"Well from the fact that you're asking I gather that there aren't. What, is there a secret third axis and eighteen more Outer Planes that Pharasma doesn't want you to know about?"

"In your experience, has Pharasma ever wanted anybody to know anything?"

"Or your reading, as the case may be.

I mean, Ran, clearly She wants people to know about those particular four alignments."

"There's a science to it. Seeing things regardless of whether Pharasma wants you to or not."

"Or an art."

"Yeah, in character for her I guess. So how does it really work then?"

She's drinking hot milk out of a kettle now. It's calming her down.

"It's like anything, if's complicated. Everything that it's possible to think of as an alignment is a solution to a superposition of divine domains."

"A shared factor or base or component godsight-pattern that resolves strongly out of several much fainter godsight-patterns, layered on top of one another."

"So like, 'Good' resolves out of shared elements between Iomedae, Sarenrae, Cayden Cailean, etc. And it's the size of the 'etc.' that makes Good be more of a thing than the stuff they don't have in common. Equivalently, it's Good being more of a thing than the stuff they don't have in common, that makes the 'etc.' of 'Good' gods a long list. Outside the Mortal Plane, causality doesn't have a direction."

"So if I understand correctly, 'Good' 'Evil' 'Law' and 'Chaos' aren't entirely fundamental principles of the universe, they're just, like, divine alliances, and there are other, smaller alliances that overlap with those four big ones, in the same way that Good overlaps with Law and Chaos and so does Evil."

"Yeah."

"Heh, that's how my brother would doubtless put it, too." To Katie, "He's a Nobility cleric of Abadar.

'Alliances', at least to me, implies, like, this sort of dramatically precarious and particularly humanoid stack of emotions, forming the bond. I don't think that's quite the right way to think about alignments. They're sets of preferences added up, so it sort of looks like their sub-patterns are working toward a common goal, but . . . there's no collaboration, no congeniality? They just are.

But maybe some people don't see 'alliances' like that. Maybe some people really do just think of them like 'common desires, realized by any means'."

Maybe some people think of it accurately, stripped of wretched delusions, indeed!

"Well said."

"Thanks."

"And so there's one of these that's something to do with day/night cycles and shared between Urgathoa, Sarenrae, Desna, and I think Taz also said Lamashtu, among others?

"Yes."

"After I'd told her just about Urgathoa and Lamashtu, and that there was some relation to day/night cycles, Katie got Sarenrae and Desna and I flipped out at first, but she said she was just basing it on who the gods of day and night were."

". . . Most people wouldn't see it that way.

I'm tempted to put you on the spot to generate your own hack ontology, and maybe teach us some things we don't know, but I'm not here to make you hate the cult and hate learning. Your choice."

"I'm not totally sure what you mean by that, but like, in Lamashtu's case, I guess she's a motherhood/fertility goddess, and like, the female reproductive system has cycles,  they're roughly in synch with the moon's cycles which now that I think about it is weird enough of a coincidence that it may be isn't one at all. Urgathoa feels like more of a stretch, I guess many kinds of undead are nocturnal, but like, is Erastil part of the group too because farming is dependent on the cycles of day/night and seasons?"

"I think it's just day/night, not the moon. Tazich might have given you the wrong impression. Cayden Cailean unambiguously ranks; people don't usually notice the circadian element to His godsight because it's not also one of His explicit domains.

I was really more talking about what other alignments you think exist, if you can name any, but it's okay if you don't want to right now."

Them explaining the way they see things will probably just piss Katie off with how wrong it is and drive her to do it better than she would have before.

"Hm, well, I think there's a three-way division into "boring sticks in the mud", "batshit insane", and "actually fun and cool", and while these might sound to a casual observer like synonyms for one end of the traditional alignment grid or the other depending on one's persuasion, they don't quite fall cleanly along alignment lines. The rest of the Lawful gods are boring sticks in the mud, but Zon-Kuthon's batshit insane, and of course the two big CE gods are batshit insane, but so are Gorum (CN), Nethys (N), and even Desna (CG), and the actually cool category consists of both major CN gods, both major NE gods apparently, and maaaaybe Shelyn, the jury's still out on her."