Years ago now I tried writing a post about alignment in D&D, Elden Ring, and Michael Moorcock. It quickly bloated into a messy constellation of ideas that only got even worse when I realized I didn't know who the hell Poul Anderson is, nor how much more important to the development of old D&D alignment (and the entirety of the paladin class) his book Three Hearts and Three Lions was.* So, I gave up on it.
More recently I found myself poring over Dragon Lords of Melniboné, the 3E Goldrush-era d20 port of the Stormbringer RPG by Chaosium. It's an odd duck that combines a few secondary systems from the original d100 game with the core d20 mechanic in a way that isn't terribly strange or broken, and from what little I know of the universe (being as poorly read as I am) it seems to strive to maintain lore-accuracy as well. Overall functional, I'd say.
It also inspired me to take another shot at the main point I'd wanted to make in that old draft:
I think using alignment inspired by the metaphysics from Moorcock's Eternal Champion series could make D&D more interesting- when one is forced into the unenviable position of having to use alignment at all, that is.
Why Do I Keep Saying "Moorcockian" Anyway?
To start, I should explain what I even mean by Moorcockian cosmology and metaphysics.
In the Eternal Champion series, the universe is a perpetual battleground between the metaphysical forces of Chaos and Law. Chaos is change, entropy, and random chance. Law is stability, stasis, and predictability. These are not personal beliefs or inclinations, but the rules that undergird the laws of physics such as they exist in this universe. Both are necessary for the multiverse as we know it to exist, but neither side cares about that; each force wants to defeat the other and reshape the cosmos in its own image. Chaos would render everything down into a roiling soup of ephemera constantly changing too quickly to really make anything, while Law would fix everything in perfect, crystalline singularity and stasis where nothing can grow or live.
The fine line between the two extremes is the only situation in which the wonders of existence can, well, exist. That is where the third metaphysical force, the Cosmic Balance, comes into play. Balance exists to keep the other two forces in check before they destroy everything with their perpetual clashing. Balance works to equalize Chaos and Law, and whenever there is a severe unbalance, it sends a new incarnation of the series' tragic protagonist, the Eternal Champion, to go sort it out.
If you've ever read the AD&D 2E writeup on alignments where a True Neutral druid is shown to help a local barony against some marauding gnolls, only to then side with the gnolls once they're on the backfoot, the Cosmic Balance is the initial idea that I believe Zeb Cook or someone on his development team took and then royally butchered and contorted into the above scenario.
I must stress that Balance is not neutrality in the interest of some unchanging status quo, nor is the Eternal Champion like the aforementioned pendulum druid, but that is a common way things are interpreted. I think that's due in part to how Elric's story, the most famous in the Eternal Champion series, depicts a world where Chaos is ascendant and thus it, the Chaos gods, and their servants are depicted in an almost comically super-villainous light, which makes the stodgy defenders of Law far more sympathetic, and Elric's eventual alliance with them can come across as vetting them as the official "good" side.
But as I've been rambling, neither Chaos nor Law are good or evil, and Balance is not morally neutral for being between the two. In fact, because Balance is so inextricably linked to life and all its boundless wonder and potential, it often comes across as both morally good and prosocial in Moorcock's writing; he's a lifelong anarchist after all. My favorite example of this is how Tanelorn, the city of Balance located simultaneously outside of and at the very center of the universe, sometimes reads less like a Sigil-esque no man's land and more like a chill commune where you can sort out your mental health, and true love can flourish outside the toxifying confines of violent society- unless of course you're Elric.
I say all of that to get to this next and most important part about using Moorcockian alignment in D&D: it's no longer about morality.
While the servants of some sides exhibit more behaviors of a certain morality than others at various points in the series, the cosmic forces themselves really don't care that much about an individual's personal ethics or lack thereof, so long as they further the cosmological goals of that force. As an example, Elric starts off as an absolute bastard despite being the incarnate champion of Balance, and only gradually turns into something more hero-adjacent as a side effect of fulfilling his role. Another dissonance is the weirdly bureaucratic and hierarchical Theocracy of Pan Tang, which operates an orderly and authoritarian war machine that efficiently mobilizes and depopulates entire continents... but it's all in service to Chaos, so Arioch & Chaos Co. don't mind one bit.
You can of course still present a side as better than the other for the purposes of a campaign, though. Throughout the Eternal Champion series both the subjectively positive and negative aspects of Chaos and Law are showcased as the wind switches direction. It can be a very 'one's terrorists are another's freedom fighters' sorta deal depending on POV. But there are no longer any morally objective tags of [Good] and [Evil] to consider.
