The “Another Lawful Good Quandry” thread reminded me of the funny things that can happen when players who are entrenched in the alignment grid mindset find themselves in an RPG with no formal alignment rules.
Last year I was running a fantasy game (using Savage Worlds with the Fantasy Companion accessory book) in which the players had built their characters according to familiar D&D tropes. The setting was an alternate history version of the Byzantine Empire in which magic actually works, circa 1000CE. The main three who were present for every session were a barbarian axeman from the north, a dwarven cleric, and a wizard named Frazier Balzof (technically a shaman, but he played like a wizard) with a penchant for ice magic.
They found an island that was being attacked by pirates. The islanders were not quite undead - a colony of people who fled society due to being cursed, being dhampirs (the offspring of a vampire and a mortal), etc. They raised chickens and did a lot of night fishing. The island’s leader was a traditional Greek necromancer, one of the psuchagôgoi or “soul-conductors”. Got a ghost problem? He’ll bust it. Someone was murdered? He’ll interview the victim and get the killer’s name. He also claimed to be a pacifist. The players were a bit stumped by the situation, because they couldn’t just whip out their Detect Evil spell. The pirates were not nice people, obviously attacking the island during the day when many of the inhabitants were helplessly stuck indoors or asleep. However, the islanders had to be Evil, didn’t they? They ended up helping the islanders, but were uncomfortable with it and kept waiting for me to spring some sort of trap on them. They are still suspicious of the whole thing.
No, but kudos for inverting the trope that the undead are always evil. (Assuming you didn’t in fact spring a trap on the party that you just didn’t mention.)
All the way back in the distant land known as the early 80s, I recall teaming up with a minor Lich (called a Demi-Lich at the time and so no real relation to the current monster of the name). He was LE but emphasis on the Law. He was a quiet researcher that just wanted to be left in quiet.
Apparently his small force of living creatures did trade with the local Halfling village. When the halflings were attacked by men looking to enslave them, the Demi-Lich assisted us in organizing and fighting off the small army of slavers.
We also kept a paranoid look out for betrayal by the Lich of course.
I found a free 3rd ed D&D module online, and incorporated it into my Pathfinder campaign. It was mainly a community fair setting, where the PCs could participate in contests and win prizes.
While they’re participating in these games, the PCs hear rumors of livestock going missing. It’s not normally an issue treasure-hunting PCs concern themselves with, but a couple of them followed the lead and found out the animals were taken from a nearby farm. The cattle farmer is puzzled by this, because the livestock had gotten sick somehow and disappeared before he could get a druid to look into the matter.
In the meantime, there’s another gang of NPC adventurers who were trying to gain access to a secret gnome wizard’s lair, but the entrance was blocked by a camp of Stone Giants. Turns out the NPC gang stole the diseased cattle and used a trebuchet to fling them into the Stone Giant camp, hoping they’d catch the disease and leave. It didn’t work, but the giants were really pissed.
So the NPCs approached the Paladin of the PC group. They told him “It’s said that you defeated an entire stronghold of Ice Giants (in a previous adventure). Since you are a righteous slayer of giants, we beseech you to end the Stone Giant menace that threatens our beloved home.” The Paladin blew him off at first, but the PCs eventually asked the townspeople about the Stone Giants, and they said “they don’t bother us, and we don’t bother them” — nothing about the Stone Giants actually menacing anybody.
Eventually their curiosity got the better of them and they approached the Stone Giant camp. When the SGs saw them, they screamed “DRINTLINGS*” and launched a barrage of stone boulders at them. The PCs actually ran away instead of fighting back, which I didn’t expect to happen. It was the first time a party of adventurers actually showed discretion that I could remember.
*“Drintling” came from a game of Balderdash we had played some time earlier. Players guess a definition of an obscure word, and other players vote for their favorite. One player got the most votes for writing down “A small turd.” (It actually means flash of lightning) I revived it as an insult Stone Giants have for small bothersome humanoids.
