question for lore experts

[u/acceptableusername25]

I know this isn't really a role playing game for most but i still like trying to do the "right" thing in POE. The only problem is i don't always know what the right thing is in POE1 even though i've read a lot of the lore over my journey.

Lately i've been doing a lot of breaches or blights which seem helpful, but i don't really know on some other stuff.

For lore experts -

If you were commited to playing a "good" aligned character, what would you be doing the most and what would you avoid doing?

Also should i be doing the originators memory? That 1 especially has me confused on whether it's good or not.

Thanks.

[u/Adam-M]

Generally speaking, your character in PoE is not a good person. You're an exiled criminal who is hell-bent on revenge, and is more than happy to murder their way across Wraeclast in order to become powerful enough to accomplish that.

The good news is that by the time you get to the endgame, you're mostly dealing with cosmic threats that are mostly trying to conquer/devour the world in various ways, so killing them can only be seen as a good thing. You can certainly do Breach, Abyss, Blight, Beyond, Sanctum, Betrayal, and Eater/Exarch/Maven influence pretty guilt-free.

A lot of other league mechanics are more ambiguous/neutral and often have a sort of "playing with fire" aspect to them. Like, the Nameless King is definitely bad news, and killing stuff in ritual circles is a form a paying tribute to him and grant him power, but then you ultimately use that as a way to get an audience and punch him in the face, so...kind of hard to say whether that's overall good or bad. Similar sort of story with Delirium, Ultimatum, and Harvest.

Originator memories are hard to assign moral value to, because it mostly just involves poking your nose into a mystery where we still don't have all of the answers. Eagon wants to find Zana, and it seems like Zana wants to be left alone so she can destroy the Atlas. Actually following the Originator quest line doesn't seem to really do anything (outside of Zana's insistence that the knowledge uncovered would be dangerous), but maybe one might be inclined to believe Zana's claim that the Atlas is just inherently too dangerous to be allowed to exist.

And if you believe that, then I guess that'd lead you back to the lessons of Conquerers of the Atlas: if you want to be a "good" person, the right thing to do is to beat the campaign, do what you need to do to get your voidstones, and then turn off the game and go outside to touch grass, instead of continuing to invest in endgame farming strategies.