I was asked today to brainstorm some ideas for "vows" for the Natural Cult like the three I wrote for the Good Cult of Alignment in my game some time ago.
I wrote up my ideas; I'll post them here soon. But first, the request and my daydreaming together led back around to my original frustration with Alignment as expressed in later D&D ... and with a new idea for something different: Allegiance!
Very original, I know.
I'm going to draw up some rough rules for one Allegiance here now, with suggestions for further types. The justification/argument will follow behind, in contradiction to the way I used to write things.
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"Allegiance" as written here is not a "moral" characteristic, but a metaphysical/eschatological choice for your character and whom they would back during the Final Battle at the end of time.
Today I'll be rough-drafting what Allegiance to Dragons could look like, given that just about all my characters worship "the Black Dragon" and so that's honestly what I've given most thought into when justifying my alignment, even before this "new" idea.
So:
Characters allegiant to Dragons prioritize the acquisition of wealth above all things, whether they merely find that admirable in itself, or wish to actually acquire wealth for some real or imagined Dragon, or even believe in their own possible "apodrakosis" in which they literally transform into dragons through their acquisitive nature.
To this end, a character so allegiant gains 1 xp for every 1 gp value of treasure nabbed above/beyond that nabbed by the player-character with the next highest gp count of treasure.
(Simple example: Xanthos, Henry, and Shoopie are on an adventure together. They find a treasure chest; Xanthos investigates it alone and finds it full of 1000 gp; secretly, he skims 100 gp, and reports back to his comrades the other 900. When they split the loot up back at town "honestly", each character gets 300 gp. At the same time, ostensibly, each character would earn 300 xp, but Xanthos will earn an extra 100 xp from the gp he "siphoned off" from the others. [My personal game would have slightly different xp, but the reasons create a math digression])
These characters are also incentivised to maximize (or steal) treasure because if they return from an expedition with more treasure than other characters (even if it's just 1 gp, or an item), they would then earn an extra 5% xp from the expedition as a whole, calculated the same way as a Thief with high dexterity, or a Fighting-Man with high strength.
But alas (and of course) these benefits come with restrictions: a character allegiant to Dragons cannot give away or lend wealth (unless the interest rate is ridiculous, like 25% or so, to be repaid in a month) or items, without reneging their Allegiance. Obviously, characters who renege cannot gain their associated xp bonuses; but they are also reviled by anyone else who may be allegiant to Dragons, causing -2 on reactions with such (other than PCs, who can form their own relationships ... though other Draconic PCs would probably face social repercussions for continuing to associate with such reprobates).
Clerics would lose spells ... in B/X D&D I think the other classes would be generally unaffected, other than the social/xp troubles. Honestly, alignment/deity/allegiance is more of a cleric function anyway, so that's not unreasonable.
Atonement for such transgressions is of course possible, per the spell and D&D rules, and the terms would adhere to the severity of the transgression (10 gp is not 10,000 gp), and the nature of the particulars of the Dragon cult ...
So, this is already longer than I was shooting for, but I still want to say that declaring one's Allegiance to Dragons doesn't necessarily mean any Particular Dragon. My own characters generally worship "the Black Dragon". I made that up of old, in a moment, because a "Black Dragon" god was something I knew I could work with metaphorically.
My expectation/hope as referee would be to ask a player, "Your character is allegiant to Dragons; so is there a real dragon that your tribe worships, or is this some kind of metaphorical dragon-god? Or ... ? Who is it, what's the name, etc?" It doesn't matter much to me if you're the only worshiper, or if you claim to be one of an entire country, but the idea of "Dragon" is that you can at least narrow down some particulars of your cult to the idea of the Draconic, and act accordingly.
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Allegiance in this sense is not merely the kind of obedience offered a liege by his vassal, but something of Cosmic significance. The kind of Allegiance under discussion here is eschatological; when the Rainbow Bridge is overthrown, when the Gjallarhorn is winded, when the Nailship sails from the Mist-Realm, your character's Allegiance determines whether he or she stands with the Gods and the Honored Dead, or if he or she marches with the Giants and Titans to overthrow the halls of the Gods--or if they stand aside altogether as the Final Battle rages, and instead look to the regeneration of the World Tree itself ...
I still don't give a crap as referee if you want to play a "lawful good" character but end up doing some larceny, or if you play a "chaotic evil" character, and lend a little charity to some orphans. What I want is for "alignment" to have some bearing on the world--and for characters to not have to worry about it if they don't want to!
And, if the players' visions of philosophy differ, for the "alignment" to be something "metaphysically true" in the game world that I as the referee can point to, regardless of what players may think, thus to adjudicate whether someone is acting "within alignment" or not.
I once considered abandoning the traditional Law-Chaos/Good-Evil schema of D&D alignment for completely made-up cults in my world, and decided that I liked the elegance of the traditional D&D scheme as shorthand for people familiar with it, and for those who have a vague sense of it.
"Shorthand" turned out to mean, in practice, that virtually everyone would write down their "alignment" on their character sheet as envisioned by themselves, and then ignore what I'd written for what that alignment actually meant.
"I'm Chaotic Good" they'd declare, and then neither seek (chaotically) to get ahead of everyone else in treasure or kills, and also not NOT get into fights (those who are Good are obliged not to start fights). "I'm Lawful Good," they'd say, but then not use the means laid out to gain extra xp by donations to either cult of Law or Good. "Alignment" generally has continued to mean nothing other than something written on a "character sheet" for basically no reason.
Well, I once dreamed of writing a specific Cult for each of the nine possible alignments in AD&D. My frustration has driven me back to a version of that--getting rid of the "moral" dimensions of "Chaos" or "Good" will unfortunately cut out certain shortcuts that I liked, but those shortcuts turned out to be so particular to me as-such, that I think abandoning Alignment altogether and writing something new will actually be the most fruitful way to go about this kind of "fictional positioning" of characters.
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"I don't want to have my character be part of a cult to be Good!" someone once said when I proposed my changes to alignment, back in the day. (what, 2012?)
I didn't make the argument correctly then; but the thing is, BE the nicest, best-mannered character you want in my game; BE unaligned, or be Good, or be Evil, or whatever.
But, after listening to (and causing, and I'm sorry) hours of arguments about "alignment-as-morality", I'd like to play a game where IF alignment matters (enough to put it on a character sheet) then it MATTERS, and there'd better be some rules about it.
Otherwise, who gives a shit what the difference is between Chaotic Good and Neutral Evil?
No rules? No worries. I'll be Chaotic Lawful! Or Good Evil. Who cares what I write on the character sheet when it's meaningless?
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