Dungeon Fantasy: "Alignment" Traits

[Anders]

Balance/Nature could definitely have Sense of Duty. What about SoD: Nature?

Edit: A better way may be to construct a "will and won't" list (things your characters will or will not do) and price them as a Code of Honor. To be Good, you must do X and not do Y.

[Gedrin]

IMC Sense of Duty(Nature) is on the list of required traits for priests of the "earth goddess". Priestess IMC is near to loosing her divine powers for neglecting this duty. She's getting the shoulder tap next session.

[McAllister]

Where is the bunny/squid axis posited? I just googled it, and I couldn't find anything except this thread. It looks pretty interesting.

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by McAllister

Where is the bunny/squid axis posited? I just googled it, and I couldn't find anything except this thread. It looks pretty interesting.

It's a recurring quasi-joke on the forum, and I do think it works better than simply replicating the standard D&D alignment axes. I agree with Bruno that it works well to characterize strongly "natural order" types vs "cultists who want to summon things from outside our reality" with most normal intelligent being being in the middle.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Sindri

The traditional view of the implicit alignments of Dungeon Fantasy is Good/Evil/Bunny/Squid. What is the Order/Chaos axis based on?

I think the OP wants to delve deeper into morality than the G/E/B/S division does, and also tie some (presumably as many as simulatively feasible) of the mental disads to one of the alignments.

I've done something a bit like that, in my own Ärth historical fantasy setting, linking mental disads with the three Divine/Pagan/Satanic "alignments", but Ärth is not a GURPS-driven setting.

Order/Chaos is an interesting subject. I touch upon that in one of the Elfland articles on my OdinsDay blog. Today, among roleplayers and related subcultures, "Chaos" is seem as sexy, fashionable, cool, even a bit avant-garde perhaps, while "Order" is boring and stale.

But to the medieval mindset, the mindset appropriate for a historical fantasy setting, there was nothing sexy about "Chaos". Chaos represented the breakdown of the natural order, the natural cycles, including cycles of growth and birth. If Chaos takes over, the cows will stop giving milk and having calfs, the grain won't grow, and the women will stop having children so that there's nobody to take care of them and their husbands when they become old and feeble.

Order, on the other hand, was wholesome and safe, meaning the good and crucially important natural cycles would continue, so that life could go on.

To stave off this exceedingly frightening chaos-thing, medievals upheld what they thought of as the social order. Some of that was good, including moral tenets such as not telling lies, but other aspects of it were about conformity to social norms (which very much includes homophobia, and in many places also some form of misogyny) and about accepting severe differences in quality-of-life based on randomness of birth (i.e. someone gets to live a good life, with wine and meat and lots of chicks, because his father was a knight or a count, rather than because he himself is a highly capable individual).

This Order/Chaos distinction seems to be older than the Good/Evil distinction, and is present both in medieval Christian and in medieval pagan societies, although in medieval Christian (and other medieval Abrahamic) societies the presence of two different moral value systems probably had a lot of interesting effects. Notice how you can't explain medieval homophobia via the Good/Evil axis - there simply isn't anything Evil at all about two men wanting to be intimate with each other - but there is a lot of Chaos in it.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Anders

Balance/Nature could definitely have Sense of Duty. What about SoD: Nature?

Maybe. But how much large-scale natural destruction actually happens in a medieval fantasy setting, sufficient to upset even a moderate bunny-type Druid?

I don't think there is any. Large-scale landscape destruction is a sauronic thing, something done by what's essentially a demigod, and with the primary purpose of being evil, whereas realistic exploitation of the landscape is almost never on such a grand scale that it'd upset anyone except the most extreme fanatics.

The one example I can think of, is a Roman method of mining that involves re-routing large streams then running huge (absolutely mindbogglingly huge, relative to medieval standards) amounts of water down hillsides to wash away the dirt to expose certain ores. That was a quick-and-dirty way to get a fair amount of ore, and I can see why even a moderate druid-type person or grouping might object to that. It was quite destructive, and fairly ugly too.

But that was the Romans. I don't think the medievals had the engineering or the manpower to do anything like that.

