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** The Deathlords are typically portrayed as [[Complete Monster]]s who agreed to destroy Creation in exchange for the power to rule over its dying remains; the First and Forsaken Lion and Eye and Seven Despairs' saving of Creation from the Great Contagion is normally described as if it were an accident. [[Fridge Logic]], however, suggests an alternative interpretation—why would they want Creation to be killed by someone else? Given that they are supposed to be two of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, it makes much more sense to assume that they saved the world ''deliberately''; even if they swore to destroy it, neither really has any actual reason to want to see it die, and plenty of reasons not to. They're all still brutal dictators and conquerors, and the only First Age Solars ''not'' to repent of the horrific atrocities they committed in life.
** All of them? [[Grey and Gray Morality|All of the above.]]
* ''[[Warhammer 4000040,000]]'' is ''made'' for this, and has room for all possible interpretations of ''every'' side, from the Imperium to Chaos.
** The Imperium of Man: Are they a [[The Empire|vast, monolithic entity]] of [[Humans Are the Real Monsters|xenophobic]] [[Church Militant|fundamentalists]], or simply a race that has been forced to [[Well-Intentioned Extremist|resort to extreme measures]] in order to ensure their very survival in the [[Crapsack World|Grim and Dark]] future?
*** The Inquisition: are they, as Ciaphas Cain ('''Hero of the IMPERIUM!''') once calls them, "the Emperor's pet psychopaths" or are they heroic individuals shouldering an impossibly weighty burden and forced to make the cruelest decisions imaginable? Canon is that they can be one or the other; some are evil, some are good. Which changes, as some who start well-meaning are [[Jumping Off the Slippery Slope]], while some who start [[Gung-Holier Than Thou]] are getting reality checks with more zeroes than they expected.
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* One of these is raised by the main rulebook of ''[[Paranoia]] XP''. Friend Computer is usually portrayed as unhinged, a little bit stupid, gullible, and ruthless. One brief section of XP suggests an alternative: Friend Computer is 100% sane and sees through all the evasions and deceptions, but has concluded that deceit, fear, ignorance, horrific inefficiency, and all the other perks of ''Paranoia'' are the very quintessence of human nature and has decided to do everything necessary to nurture these traits, using [[Obfuscating Stupidity]].
** The rulebook also suggests that the GM should always have another layer. Okay, the PCs find out that Friend Computer is being controlled by evil mutants from Beta Complex, who are actually being controlled by a group of High Programmers back in Alpha Complex, who were set up by Friend Computer as part of a paranoid sting operation, but this plan was added into Friend Computer's memory banks by aliens from Pluto, who are actually just psychic projections of [[The Illuminati]], etc. In short, in Alpha Complex, everything has an alternative interpretation.
* ''[[Dungeons and& Dragons]]''
** One word: Elves. Even after ''The Complete Book of Elves''. Naturally, the internet demonstrated that there are both people [[Can't Argue with Elves|squeeing]] over these obliviously enough to not notice [[Screw You, Elves|any of the jokes]] refined in the book, taking all for face value with complete seriousness and run with it, and vigilant geniuses who take jokes there for face value and then "discover" (GASP!) that elves aren't as cuddly as they present themselves.
** The Dark Powers in the ''[[Ravenloft]]'' campaign setting are usually interpreted as being evil, since they are the [[Genius Loci|presumed masters behind the eponymous Demiplane of Dread, a place of evil and horror]], but it is also possible that they are good, and use Ravenloft as a prison for the worst villains and monsters in the multiverse. If the cage sometimes seems a gilded one, remember that each of the major villains trapped there are also given curses [[Cool and Unusual Punishment|appropriate to their crimes]].
*** The [[Cool and Unusual Punishment]] suffered by every dark lord is designed to break them and hit them where it really hurts. For example, Strahd von Zarovich, who murdered his brother to steal his fiancée (and countless other crimes) is cursed with vampirism and forced to relive the loss of his beloved Tatiana every generation. Unless things have changed in the latest edition, the setting is called The Land of Mists or something similar by its residents; Ravenloft is from ''Ravana's Loft'', and is Strahd's absolutely trope-tastic [[Haunted Castle]], named for Strahd's mother.
*** The problem is, almost none of the villains trapped in Ravenloft are actually major (only Vecna/Kaz and Lord Soth, all long gone from Ravenloft, were bigshots before going there). Dark Powers pick people whom they can make to suffer beautifully, not those really dangerous or really heinous. Snatching a guy who murdered his brother to steal his fiancée out of love, when ''[[Dungeons and& Dragons]]'' is chock-full of people whose job description amounts to killing and torturing innocents [[For the Evulz]]? On the other hand, core domains of Ravenloft often are relatively safe places to live, compared to what is normal to DnD-land. Commonly encountering monsters are weak enough to remain in hiding, instead of rampaging and assaulting openly, and there is a comparative shortage of insanely powerful psychopaths on the loose. To be fair, it's not like TSR and later WotC could denude their other campaign settings of all their good villains. Also, the Dark Powers may just not have the power to take all the really major villains from all over the multiverse; it's not like the Dark Powers have ever been portrayed as omnipotent, even within Ravenloft. Maybe they're just doing the best they can. Also, the fact that Ravenloft is in some ways ''safer'' for the average person than the typical campaign setting, what with the lack of lots of randomly rampaging monsters, may be further support for the idea that the Dark Powers are good.
** "[http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Pelor#Pelor.2C_the_Burning_Hate Pelor The Burning Hate]" is a reinterpretation of Pelor, Neutral Good god of the Sun, Light, Strength, and Healing. In part inspired by [[Tutorial Failure|examples incongruent with the given rules and statistics]] - thanks to D&D3 suffering from lazy editors and shameless copypaste [[padding]] at the same time. Digging deeper adds that ''Weapons of Legacy'' introduced a Pelorian heresy focused on [[Burn the Witch|random murder of arcane spellcasters]], some of his followers having a tradition of [[Human Sacrifice]] in ''The Price of Power'' even before D&D3, etc. The theory manages to remain consistent with everything attributed to Pelor, explaining his every action and trait as actually evil in disguise. [http://wayback.archive.org/web/20130518001708/http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19558798/Pelor_the_Burning_Hate This] in turn is split on whether he's actually [[Chaotic Evil]], [[Neutral Evil]] or [[Lawful Evil]]. Also, there's still the question of his relations with Pholtus of the Blinding Light ([[Lawful Neutral]] god of sun, law, [[Knight Templar|resolution and inflexibility]]) either way.
** [[Forgotten Realms]]: is Cyric a lunatic who got lucky too many times and was a keen enough opportunist to exploit openings between his blunders, or an evil mastermind? The novels left this open to interpretation.
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