Playthings of Mad Gods

Alternative Alignments, or how I learned to stop caring and embrace Imperialism

We all know the old axes of order-chaos and good-evil. Looking at them, however, I noticed a glaring flaw, namely what kind of an idiot would willingly follow something that is literally named evil. That being said, I believe that one may make their own alignments, and use them to make their settings better. Therefore, I present

Overly-specific alignments!

Because most people do not identify with things like law or chaos. They identify with belief systems, political ideologies and the similar. In example, if you took a bunch of Roman Patricians from the times of the late republic, they wouldn't be chaotic or lawful. They would be Republicans or Imperialists. To follow up on this example, let's outline these two alignments:

(Note that this is a major oversimplification of late Roman Republic's politics) None of them are especially chaotic or lawful, all have some good and some bad points, and not all people rank anywhere on the Republican-to-Imperialist axis. It applies only to Roman Citizens - to the nearby Barbarians it would be just as strange as it is to us. That being said, these alignments may not be just political: they may be in relationship to various metaphysical principles, or gods. In example, I present you with the Ork Alignment Chart:

And so on and so forth. Regardless of how alien moralities are, they may be turned into dichotomies, or even threefold scales! In example, the scale of Flesh, Divine and Machine among the Immortality Seekers:

TL;DR - I think that alignments are currently under-developed and underused, and that they may be made much better by changing the ways we apply them to the worlds we create. By making them more specific than just "good/evil" or "order/chaos" we can make them more nuanced and more interesting.

#Essay #System