AD&D Alignment Notes

Alignment in D&D is one of those perennial (and perennially frustrating) topics of discussion, because everyone has their own ideas about what the words mean, and the definitions provided in the books are overly vague and generalized to the point of being essentially meaningless, so there's a lot to argue about and for people to accuse each other of being both Wrong and possibly A Bad Person. 

What it ultimately comes down to is that each individual DM should decide how they want to define and handle alignment in their campaign world and let the players in that campaign know what they've decided early on rather than assuming everyone is in agreement and then getting into arguments later on when the players do something based on a different interpretation than the DM. While that's surely wishful thinking (because players who disagree with how the DM defines things aren't going to disagree any less if they see it in writing in advance) I've nonetheless collected some notes both on how I view the alignments in my games along with some representative examples of characters from fiction and media who I feel fit into each of the alignment buckets, and figured since I've gone to the trouble to write this stuff down I might as well share it. The examples serve a second purpose as well, by drawing characters from a variety of sources that I'm interested in and feel are relevant to the style and flavor of the games I like to run (as opposed to other lists you can find online, which tend to be limited solely to examples from comics, Star Wars, and Harry Potter). 

AD&D ALIGNMENT NOTES

Lawful Respects (and expects) authority and loyalty derived from formal structures (title, office) and hierarchical organizations

Chaotic Respects (and expects) authority and loyalty based on individual personal qualities (strength, charisma, renown, family ties) and fluid or informal power-structures

Good Seeks to help others, especially the weak

Evil         Seeks to exploit others, especially the weak

Neutral Pragmatic, opportunistic, or indifferent 

Representative examples from fiction and media:

Lawful Good John Carter (Edgar Rice Burroughs), Agent Dale Cooper (Twin Peaks), Roland Deschain (Dark Tower), Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), Spock (Star Trek)

Neutral Good Cazaril (Curse of Chalion), Jake Chambers (Dark Tower), James T. Kirk (Star Trek), Harry Potter, Shimrod (Lyonesse)

Chaotic Good Lyra Belacqua (His Dark Materials), Eddie Dean (Dark Tower), Katniss Everdeen (Hunger Games), Kickaha/Paul Janus Finnegan (World of Tiers), Peter Pan

Lawful Neutral Judge Dredd, Inspector Javert (Les Misérables), Agent Albert Rosenfield (Twin Peaks), Severian (Book of the New Sun)

True Neutral Ged/Sparrowhawk (Earthsea), The Gray Mouser (Fritz Leiber), The Man With No Name (Sergio Leone movies), Nifft the Lean (Michael Shea), Rhialto the Marvelous (Jack Vance)

Chaotic Neutral Harry Mudd (Star Trek), Loki (Marvel movies), Skafloc (The Broken Sword), Captain Jack Sparrow (Pirates of the Caribbean)

Lawful Evil Casmir (Lyonesse), Lady/Dorotea Senjak (The Black Company), President Snow (The Hunger Games)

Neutral Evil Kane (Karl Edward Wagner), Khan Noonien Singh (Star Trek), Steerpike (Gormenghast) 

Chaotic Evil BOB (Twin Peaks), Cugel the Clever (Jack Vance), Voldemort (Harry Potter)

Jim Henson: Genius

Yesterday my wife and I finally made it to the Jim Henson exhibition that has been running all summer at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and will be closing in two weeks. It's got puppets, drawings, models, and videos from across his entire career, from the 50s to his untimely death in 1990. It was a great experience, drawing a huge multi-generational crowd where the parents were just as excited and emotional as their kids. I couldn't resist getting a photo with the oracular pile of offal that gives this blog its name (even though it was just a huge photo, not the actual puppet), as can be seen in the new cover photo. 

What really struck me seeing all of Henson's life work collected before me is how key a role he played in my childhood - from Sesame Street as a very small child to the Muppet Show (and movies, especially the first one), Fraggle Rock, and The Dark Crystal, he was a constant presence for the first decade of my life. By the time Labyrinth came out (in 1986) I disdained it as kid-stuff but I came to appreciate it later, as an adult (in no small part as I discovered that girls around my age with nerdy proclivities all adore it - I don't think I ever dated a girl who wouldn't include it on her list of all-time favorite movies). Thinking about it now and looking back, I see how much of an influence his sensibility had on me - his imagination and proclivity towards the surreal and fantastic, his irreverent sense of humor, his lack of condescension or cynicism, his work-ethic and meticulous sense of craft and artistry, and his DIY free spirit. This was a guy who loved TV and puppetry, and had a boundless imagination and hippie idealism, and spent his entire life working to bring those strands together and create something that hadn't been seen before but has become so ubiquitously and indispensably ingrained in our culture in the decades since that we now take it completely for granted - of course there will always be weird wise-cracking felt puppets of impossible creatures who straddle the line between entertainment for children and for adults.

There's no historical survey or detailed analysis here because Jim Henson isn't somebody I've studied in any sort of consciously comprehensive manner - I haven't read books about him and don't know that much about his life or his puppetry techniques or any of that stuff. I just know him through his work, and even that I know mostly on a sort of pre-conscious emotional level, remembered from the mists of my early childhood. But it has a strong pull on me, a deep inner resonance, that experiencing the exhibit yesterday really brought home to me. Encountering those felt puppets of Kermit and Grover and Beaker and the Fraggles and the gelflings and skeksis, I understood and realized how much of a presence and influence Jim Henson and his creations were for me, even without me ever consciously being aware of it, and that feels like a profound discovery - a key to a new, unexplored room of my inner self.

All of which is to say that if you were a kid in the 70s or 80s, and will be in Los Angeles during the next couple weeks (or this exhibition travels near to where you live), I really recommend going to see it, but prepare yourself to be overwhelmed by a wave of nostalgia and emotion.

[Movies] Fantasy Movies of the 80s

It's crazy looking back how much the 1980s (especially the first part of the decade) were an incredibly rich goldmine of fantasy-oriented movies, to an extent that I don't believe has been matched before or since. Sure, many of them were low budget and/or aimed at kids (and many of them were pretty awful), but there were some high-budget movies and things aimed at older audiences as well. It's no wonder kids in this era all took so naturally to D&D - we had already been totally inundated with and acculturated to fantasy, whether we realized it or not. This is just a partial list, going by memory of things I saw, and doesn't even include all of the fantasy-oriented TV shows of the era like Thundarr the Barbarian, The Smurfs, Fraggle Rock, ThunderCats, He-Man, and (of course) Dungeons & Dragons, or non-English-language and anime stuff that I didn't become aware of until the 90s or later:

1981
Clash of the Titans
Excalibur
Time Bandits
Dragonslayer
Heavy Metal

1982
Conan the Barbarian
The Dark Crystal
The Last Unicorn
The Secret of NIMH
The Beastmaster
The Sword and the Sorcerer

1983
Fire and Ice
Krull
Deathstalker

1984
Gremlins
Ghostbusters
The Neverending Story
Conan the Destroyer

1985
Legend
Return to Oz
Ladyhawke
The Black Cauldron
Red Sonja
The Barbarian Queen

1986
Big Trouble in Little China
Labyrinth
Highlander

1987
The Princess Bride
Masters of the Universe
The Barbarians

1988
Beetlejuice
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
Willow

1989
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
Erik the Viking
Ghostbusters II