Fey Alignment

One more way I'm trying to make Fey Elves alien is by having the Fey, including any Elven characters, use a different alignment system. This alignment system straddles the line between D&D and AD&D conceptions of alignment: I imagine both Seelie and Unseelie courts, for example, though I haven't figured out how to flesh that out yet, besides members of different alignments generally avoiding or being somewhat antagonistic towards each other; on the other hand, these alignments definitely serve as AD&D-style roleplaying aids. What do you think?
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Elves, and indeed all Fey, are not aligned along the Law-Chaos axis. They have little to do with metaphysical concepts of Order or the progress of Man’s civilization and they, being inherently of Nature, cannot engage in unnatural Necromancy or Summoning. Indeed, the Elves continue to hold the entire Fey outlook and are aligned along the Seelie-Unseelie and Trooping-Solitary axes.

Seelie Fey, including Elves, are lighthearted, fickle pranksters and change their attitudes towards other characters easily, neither holding grudges nor gratitude for long. They are generally friendly when first meeting someone and as prone to performing acts of service for no reason as to pranks and practical jokes. The Unseelie Fey, again including Elves, are generally aloof if not unfriendly to new acquaintances or strangers and not prone to spontaneous pranks or services. They hold both grudges and gratitude for a long time, if not forever.

Whether Seelie or Unseelie, Elves, as Fey, should always be roleplayed with no appreciation for Man’s ideas of proportion, whether dealing with pranks, random kindnesses, thanks or revenge. Both beneficial and malicious actions should be more than a Man would find appropriate or worth the trouble.

All Elves that join mortal parties are Solitary. Elves that travel in all-Fey parties or who settle down in forests where they establish a Fastness are Trooping. Solitary Elves must leave their parties and wonder alone for a month in order to level up. Trooping Elves must not leave their troop for any reason and most interaction with mortals must be corporate instead of individually building relationships with mortals.

The DMG, Section by Section, Part 17: Spell Explanations – Clerics

Gary now embarks upon six and a half pages of explaining spells. A good bit of this is expressly banning certain liberal interpretations that players might attempt to use with spells, much as Gary previously dealt with the abuse of Thief abilities, but a good deal of it is also explaining tactics that can be used with certain spells or just plain explaining how to execute the effects of a spell from behind the DM screen. Today let's hit the Cleric spells I find interesting.

Light & Continual Light
Gary quite helpfully points out that both of these spells can be cast on an enemy's eyes, effectively blinding them (permanently, or until dispelled, in the case of Continual Light), as well as suggesting that Continual Light can be cast on objects and then used in place of torches.

Augury
The idea of allowing any kind of prophecy or means of knowing the future in a sandbox game has always left me feeling uncomfortable and unsure regarding how to handle it, but Gary gives some decent guidelines here: basically, it's OK to just go off of what you guess will happen. The example he gives is if a player asks, "Will we do well if we venture onto the third level?" and a nasty troll guards a great treasure near the entrance to level 3 then an appropriate response is, "All who survive will be rich!"

Dispel Magic
Gary gives some nice mechanics here. Any item this is cast at that fails a saving throw is inoperative for one round; items only get saving throws if they are in a character's possession, and only have to make saving throws if they are specifically targeted. Relics and artifacts (I don't think Gary's discussed the difference between those two categories yet) are immune to this effect.

Atonement
The referee is encouraged to gauge the player/PC's sincerity of repentance and require penance accordingly. If the referee believes the player/PC is truly repentant, a few coins in the money box may suffice to fully restore the PC, while insane, nearly impossible quests, such as capturing and sacrificing rival high priests, may be handed out to players/PCs who don't seem sincere. Personally, I like the help of an actual alignment charting system to help me gauge just how much a PC is in trouble, rather than having to figure this out by ear.

Plane Shift
Planar adventures have never really interested me (I'm certainly open to that changing in the future), but I find Gary's description of each plane having a corresponding musical note, with the potential for an octave of planes, to be intriguing. Not enough for me to build on right now, but if I ever do run planar adventures, I'll be sure to incorporate the "planar scale" into the way plane shifting works. Has anyone seen planes run like this? Do any settings use this at all?

Quest
Counterintuitively, at least for me, characters are more vulnerable or susceptible to this spell the more they agree with the Cleric casting the spell, not even receiving a saving throw if the quest is just and they share religions with the Cleric. Also interestingly, characters who agree to a quest, even if forced to do so, do not receive a saving throw.

