On the Muddling Of Alighment

I tiny thought I had: when we think of alignments, they can be interpreted as cosmic or personal.

Good means being kind hearted and well intentioned. GOOD is vaguely Christian and occasionally not very nice or down right vicious. It sometimes seems more concerned with being lawful, but with those laws being generally nice and always important in a cosmic sense. Good can find mercy and spare evil but GOOD rarely does.

Lawful is a respect for rules and social institutions. It's about fair dealings and straight talk. Lawful is civilized, perhaps cultured and refined. Sometimes lawful is snooty. LAWFUL is an absolute obedience to the state, holding the law as a virtue unto itself as opposed to the means to an end. LAWFUL is imperialistic. LAWFUL is suffocating. LAWFUL is merciless and uncaring, without emotion or pity. LAWFUL is arbitrary, and thinks it is GOOD and rarely is.

And LAW is that principle on a cosmic scale. It is the slow crystallization of existence into utopia, an unmoving dead perfection. LAW stands surrounded by enemies and seeks to destroy all of them. LAW believes itself to be GOOD and occasionally is, if only because it fights EVIL and CHAOS.

Sometimes being NEUTRAL is the same as being LAWFUL, and sometimes it means apathy on a cosmic scale. NEUTRAL can also be active, a perpetual helper of the underdog and a preserver of balance, and end in and of itself without any rational purpose. Sometimes neutral means being unthinking and sans opinions, no more than a beast. Sometimes neutral is only neutral about you: the spirit world gives no shits about you.

Evil is selfish, and petty, and always more interested in itself then in you. Evil cares about it's own and sometimes not even them. Evil is backstabbing. Except when evil is just an inverted good, just as loving and caring and loyal but also opposed to GOOD. Not so different after all.

Then there's EVIL, which can be the devil and morally corrupting or 40K and RIP AND TEAR. Which is often the same as CHAOS.

CHAOS is entropy, the slow dissolution of the universe, and a cthullian madness of anti life. Or CHAOS is perfect randomness, a dull and non malevolent static. A more fey twist has CHAOS as being whimsical and cruel and spitting into physic's open mouth. Chaos is also appropriately varied. It can be anti-authoritarian, anti-social, or plain anti-sense.

This complexity of ideas is why some OSR folks insist on 'people are rarely LAWFUL or CHAOTIC, those are cosmic concepts' while in 3.5 we had a lot of angsty chaotic good antiheroes. It's why you get TRUE NEUTRAL  druids and chaotic neutral murder hobos who just set shit on fire.

Writing all of this, I realized all of the alignments, when turned cruel and impersonal, are different shades of cosmic horror. I think that's useful, if you're going to have multiple bad guys. A great way to have a real shithole setting is to make both or all three of the competing cosmic powers be total assholes. It makes a world where only our HUMANITY can save us.