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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8773642" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As others have said, Chaos-made-useful is creativity, and the ability to grow and change. Flexibility, adaptability. Chaos-unfettered is wanton destruction, dissolution, consumption. Conflict, unreliability.Law-made-useful is discipline, and the ability to sustain and persist. Perseverance, and reliability. Law-unfettered is entrapment, stasis, cessation. Inaction, passivity.So it seems to me that, if one wishes to make a "plane of law" and a "plane of chaos," there should be a place of hyper-intense alignment, where that alignment has unequivocal sway and is irresistible and unstoppable, and toward the edges it becomes strong but moderated.Perhaps The Great Work is the plane of Law, and the Heart of the Machine in its deepest core is a place none--not even other spirits of law--dare to tread, for fear they will be pacified and incorporated into the Heart. This is not because the Heart is evil, but rather because its fundamental nature, so intensely, purely Lawful, makes it incapable of recognizing such distinctions as individuality or agency. Indeed, it is incapable of cruelty or anything so personal. In the middle ranges of The Great Work, you have places that resemble "concrete jungle": places with beautiful grid structures, workers like drones in a beehive, spirits of law that follow programmed paths. These places process the paperwork of existence and serve a valuable function keeping track of the things that need to be kept track of. And then, near the outskirts of The Great Work, you have the rather nice places to live, quiet neighborhoods with neat, tree-lined lanes, and white-gravel driveways. The kinds of places parents would love to raise their kids, and painters would love for village paintings and the like: things just work right, people "fit in," life progresses day after day, disruptions are rare and when they happen the appropriate response people arrive promptly and do their jobs swiftly and professionally.By comparison, the Wyldlands are the plane of Chaos, and the Maelstrom lies at their far edge. Again, few go there, but more because it just obliterates anyone or anything that approaches--again, not out of any cruelty or malice, but because the force there is so inimical to anything even remotely like structure or definiteness that it naturally erodes anything like that. An ever-roiling, never-stable storm. At the edges of that storm, however, reality yields to the desires of those who live there. It's extremely dangerous, but extremely useful for those who can survive it. Further still, reality holds enough solidity that it isn't malleable anymore, but it's definitely weird. This isn't "the wild" like a forest, this is things like trees made of solid fire and mountains that walk and transient oceans of liquid light. It's consistent enough for folks to live there casually, but you'd better be prepared for everything to be weird every morning for as long as you live there. It sure as hell isn't safe, but those who can manage that lack of safety can do, or find, some amazing things.Would that be a more interesting Law-vs-Chaos dichotomy?</blockquote>

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