Alignment as cosmic affiliation

A simple line drawing portraying two opposing countries, probably in the Early Modern era. The scene is symmetrical, with one country on the left and one on the right, separated by a body of water. The two are essentially identical. The country on the left is labeled 'Our Blessed Homeland', while the one on the right is labeled 'Their Barbarous Wastes'. This continues with other labels: A castle on the left is marked 'Our Glorious Leader', and one on the right is marked 'Their Wicked Despot'. And so forth. — An absolute classic by Tom Gauld.

I never use alignment in my games. It's a poor representation of human behavior, and I think it produces more trouble than benefits as a game mechanic.

But, back in the '00s or '10s or so, there was a lot of TTRPG discourse around the idea that alignment could actually be cool if you treated it as an objectively real phenomenon, a manifestation of some kind of cosmic conflict. That could make a bit more sense out of things like spells that detect alignment, magic items that work differently depending on the alignment of their wielder or target, and maybe even the much-derided concept of alignment languages.

I think this idea was much more closely associated with the older Law-vs.-Chaos alignment paradigm than the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons nine-box system (which would later become such a meme with "alignment charts" of things like sitcom characters and bread storage techniques). This makes loads of sense, given that D&D's Law/Chaos axis was famously inspired by Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (and probably influenced by Michael Moorcock's Elric / Eternal Champion saga), which absolutely casts those concepts as players in a metaphysical struggle. Also, there's something to be said for leaving the Good/Evil axis out of this conflict, separating cosmic ideals from mortal ones, and avoiding the declaration of any absolute, objective definitions of right and wrong.

Unfortunately, I never really saw any worked examples of this paradigm. Maybe they just stayed in people's home campaigns, or maybe they never really materialized beyond forum discussions. So I'll try developing the idea a bit myself.

A brief sidebar on terminology

So, I actually think that "Law" is a dumb word for a fundamental cosmic force. All respect to Anderson and Moorcock, but for me that word evokes very distinctly human concepts. Maybe it's my familiarity with superhero comics before fantasy novels, but I strongly prefer "Order" as the opposite of Chaos. (See Marvel's Lord Chaos and Master Order, and DC's Lords of Chaos and Order.)

That said, I also think it would be appropriate to discard those very loaded terms anyway.

Chthonos and Ouranos

Two black abstract shapes on a white background. The one on the left is a round-edged splat made of soft curves. The one on the right is a jagged starburst of straight lines and sharp angles. — Everybody's favorite neurolinguistic duo, Bouba and Kiki. You know which is which.

Let's say that there are two opposing metaphysical forces that interfere with sapient beings in the mortal world. These aren't conscious entities like gods, but fundamental forces like gravity or electromagnetism. They've each got a lot of names (being named anew by each culture who encounters them), but I'll mostly call them Chthonos and Ouranos here. As you might guess, these names are derived from the chthonic and ouranic categories of Greek deities. I'd never use them as in-fiction terms (unless I'm setting my game in a Hellenic context), but I'll use them here to distance us from the D&D alignment system.

Chthonos drives people towards change and freedom. It's connected to innovation, creativity, whim, travel, revolution, individualism, transformation, and egalitarianism. It's associated with deep places (both caves and oceans) and the dark, but also with fire. Many of its symbols are variations on spiralling, squirming, or branching shapes, with snakes, trees, and torches also being used.

Ouranos encourages order and cooperation. Tradition, safety, community, permanence, hierarchy, control, and stability are important Ouranos concepts. It's associated with the sky and celestial bodies, with light, with stone and metal, with day and night and the seasons (but not with weather, usually). Its symbols tend towards wheel and circle themes, as well as the sun or moon (or both), stars, eyes (particularly singular, disembodied ones), and also trees (in places where that's not a Chthonos symbol).

Chthonos and Ouranos aren't self-aware, but they create something like a will or drive when in contact with mortal beings, like light shining through a prism to create a rainbow. The mortal involved will get the impression that the force has goals and might even feel that it gives them wordless commands, but those goals and commands are largely the product of the mortal's mind.

