Blogs and blogs

I've got some good news! I recently joined the blog writing team at Quest Chests, a new fifth edition third-party publisher and content producer. I'll be regularly producing content on a range of 5e topics for players and DMs alike. Check out my first article, hot off the presses, or whatever it is blog posts come hot off of.

Law and Chaos, Revisited

In this post, I quoted, without context, a few passages from Michael Moorcock’s The Weird of the White Wolf, in which Elric muses on law, chaos, and the balance between the two. Moorcock’s Elric stories are the basis for the original D&D alignment system (lawful/neutral/chaotic), and though the D&D alignment system has taken on a life of its own over the course of the past 40 years, understanding its origins in Moorcock’s writing is vital to understanding what it actually means to be “lawful” or “chaotic.”

In the first passage, Elric describes his desire for stability, for order, in the universe. The world is a chaotic place, and Elric searches for meaning in the meaningless swirl of events. Ultimately, however, he decides that there is no lasting order, that chaos reigns: “our brief existence is both meaningless and damned.” Given this truth, he trusts “only in my sword and myself.”

Between the poles of law and chaos, there is another cosmic outlook: neutrality. To be “neutral” in the struggle between law and chaos is to believe that a balance of these two extreme forces is necessary.

The “True Neutral” alignment makes sense within this context. True neutrality is not a belief in the balance between good or evil, in which someone feels the need to balance a benevolent act with a malevolent one—to tip the scales toward goodness by saving an innocent life and then redress this imbalance by murdering an innocent—but a belief in the balance between law and chaos. 

In the neutral disposition, too much law leads to stagnation, but too much chaos leads to dissolution. Rigid bureaucracies need to be shaken up once in a while lest they ossify into reflexive traditionalism, and even in an anarchist society hierarchies must form now and then to accomplish certain goals.

Looking at it this way, neutrality seems like a fairly sensible, even common-sense, position to take. The vast majority of NPCs would likely be neutral, avoiding the extreme positions of law and chaos and instead favoring a pragmatic balance between the two.

A follower of Law, on the other hand, would reject anarchism outright, believing that “without law nothing material is possible,” and that meaning and purpose are inherent within the lawful structure of the universe, while a follower of Chaos would see seemingly “lawful” natural events such as the movements of the planets as ultimately transitory in the grand scheme of things. Everything that seems permanent eventually crumbles into dust, and from that dust, new patterns emerge, but not because of any cosmic order, but by sheer accident. 

Even within the nine-alignment system, understanding law and chaos in this manner makes alignment make sense. The lawful/neutral/chaotic axis is a cosmic philosophical outlook, and the good/neutral/evil axis represents a character’s actions in the context of their philosophical beliefs.

For example, Elric sees only chaos in the universe, and so chooses to trust only in himself. That seems like a chaotic neutral disposition to me, not chaotic evil, as the original Deities & Demigods surmises.

A chaotic evil response to the universal rule of Chaos would be, “nothing matters, nothing means anything, so I am free to lie and steal and kill and do whatever I want because all laws are fake.”

A chaotic good character would see the chaos inherent in the universe and say that because Chaos reigns, Law does not have a monopoly on righteousness. In fact, Law only leads to stagnation, a slavish devotion to tradition, and a constraining of freedom and progress.

So in light of Elric’s ruminations on Law and Chaos, I would explain alignment this way: lawful, neutral, and chaotic describes how you believe the universe functions; good, neutral, and evil describes how you act out those beliefs.