Re: [DF] What's Distinctive About the Default Worlds of DF?
 

Regarding chaos, the natural order differs a bit from society.

The laws of nature strive toward the state with the lowest energy (although it may be locally). When it comes to society, change is more about creating a new state with oneself or one’s ideology at the top (ideally, or at least higher than the alternatives including the status quo).

So in a sense, chaos (in the real world) is the process of replacing order with order.

Re: [DF] What's Distinctive About the Default Worlds of DF?
 

For a variation — as I recall (it’s been a while since I read it), Warhammer seemed to have a single-axis alignment that still allowed four terms. Good and Evil were much as most people tend to imagine them on a human scale; nice and unselfish people doing pleasant things vs. selfish and heartless people being unpleasant. Law and Chaos then carried these two ideas off to supernatural or psychotic extremes; everything having a place and individual interests always being subordinate to the interests of the collective vs. the war of all against all and cruelty for its own sweet sake.

(Druids and the like then sat in the Neutral middle because they were more worried about preserving nature than in the selfless or selfish interests of human beings.)