Holy/Unholy Word
I wasn't aware that there were any spells that banished beings back to their native planes, but this spell does exactly that. I'm undecided on whether to allow this spell in my game since I had expected to get so much traction out of the Carcosan banishing rituals that require special components. We'll see what happens.

The DMG, Section by Section, Part 9: Alignment

I've gone through numerous understandings, tinkerings and levels of enthusiasm concerning alignment, and read plenty of other bloggers do the same. It was interesting to see Gary's own take on alignment, at least as he sets it out in the DMG.

Gary begins by explaining what alignment is and some basics about how it works: it is the general "ethos," of a character. It doesn't determine religious views, though it may be determined by religious views, and it doesn't prevent characters with the same alignment from fighting with each other, though similarly aligned opponents are likely to cease hostilities and team up with each other against opponents of different alignment.

In AD&D, Gary differs from the single-axis, "allegiance in a grand cosmic struggle," D&D definition of alignment so common in the OSR and instead sets out alignment as a roleplaying aid, a compass to help players run their characters well and in such a way that they do more than just ask, "what would I do in that situation," and go with that. In Gary's own words, "alignment describes the world view of creatures and helps to define what their actions, reactions and purpose will be. It likewise causes a player character to choose an ethos which is appropriate to his or her profession, and alignment also aids players in the definition and role approach of their respective game personae."

In AD&D, there are now two axes for alignment, Law-Chaos and Good-Evil. Gary casts Law as being about the group over the individual; the group needs order and organization to survive and function. Spock was being supremely Lawful when he said, "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few or the one." Chaos in AD&D, far from being the existential threat to the cosmos it is in D&D, is merely promoting the individual over the group. Good is basically about valuing the rights of others, while Evil is about accomplishing one's goals without regard to the rights of others.

Gary goes on to describe each of the possible nine alignments. Nothing is particularly surprising when one realizes that each alignment is just a synthesization of two points on the two axes, except that I found it interesting to read Gary's descriptions of Evil alignments. Gary describes Neutral Evil characters as basically social Darwinists, believing in the success and survival of the fittest and the failure and extinction of the weak; Lawful Evil sees Law as a mechanism for subjugating those who are weaker, the epitome of classism and racism; Chaotic Evil values individual desires and volition… so long as the individuals who have them are strong enough to bring them into reality and defend them. Ultimately, "might makes right," seems to be the unifying theme of Gary's understanding of Evil.

Gary stresses that it is important to chart the alignment of characters' behavior, using a chart in the PHB. He doesn't go into much detail on this point and I'm unclear on whether that chart is this chart that I've seen multiple times before:

or something else. If it's this chart that Gary is talking about, I'm not sure how he expects "small shifts" to be kept track of. Charting character behavior on the alignment chart is important because some classes require certain alignments and because there are serious consequences to actually changing alignment.

Gary takes alignment so seriously that he states, "failure to demand strict adherence to alignment behavior is to allow a game abuse." Gary offers as an example of such game abuse a Paladin who is conveniently led away from the party while the rest of the party schemes to poison a monster; the Paladin isn't stupid and, if played according to alignment, would not turn a blind eye to that sort of behavior, but the players play their characters that way because it is convenient. Gary argues that the Paladin's player should be told that turning a blind eye towards obviously non-Lawful behavior will cost him his Paladinhood and if the player continues to act against alignment then the DM should follow through and strip the Paladin of his Paladinhood.

Gary goes on to discuss alignment languages. He draws parallels with Thief's Cant and the Catholic Church's Latin, but it's clear that there are no strict real-world parallels with what he is describing. Alignment languages are not complete languages; their vocabularies are well-developed concerning the main topics of the alignment, but very bare in all other areas. Thieves can discuss casing and stealing to no end, but a discussion of literature is out of the question; Druids can discuss plants and weather, but not politics. Gary's examples of Thieves and Druids discussing things with their alignment tongues makes me wonder just how many alignment tongues there are; are there nine, one for each alignment? More? Less? Nine seems to generally fit what Gary is saying, as it seems that any intelligent creature, even Gold Dragons, isolated from humanity, can speak the tongue of their alignement. It is taboo to speak in an alignment tongue in the presence of anyone not positively known to share that alignment.

One aspect Gary doesn't address with alignment tongues is how they play out in a game. Do characters ensure that they are not overheard by enemies who don't share their alignment by using it? Do characters prove to monsters that share their alignment that they, too, are of that alignment (for example, a Lawful Good party approaching a Gold Dragon)? Of what real use is alignment language?

