Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 1926885" data-attributes="member: 22882">St. Thomas Aquinas famously said (disclaimer: almost nobody knows or seriously reflects on this, it's NOT one of his famous ideas, and this isn't an exact quote) that if human nature were different, human morality would also be different.  In the animal world, this certainly holds true: a wolf's nature, social order and, for lack of a better word, "ethics" are radically different from a sheep's, or an ant's.Now, by popular request (disclaimer: one person asked to see it), an alternative to alignment for YOUR grim n' gritty fantasy or hard sci-fi campaign: naturalist alignment!Essentially, the idea is that each creature has a particular nature that determines what is good (natural) or evil (unnatural) for it.  These are actually quite primitive, but combine into complex forms due to their interaction.Each also has a basic unit of society and social order.  Wolves (and wolfmen!) have a pack.  Humans are family-based and naturally feudal (so are orcs); dwarves place greater weight on the extended family than the nuclear, but are also naturally feudal.  Giants are pair-bonders with a subrace-stratified caste system.  Elves are unusual among intelligent races in that their basic societal unit is the individual, and they have no broad social order outside of opportunistic cooperation.Some of the natural orders seem abhorrent to other races; elves loath dwarves' instinct to subsume individual goods to community goods, while dwarves think elves completely amoral and painfully lonely.An elf who tries to live like a dwarf will inevitably become corrupt and degenerate; so too, a dwarf who tries to live like an elf.  Thus lies the path of madness, the path of what each race calls evil.  Even if it at first seems a road paved with good intentions...Intelligent species like humans, elves and dwarves all have the opportunity to go against their natures by making (seemingly) rational choices.  They may try to live like members of other races, or even to invent for themselves a whole new society... but they still walk the path to ruin, blasphemy and madness.In D&D terms, this means that Good, Evil, Neutral, Lawful and Chaotic spells and abilities are replaced by Natural and Unnatural spells and abilities (Smite Unnature, for instance, will smite an egalatarian orc, a Cthulu-worshipping anything, or a feudal elf with equal efficacy, according to the base system) and spells and abilities with a racial qualifier (Smite Orc, Smite Elf, Smite Dwarf, etc.).</blockquote>

Verification