"A knight is just a lawful fighter". It came into my mind that a cleric is just a lawful magic user too. And in a way, seeing mages as good and evil clerics makes sense if you imagine it in, for example, Lord of the Rings: Gandalf (and every elf too) feels more a cleric to me than anything else. I feel that anything he does is a version of Light, Bless and Turn; while Sauron and Saruman are tainted with evil and that is why their magic feels "different". I don't know where its the key difference. I heard somewhere that elven magic creates, while the shadow magic cannot create and only corrupts. I leave here this article to further reading when I have some time.
Then I started to think deeper into the alignments: How they are always just ignored (I never payed them any attention myself), and I think that it is because A: they have no mechanical weight beyond certain magic weapon restrictions, so why bother? and B: they are metaphysically complex. After all, in real life is hard to define or tell good from evil sometimes.
But inside a game's rules, we can simplify them enough to make them work and make them mean something. These are some guidelines I've come up with:
* There are three alignments: Lawful / Neutral / Chaotic; which are just another words for Good / Neutral / Evil. Lawful is because it follows "god's" law, or whatever benign force you picture. Chaotic is for vampires, undead, demons, etc; but also any corrupted or tainted person, object, race, etc.
* There are no clerics. Instead, a lawful fighter is a Paladin, and a lawful Magic User is a Cleric, as we know them. I dont know what to call lawful thieves, hobbits, elves, etc; but I assure you they exist.
* Mages can only take spells from the MU list or their aligment list (cleric for lawful mages or reversed clerical spells for Chaotic mages). This makes neutral MUs the boring, academic guys who actually have less spell choices.
* Any lawful character can attempt to turn undead. Holy symbols give a bonus to that, or even allow the action to neutral characters (though neutral characters doing that count as level 1 for turning purposes)
* As being Lawful has an upside, it must have a cost or every character would pick it as an alignment. My best idea is that being lawful makes you start with 1/3 of the money (because you're so selfless, bro). Maybe even you have to give some XP money to charity to level up.
* Being Lawful its a status to be kept. It is weird and awkward to have a Judge GM telling you that you are "behaving bad" on a grey area and taking your alignment from you. I don't know if that is a thing that happens. But there must be ways to become a neutral or even evil in-game. I'll think later about this.
* Being Lawful is something you can become mid-game. I think that a good way could be to have it as a prize: remember all those Lawful monsters on the list, that don't seem to have a use? Well, on a good reaction roll, they will give you missions, related to god's will, cosmic struggle or maybe some humble thing (how does it fit on the lawful plan is up to you to imagine). If you succeed on it, you have a chance to become lawful, possibly based off charisma or wisdom to see if it "opens your eyes" or "converts yourself" to the good side. Rescuing princesses, killing evil monsters, recovering lost scions, restoring hopes: that is what lawful guys do.
* Evil characters can happen too, but they are subject to be specially affected by lawful monsters. Apart from evil spells, maybe they could have some area effect of fear, darkness... who knows, maybe at high levels. This is to be decided later. Chaotic thieves are assassins, while chaotic mages represent warlocks and witches.
* Alignment adds + or - 2 to reaction rolls if faced with the same or opposed alignment (neutral characters do not benefit from this)
* The list of things affected by alignment does not end here: magic weapons restricted to alignment, alignment languages, aligned places, groves, rivers, havens, etc. I am starting to think that understanding and exploiting alignments is one of the most powerful keys of the fantasy genre.
was this a case of clerical turning induced by magic object?
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