It’s not D&D. There is no spell by that name in Savage Worlds. They could use a specialized casting of Detect Arcana to detect supernatural evil, like a devil, a werewolf, or a cleric of Cthulhu, but it’s not going to tell you anything if Antonius the friendly fisherman happened to be a living descendant of a vampire, or if the pacifist Tryphon Zarides only uses his necromantic powers to talk to spirits, do object readings, heal people, and surreptitiously raise the dead if he gets to the body first. “No, no, your friend is fine, see? He just got knocked out.”
It’s my style, as a GM, to treat encounters as a sort of negotiation with players. How they address a situation tells me what kind of game they want to play, and I factor that into my storytelling. Sometimes they do something wacky, and I just try to roll with it.
In this case, a party that had taken something of a beating in a prior encounter ran into a bunch of zombie pirates and decided that, rather than launch an alpha strike, they would try talking to them. If you try talking to zombies in my game, that’s telling me that you want sapient, talkative zombies, and if I have no particular reason to avoid that, I’m probably going to provide them. (The kicker is that I am then free to use smart zombies against the players at a later time of my choosing.)
After a bunch of improv back and forth about why the zombies were guarding the ship, it was established that they were contract labor. It was an ALU (Animated Labor Union) approved ship, and the contract had great health benefits, with a rider for onsite medical from a Union necromancer. The PCs eventually got their MacGuffin by identifying a breach of contract and persuading the zombies to go on strike.
A later adventure found the PCs helping zombie miners unravel a scheme to falsely implicate them in sabotage, so that they could be replaced by non-ALU skeletons from a contractor called Skeleton Crew Abiotic Solutions.
I was playing a cleric in a 3.5E campaign (in the Kingdoms of Kalamar campaign setting) and my character was more like a paladin than a traditional cleric. In that setting, clerics varied greatly from religion to religion, and got special features depending on the god they worshipped, to the point where they almost resembled hybrids. For example, you might follow a hunting god and you are an archer, or a god of darkness and have some thief skills. I followed the Knight of the Gods, swung a two handed sword, and scrapped it up like a fighter most of the time, and I was also bound to a strong moral code.
Anyway, I was pretty much the party leader (I don’t think it was ever official but it just ended up that way) and we were infiltrating a cultist lair and got surrounded, I mean it was like 4-1. And I surrendered. My DM was stunned, but I said that there was no way we could possibly win with those odds, but if we surrendered there was a better chance of escape if we went quietly and were unharmed. He agreed that it made the most sense, but he was shocked not only that a player would not want to fight anyway, but that someone running a paladin-like character would surrender to evil cultists.
I said my character was Lawful Good, not Lawful Stupid.
I played in a 3.0/3.5 homebrew D&D campaign where we encountered Elric of Melniboné. For those who don’t know Elric, he’s a character created by Michael Moorcock that would later be retconned into one of the incarnations of the Eternal Champion. In Moorcock’s multiverse, there are only three alignments: Law, Neutrality, and Chaos. Law is nominally good and Chaos is nominally evil. The eternal champion is constantly reborn in various forms throughout the multiverse to maintain the balance between Law and Chaos. Sometimes the champion is a hero of Law, sometimes a hero of Chaos, but always whatever the multiverse thinks is necessary to prevent one side from gaining too much of an upper hand.
So anyway, Elric would be considered probably neutral evil in D&D terms. He’s the last emperor of a stagnating civilization. He regularly strikes deals with lords of Chaos and wield a sword that absorbs souls in exchange for providing him with ability to maintain his health without relying on drugs that are less reliable and have bad side-effects. He doesn’t particularly enjoy being evil, but he does what he feels he needs to do to maintain his civilization. (BTW, this is how I understand it from having never read the Elric books myself, so I might be missing a few points.) Elric is also an albino.
Anyway, the DM who was running this campaign had Elric show up as a protector of a rare artifact the bad-guys were trying to get a hold of and our party needed to thwart some greater evil. At this point Elric, who’s role in Moorcock’s multiverse pretty much could be described in D&D terms as “elven lich” was indeed a lich, but had ended up “gated” into our world, sworn to a good-aligned demigod, and was protecting this artifact as part of his penance for his past deeds.
