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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7783374" data-attributes="member: 6873517">The Cosmic Balance is a Moorcock idea. However, it's not Anderson, where there's no such philosophizing. Anderson is, IMO, unquestionably the much more influential source on Gygax---something Gygax himself said but is also quite clear from reading Anderson. Likely. As I recall he was a somewhat devout Christian of some flavor---can't recall where I remember seeing that, so take with an even bigger than normal grain of salt. He was active in Republican politics but, again, what one can conclude from that is not entirely clear. I am not a Medieval historian, but my understanding is that Order vs. Chaos is very much in line with the way the Medievals thought of things, rather than good and evil, per se, in line with the "forces of civilization vs. barbarism" type thinking. It's also pretty strongly inherent in the kind of frontier thinking common in, say, Westerns. This is very much inherent in adventures like B2: Keep on the Borderlands.  I think that's true regarding the kind of implied "LG is the goodest of good" though I'm uncomfortable with the psychologizing that's going on about what Gygax personally thought about moral questions based on what he put in a game. A lot of what he put in D&D were tropes that were likely familiar to his likely readers, though of course many were not and needed explaining (e.g., Vancian casting). For example, most of the early cleric spells like Sticks to Snakes or Flame Strike are obvious ripoffs of things that appear in the kind of late '50s Bible epics that starred Charlton Heston. </blockquote>

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