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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 8770287" data-attributes="member: 7030042">I'm stripping alignment out of my "fantasy heartbreaker"™. But I intend to include some possibilities for tables who want to have some version of alignment:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Good vs Evil - celestial forces of good versus all the manifold powers of evil</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Law vs Chaos in a modified Poulsenian sense of society/order/natural law versus supernatural/magick/the cruel whimsy of capricious outsiders</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Law vs Chaos in the Moorcockian sense) with Balance betwixt</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Yes, the nine-alignment grid</li> </ul>[HR][/HR]If I were to come up with a summary of the broad alignments for a nine-alignment grid, this is roughly what I would go with. (Note that there's no intention for this to be philosophically coherent or map well onto our own societies.)The four cosmic forces are broadly defined by what they prioritise above other considerations.- Good is concerned about Welfare. A good-aligned creature wants to preserve and expand its own well-being and the well-being of other creatures around it. A good-aligned creature will make sacrifices of its own well-being - even its very life - if it feels that will on balance bring greater improvements to the well-being of others. A good-aligned creature will value order and freedom to some greater or lesser extent based on how they enable it to preserve and expand welfare: while a lawful-good being believes order more reliably paves the way to greater welfare and a chaotic-good creature believes freedom does. To a good-aligned being, power is merely a defence or an instrument. You can see how this overarching goal might lead good-aligned folk to disagree (especially when some are lawful-good and others chaotic-good), but only rarely to the point of coming to blows; bitter conflict between such folk is almost always to the detriment of cosmic welfare.- Evil is concerned about Power. An evil-aligned creature wants power over other beings, to do as it will, and to deny others from having any power over it. Such a being tolerates more powerful beings only insofar as it either serves its purposes or it is unable to surpass or destroy them, and tolerates limits to its power to some lesser or greater extent insofar as they serve as a safeguard against losing power or insofar as they can be leveraged to wield greater power. An evil-aligned bring values order and freedom to some greater or lesser extent based on how they enable it to gain and maintain power, prevent and deny others from doing so, and destroy the power of others who have it: a lawful-evil being has a higher tolerance for others with power and for limits to its power, seeing order as a better "force multiplier" for power than not, while a chaotic-evil being takes its whims to be the only cosmic "order" (as such) worth anything. Evil beings don't care about the welfare of others except on an instrumental basis, and will sacrifice their own welfare to advance their power or to deny power to others. You can see how this overarching goal innately engenders conflict between evil-aligned beings and between evil beings and beings of all other alignments.- Law is concerned about Order. A lawful-aligned creature wants a place for everything, and everything in its place. It is not enough to have a strong personal code that satisfies your desire to have a place in this world: the rest of the world - nay, the whole cosmos! - must also be in its proper place. I would say that lawful beings are mostly agnostic about hierarchy, as such, while others will either see it as an instrument to be used, modified, or discarded at need as it serves the putting of all things in their proper place or will have a conception of Order that innately includes some kind of hierarchy. Lawful-evil beings desire order for the sake of gaining and maintaining power, and lawful-good beings desire order in order to maximise well-being. Lawful-aligned beings don't care about freedom, except when it can be used as a "force multiplier", as it were, in the creation of more order.- Chaos is concerned about Freedom. A chaotic-aligned being wants to chart its own path, and mostly sees rules, statutes, and systems as an imposition on that path. Such a being need not be indisciplined or behaving at random; say rather that it sees itself as its own master, who decides for itself its own place in the cosmos, and rejects the idea that anything else is entitled to any say as to what that place ought to be. A chaotic being will sacrifice welfare - its own or that of others - in the service of freedom, and tends to view power as a defence or instrument; something to be wielded to protect or advance its freedom, and only cares about the power of others when they use that power to impose upon its freedom. A chaotic-good being sees freedom as the ideal means of securing and preserving well-being for all, while a chaotic-evil being sees a lack of structure or orderliness as the key to maximising its own power. Chaotic-aligned beings don't care for order except to the extent that the limits it imposes on freedom in some respects provides a greater amount of freedom in others.- A neutral being, then, is one who balances priorities, or perhaps lacks them. A neutral-good character has no particular preference for either order or freedom when it comes to serving welfare; likewise a neutral-evil character values neither order or freedom over the other for the purpose of seizing power and preventing others from having it. (The overall description of Law and Chaos basically described lawful-neutral and chaotic-neutral beings.) A neutral being cares about its welfare and that of others, but not enough to try to organise the cosmos around maximising it, and it cares about power, order, and freedom insofar as they help it to get through life, with no particular desire to pursue any at the expense of the others and no particular care for how other creatures value such things. You might say a "true" neutral being is one who could align to a cosmic force, but doesn't, while an unaligned being is one who can't align to a cosmic force.</blockquote>

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