Consequences for alignment change include: losing spells or spell-casting ability (particularly for druids), losing a level and loss of alignment tongue while beginning to learn the new alignment tongue. If alignment change is the result of magic against the character's will, magically reversing the alignment change can restore the lost level, but at a hefty monetary cost.

Gary suggests not informing players that there are consequences for changing alignment, letting players cross into other alignments and then penalizing them. I've read and heard complaints about alignment from the players' side that make much more sense to me now that I've read this. I mean, how would you react if you were playing your character according to how you understood your character's alignment, all the while moving closer and closer to alignment change because the DM interpreted your actions differently but wasn't telling you that, and then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, the DM tells you, "you just changed your alignment; congratulations, you lose a level!"? I actually argue for keeping alignment secret from players in this post, but with less drastic consequences, especially for players who play classes that aren't aware of alignment; I think it's important for players of classes that depend on alignment to have at least an in-game understanding of how things work if they are going to suffer consequences for their actions. Gary's approach, as far as I can tell, is "gotcha-ism," pure and simple; I understand that Gary apparently DMed with unrepentant, shameless power-gamers, but this, I think, crosses the line into dysfunctional adversarial gaming advice.

Charting Alignment

So, here's how I think I'll chart alignment.

First, I need a scale. I was originally thinking of using a scale of 1-100, but that seems too small for me. I don't want just a few actions to rapidly shift alignment; I want a character's alignment to really, really be a product of habitual action. A scale from 1-300 is, I think, about the right size; without testing, I won't know for sure.

Next, I need to decide which ranges are Chaotic, which are Neutral and which are Lawful. I think the 1-50 range will be Chaotic and the 251-300 range will be Lawful, with 51-250 being Neutral.

Then I need a list of activities that move a character along this scale. These should be relatively big things; pickpocketing, for example, doesn't significantly support the cause of Chaos or the downfall of Law. In fact, I'm leaving theft completely off this list since that's such a common activity in D&D in the first place. The actions on this list should actively and significantly build up or tear down the health and order of society and the universe at large. Here's the list I have so far; other item suggestions are welcome.

Lawful Acts:

Healing: +1
Freeing the enslaved: +4 per slave freed
Defending or rescuing the helpless: +5 per victim rescued
Bringing the guilty to justice: +10 per HD
Banishing Cthuloid beings: +15 per HD
Moderation: +1 per 100 Gold Pieces given to worthy causes or the less fortunate
Joining and taking the vows of a Lawful order: +50

Chaotic Acts:

Necromancy: -10 per HD
Slaving: -2 per slave bought, sold or owned
Slaughtering innocents: -10 per HD
Sparing the guilty: -1 per offense overlooked
Consorting with Cthuloid beings: -10 per HD
Excess: -15 per ostentatious purchase or night of debauchery
Betraying or falling from a Lawful order: -30

You'll notice that Chaotic acts will bring someone towards Chaos more easily than Lawful acts will bring someone close to Law. This is for a few reasons. One is that it is easier to destroy than to build. The other is that Law is a lofty ideal that is difficult to attain and maintain, while Chaos is insidious, tempting, easier and, being the corruption of the ideal, multitudinous in its paths.

Some things I like about this:

This gives a more objective criteria for allowing or barring existing characters from joining Lawful orders: If the +50 from joining an order won't get a candidate into the Lawful range on the alignment scale, they aren't accepted. By a similar token, fallen Paladins (or whatever other Lawful orders boot their members when they mess up) may only undertake a quest to redeem themselves if the -30 from breaking a rule of their order and being expelled doesn't take them outside of the Lawful range; otherwise they won't be allowed to re-join, ever (or, if you want to be nice, until they get into Lawful range again).

This also allows for Paladins and other Lawful types to engage in limited Chaotic activity, so long as they are balancing it out with Lawful acts. This way, they don't have to be super-careful about their actions. A very Lawful Paladin could indulge in a night out on the town with his friends and still be a Paladin. With this system, Paladins don't have to be as strict and grumpy about every little act.

A quirk I purposely built in: buying a slave and setting him free results in a net gain of 2 alignment points. Rescuing a slave and killing the 3HD slaver nets 34 alignment points.

I'm currently planning on all classes starting out at 150 unless their class is inherently Chaotic or Lawful. If a class is Chaotic, the character starts at 50; if the class is Lawful, the character starts at 251.

