Wednesday, December 24, 2014

And One Last Alignment Thing

And more on alignment...

Yet the previous two posts do not consider the other way of looking at alignment, which is to say it is merely an alignment to a faction. Which "side" are you on? The group that is Lawful or the group that is Chaotic? Does this entail good and evil or not? What does the group's stance on law and chaos have to do with their moral character, if anything? This obviously comes down to a matter of your specific campaign setting. If in your world the monsters we can all agree are evil are of the Chaotic alignment and all the creatures we tend to see as good are Lawful then law correlates with good and chaos correlates with evil and we'd be on pretty strong ground to argue that Lawful is good and Chaotic is evil.

But what if your factions are not like that? The recent movie Maleficent (which I thought was just "ok") poses the Kingdom of humans against the un-ruled world of faery kind. Maleficent herself is portrayed as innocent and good in the beginning, then she becomes a bit twisted by thoughts of revenge and could be called evil. But the world of humans is harsh to the faeries and, I think, fits the bill of being quite evil in that sense. Meanwhile the feary realm seems quite good, if chaotic.

These factions do reflect Law and Chaos. But they do not align with good and evil in any clear way, or if they do it seems reversed so that Law is more evil than Chaos.

I don't really like the faction interpretation. It's a little too particular to each setting for me. I prefer something a little more universal.

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