly though, if I were running a D&D game in the real word, I wouldn't describe any of the gods in much depth. I'd make it like Eberron, only moreso. None of them have visible stats, none of them grant clear-cut miracles, and their "alignment" is simply what the clergy believe them to be. There would be no unimpeachable proof of the gods' existance, and all religions would be based entirely on faith. Basically it would be like the real world. In game, that would mean getting rid of the Cleric alignment restrictions and making the connection between gods and divine spells (if it exists at all) less clear and direct.
There has been a lot of conquering, the greek-roman pantheon has no more worshippers, the nordic gods are down to some heavy metal bands and the former american pantheons are also mostly gone. So much for the christian branch of this god, and while I don't know anything about the former religions in the states of the near east, where the moslem branch of this god now is the most powerful religion, I still guess they drove away some former pantheons, too. But that is not gods deed, it's what his followers have archived.
And for those who think of god being more than a greater power:
Why would this all powerful god start as a local deity for a single nation in a backwater prime world. He even managed to send enough prophets to split his followers into 3 major sects that battle each other - seems like a very bad idea for me, but he wouldn't be the first (greater) god with a bad idea and he won't be the last.
Everyone has to start somewhere. They explored this paradox in a very weird story arc in the Lucifer comic book by Mike Carey. A group of titans traveled back in time and usurped all the Old Testament miracles (parting the red sea and so on), thereby becoming omnipotent in the present day.
god is lawful good
but while his alignment is lawful good he is a dick
he killed everybody but noah in that flood to get rid of those disbelievers
which brings into account that god is just a dick
it's like a pladin, Paladins are believed to be the holiest of all, but they kill what is believed to be evil, bu tno one considers the fact that this "evil" is just doing what they were raised to do, this "evil" doesn't know any better, but paladins kill them and everybody cheers
no one stops to think that drows are only evil because of the circumstances that are thrust upon them, so the next, you ask yourself the question of what alignment is god remember that he should have no alignment, but if forced he is lawful good, but a dick
(also known as true nuetral)
Yeah, when people start calling other people's God a "dick", I think a line has been crossed there... Now personally, I might AGREE with that sentiment, but that's not the point! I was hoping for a polite discussion of why Jehovah should or should not be listed as Lawful Good, but at this point I think it's probably best to move on to a different topic...
[mod]Yep. That would be the line. I doubt this particular thread will be producing much more of interest after this, so I'll be shutting it down now. Please do not restart the topic.
I do appreciate how long everyone was able to keep the thread going on with a Planescape orientation (and it's not like the subject doesn't come up at least yearly, it is sort of an obvious one)- but sometimes the topics are just too touchy to survive for very long.[/mod]
I think it depends a great deal on whether you use the Old Testament or the New Testament God, but either way, interpretation is going to matter even more. Different individual Jews, Christians, and Muslims have extremely different interpretations of the passages.
Beyond that, I can't help you, because I'm not familiar with the Bible. For example, I don't know if the "all nonbelievers go to Hell no matter what" is actually in the Bible, or is just something that some readers made up. And even if it is in the Bible, lots of people who worship the Judeo-Christian God don't believe it anyway. Anyway, for this to work, are you assuming (for the point of argument) that the Bible is at least mostly an accurate portrayal? Because if not, then "interpretation" simply becomes any one believer's opinions about God.