I realize this system is still rough, dirty and untried; I have no idea what the kinks are that will need to be worked out, but I do like this system and plan to try it out. If you have comments, critiques or suggestions, they are very much appreciated: what to you think of this system?

More Thoughts on Alignment and Setting

Alignment as I described it in my last post is a single axis: Law-Chaos. Good and Evil are part of this axis, instead of a separate axis; the New School conception of alignment as personality traits is not applicable. Staid traditionalist characters and free-spirited characters (the New School interpretations of Lawful and Chaotic) may support either Law or Chaos.

Most individuals, however, no matter what their personality type, will fall into the category of Neutral, neither particularly helping nor harming the cause of either Law or Chaos; in fact, most everyone is ignorant of the struggle, not taking it seriously on the few occasions when they do hear about it.

In fact, until they begin to establish themselves and discover the reality of both the forces of Law and Chaos, the PCs won't usually know about it. That's what sets Paladins, Rangers and the more devout Clerics apart from your average Fighters, Thieves, Magic-Users, most Clerics and all the other classes: they're true believers from the beginning in a grand cosmic struggle, instead of stumbling upon it in the course of amassing their personal fortune. It's why Paladins and Rangers exist, and why Clerics are sent out to fight Chaos instead of blessing crops and healing the sick on a full-time basis.

So, how to deal with alignment when the PCs don't even know about or believe in it? Well, I could just let the players decide their PCs' alignments, but that, I think, risks making this more about what color jerseys the PCs are wearing instead of which side they're actually scoring for. It also bares for my players a part of the setting that I really don't want to just tell them about. I want them to discover it along with their PCs.

It's true; I've begun keeping secrets from my players. They don't read my blog and they have no idea that Dragons run much of the world. They're just starting to get an inkling of the Cthuloid horrors continued adventuring will bring them in contact with. I think I may have mentioned the possibility of Mindflayers and they've fought a Shroom, like, once. They have no idea that Necromancy exists in my setting at all. They certainly don't realize that Carcosan rituals exist and are utilized by evil sorcerers, nor do they know why intelligent monsters have tried to kill them twice (after rolls on the Puppet-Master Machination Tables), although they are getting curious about that.

To be clear, when there have been questions about these things, I haven't refused to answer. Instead, I told my player that there were good, non-arbitrary reasons for what was happening; cause-and-effect was occurring. I told him that I thought it would be more fun for him to figure out what was going on through the course of play, but that I'd be willing to explain it to him if he preferred that. He opted to try to figure it out, at least for now.

My gut tells me to do the same thing with alignment. Tell most players not to worry about it. Slip the players of Paladins, Rangers and Clerics of certain gods secret handouts about their characters' understandings of Law and Chaos. Then come up with a scale for measuring alignment and a list of Lawful and Chaotic actions: actions which materially benefit Law or Chaos. Different classes may start out on different points along the scale (Paladins, etc., start out high on the Lawful scale, while most other classes start out near halfway or so. Thieves start closer to Chaos but still inside Neutral territory.) and I adjust their scores as they perform action on the lists in the course of their normal adventuring career. This idea, by the way, is stolen almost whole-cloth from the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets; the differences are that the Ready Ref sheets try to work with a double-axis alignment system, that there is no list of Lawful or Chaotic acts and that you're supposed to roll for your alignment.

Next time I'll try to flesh this out mechanically. In the meantime, how much about your settings do you keep away from your players, waiting to reveal through play? Is most everything pretty straightforward or are there definite twists that make your players sit up and take notice?

Making Alignment Mean Something

Alignment is a part of the game that has NEVER been a real issue in my games. I've run games with new players where we didn't even mention alignment during character generation. Alignment has only been mentioned when I'm trying to explain the difference between the Old School and New School understandings of the Law-Chaos axis (I attempted to create a way to use both with my Civilized-Barbaric axis, not understanding that Old School alignment is more about allegiance than personality) or when players are describing their characters.

I don't know the last time alignment was even mentioned in my games, though; these conversations all happened months ago, at the latest. I'm not even sure that the latest round of generated characters (to replace the fallen) have an alignment; they very well may, but I've had no reason to ask. Honestly, I was about to just throw alignment out the window until recently; I just didn't know what to do with it.