Oh, and he had some skeletons he controlled, so in mechanical term he had ranks in the Necromancer prestige class.
Those books heavily influenced D&D to the point where early books flat-out plagiarized things from them. (Also the Lankhmar books and Lord of the Rings.) I wouldn’t doubt the whole chaos/law axis was pulled right from Moorcock.
Whenever I play any of the Elder Scrolls video games, the Daedric Princes remind me so much of Moorcock’s Chaos Lords.
When I was young I adored the Elric books. I also read other Moorcock series but didn’t enjoy them as much.
Besides, lots of heroes get captured, so the villain can gloat and reveal their evil plans. Very few RPGers will go with that flow because they don’t want to look weak.
I played in a Heroquest campaign where characters had skills that they could apply to combat if they could come up with a justifiable reason. I had a high Wealth rating. When our party was attacked by “40 guys with clubs,” I said “I offer them double their pay to work for us.” I made an opposed roll with my Wealth skill and succeeded. It was probably my proudest moment in any RPG situation.
In one of my group’s big (60+ players) Dresden Files LARP games, we had a character with the max rank in Resources due to being extremely wealthy. Despite being an ordinary mortal in the company of wizards and monsters, he was arguably one of the most powerful characters in play. Wizards can throw fireballs; he has a chopper full of guards with machine guns a Resources check away. Fae can use the Ways to travel fast; again, he has a helicopter on standby. A rogue can bypass security on a building they need to check out; he owns the security company.
As The Revenant says in PS238, “Sometimes I think access to cash is the greatest superpower of all.” (The Revenant is a Batman-like hero, but without the angst.)
I ran a fantasy game many years ago using the Savage Worlds rules. It was an all dwarf campaign and the premise was they were going on a quest to win the hand of one of the Grimké sisters who were the most eligible bachelorettes in all of dwarfdom. Here’s the kicker, I combained a little 19th century American feminism with The Lysistrata. The Grimké sister hatched a plot to send all the young men out on a fool’s errand while they led the women into taking over the government buildings and refusing to surrender until given equal political rights.
The dwarves were fairly extreme isolationist, and this was the first occasion many of them had reason to leave their city in more than a century. I told the players it was a bog standard fantasy world, and they interpreted this to mean it was just D&D. Which was fine with me. Having them initially react to goblins as if we were playing D&D was a lot of fun when I said, “Attacking goblins is a time honored tradition among dwarfs. But it’s been more than a century since you kicked the goblins out of your mountain, and honestly, they seem happier for it and greet you warmly.” Because the dwarves were out of touch with the “modern” world, it was fun watching them try to figure things out when they met goblins, humans, and other people.
We played a Dresden Files campaign for years (not a LARP though, that sounds interesting). They do a good job of evening the playing field. You don’t need to be a vampire or wizard or holy warrior to be powerful; everyone has their thing they can do and if you know how to use what you have, you can stand toe-to-toe with anyone. In our campaign we also had someone (a mundane spy lady, think Marvel’s Black Widow) whose most powerful ability was being rich. And we had to lean on her all the time, she was the backbone of our group, not me (I was the full White Council mage).
I mean, eventually the most powerful guy in Chicago’s magical world in the books is Marcone, whose only real power is money.
Sorry, late to this thread, but no. Elric is undoubtedly Chaotic, and probably more Chaotic Neutral, although Deities and Demigods had him as Chaotic Evil.
Chaosium’s Stormbringer doesn’t do Good/Evil, but Elric there is 300 Chaos/105 Balance/24 Law. For reference, his sword is 666 Chaos/0 Balance/ 0 Law
While Elric is a being of chaos by nature, he’s also an incarnation of the Eternal Champion, paladin of Balance, and while he often finds himself doing evil, I think he wants to be a good person and respects those who are. I’d put him at True Neutral.
Ha! I’ve never seen that movie.