Dragonlance: Law vs Chaos

Been thinking of Dragonlance again lately. And one thing that strikes me is that the setting works so much better on a classic Moorcockian axis of Law vs Evil than it does "good vs evil", so I thought I'd write to unpack my meditations on this.

For one, the whole "i am on the side of EVIL" shtick. Does that even exist? has it ever? There has been plenty of evil in world history, but as near as I can see, even in those cases of self-admitted evil, it has been something accepted as a means to a higher end, never an end in itself. Team Evil simply isn't a coherent position.

Law and Chaos however, are very much coherent positions. And it makes a lot of things in Dragonlance coherent quite easily.

For one, it gives the black hats a justifiable place in the world. Sure, a lot of Chaos followers may be evil (owing to the ease with which Chaos can be used to deconstruct of moral order), but they are not necessarily so. They are also agents of liberty, change and renewal, of elemental dissolution and testing what is stale. Even amongst the cruel and callous of Chaotic cohorts (of which there are many), "Evil" misses the mark. Say rather that they are first and foremost predatory.

And Takhisis is of course, the apex predator of the setting. The Queen of Chaos who incessantly gnaws at the roots of the world and basically wants to eat the world and dominate all she can not yet consume. She is the primordial elemental force in the world (just as Paladine is the primordial refinement and sublimation of the elemental in the world), but what creative potential she might have once possessed has been subverted to elemental destructiveness. 

Sargonnas is a somewhat more upright deity, even if he is relentless dedicated to the testing of all that exists, clearing away all that is too weak to endure his challenges. He speaks power to the strength and wrath that overcomes adversity and breaks that which lacks the sufficient strength to do so. Needless to say, ogres and minotaurs think he's real cool, even if they have different notions of how honorable he is.

Zeboim is volatility and strife, motility violently embodied in the form of the tempest and sea. Above all, she is the goddess of change and transformation, at the ready to thrash though any bumper lanes and dams that might hem or stall its advance.

Morgion, the god of decay, rot, pestilence and disease. He ensures the passing of that which should pass and provides the soil for renewal. A hard uncaring god, but not a tempestuous one like the former three.

Hiddukel - the trickster who facilitates change from within Law itself through the subversion of it. Arguably the most effective of the chaos gods besides Takhisis herself.

And Orcus Chemosh, the foul anti-god who should not be. A corrupted reflection/emanation of Takhisis hunger for all-consumption. The only truly evil Chaos god, besides Takhisis herself.

Besides Chemosh, the chaos gods all have a love/hate relationship with Takhisis. They do not share her extreme ambitions of all-consumption and total domination, but their short and mid-term desires overlap often enough that they join forces as often as they squabble in petty rivalry and sometimes downright enmity.

Paladine, the lord of order, majesty, kingship, light and redemption. In that order. For the most part, a good guy. But, you know, the Kingpriest was his acolyte. He's not the most flexible guy. There is a strong argument that says that his success as the patron of Istar was the root cause of the cataclysm. And you can be sure Chaos cohorts will remind you of that, even if he might have a few regrets on how that all panned out. Some also say that his rigidness is why he was not the sole patron of the knights of Solamnia and why they endured longer than Istar.

Mishakal is lawful GOOD. nuff said. She was not in any way party to the causes of the cataclysm.

Majere is as lawful neutral as they come. order! work! austerity! discipline! nirvana! But spoken softly unless a kungfu kick is required to uphold it.

Branchala is the musicality of existence, the aspect of law that is harmony and aesthetic patterning. She is all fractals and symphonic creativity, anthropomorphised into a divine bard.

Kiri-jolith - as the god of justice, battle, honor and solidarity, he definitely has more emphasis on law than good. Still a good you want on your team regardless.

Habbakuk is an oddity in the lawful pantheon, a guardian and balancing deity, who is basically the antithesis to Chemosh, and to a lesser extent Zeboim and Morgion, that keeps their chaotic influence on the natural world in check. His vitality and passion is in many ways the animating force of the lawful pantheon.

The neutral gods are the checks and balances that ensure that Law and Chaos come together as a symbiosis. They are also the secondary cause of the cataclysm, in a manner of speaking. The Dragonwars were Takhisis' play at an endgame. Istar was Paladine's play at an endgame and arguably the more successful of the two, because the Kingpriest was on the verge of success. That meant neutrality had only one balancing move left and that was to lend their power to the Chaos gods and let them call down the cataclysm. The price they exerted from Chaos for this (and were able to enforce upon the lawful pantheon with the support of Chaos) was to pull all divine intervention for the next 350 years, to stabilise the situation. Takhisis wasn't part of the deal since she had been pulled out at the end of the third Dragonwar anyway.

The orders of high sorcery are divided along the lines of the kind of magic they practise. Black robes are literally chaos magic practitioners, White robes abhor it, whilst red robes are into all magic. There's some secondary fault lines about what magic is to be used for. Black robes normally don't have issue with predatory use of magic and often embrace a 'will to power' ethos'. White robes tend to see magic as something to task to greater causes, whatever they may be. They work together to avoid a repeat of the end of the second Dragonwar. White robes are in it because they know without chaos magic, the war would have been lost. black robes are in it, because they know with only chaos magic, they'd have been wiped out. The Orders of High Sorcery is basically a social contract with all non-magic-users of Ansalon for the continued existence of wizardry.

In the Holy Orders of the Stars , Chaos finds representation comes more easily than EVIL as well, for chaos acolytes can rightly claim that they are a necessary part of what makes the world go round and point to the Cataclysm for what happens when they aren’t around. As such, they tend to be grudgingly tolerated as edge cults in most civilised cultures. The exception are the cults of Takhisis and Chemosh, since it is well known that they, like their patron deities, are chaos supremacists who will only ever be content when all that stands against Chaos has been destroyed, corrupted or utterly dominated. Of course there will be some cults to other Chaos gods that are EVIL, and some who will use a front of non-extremism to set up shop in civilised communities (this is also why such 'civilised' cults are never really trusted).

There any many reasons to become an acolyte of Chaos. Some ideological, others simply because a given Chaos god mirrors one's own place and behaviour on the world (Hiddukel is the god of hucksters, flim flams and opportunism, Sargonnas of most non-knightly warriors, Zeboim of those who wish to be free of all confines), some for power, opportunity or desperation.

Whilst Law is generally the favored side in civilised lands, this is by and large owing to the pragmatic concern of the protections it offers against the predations of Chaos. Unlike Istar, most places in Ansalon accept to a greater or lesser degree that the world is governed by all three forces (and thusly reflected in human society) and consider the Holy Order of the Stars a singular order with 18 branches (the gods of magic have no clerical orders), that represents the cosmic order as embodied by the gods, on Krynn. Of course, this has never stopped a good witch burning, or for various Chaos lands to excise all lawful saps in the most violent ways possible. Chaos and Law still WAR against each other.