Alexander vs Black Ring - who to support

[Sabi The Worst Player Ever]

And in before somebody would say "play the game yourself" - I dont really want to repeat whole chapter at some point simply because in the end, it would turn out that I supported wrong side. Or both are wrong this time?

Who in the end is proved to be good? Or both sides are equally bad?

I heard I can go against both and still progress so I would like to know.

Thanks for replies, like always.

[Seether]

I ended up going against both. I suppose I would say that the Black Ring are worse, but Alexander isn't good (not all Magisters are bad though). There are other factions in the game as well, although they are side-plots. Every faction in the game is more or less acting in its own interests, which has good repercussions for some and bad repercussions for others. There is no faction that is good for everybody.

[Gregorovitch]

I struggled to come up with any good reason why any of them should live to see another day. So they didn't. This decision had absolutely nothing to do with the loot and XP involved you undertand. I was merely conducting my civic duty as any right minded citizen would.

[Chaoslink]

The black ring is pretty much bad. If you’re going for the idea that helping/saving the people of places like driftwood or Arx (all dwarves, humans, elves and so on) then the black ring is an evil faction to you. They’re all sworn to the God King. Basically allied to the voidwoken. However, (without spoilers) they do have an objective of their own and with things you learn about the disappearance of the eternals, you might agree with them and choose to support them. It’s not completely black and white.

Magisters aren’t evil. Only the leadership, Dallis and the white magisters are, from a certain perspective at least. They intend to stop the voidwoken, but they have to essentially destroy all sourcerers and purge them (making them silent monks) to do so. So you can decide if they’re really evil yourself. Regular magisters are just normal people being manipulated by the leadership and fighting a battle against others when they’re not being told the whole truth. Your average magisters aren’t evil, though some go a bit overboard in their hate, which stems from misinformation. They are relentless against sourcerers simply because they have been told that sourcerers are the cause of voidwoken attacks. So they hunt sourcerers with no mercy under the idea that they’re ending the voidwoken attacks plaguing the world by doing so.

By this point in the game, act 3, Alexander knows he was manipulated and is no longer aligned with Dallis and her magisters, effectively taking whatever magisters he had at his command and using them to achieve his own divinity, thinking that he could end the voidwoken attacks by following his Father’s footsteps and becoming divine. At this point, I’d not consider him evil. However, he is still working against you for divinity.

[Valentino]

Look, at the end of the day, they both have exceptionally good reasons for doing what they are doing. It's an ends justify the means issue here.

So yes, just play the game. I know you don't want to hear that. But there is no right/wrong decision. If anything you should have figured out by now that there are no "good guys" outside of maybe you if you are playing that way for your own party. But generally speaking every single major chain is someone trying to get more power for themselves or their people at the expense of all others. It's the theme of the game. Even the Black Ring, whom are painted as generic baddies, are not quite as simple as that.

for what it's worth: I killed both, and I roleplayed "good guys".

[Yaldabaoth]

Well, on the one hand you have a self-righteous guy who rounded up hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent sourcerers and destroyed their souls turning them into zombies, now turned jesus-figure and wants to become god (and most likely exterminate more people).
And on the other hand, you have a group of people trying to utterly exterminate every living being on the planet.

[Chaoslink]

Originally posted by Yaldabaoth:

Well, on the one hand you have a self-righteous guy who rounded up hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent sourcerers and destroyed their souls turning them into zombies, now turned jesus-figure and wants to become god (and most likely exterminate more people).
And on the other hand, you have a group of people trying to utterly exterminate every living being on the planet.

See, I'd disagree with that description of Alexander. He was son to a divine, expected to inherit his father's title and expected to become divine himself. It wasn't a fate he chose, but one that was thrown upon him. He was like any other magister, under the impression that source attracted voidwoken and that sourcerers needed to be controlled in order to prevent those attacks. However, it wasn't under his order that they be purged into silent monks. That was Dallis. He was really just a puppet, a tool Dallis could use to keep the people on her side and a focal point to keep attention on so that the whites could keep doing their sercetive deeds.

The magisters with him in act 3 weren't really under command of Dallis so much as they were those loyal to Alexander himself, fighting to see him risen to divinity, expecting that to be what would end the voidwoken attacks. If you talk with him and have the persuasion to pass the conversation at the end of act 3, right before the fight for divinity, you'll see his real thoughts on the whole thing. He was nothing in his father's shadow, someone that people looked up to with expectations so great, he feared that he couldn't live up to them. Most of his confidence was faked. Honestly, I ended up feeling bad for him. He didn't choose that life, and I don't think it was what he really would have wanted. But his father's legacy kinda forced him to try and follow, while Dallis knew that he'd never rise. Because that conflicted with her own goals.

The magisters themselves aren't bad people. They're just average citizens who joined the fight against the voidwoken. But people in power manipulated them against sourcerers for their own secret reasons. Obviously that made them enemies to sourcerers, but that didn't automatically make them bad people. They were told that sourcerers had to be rounded up and sacrificed (not that all of them even knew what hapened at fort joy) in order to stop the voidwoken.

As for the Black Ring... I dunno their entire history. What I do know is that what little of them remained were desperate after the deathfog destroyed them. They basically sold their souls to the God King for the power to fight back. In doing so, they became slaves. They were just tools designed to help the voidwoken win so that they could claim the world as their own. And given the power of the covenant, there was nothing they could do to escape their mistake.

Its actually interesting to see just how tangled all the factions were. The God King had puppets everywhere, twisting just about everyone so they'd turn on the other races and fight one another so that he could win. If you really look at it, almost everything established in the early game just about reverses itself in the end. And if you just listen to everything said without analyzing it for yourself, you can see how you were manipulated into believing certain groups were good/bad when nothing in the game was that black and white. It was all really well done.

[Yaldabaoth]

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

long ass post

Let me translate this into the modern world:
Göring wasn't such a bad guy, you know? He was just manipulated by daddy Adolf and brother Joseph to hate the jews. I feel bad for him, he didn't choose this life. He just wanted to fly planes. And the soldiers in normandy, they weren't all bad, some didn't even know what was going on in Auschwitz. I wish the allied soldiers had asked them about their feelings before shooting back.

I think it's good that you look into motivations of others. But at some point you have to draw a line. Understand, then pass judgment based on what they do, not what they could have done.

[strangecat]

Originally posted by Yaldabaoth:

Originally posted by Chaoslink:

long ass post

Let me translate this into the modern world:
Göhring wasn't such a bad guy, you know? He was just manipulated by daddy Adolf and brother Joseph to hate the jews. I feel bad for him, he didn't choose this life. He just wanted to fly planes. And the soldiers in normandy, they weren't all bad, some didn't even know what was going on in Auschwitz. I wish the allied soldiers had asked them about their feelings before shooting back.

I think it's good that you look into motivations of others. But at some point you have to draw a line. Understanding is not agreement. Understand, then pass judgment on what they do, not what they could have done.

becareful mention anything with Jews in it I was banned for life from Torment Tides of Numenera Forum for speaking the truth about something.

just keep that out of dicussions on boards. also your history is wrong but I won't correct you.
this just friendly warning so you don't get banned^_-

[Yaldabaoth]

Originally posted by strangecat:

just keep that out of dicussions on boards. also your history is wrong but I won't correct you.
this just friendly warning so you don't get banned^_-

No wey! Did you read anything before that? You really think I TRIED to give an accurate description of actual history? In that case you need to work on your reading comprehension.

[strangecat]

no I did not but you said the J word and I gave you a warning I don't want you banned from posting.
it's just warning. Now you know.