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Front End Alignments
🕑 Added 2024-12-17 17:58:01 +0000 UTCI have a goal for my re-tooling of 5e: make all of the alignments sensible choices for players. Here's my hack at it, along with languages that give some sense of where I want to take the implied setting.
Alignment
Alignment indicates a creature’s place in the metaphysical order. In a world where magic is real and the gods peer down upon the world of mortals, one’s standing in the cosmic firmament matters.
Components
Alignment has two components, an ethical element and a cosmic element.
Cosmic Alignment
Your cosmic alignment determines how magic and divine power interacts with you. It can be measured by magic and can influence how some spells affect you.
Since the dawn of the universe, the cosmos has struggled between chaos and law. Pure chaos reduces the cosmos to a meaningless blur, but overwhelming law locks all of reality into a frozen state. The tension between those two extremes, and their endless conflict, produces the world as we know it.
There are three cosmic alignments.
Lawful: You are attuned to order and predictability. You expect the universe to bend to laws and seek that from society and others. You build or rely upon institutions, organizations, and external standards to guide you and provide justice.
Chaotic: You seek freedom and liberty above all else, reflecting the primal nature of the cosmos. You are an individualist, preferring to rely on yourself. You act as you see fit based on your internal reasoning, rather than rely on external forces to guide you.
Neutral: You move between the two extremes, finding utility in individual freedom and in institutions that provide order. You adopt both to suit your needs.
Ethical Alignment
Your ethical alignment reflects how you treat others and think of them in relation to yourself. Unlike your cosmic alignment, your ethical alignment is unknowable. No amount of magic, not even the power of the gods, can determine your ethical alignment. Only upon death, when your soul ascends to the divine realm, does your ethical alignment become apparent.
There are three ethical alignments.
Good: You place the needs of others before your own and seek to use your skills and talents to aid them.
Evil: You place your needs first, even if it means you sometimes need to hurt others to get what you want.
Neutral: You shift between good and evil. You help others when you can, but you are willing to put yourself first if you must do so to survive. Personal connections matter to you much more than a collective good.
The Nine Alignments
The two components of alignment combine to produce nine different options.
Lawful Good (LG): You believe in helping others and seek to build long-lasting institutions that create just laws that push others on to this path. In the face of an ethical dilemma, you rely on the rules you have been taught to guide you.
Neutral Good (NG): You care about the good of others and use whatever tools are available to achieve that good. In the face of an ethical dilemma, you measure which act ultimately produces the most benefit to the world regardless of the means.
Chaotic Good (CG): You believe in the common good, but you think that rules are too rigid to help. Instead, you use your common sense and internal moral compass to guide you. In the face of an ethical dilemma, you rely on your inner judgment rather and personal experience to make a decision.
Neutral (N): If you are neutral in both components, you care nothing for superstition, cosmic questions, or philosophy. You act as the situation demands to preserve yourself and those you personally care about.
Lawful Neutral (LN): As long as order is maintained, the world is on a right and proper path. Without rules, the world is a dangerous place. You care little for ethics. In the face of a dilemma, you let the rules guide you. If there are no rules, you rely on an authority you serve to guide you.
Chaotic Neutral (CN): You rely on you internal compass to guide you, and you heed its whims without question. You crave freedom. Responsibility, expectations, and demands all wear you down. In the face an ethical dilemma, you do whatever is most pleasing to you.
Lawful Evil (LE): Systems exist to serve you. You study rules and laws to find ways to exploit them to your own benefit. You crave power and seek to use institutions to gain it. In the face of an ethical dilemma, you find a way to apply the rules that benefit you the most.
Neutral Evil (NE): You look out for yourself before giving any thought to others. Your personal good is the only outcome that matters, and you use whatever tools are handy to preserve yourself. In the face of an ethical dilemma, you find a way to make the most profit from it.
Chaotic Evil (CE): You seek personal strength to ensure your prosperity above all others. Life is a competitive game, and there can be only one winner. In the face of an ethical dilemma, you seek to bend things to weaken others while strengthening yourself.
Languages
Most creatures speak Common, but there are several other languages common in the world.
Common: The language first crafted by angels and devils to proselytize to mortals has become the standard language for all folk.
Bleak Speech: The language of the Shadowfell and all dead things.
Stone Speech: This language is the standard for creatures that live underground, such as dwarves.
Fey Speech: Commonly used by elves, this is the language of the Feywild and its denizens.
Primordial: Used by giants of all types, orcs, and creatures of the Wildlands.
Draconic: The language of the dragons is used to work arcane magic.
The Old Tongue: The language of druidic cults is also used to communicate with beasts and plants, though magic is needed to comprehend what a plant or beast may say in return.
Axiomatic: This is the language of Law. All Lawful creatures can understand it, though it takes study to speak and read it.
Anarchic: The primordial language of Chaos can be understood by all Chaotic creatures, but learning to speak and read it requires study.
Comments
smallfish
Hi Mike, good stuff as always, but doesn't this reformulation sort of make "cosmic alignment" a fixed/immutable, possibly even inherited trait? Is this the foundation for the idea of cosmic alignment-specific languages? Also, if one's "ethical alignment" is only revealed at the time "when your soul ascends to the divine realm" (in a world where "magic is real and the gods peer down upon the world of mortals"), how does that work in a world with multiple gods and/or a spectrum of very different alignment-oriented "afterlife planes" -- i.e., who ultimately does deciding/revealing? Not just quibbling for sport here, I'm close to three years into running a 5e campaign in a setting with a very nonstandard cosmology (within which I've tried very hard to maintain strong internal consistency, so players can have confidence in the grounded inferences that they make), and Im very curious about how others have grappled with challenges like this ... Thanks in advance!
Lojaan
I feel like the most fantastical element of Fantasy as a genre is not dragons, or elves, or magic, but the fiction that there is objective "good" and "evil". A clear line between the good guys and the bad guys. Extra points if you can tell which is which on sight. It is also the least interesting element of the genre. I'm glad we've mostly moved past it.
