My Druid Mod is undergoing a serious overhaul and I wanted to add a little lore flavor to it by including who is responsible for some mod-related goodies. I know Hircine is the shapeshifter guy, which is cool. But because he's Daedric, does that mean he's automatically evil? And would there be an Aedra nature-hippie god?

Mara?

One of the wikis describes http://oblivion.wikia.com/wiki/Kynareth as Goddess of Nature. That works, and she has a cool name. I don't think I could do without Hircine too. Both of them as opposing forces might work.

It could be Dibella.

Well, Kynareth is the goddes of nature and the ocean (and storms in the Nordic pantheon as Kyne), so there's one.

Meridia is fairly hippieish, being the Prince of Living Energies. Got no clue what it means, but I doubt her servants do either. It just sounds badass.

Hircine is the god of the hunt, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cernunnos or the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horned_God , but a wee bit darker, although given how many different ways the gods of the Elder Scrolls are worshipped, your rangers worshipping Hircine under a different name and with a kinder attitude is hardly un lore-friendly. I mean, look at the differences between the Nordic Alduin (enemy of Skyrim) and the Imperial Akatosh (maybe the savior of Oblivion). Same god, wildly different attitude, just like in real life religions.

In fact, the Daedra/Aedra divide is largely an Imperial thing, and the coutnerparts of Aedra and Daedra can be found lumped together in other pantheons, like the Khajiit pantheon. Feel free to stick all the naturey Aedra and Daedra into one Ranger Pantheon (a small splinter religion would give you a nice source of tension between the rangers and the Imperial Church, who aren't shown as loving the religious differences) and change their personalities in general. That sort of thing happens all the time in real life religions. Look at the Egyptian gods! Personalities flipflopping like a beached fish, gods synchretizing and splitting... gah!

Really, there's no automaticaly evil in the Elder Scrolls. Daedra are hard headed, they demand sacrifice and are often beyond our understanding, from being (like Hircine) gods of nature red in tooth and claw, to being Eldritch Cosmic Horrors out of H.P. Lovecraft like Vaermina and Hermaeous Mora, but there's really no good/evil divide. Heck, even the plain old Imperial versins of the Aedra can do monstrous things, like cursing a jerkish knights innocent descendants to a debilitating curse for generations.

Sorry for the wall of text. Bit of a lore fan, and an amateur anthropologist.

Kynareth was the first dude that came to mind when I read the topic.

Daedric guys aren't necessarily evil. It's in the eye of the beholder, I think.

The guys from the mod Et in Arkay Ego are about as "hippie" as they come. I use the au naturel version of the mod and whenever I'm around Goldenrod and his commune of naked worshippers I keep halfway expecting somebody to light up and chill out.

http://www.imperial-library.info/search/node/y%27ffre.

But more importantly: spend a lot of time reading EVERYTHING at The Imperial Library that has anything to do with Aedra and Daedra. There's this thing about TES lore, and it's one of my favorite things about the whole setting, but it can be maddening in situations like this: absolutely every piece of lore you read is biased. It's all written (or said) by a character in-game, and every single one of those characters will insert their own agenda, ignorance or other spin. The game writers never use their own voices, and I'm sure sometimes they haven't even decided what really happened when they're writing up multiple accounts of it. With regards to the original nature of the gods, the Altmeri (and particularly the Psijics) have written the most about it, but my personal hunch is that the Yokudan creation myth is closest to the original truth (in addition to being awesome). But there's no way to know for sure, and since people can mess with time, it might no longer be the actual truth even if it once was.

For instance, there's evidence that the Nine Divines were created by men at the dawn of the Second Era and are not the same beings as the previous gods they're based on; or if they are, they have been bound up by mythic magics strong enough to prevent them from behaving as they naturally would -- all so that the Cyrodiilic Empire would have a divine right to rule over all of Tamriel. And these gods really exist and so far as the cosmology of Tamriel is concerned, they always have; it's just that they haven't always always existed. (And from the Skyrim teasers, perhaps the bubble will be bursting soon...)

Anyway, the most basic fact you need to start with is that Aedra and Daedric Princes are pretty much all one race, called et'Ada. Quick summary of the Monomyth: the entirety of existence is a resonant fractal interaction between the original forces of Is and Is-Not. Is came first, but Is-Not sprang into being before time so that Is could recognize itself by contrast; they started mixing, necessitating Time (also a sentient being, names include Akatosh) to keep track of which mixes happened when, and over Time other et'Ada emerged from the flux. Some had more Is in their makeup, some had more Is-Not; the classical standpoint is that the Is-aligned became Aedra and the Is-Not-aligned became Daedra. There are some obvious exceptions to this (Lorkhan, Meridia) and the real truth is that within the Empire "Aedra" really just means "you're allowed to worship this one."

By the way, I've seen people associate Aedra with Law and Daedra with Chaos in the classic alignment scheme. This is exactly backwards. The state of Is represents pure potential, undefined and chaotic; magic, i.e. the ability to violate natural law, comes from Is. The state of Is-Not is calm, empty, perfectly smooth, the very definition of order (i.e. Law); the ability of any object to be defined depends on the ability to say that object "is not" other things.