A little more detail

Thought I'd take a break from scripting the ambient system to make a blog post.

So in the last entry I posted an exceedingly boring screenshot of a dude in a brown overcoat and equated him to one of the most famous arch-mages in D&D-geek culture. What gives? We'll talk a little more about Dante here.

Origin
Little is known about Dante save that he's a retired Churchman. As an Archonist, he traveled about the Plain seeking knowledge useful to the Church. After the most recent war with Nerath (about forty years ago), he retired to Midport, using the considerable wealth he gained in the war to build an inn. It was there that he founded the Order of the Ouroboros, an association of alchemists and adventure-seekers who continue his work seeking out occult knowledge in th Plain.

But behind every truth, there is a deeper truth. Dante, in fact, is responsible for much of the state of the world, and especially for the progress of alchemic study. Though I won't spoil any possible plots for those of you who may play on S&S when it is finally released, I'll let it drop that Dante is who you can thank for the triumph of science over mysticism in western culture.

Well, that was disappointingly minimal in the way of exposition. Okay, here's another, more juicy fact: Dante is one of the controlling investors in Aether Technologies, Inc. (better known as AetherTech). AetherTech is at the forefront of alchemic research in Emorlad, and its inventions are creeping into every corner of Adunay. It is both loved as a symbol of Adunean ingenuity and despised as a pit of Machiavellian bureaucracy. AetherTech is deeply entrenched into Adunean politics as well, and there's some speculation among the less patrotic of Adunay that AetherTech started the current war with the northern state of Kruna to profit from the sale of arms.

Motives
So Dante has his fingers in some not-so-nice business. I thought he was supposed to be a good guy, you say.

One of the underlying truths of human nature (and a concept which I hope to reflect in the morally grey world of Shadows & Silver) is that there are no such things as good people or bad people. In truth, there is good and bad in each of us. In some the good is stronger; in others, the bad is stronger. It's rather like the old Native American story, when the old man tells his grandson, "Whichever dog I feed the most is the winner."

It may seem a pedantic distinction, but it's not. In fact, it's a distinction that, if we made more often, would vastly improve both the quality of our role-play and the quality of our lives. Both in our games and in RL, we like to separate things into boxes in a futile attempt to quantify the world. The adventurers are good, the goblins are evil. The Allies were good, the Nazis were evil. It's an easy way to approach the world. It's convenient, and simple, to imagine yourself on the side of good.

But flip the coin to the other side. The Nazis believed they were doing good, for example. Solidifying control of the world under what they presumed was the rightful ruling race was, in their minds, one of the greatest goods they could achieve. In their war and their genocides, they believed they were accomplishing a noble and righteous goal.

Those goblins raiding the caravan likely believe the same. They're defending their territory from the ever-encroaching humans, taking back some small measure of the wealth stolen from their land. Curious, isn't it, how we put them into the "evil" box just because their goals conflict with ours.

So what is all of this to say? As Socrates tells us, no man willingly does evil. If he does evil, it's because he is trying to do good, either for himself or for another; his reason and, thus, his methods are simply clouded. Dante... well, his reason is clouded sometimes, though he refuses to admit it. He's not dogmatic, like many Churchmen. Since he's one of the more powerful forces in Emorlad, he tends to try to "fix" things, attempting to remake the world the way he thinks it should be. Unlike your typical, mislead tyrant, though, he sees himself simply as an agent of the change, not the destined ruler. He's quite happy to work in the background (or have others do the work for him) in order to make things right.

As the saying goes, you have to break some eggs to make an omelette.