I think the reason that I didn't know what to do with alignment is that I didn't really have anything in my setting that the players could have allegiance to. My settings, up 'til now, have consisted almost entirely of wilderness; the one time the players ventured into a city, they promptly got themselves arrested and sent out into the wilderness again. Magic was value-neutral and I'd done away with Clerics. What Law was there to swear fealty to?

Even in the wilderness, I had just plunked down a bunch of dungeons without any real organizing principle. There were no real puppet-masters or dark lords gathering their power. The worst that was out there was a large goblin warren, or perhaps a cult or a crazy wizard. What real Chaos was there?

My thinking on this started to change with Carcosa and Pellantarum, however.

What if there were things that were out there that really were working to destroy, or at least subvert and rule tyrannically, the civilized world? What if Dragons controlled politics for their own ends, using both civilized and uncivilized peoples as unknowing pawns in their Byzantine games of chess? What if Cthuloid entities were constantly attempting to break into this reality and tear it apart? What if mushroom-men and mindflayers were also attempting world domination, by means and to ends so alien as to be inscrutable to the civilized? What if the undead were not the random products of poor burials or cursed ground, but the tools of dark, evil and very intentional necromancy?

Well, that would be real Chaos.

And what if there were genuine organizing principles in the world? What if magic, or at least certain schools of magic, were a rough analog to science and the progress, order and dominion over the world that it gives to civilization? What if the gods create and bless order and love and protect the civilized? What if Clerics, Paladins and Rangers weren't being overzealous after all, and in fact were the ones with the true understanding of the workings of the world and what is at stake?

Well, that would be real Law.

And what if this struggle between Law and Chaos were a hidden struggle, one of which the common man remained ignorant and which the educated dismissed as over-simplification or the crazy black-and-white ravings of fundamentalist bumpkins? What if accidentally becoming a pawn of a Dragon was only too easy, or if some problems just seemed so much easier to solve with the summoning of a Cthuloid being? What if the mushroom-men didn't seem all that bad, and besides, they offered fungus products at a considerable discount? What if the mindflayers paid good money for goblins you were just going to slaughter anyway? What if eternal unlife was a true possibility, albeit at terrible cost?

Well, then we'd have a genuine campaign setting concept, one where it starts to make sense why a Lawful sword or a Chaotic throne won't work for those who are aligned in opposite ways, or even those who aren't aligned, one where even alignment tongues begin to make sense (almost- they still need some tweaking, I think). In short, it's a campaign setting where alignment is no longer a question of abstract philosophy; alignment is now about, "the forces of Chaos pose a constant existential threat to Law, civilization and all humans and demi-humans- what, if anything, are you going to do about it?"

Stay tuned for more thoughts on this in the near future; in the meantime, how do you handle alignment? Are you satisfied with the way alignment works in your games, or does it get in the way- or do you wish it could be something more?

10 ways Carcosa will improve my game

So, apparently posts about Carcosa garner lots of attention, whether truly merited by their content or not. Here's a list of ways that I'll be cherry-picking from Carcosa to enrich my own campaign that I hope has more merit for attention than my last Carcosa post.

1. Psionics: Carcosa has a psionics system that could easily fit on one sheet of a legal pad. I'm going to give it a shot; I've never even seen psionics used in any game I've played in, so this will be a new experience. It should be interesting.

2. Mindflayers: Now that I have a psionics system that is easy and fun to work with, I can introduce mindflayers into my game setting. Anyone have suggestions of reading material I should use for inspiration (that is easily accessible)? The only thing I really have is a Type III (not III.V) Monster Manual. Any help on this would be appreciated.

3. A good foundation for a Barbarian class that is built around immunity to mechanics taking over your character instead of being built around mechanics taking over your character. I'll post a Barbarian class here when I figure the rest of the class out.

4. Really nasty NPCs: I've decided that Carcosan sorcerers in my setting will also be Magic Users. Why are they summoning nasty Old Ones? I've decided that, along with the standard reasons sorcerers summon Old Ones, many sorcerers are trying to destroy dragons, which are inspired by Pellatarum.

5. Endless motive for kidnapping: Strip the colors (or replace them with more standard D&D races), rape and details from the rituals in Carcosa and you have generic PG-13 rituals with a certain number of a certain kind of victims that can be transplanted into any setting. Have a strange number of members of one particular demographic recently disappeared? Before long, my players may immediately go into "sorcerer hunting mode" when they hear that.

6. Ray Guns: Carcosa has a great advanced technological weapons generator that is intended for Space Alien weaponry, but it works just as well for generating lost weapons from before the fall of ancient advanced civilization. D&D is, after all, post-apocalyptic.