Ultimately, it's probably best to look at Chthonos and Ouranos as ideals, but ideals with an objective, external reality.

Alignment

By willingly aligning one's self with Chthonos or Ouranos, a being can become supernaturally connected to their chosen force. This usually involves induction by someone else who's already aligned to that ideal, but there are places, artifacts, and rituals that one might use to embrace a particular force without help.

Alignment has a number of effects, largely beneficial but circumstantially harmful.

Identification

Anyone aligned to a given force can recognize that same alignment in others. They can't sense any alignment in people connected to the opposite force, though—not without using a spell or something.

Communication

Beings who share the same alignment can pretty much understand each other. This isn't telepathy as we normally understand it, nor is it a shared language. It's just that, when an aligned being speaks, the general meaning of their words is conveyed (loosely) to any nearby beings with the same alignment. This also makes it a lot easier to quickly learn the language involved for real, even without the help of a bilingual teacher.

Hierarchy

Alignment carries with it a quantitative rank, an abstract degree of alignment. Everyone starts out at the same base level upon joining up, and their ranking is increased or decreased according to how they serve and aid (or betray) the ideals and individuals associated with their chosen force.

This isn't a social reputation, but an objectively real degree of alignment. The ranking phenomenon is mostly experienced subconsciously, but it has a lot of effect on social interaction: Aligned people tend to go along with higher-ranked people of their alignment, even if they've never met them before.

Note that the whole phenomenon works the same under egalitarian Chthonos as it does under hierarchical Ouranos; it's just expressed differently by the people involved.

Subjection

Alignment can increase the effectiveness of magical or supernatural phenomena applied to an aligned creature by another being of the same alignment. That is, your alignment buddies can heal and buff you more effectively, but they can also hurt you badly if they turn on you.

This effect is strongly dependent on alignment rank, though: Your spells don't get any bonuses when used on your alignment superiors, just your peers and underlings.

Induction

Aligned individuals can grant that same alignment to willing, cognizant, unaligned individuals. There's usually some ceremony involved with this (sometimes a lot of ceremony), but it's not technically necessary: Physical contact and informed consent will do the job. And it needs to really be consent: You can't force anybody to align through duress. It just won't work.

Alignment is generally permanent. That is, there's no built-in capability of alignment to be discarded by the individual or revoked by their superiors. However, very powerful mortal magic can de-align an aligned subject. This is soul manipulation stuff, so we're talking 5th- or 6th-level spells. Also, this is a lot easier if the caster is the target's alignment superior.

Persistence

For some folks, this is the big one. Alignment ties people into their chosen force at the soul level, and the more aligned a person is—the higher their alignment rank—the more of an impression their soul leaves on that interface between the primal force and the world. The ideal itself isn't changed, but the metaphysical shadow or footprint left behind by a person who maintained a high degree of alignment over a long time can even persist after that person's death. And that can be enough to shelter their soul, preserving them from the wheel of rebirth, from roving spiritual predators, and even from whatever divine power might otherwise have a claim on them.

Such souls become a kind of ghost, but without the usual psychological degradation and binding to a location or object. They become saints, ascended masters, even candidates for godhood, and they almost always continue to serve leadership roles within their alignment groups.

Neutrality

There's no such thing as "neutral alignment". There's just Chthonos-aligned, Ouranos-aligned, and unaligned. The vast majority of beings are unaligned.

Society

As I mentioned, "Chthonos" and "Ouranos" are just terms of convenience here. In-fiction, nobody is using those terms. The dual forces they represent don't truly have names, and any culture who becomes aware of them generally comes up with their own terminology. One culture might frame all of reality as a struggle between the Skies and the Depths, while another might talk about the conflict between Fire and the Tree.

