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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JEB" data-source="post: 9360340" data-attributes="member: 10148">One of the surprises when prepping my <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/reviewing-my-original-d-d-one-shot.704301/" target="_blank">OD&D one-shot</a> was that monster alignment was originally more varied. While many monsters still followed only one of the three alignments (law, chaos, and neutrality), many were listed under more than one. Per page 9 of Book I in the OD&D boxed set:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Men (humans) and all lycanthropes (werewolves, wereboars, weretigers, and werebears) could be any alignment: law, chaos, or neutrality.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Elves, rocs, dwarves, gnomes, and centaurs could follow law or neutrality.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Orcs, ogres, chimeras, minotaurs, all giants (hill, stone, frost, fire, cloud), and nearly all dragons (white, black, green, blue, red; but not golden) could follow neutrality or chaos.</li> </ul>This resulted in the dungeon and wilderness I built for the one-shot containing a fair number of neutral orcs, for example. Which was pretty neat to have in a 1974-authentic version of the game.A skim of the supplements shows that this trend continued into Greyhawk. However, Blackmoor never assigned alignments to its new monsters, and Eldritch Wizardry only described good/evil tendencies when it covered monster alignments. By the time of the 1977 AD&D Monster Manual, such nuances were no longer explicitly supported (though they didn't explicit forbid them either, FWIW). Wonder why the shift?</blockquote>

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