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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yesminde" data-source="post: 3688885" data-attributes="member: 54072">Check out L.E. Modesitt's books if you're looking for ideas.Alignment-wise, Lawful and Chaotic have no meaning apart from the second part of alignment they are attached to.  Lawful means that you adhere rigorously to some sort of structure . . . *what* structure is never laid out.  It is indicated that LE people follow some kind of "internal" code, but what is the point of a structure you make up for yourself?  Chaotic people make up their own "rules" too!  In the end it seems more like Lawful means that once you *have* a set of rules (regardless of where they come from), you, personally, don't change them.Chaotic is self-contradictory and *reactive*, because it is based on a *rejection* of structure.  If you rigorously disobey all the rules, then you're just as ordered as a Lawful person . . . but if you *sometimes* obey the rules and *sometimes* don't, then shouldn't you be *neutral* with respect to the Law/Chaos axis?If you are looking to have a true Law vs. Chaos conflict then you need to have a set of external (to individuals) rules that everyone can reference in order to determine whether a given individual is lawful or chaotic.  Namely, you need a set of rules that govern reality (or nature or whatever you want to call it).  Chaos, then, is a defiance of reality, a constant striving against the restrictions of nature, whereas Law is an acceptance of natural restrictions and acting in accordance with them.For example: a lawful person accepts the fact that all mortals must die and lives their life accordingly, a chaotic person might live as though he believed he was going to live forever.Depending on your personal viewpoint, you could present Law as possessing a great deal of passivity (would a lawful person seek to *extend* their life by, say, working out and studying medicine and ways to keep people from aging?  Or would they just numbly resign themselves to death and not even bother to get some rest if they got sick?).  You can also present Chaotic people as living in denial or even nihilistic (would a chaotic person jump at the chance to be undead?  Would they get pissed off and devote their lives to "defying" death by becoming some kind of daredevil?)You could even do *all* of the above approaches, so that there was constant debate within both groups as to who belonged to them, which is where your magic could come in: means of detecting whether someone was actually Lawful or Chaotic could be quite valuable! I view a Chaotic person as someone that doesn't even think to discover whether what they desire is actually possible, a Neutral person (on this axis) as one that is aware of the natural rules but follows them or not based on some sort of personal scheme, and a lawful person as one who seeks to command nature by obeying it.</blockquote>

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