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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 8348738" data-attributes="member: 6796468">Three notes:1) Conan is still a Barbarian who neither understands nor cares for the laws of cities. Much less something as meagre as "Contempt of Court". Threatening to lock him up "'until he rots" or commits an evil act (betraying his friend) is a threat. Add in rage as a class feature and a drastic misunderstanding of how legal threats work and you're in for a bad time.2) Conan was fleeing violence in the dockside scene. Specifically he was trying to escape the guards from the courthouse who wanted him dead for refusing to betray his friend and killing the judge. He knew he could use his Pirate Background Trait to get the Captain to let him ride on the ship for free with a little threatening.3) While alignment itself can change, it's also not a single-instance function. A person who is good can take evil actions on occasion for various reasons and still be "Good" so long as the majority of what they do is, or results in depending on your moral philosophy, good.And while Conan and Sword and Sorcery in general are Existentialist, D&D Alignment is a mish-mash of different moral philosophies. From Kantian virtue ethics to consequentialism and more. 'Cause, y'know, it -attempts- to define people within a moral framework while Existentialism doesn't really bother. So determining his morality within that sort of system is going to either involve showing each moral step pace by pace or applying an overall alignment based on the full context of his career. I went for the second one.For all his violence and threats, Howard still wanted a hero. So Conan followed Howard's morality without it's trappings and with Howard's personal power fantasies toward using violence, threats, or deceit against the societies and cultures that he railed against. Things Howard couldn't do in reality, like split a judge's head open for terrible and unjust laws like Contempt of Court. We can see the author's propensity for "Solving Problems" with overwhelming violence outside the bounds of law in his previously aforementioned letters. Conan, unbound by reality, could do what Howard could not.I should note that we can infer Howard thought the law was terrible and unjust, I'm not claiming that it is or isn't.</blockquote>

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