Additionally, societies can have wildly varying relationships with these powers. In some places, one force might be accepted—even to the point of making alignment to it a near-universal rite of passage—while the other is considered anathema. Other groups might consider both forces to be dangerous alien influences, and shun all initiation ceremonies as potential vectors for socially destabilizing influences. Some cultures could even regard both ideals as legitimate and morally neutral choices.

Many societies—especially geographically and culturally isolated ones—remain unaware of one or even both forces, at least for now. While Chthonos and Ouranos have presumably existed since the beginning of reality itself, the phenomenon of alignment has a distinct historical starting point—probably a few thousand years ago.

Every few generations or so, reports will emerge of a "third primal force". If any of these really were distinct phenomena on the same order of magnitude as Chthonos and Ouranos, though, their influence in the world must have somehow been curtailed (possibly by agents of the other two), because they never really stuck around. More likely, these other forces were just foreign names and traditions for one or another of the usual two, managing to go unrecognized for a while due to mortal cultural barriers. It's also possible that some alleged thirds really were distinct forces of a totally different type: gods, curses, plagues, cultural movements, etc.

The gods

Gods can be aligned with Chthonos or Ouranos just like any other conscious thing. It's extremely rare for an actual deity to be inducted into an alignment, but it's much less unusual for alignment to be part of a mortal's path to divinity. Souls who manage to persist after death through alignment are often revered within an organization or community of similarly aligned individuals, and that reverence can accrue as divine power across the generations.

Gods born this way inevitably become even more strongly linked to Chthonos or Ouranos than they were in their mortal lives, and they come to represent their chosen force in the eyes of their followers, putting a name and face over a blind and mindless ideal (and possibly joining an existing host of similarly aligned deities). Alignment becomes a sacrament of the new religion, and the god gains the additional power of alignment rank over their subjects.

As a result of this, Chthonic and Ouranic gods (again, not something anyone would call them in-fiction) exist as distinct groups apart from each other, and from the more numerous unaligned deities. Co-aligned gods will often cooperate, even far outside of their own domains and originating cultures.

Elves, dwarves, and others

Somewhere in my giant scratch document, I've got this half-facetious and unexpounded fragment:

Elves are what happen when a human civilization succumbs to Chaos. Dwarves are what happen when a human civilization succumbs to Law.

I'm not actually interested enough in demihumans to develop the idea—for real, I generally want either a setting that's all humans or one that gets a little more interesting than pointy ears—but there might be something in it. Maybe elves, fairies, and goblins are all creatures of Chthonos, the end result of that primal force being allowed to influence human biology for generation after generation. And Ouranos, meanwhile, might have done the same thing to dwarves and, say, gnomes and giants, maybe. (Of course, in this paradigm, the elves would probably live underground while the dwarves live on mountaintops.)

You could also connect the traditionally Law/Chaos-designated devils and demons to the two primal forces as well: Maybe those flavors of fiend are just the fates of aligned souls who don't manage to hold onto the mortal world after death.

Back in the v.3.5 days, demons had a vulnerability to iron, while devils had a vulnerability to silver. (The latter quality remains in 5e, I think, but I think iron is no longer a mechanically distinct weapon material.) And, of course, fae creatures are frequently vulnerable to "cold iron". I tend to think of fairies as chaotic creatures, even if the Monster Manual doesn't back me up, so I always thought that maybe demons were vulnerable to iron because they were chaotic. And, really, doesn't iron feel like kind of a Law-aligned substance? You know, being associated with bars and chains and such? Whereas silver might be considered chaotic through its connection to the ever-changing moon? Of course, this paradigm really wants me to find a way to say that lycanthropes are especially lawful, which I can't honestly do. Oh well. But I definitely think you could extend the Chthonos and Ouranos correspondence chart to include materials, and iron and silver are thematically solid choices.

(I'm beginning to fear I overuse the word "paradigm" the way Gygax overused "millieu".)

Mechanics

Dang, maybe another time. This post is long enough. I might start working this alignment concept into the BX hack I'm developing, and nail down some mechanics in that process.

Posted 2025-09-09

Zoteris