This recontextualization of alignment around big, cosmic acts rather than the personal and individual is, I think, somewhat freeing for many types of characters and stories. Sincerely kind people and royal pricks can find themselves working toward the exact same metaphysical goals, a slight shift in morality doesn't put champions like paladins in danger of Falling, and the overwhelming majority of creatures in your D&D world would be (or at least start off being) neutral and uninvolved in the cosmic conflict, so you're free to have the same interpersonal moral complexity as in an alignment-free game.
Remember, minor acts shouldn't budge the PCs' place in the conflict much, so the low levels might also be heavily unaligned until the PCs grow powerful enough or (un)lucky enough to meaningfully tip the scales in some way with a regional shift in power or so. That leads to the cosmic forces taking an interest, which in turn leads to a gradual teasing-out of the universe war.
It also makes the OD&D convention of alignment languages make so much more sense in-universe. Moral outlook as the determining factor in whether or not you know a club's secret passwords is kind of silly; it being something taught to you after you consciously buy into the cosmic conflict as a way to communicate in code with other members of your metaphysical army is cool.
Reusing the 3-Point Alignment Axis
Speaking of OD&D, that would be the easiest edition in which to implement this alignment system, partly because it was only just recently divorced from something quite like it back when D&D released in the '70s. Keep the 3-point axis of Chaos and Law with Neutral in the middle, rename Neutral to Balance, and instead make "Neutral" the default alignment outside of the spectrum for beings totally uninvolved in the conflict, like Unaligned animals in 4E, or certain outsiders.
Speaking of 4E, the odd job they did flattening alignment into a linear track from LG down through Neutral straight to CE in that edition actually fits this whole scheme just as well; it's basically a 5-point axis.
PCs begin dead-center and then hold steady or drift one way or the other depending on their acts in the world. Anyone can choose to have a disposition one way or the other as backstory demands however, and certain classes like pact warlocks, clerics, and paladins should automatically begin a couple steps to one side as appropriate. Druids and their kind start and probably stay in the center, right where their normal counterparts do.
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| Just slap a meter on this bad boy and you're good to go. |
How long to make the axis depends on how much you want to do with it and how granular things get. You could make it as simple as just 5 or so steps from Balance to one of the extremes, with 1 step representing the minimum level of devotion to a force that an underling can demonstrate, and 5 being a creature who has practically ascended to become one with the force so to speak.
One downside of this approach is that it kind of diminishes Balance and makes it seem more like Neutrality, since one cannot become anymore aligned with Balance through deeds than an ordinary creature starts off as when they're born. One solution to that is...
Alternative Approach: Scoreboard
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| Ill-fittingly crisp numbers added for illustrative purposes. |
Taking another cue from the Stormbringer books, instead of using an axis that you shimmy back and forth along, keep a scoreboard of how much stuff you've done aligned with each cosmic force.
These Allegiance Points or Elan as they're called in the d100 games are on a 0 to 100 scale. All three forces have an Elan scale, and a player keeps a running tally of all three on their character sheet. Everyone starts at 0 in all three unless a starting class or other factor changes that. Major acts like slaying demons or casting magic add or subtract from a PC's allegiance points in the appropriate power, but it's possible to accrue points in all three at once due to the complexities and inconsistencies of being people.
Without a sliding scale, your highest value represents the force you are most aligned with (and that's only if you accept it), but having a close second can indicate all manner of plot-driving possibilities like inner turmoil, deliberate playing-off of several factions, suspicion among the gods of 'your' side as to your true loyalties, or even that another faction is interested in poaching you.
In this system rather than beginning one or more steps toward one extreme, clerics and their ilk instead start with X amount of points in their chosen power, whereas everyone else starts with all 0s.
Whether or not your game uses allegiance points to fuel certain powerful effects or events like divine intervention or ultimate apotheosis in the Stormbringer books is your call, but it is an easy and fun way to transform D&D alignment into a gameplay resource rather than a potentially limiting guideline.
Salvaging the Holmes' Basic Alignment X
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| Has anyone ever read an explanation for this one? |
Holmes' Basic with its weird 5-point alignment system of Lawful Good <=> Chaotic Evil and Chaotic Good <=> Lawful Evil with Neutral slapped in the middle of the two kinda-sorta-overlapping axes is harder to adapt to nonmoral concepts, but then again it was always kind of incongruous with the rest of D&D at the time. The axes don't exist independent of one another, so you can't have a creature dedicated to just Chaos or just Good; only Chaotic Good. I've found the matrix odd ever since I first learned about it through Blueholme; it lacks the simplicity of the 3-point linear axis and the depth of the 9-point graph without really adding anything of its own, unless I'm just completely missing the point.
Regardless of my feelings on it, you don't have to ditch the Holmes X. In fact it's very useful for illustrating my next big point: don't limit yourself to Moorcockian Chaos vs Law.
You can and should think up different sets of powers to align in an X or + shape, but maybe with the extremities corresponding to each power directly rather than to a corner between two of them. These could be two sets of opposing forces that are then neutral to each other, to explain the shape.