Some magics, including necromantic or demonic magics, could well have a large-scale Lifebane-type effect. That is objectionable. For instance, the Dead Zone (long-lasting and frequently renewed magic that prevents photosynthesis) around the Magocracy of Bretagne in my Ärth setting, a kilometers-wide band seperating Bretagne from France and Normandy (meaing the magocrats are doing it for a valid strategic reason- they're not sauronic for-the-evulz types). But lots of non-druids, lots of people who don't give a hoot about bunny religions, would also find that objectionable.

That's magic, though. I can't envision mundane industry, at medieval TLs and with even optimistic assumptions about what kind of manpower would be available, doing anything much that could trigger a SoD: Nature in someone else. The land is so wide, and manly projects are so small, after all.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by McAllister

Where is the bunny/squid axis posited? I just googled it, and I couldn't find anything except this thread. It looks pretty interesting.

I'm not sure where it first came up, but someone noticed the repeated references to Elder Things (which are about as unnatural as things get, being from outside time and space and the "natural order of things") and made the obvious play on words about druids being defenders of Nature therefore being opponents of unnatural things.

If this is in fact how the game world works, the fact that Druidic powers are opposed by artificial, urban environments has interesting implications. If "squiddy" elder things are the antithesis of Nature, then urbanization is awfully squiddy...

"Squid" as the nickname for elder horrors seems pretty obvious with Cthulhu and popculture linking with all things tentacular. I'm not 100% sure why "nature" became nicknamed "Bunny". I do know elves and druids have a local nickname of "granola eating bunny-touchers", so I'm guessing whatever that's a reference to is where it came from.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Crakkerjakk

It's a recurring quasi-joke on the forum, and I do think it works better than simply replicating the standard D&D alignment axes. I agree with Bruno that it works well to characterize strongly "natural order" types vs "cultists who want to summon things from outside our reality" with most normal intelligent being being in the middle.

It is worth taking seriously.

The same way GURPS DF is presented as much more low-brow than it actually is, the bunny/squid alignments seem to fit well into the implicit cosmology of the DF setting and so are worth taking fairly seriously.

Then again, I like orthogonality. The Pagan alignment in my Ärth setting isn't actually the middle ground between Divine and Satanic. It's partly middle ground, but much more than that it's something entirely different, agreeing with Divine about some things (in terms of what "mental disads" are morally good or bad) and agreeing with Satanic about some other things.

If one were to use GURPS to run an Ärth campaign (it'd be a bad idea, but i'm just using it as a hypothetical), GURPS' Lecherous mental disad would be favoured by Pagan and Satanic and disfavoured by Divine, while GURPS' Honesty and Truthfulness would be favoured by Divine and Pagan and disfavoured by Satanic. Just to give a few examples.

Same way, DF's Bunny is different from Good (not just a variant, but a thing of its own), and its Squid is different from Evil. That makes them harder to understand, but it still seems like a really good idea. I prefer my division but that's for historical fantasy - for dungeoncrawls and related activities, DF's is clearly much better suited.

[Dwarf99]

Originally Posted by WaterAndWindSpirit

Not necessarily. Someone with Criminal Record could have been framed for a crime they didn't commit.

That's why I said "indicates" rather than "is". Indicates was used in a less absolute sense than one might use 'is' or than what I meant when I said "Add Duty to Order". It was intended to express more of an inclination than an absolute leaning.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Bruno

I don't see Balance and Nature as synonymous, and I've always wondered just where the D&D folks got that idea. I mean, there's "ecological balance", but not much relationship between that and "cosmic forces balance" - yin yang, the four elements, the 2/4 classic D&D alignment extremes, and so forth don't necessarily stand for or against any part of the ecology, so balancing them doesn't seem to go with nurturing the environment.

Many years of confusion over just what the Neutral alignments, especially True Neutral, actually mean AFAICT. One possible meaning is a character who has consciously decided that they don't want to see the triumph of Good, Evil, Law, or Chaos, and is devoted to maintaining some kind of balance between them. The other one is the 'natural' alignment found in animal intelligence creatures (and, theoretically, Druids): a character who is simply unconcerned with matters of good and evil and morality and the like; the wolves trying to eat your horse aren't evil, they're just being wolves.