lAwful

So in the last Talarin run, we are on a quest to gather the Items of Power to allow us to fix the hole in the Sky that the monsters are trying to get through. One of them is held by an evil-slave-lord in one of the major merchant houses of one of the civilized lands. Two of them are held by an evil Drow overlord in the underdark (not actually called that in Talarin), who is in a state of more-or-less-perpetual war with the Skrikk, a race which if not quite civilized at least tries to get along with the above-ground-people. The slave lord we tried (and failed) to negotiate with, and then declined to try to steal it. The Drow, we're just going to go beat up and take the stuff. (Sadly, I'm going to miss that, as I'm gone this week.) Our druid made some comment in passing about this being racist of us, but I don't think it is. If it was a Drow slave lord (or more likely, a Lich slave lord) we still would have tried to negotiate, and a human leader of barbarian hordes trying to wipe out the civilized lands would probably still just get beaten up. ("Probably" because it wasn't totally clear we were just going to beat up the Drow until we got close and found out more about her - we might have tried to negotiate if she'd been more civilized.)

Rather than being about what race the bad guy is, I think it's totally about the Lawful part of Lawful Good. Someone who is part of your culture, playing by the rules, gets to take advantage of those rules for their protection even if they're a bad guy, because the rules are there for everyone's benefit, and you don't get to start breaking them just because it would be convinient this time. Someone who's outside the culture, spitting on the rules, gets no benefit, and you can just beat them up. We've been going through a similar experience in Conflux recently, from a slightly different perspective, where the bad guy finally convinced us that the rules just didn't apply to him, so we went and took him out. Now we're trying to deal with the consequences of that, and figure out if it means that we're outside the rules now, and just abandoning our well-ordered lives, or if we're going to try to get back inside the rules, and what it requires to do so, if we do.

I haven't figured out how this applies to Evil characters yet, since our Sharn characters, on being told we had a contract on a detective, said "Well, lets set up an atrocity, frame his group, and jump him when he comes to investigate." Which feels like not the Lawful way to deal, but I'm not lawful in that run, so I guess I don't care so much. :-)