7. Nasty Cthuloid entities: Pretty self-explanitory. I should point out that there's a very good set of 13 charts for generating more if ever I "use up" the ones that are included.

8. Making alignment mean something: When Cthuloid entities, Mindflayers (made possible by Carcosa), Shrooms and Dragons (those last two not from Carcosa at all), etc. exercise such control over the setting, Law and Chaos become not just ways of interpreting meaning, but two very different ways for humans and demi-humans to attempt to gain and keep independence. That means that alignment will, for the first time in my game, have concrete courses of action tied to them. (Yes, I realize that what I've described isn't the Carcosan alignment system, where Chaos means allegiance to the Old Ones; the Law-Chaos alignment spectrum I've described comes from thinking about the implications of cherry-picking elements of Carcosa and adding them to my game.)

9. The five lotuses: Each one, in powdered form, has drastic and dangerous effects on those who consume them. One creates non-undead zombies, so that's pretty cool.

10: Three new colors with which to freak my players out: I realize that Geoffrey didn't invent these, but how much on this list did he really invent? The great thing about Carcosa isn't so much that Geoffrey created a setting out of whole cloth but that he synthesized lots of ideas from Appendix N and other traditional D&D sources and then distilled them into fun, easy-to-adjudicate systems and a setting with its own very flavorful atmosphere.

Disclaimer: This is a quasi-review, so, consistent with my policy, I'll point out here that Geoffrey commented on my last post about Carcosa. I haven't had any contact with him other than that.

Triple-Axis Alignment System

Recently, Delta posted two quotes from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. Clearly, this is at least a large part of the inspiration for alignment as originally conceived in DnD.

I think, for my purpose, the most important line in what Delta quoted is, "Decent humanity would, on the other hand, always want to strengthen and extend Law, safety, predictability." That's the main problem I have with the traditional definitions of the Law-Chaos spectrum: when all the PCs, and just about everyone they meet that they aren't killing is too, what's really the point of saying they are Lawful? Categories only work if they provide useful distinctions.

So, while the original DnD Law-Chaos spectrum is cool, I think it might be best left in the inspirational material. (Then again, I might be missing something- I suspect not, though, since, from what I can tell from reading the blogs, alignment is something everyone deals with differently. This just happens to be the way I deal with alignment.) In my games, I instead use a triple-axis alignment system. It's based off of the 1e-3.5 double-axis alignment system, with another axis that resembles, but is certainly not identical to, the original Law-Chaos spectrum.

I'm not going to include the write-ups of the Law-Chaos and Good-Evil spectrums that I included in my players' handbooklets that I typed up, partly because they are long and everyone is probably already familiar with them, and partly because I'm not sure, technically, about the rights to everything in them. I borrowed some from the 3.5 SRD and am also pretty sure that I got some inspiration from ChicagoWiz, but I don't know just which parts, and I don't know the particular blog post, so it's safer if I keep that offline. I call this third spectrum of alignment the "Civilization-Barbarism" spectrum. Here's what I included in my handbooklet:

The Civilization-Barbarism axis concerns the way a character views the spread of large nations and the homogenization of culture and progression of science that comes with it. A Civilized character will view the expansion of great civilizations to be bringing light to dark places, making the world safer and advancing progress. He will value cosmopolitanism and science and will make sacrifices to bring other places within the influence of his civilization or just civilization in general. A Neutral character may not care about such things as progress or the destruction of old ways, or he may see both good and bad in the growth of great civilizations. A Barbaric character views the growth of nations and civilizations to be a destructive influence, destroying the sacred traditions passed down for generations and forcing all in its wake to adopt the soulless ways of life of the conqueror, or else become extinct. A Barbaric character will fight against the imposition of a dominant culture upon others of different cultures and will work towards the preservation of diverse races and ways of life, whether his own or others'.

A good test to see where your character falls on the Civilization-Barbarism axis is to imagine that your character is leading a squad of crack fighting men through a forest when they come upon a battle between the Imperial Guard and some nomadic tribesmen. If your character sides with the Imperial Guard, your character is Civilized. If your character sides with the nomadic tribesmen, your character is Barbaric. If your character sides with neither side, your character is Neutral.

How do you use alignment in your games? Is my triple-axis alignment system too complicated, do you think? Is there something I'm missing that is causing me to abandon the original Law-Chaos spectrum?