Two pigeons for morality in RPGs

This morning I received a notification about a new video from a fellow collector I know from the Acaeum boards (long live the Acaeum!). It is about Strategic Review #6 made by AZMountaneer: if you’re out of time, please focus on minutes from 7’ up to 9’.

This event brought back to my mind an old post from 2022 I wrote about that very magazine:

Morality, a true cornerstone in the VI·VIII·X KUP RPG

I read again my post and indeed found it lacking the contents of the cited article. So I decided to write today the salient passages of the article with 3 quotes. The first on the definition that EGG outlines for the terms chaos, law, good, and evil: in this case, it would be worth seeing what and how many coincidences can be found with the traits of the characters according to the Path I traced in the meanwhile in the supplement Personæ.

Now consider the term “Law” as opposed to “Chaos”. While they are nothing if not opposites, they are neither good nor evil in their definitions. A highly regimented society is typically governed by strict law, i.e., a dictatorship, while societies which allow more individual freedom tend to be more chaotic. The following lists of words describing the two terms point this out. I have listed the words describing the concepts in increasing order of magnitude (more or less) as far as the comparison with the meanings of the two terms in D&D is concerned:

LAW: Reliability, Propriety, Principled, Righteous, Regularity, Regulation, Methodical, Uniform, Predictable, Prescribed, Rules, Order

CHAOS: Unruly, Confusion, Turmoil, Unrestrained, Random, Irregular, Unmethodical, Unpredictable, Disordered, Lawless, Anarchy

(…) Now consider the terms “Good” and “Evil” expressed in the same manner:

GOOD: Harmless, Friendly, Kind, Honest, Sincere, Helpful, Beneficial, Pure

EVIL: Unfit, Mischievous, Unpleasant, Dishonest, Bad, Injurious, Wicked, Corrupt

The second quote outlines what the GM should do to keep track of development of alignments in each quadrant for the alignments CE, CG, LE, LG (with a fifth central one, neutrality). Btw, a future discussion could be neutrality: to my eyes that concept doesn’t exist in terms of alignment, I hardly can find neutrality in a single act, I can’t figure out a character devoted to neutrality.

Placement of characters upon a graph similar to that in Illustration I is necessary if the dungeon master is to maintain a record of player-character alignment. Initially, each character should be placed squarely on the center point of his alignment, i.e., lawful/good, lawful/evil, etc. The actions of each game week will then be taken into account when determining the current position of each character. Adjustment is perforce often subjective, but as a guide the referee can consider the actions of a given player in light of those characteristics which typify his alignment, and opposed actions can further be weighed with regard to intensity.

The third quote shows the case of a character behaving inconsistently with their alignment.

Alignment does not preclude actions which typify a different alignment, but such actions will necessarily affect the position of the character performing them, and the class or the alignment of the character in question can change due to such actions, unless counter-deeds are performed to balance things. The player-character who continually follows any alignment (save neutrality) to the absolute letter of its definition must eventually move off the chart (Illustration I) and into another plane of existence as indicated.

Now, I kindly ask you to do an exercise: replace the terms 'Alignment' with 'Path' and try to read the paragraph on Morality from the online Core rules here:

CORE RULES ~ CHAPTER II

A local proverb says 'killing two birds with one stone': in my language it is more poetic as it says ‘prendere due piccioni con una fava’ (grab two pigeons with a single broad bean, no one has to kill any bird here)… I think I did it! This post allowed me to point out a very interesting article by EGG and to bring back to your attention the cornerstone that I have carried forward in VI·VIII·X since the very beginning!