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 ren...

Googling "Fixing the Cleric" in quotes give ca 17900 results. Obviously, this is a recurring theme of frustration among D&Ders. So here is take 17901 trying to do the same. Why this keeps coming up is not hard to see - There are no clerics in fiction. It doesn't match to any sort of narrative archetype. The only archetypes it is recognised as is gamist: "the healer". As it is, it falls squarely between the two stools of religious warrior (which is the Paladin) and Mystic (which doesn't really exist in D&D). It's not that divine classes themselves struggle with this. Paladins are an easily recognisable archetype, as are druids. Yet, somehow clerics seem to expertly evade narrative recognition after decades of being a core class in D&D. The Cleric as Gamist Archetype Maybe if they had made the cleric more like the monk, using simple weapons and little armor but being somewhat capable in melee anyway and then jazzed that up with cl...

Back in the day, when I thought alignments were stupid and confining to character development and lawful/chaotic made the least sense of all, nothing was more contrived than alignment languages . From the Rules Cyclopedia: Each alignment has a secret language of pass- words, hand signals, and other body motions. Player characters and intelligent monsters always know their alignment languages. They will also recognize when another alignment language is being spoken, but will not understand it. Alignment languages have no written form. A character may not learn a different alignment language unless he changes alignments. In such a case, the character forgets the old alignment language and starts using the new one immediately. So because of your philosophical convictions, you learn how to speak a new language. Right, way to go putting everything in black and white. I wondered if anyone ever actually used this bizarre device at the table. Of course, since then I've done a...

Being a write-up of how alignment works in Erce and a few ponderous notes on said write-up. Pic unrelated. Alignment Alignment in Erce runs on either a 2 or 4 point axis. The most fundamental and unavoidable one is Law vs Chaos – This is an either/or disposition. If you are not Lawful you are, by definition, Chaotic – There is no in between. This alignment axis is more of an allegiance, or even obligation, than an ethical or philosophical outlook that dictates ones actions – It is most fundamentally choosing sides in a cosmic battle. An adherence to a metaphysical, but very much tangible, faction. The other polarity is an ethical one: Good vs Evil – Unlike Law and Chaos, most people are not strongly aligned with these to be truly considered either. Though good is known and valued all across the West, the notion that people ought to be guided wholly by ethical choices is not a universal one. Being morally upright is a value that must be weighed against other values lik...