Belkar has decided it suits his purposes to act like he’s grown into a better person. That’s not the same as actually growing.
It surprises me that some people take Belkar’s change of heart at face value when we’ve explicitly been told he’s faking it.
Burlew has always been fair to his readers on things like this. When the characters lack some information that a reader would know about through the manuals, he’s always lampshaded their ignorance.
Rich Burlew himself has stated this is how vampires work in OOTS-verse.
Where?
If he did it would be in a post in the giantitp forums which are even more of a bitch to search than the dope.
Rich Burlew spake thus :
There is absolutely zero difference between Malack and Durkon’s vampirizations … Hel is able to put that spirit into Durkon’s body because of the physical vampirization process that Malack enacts on Durkon’s corpse, which opens a door to Negative Energy and traps Durkon’s spirit inside it. Which would also be true of any other vampire created from a person who fell under the Northern Pantheon’s domain… There is only one way that vampirization works
We’ve also seen him do an arguably good act by saving Enor and whathisname. Why deny that?
There’s more:
[INDENT]Likewise, any assumptions that characters in the comic know or understand the details of how this process occurs on a detailed internal level should be thrown out the window. They don’t. Being a vampire is super-rare; being returned to life after being a vampire so you can share the logistics of how it worked from your point of view in such a way that it entered a general body of knowledge that people would have learned about in the course of their education is simply not something that has ever occurred.
I’m sure there are more byzantine arguments going around that I’m missing, but really, this isn’t as complicated as most of you are making it. There is only one way that vampirization works, and it overrides the natural order of things, including where souls go. That’s why everyone says things like, “That’s against the natural order of things!” about it.[/INDENT] Frankly, even if Oots figures out that something is up, the simplest explanation probably involves a corrupted dwarf not a trapped soul.
Cite?
Informed Evil. Gotcha.
There’s the rub: he was told by Shojo to fake it, but has he stopped faking and started being? Only time will tell.
Exactly. It’s hard to act one way and not begin to think another. The change in alignment may well surprise even the Belkster himself.
I wonder what would (will) happen if Belkar ended up in the Chaotic Good afterlife? Could he get kicked out for unruly behavior? 
But Shojo advised him on how he could be effectively chaotic in a lawful world, and didn’t advise him to be less evil. He still enjoys killing and mayhem, he’s just trying to be more selective about indulging himself in situations where people won’t get on his back about it. If his alignment is shifting, I’d expect him to be neutral evil, not chaotic good/neutral.
Also, somewhat off topic, shouldn’t there be a “Word of ‘Meh’” spell that neutral clerics can cast in place of Holy Word/Blasphemy and which will whammy good and evil alike?
There is; it’s called Word of Balance (though I like “Word of Meh” better). It’s just not in the core rules.
And of course Shojo didn’t tell Belkar that he was trying to make him more good. But that’s the intent, anyway, and appears to also be the effect. Yes, it probably still “averages out to somewhere south of Neutral”, but he’s definitely significantly less evil than he was pre-Mark.
Hey, you left off Dictum and Word of Chaos!
I sometimes feel like the DnD authors were hoping for paragons of a particular side, so even though 90% of sentient beings in a DnD world should be Neutral Neutral (as opposed to the True Neutral Druids aspire to), they didn’t leave a lot for Neutral characters since characters shouldn’t spend a lot of time there (unless they are the aforementioned True Neutral druid).
I’ve never seen a distinction between “True Neutral” and “Neutral Neutral” before. What’s the difference, and where is it described?
True Neutral is all about maintaining the balance (the old Planescape Rilmani (the Outland equivalent of fiends and celestials) were this). Neutral Neutral is basically the kind of neutral that the MM entries for plain old animals usually meant when they were “neutral”…it’s kind of a null alignment.
I don’t know that it was ever official, but it was always how I considered it, since animals obviously didn’t really HAVE an alignment, not having the equipment to moralize about their actions, usually.
So is Neutral Neutral basically “will perform acts of law or chaos, good or evil as suits their need?” More like a “don’t care.” Julia Greenhilt comes to mind, as she seems to just do whatever she wants without regard to ethos or alignment.
And True Neutral more like “will perform actions so as to actively seek a balance between law and chaos and good and evil?” This makes me think of John Constantine, who I believe exerted effort to prevent either Heaven or Hell from getting an advantage over the other.
An when has Shojo ever told the truth? You’re treating him as if he’s the Word of Wisdom, when in fact, it a well-established fact that he’s the Word of Bullshit.
Look at it this way - wouldn’t it be right in character for the world’s greatest Good con artist to *trick *an Evil person into changing alignment?
It’s plausible. But what has it been, maybe two in-comic months at most since the conversation? Much of that time has been spent in a trackless desert, in transport, or in jail, none of which gave Belkar a lot of opportunity for evil even if he’d wanted to. He was willing to let the slave-trading bug guys go until they messed with his personal property, and his behavior toward the other gladiators was pretty atrocious too. Mostly, it seems to me like Belkar has not considered the fact that any of his previous behavior was wrong or why (compare V), except insofar as it made his personal life more difficult. It is true that he might finally be getting some measure of empathy (e.g., the bounty hunters, his cat, his tyrannosaur), but even evil people can have friends or standards.