Long ago, there was a wizard touched by the plane of fire whose name was unknown. This fire genasi was pretty tall and idealistic, with head full of dreams as he went onto his first adventure when he was 17. However, his dreams soon turned bland, as he found that world is not all sunshine and rainbows. Heroes have to make hard moral choices all the time, and this is why he felt lost after some time. He wanted to do good, wanted to be good.
On one of his adventures, when he was already 24, he got a task of slaying a demon that's in an abandoned wizard's tower. He went inside, and saw an evil but sad creature, begging to be let free. Words that demon revealed to him however turned his life upside down - the demon said not only that he is good, but also that the whole village of nearby people is evil, and thus can't enter the tower. Wizard was skeptical at first, but then... he realized that nobody in the village wanted to accompany him to the tower. That there must have been other heroes passing by. He realized that the right thing to do would not be to let the demon free. That is an evil thing, something a good person would never do. He ran away from the tower, knowing the multiversal truth.
Research
He spent several more years researching the good and evil. He stood on the streets to tell people the truth, but nobody believed him. That is, until he found a book about Feywild, which said that there is a particular kind of fairy that's able to tell apart good and evil people.
He went into the Feywild, and after copious amounts of search and research he found it. For the better good, he captured the sprite and did research on it. The legends turned out true, the sprite could tell that the wizard is good, and the wizard used it to check several other creatures too. He then harnessed its power and did lots of experiments until he not only extracted this power, but also evolved it into something much more potent. Thanks to this power, he knows not only that Good and Evil are actual existing things, but also that one's morality is a measurable variable.
Four deaths of Kephathosthu
Being one of the very few people to leave the Feywild, he afterwards seeked out all evil in the world to remove it, spreading his word once again. His zealous talks did not get any audience though, which brought him to a horrifying realization - who will be here to protect the good and slay the evil once he is gone? Nobody listens to him, everyone considers him mad. That's when he started to seek out a way to become lich.When Magistrate, the Unfavoured organization of arcane magic research, found out about him, they tried to stop him, but failed for they did not go out on him fully until the very end. When he was about to die, he was contacted by a mysterious voice in his head, who offered to save him if he will serve him. He agreed, and crawled out of his grave, feeling more alive than ever. As the legend of him goes, it took him only a couple more days to become a Lich.
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| Kephathosthu the Good, as most remember him. |
Magistrate tried to stop him, but it was useless now. They first tried to kill him by blowing his house up, but he survived and built a hidden keep away from the Mourningbay. Then they tried to send master assassins after him, who did their job, only to be destroyed by his servants. The Magistrate used divination magic to locate his keep and destroy it, and that is where the tale ends. Kephathosthu was killed once again, but nobody knows whether it was the last time he was killed. No amount of divination magic helped Magistrate this time in finding any answers.
Current opinions on morality and Kephathosthu's state
It was never known what was (or is) his phylactery, what his research said or whether the research was true. Good and evil are ever since forbidden by Magistrate to investigate, for they will make man's mind into a mush, turning him insane. Instead, they say that good and evil are just social constructs, and that morality is truly something mysterious. They do have rules within their organization, sort of a contract that is signed when someone becomes a member, but everyone in Magistrate is discouraged from engaging in philosophy of ethics.Not many Favoured heard or cared of the problem, for they have their own morality, their gods. Whatever gods say is good surely must be good. Why would their creators lie to them afterall?
Was Kephathosthu the Good right? Is morality an empirical thing that can be measured, or were these just delusions of his mind? Is Kephathosthu definitely dead? These are the mysteries.
And this is why I dislike not only the notion of alignments, but also PCs (or even just players) knowing about the alignments being a thing. Alignments can be used as an excuse to go on murderhobo rampages, boil down the moral dilemmas to math problems, or for players to generally be cruel to one another. What I'm trying to say is that nobody is absolutely evil or absolutely good. The tiniest bit of good can be found even in the lord of hell himself, and vice versa can be said for the lord of heavens. Gods, celestials, fiends and undead too are not good nor evil. Everyone in this world is morally grey.