An example of this would be using the classic elements as the cosmic forces. Earth stands opposed to Air and Fire to Water (or Earth to Water and Fire to Air as the Elric book I was reading earlier did it). Actions in favor of one element necessarily pull you away from its opposite, but the other two don't particularly care (unless you're mucking about at such a high level you might upend the entire planet).
A character also has the option of gaining favor with one side of the remaining pair in such a system as well, or remaining neutral in that particular conflict. Thus a PC could wind up wholly dedicated to one force, or they could wind up in a corner between non-opposing sides like the original Holmes X.
9-Point Alignment Chart
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| The format that launched a million memes when I was in high school. |
Now it's time for the big one. The 9-point box that most people imagine when they think of alignment in D&D. Obviously a single-axis cosmic battle won't do here, but you can easily use the default system's double axes replaced with two opposed pairs, similar to how we did the Holmes X a minute ago.
But I think there's a cooler way to implement this chart than that. And it only involves throwing it in the trash a little bit.
Most D&D CRPGs over the years have given the alignment axes numerical values, whether they're hidden or visible. I want to say the old Neverwinter Nights games use a -100 to 100 scale? This turns a character's alignment into a dot on a graph plot shaped like the above that moves around according to the morality of actions taken during play.
I want to take that concept, but round the edges off the box a little. In fact, make it a circle.
AD&D also brought us what would come to be known as the Great Wheel cosmology, in which a huge number of intersecting cosmic planes lead to the existence of the Prime Material where most of the living and adventuring and dying takes place in a given game. Of interest to me are the Outer Planes, which are the manifestations of different moral and ethical outlooks, home to gods, archdemons, angels, fiends, and all that sort of thing.
I like me some Planescape, and I know what I'm about to suggest sounds like a derangement of the basic conceit of the setting. But consider giving the Outer Planes the same treatment as Law vs Chaos and strip the objective morality dimension from them.
Every god and outsider can remain exactly as pleasant, nasty, or indifferent as they are in canon, and each plane can pursue the same interests abroad, so no need to cancel the Blood War or other turf wars and Prime Material influence/absorption plots. In-universe, people can still conceive of them and speak of them in the same language of moral extremes. But none of them are literal manifestations of good, evil, law, chaos, or neutrality anymore.
To reflect this change, mortals don't have any of the old 9 alignments. Like in the 3-point system the overwhelming majority of living creatures are or start off with a planar alignment of Neutral in the dead center of the alignment chart. Radiating out from that center is a map of all 16 Outer Planes with a circular grid of planar alignment steps between them and the center, which you could represent with your pick of the Prime Material, Outlands, the Spire & Sigil, or The Lady. Just be careful of that last one.
A major step toward aligning with one plane, its agents, and its motives moves you one box closer to that plane. A step toward one of its polar opposites (any of the 3 planes directly across the middle from it and its edges on the wheel) brings you back toward the center. A step toward a non-opposed plane rotates you one box over, while staying in your row. As in previous charts clerics, warlocks, paladins, and other people with overt connections to extraplanar forces begin play a few alignment steps closer to the plane to which they are connected.
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| Basically just slap a polar grid on top of this badder boy and you're even gooder to go. |
Max steps toward a plane may represent a character becoming such a living embodiment of that plane that they transform in some way, like Stormbringer's apotheosis mechanic but far less powerful. Consider something along the lines of giving the character free [Outsider] traits, free teleportation to and from their chosen plane and the Prime Material, or other goodies. Also consider drawbacks, such as creatures, weapons, or magic aligned with an opposing plane being able to harm them more than usual. That allows you to continue to implement things like Protection from X spells, weapons that bypass certain Damage Reduction, and so on.
Other Ideas
There are plenty of other ways to implement a more Moorcockian style of alignment in a d20 game if the above seem a little too awkwardly-fitted or uninspired for you. There're 13th Age's Icons, Dungeon World's Bonds, and various similar boon/relationship type mechanics from other games. Knowing my luck, there's probably a game directly inspired by the concept that delivers on it perfectly, but I somehow overlooked it.
* Full Spoilers for those who don't care: 3H&3L is a 1961 novel about a Danish Resistance engineer in WW2 getting shot by Nazis while protecting Niels Bohr. At that point he's isekai'd into a medieval French parallel universe where folklore and Arthurian legend are real and a war between Law and Chaos is raging. He finds some knightly gear including a shield emblazoned with the titular heraldry, falls in love with a swan elf, befriends a funky little dwarf who's actually the earliest confirmed instance of a dwarf with a Scottish accent before the fantasy media of the '90s and 2000s, becomes the champion of Law, and eventually discovers he's an incarnation of one of Charlemagne's paladins. Also Morgan le Fay shows up to be villainously sultry a couple times. It's a trip.
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