Originally Posted by Nerovar
Originally Posted by Crimsomrider
A coward, oh really? What else is he supposed to do when you betray him?

And yes, you do betray him... or do I need to remind everyone that even Orpheus is not deluded to such fact;

"You rejected the illithid when it no longer suited your needs. No doubt you freed me because it suits you now. I will neither forgive nor forget your abuse of my powers.

You had the opportunity to surrender yourself to my Honour Guard. They would have given you a noble end. Any worthy individual destined to become ghaik would've done so! My guard would have freed me, and I would have stopped the elder brain before it evolved into a Netherbrain."

It's funny how players only judge and condemn the Emperor, but refuse to judge their own character who is just like him. Tell me now... why did you not let his Honour Guard simply give you a noble end just like Ansur wanted to give the Emperor? Are you a coward? Willing to kill everyone to save your own skin? Willing to betray your very guardian, the person who saved you so many times? How many died so you can live?

Or are you simply a survivor, an opportunist JUST LIKE THE EMPEROR. Wanting to be free, wanting to live. Someone who is fighting to survive, someone who doesn't want to do these things, yet must do them in order to survive because there is no other choice.
The situation is bit more complicated than that. You are resting at your camp when you get attacked by Githyanki coming out of a portal that was (presumably) opened by the Emperor (since he is in control of the Prism). You never actually get to make an informed choice regarding Orpheus because the Emperor withholds all relevant information from you until it's absolutely necessary for his plan that you have it. It's the Emperor who presents you with an impossible choice here and thereby tricks you into being his complicit, signing the pact with the blood of Orpheus' honour guard. He presents you with a fait accompli.

Let us also not forget that for everything the Emperor has done to "help you" he was only a pawn for the Elder Brain's plan to break free. The Elder Brain freed the Emperor and guided him to the prism. Does that mean the Emperor owes it allegiance? Does it mean that he "betrays" the Elder Brain in the end? Of course not. That's not what allegiance is. Deciding that you no longer want to be manipulated by the Emperor and kill the innocent Orpheus for him once you have the means to resist his designs is not a betrayal - it's the first actual choice you get to make in that relationship and it's the only moral one.

I had this exact thought regarding your point, Crimsomrider. We're brought into a situation we don't really have full understanding of. We're faced with a bunch of Githyanki and up until this point every gith we've met has been an enemy trying to kill us. Calling the emperor an anti-hero is definitely the incorrect term. He's the lesser evil, but his ideal outcome, if we're as generous as it gets, is that he wants to be free to continue running a clandestine criminal organization via mentally dominating and manipulating people. Pretty low in terms of threat and overall harm, but there's no way he's not a villain. In most other stories, he would be the big bad, objectively. He's an anti-villain, a villain who's on the side of good due to circumstances. If you remove his squidiness from the equation then what you're left with is an unrepentant criminal who wants to continue running a corrupt criminal enterprise that will inevitably lead to violence and corruption wtihin the city he runs it in. That alone is enough reason to distrust him even before you start adding in the fact he does those things by at least in part violating the minds and wills of people around him. Then factor in the fact that he is absolutely manipulative of us. Maybe his intentions are actually aligned with ours, and he honestly does mean it when he says his goals are good, but he does obfuscate the truth from us, gives us partial information and is at least dishonest even if he doesn't outright lie.