This is a weird one because despite being a “good” spell, it entails the mass murder of innocent neutrals. It really doesn’t seem like a good action to me.
It seems like anyone who was okay with this would fall to neutral or evil simply by virtue of being okay with mass murder, and in turn fall victim to the Great Neutral Purge.
Indeed, hence the sticky philosophical puzzler. I would think that the clerics themselves would start getting affected by the spell. Fortunately (for them), the effect of the spell when cast on someone of the same level as yourself is only deafness for 1d4 rounds. The Church could probably cover that up.
There was another interesting related situation that came up in an actual campaign I was in, involving the Blasphemy spell (a variant that only kills non-evil targets). My party and I were in our “home base”, a mansion belonging to an allied NPC noblewoman, planning out our next excursion. A powerful demon we’d been tangling with attempted to scry-and-fry us, teleporting in and nuking us with Blasphemy. Unfortunately there were a lot of low-level NPC staff working in the noblewoman’s household and the spell wiped them out instantly… except for one guy, who happened to be of evil alignment. He survived the encounter because of that.
Even though his alignment was evil, though, he’d never done anything wrong and didn’t seem like he had any reason to do anything wrong in the future. So we weren’t sure if we should fire him or what. It wasn’t illegal to simply be evil, you had to actually do something evil before you could be punished. We just warned him we’d be keeping an eye on him, in the end, and kept him on staff.
I’m pretty sure if you aren’t a creature from a celestial plane of evil or good, only your actions define your alignment, not the other way around.
I feel like there might be interesting ways to deal with it. Perhaps the mass killing of neutrals only ever happened the first time, which could have been many generations ago and under singular circumstances. Since then, only the odd one here or there ever dies during the purge. Perhaps it’s been decades or centuries since anyone died to the purge, reinforcing belief in it’s effectiveness as a basis for a pure society. It may have been so long that people wonder whether the purge is even real, or just a traditional ceremony carried out annually based on old myths. Then one year, it wipes out half the city. The party investigates?
The ritual could have been real, but was quietly faked so that a corrupt leader could avoid facing their fate.
Or, the ritual was always fake but used as a cover to assassinate specific targets without consequences.
What is being good except having self-imposed restrictions to avoid doing something evil? This spell seems perfect. There will rarely be a time where a good aligned character could justify using it in an overpowered way. If it were inverted then you would see evil characters using it all the time. It’s a self-imposed balance. You have a very powerful tool, but you must avoid using unless absolutely necessary.
Ah, but there is an evil equivalent, Blasphemy. It affects non-evil creatures instead of non-good creatures, and as such has no self-balancing properties. There are even equivalents for Law and Chaos, which are… worryingly abstract.
