Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Alignment in EPT

Empire of the Petal Throne occupies an unusual place in the history of roleplaying games. Published a year and a half after the release of OD&D, EPT is at once thoroughly indebted to and dependent upon its predecessor and a huge leap forward in terms of design and presentation. Consequently, the rules of EPT are a glorious mess, equal parts OD&D atavisms, half-baked evolutions therefrom, and genuinely original ideas. You can see this uneasy tension in place like Section 310, which discusses alignment.

Before diving in, remember that Volume 1 of OD&D has little to say about alignment, framing alignment as a kind of allegiance

Before the game begins it is not only necessary to select a role, but it is also necessary to determine what stance the character will take – Law, Netrality [sic], or Chaos.

Beneath it is the following chart, which divides intelligent beings in "teams," according to their alignment.

Not much else is said about alignment in OD&D, except that clerics of 7th level and greater must aligned with either Law or Chaos and that changing one's alignment has (unexplained) dire consequences. By contrast, the aforementioned Section 310 of Empire of the Petal Throne is comparatively long (five paragraphs) and spells out many more details of what alignment is and how it works. M.A.R. Barker begins the section with this remarkable section:

For convenience's sake (and not to reflect reality necessarily), all characters are divided into two basic types: those serving the Good Gods and their Cohorts, and those serving their Evil counterparts. There are no "neutrals" on Tékumel, although it is possible to achieve a limited neutral status as one of the nonhuman races which traditionally remain aloof from human affairs.

"For convenience's sake" is an interesting turn of phrase, especially when coupled with "not to reflect reality," since it seems that Barker viewed alignment largely as a construct of EPT's game rules. Equally interesting, to my mind, is that he immediately connects alignment to serving the gods. He elaborates on this in the second paragraph of Section 310, saying "Each player names his or her God, Goddess, or Cohort at the beginning of the game." 

Despite the constructed nature of alignment in EPT, it nevertheless has social consequences. "A good character," Barker explains, "does not consort with an evil one, although it is not required to attack him if there is an encounter." Naturally, evil characters are not bound by these same restrictions, though, oddly, it's suggested that even evil characters will not attack members of their own party while "sharing an adventure together." This reinforces the idea that alignment on EPT' is foundational to the presentation of Tékumel's society rather than having anything to do with personality or morality. (It's worth noting that later presentations of Tékumel develop this further, replacing Good and Evil with Stability and Change and fleshing out a moral system based around "nobility.")

As noted above, nonhumans don't have alignment as humans do. Rather, their alignment is based on their "general attitudes toward mankind," as this chart demonstrates:

This chart recalls the one from OD&D and supports the notion of alignment as being, first and foremost, the marker of one's "team." This is in keeping with OD&D's conception of alignment, though Barker teases out some of its assumptions and consequences a bit more in Empire of the Petal Throne. This is, I believe, where EPT shines, since Barker offered a model of how one might apply the rules of OD&D to a specific world in order to create an immersive, believable place. This is something Dungeons & Dragons has never really done, which no doubt contributes to the dislike of alignment by many of its players.

15 comments:

  1. Agreed. Alignment in a vacuum is awkward. Baking it right into the core of a setting is the way to go - I never had a major issue with alignment primarily because my entry into D&D was Michael Moorcock supplemented by Greek and Arthurian myth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That’s kind of the tricky thing about D&D in general, because it doesn’t assume a specific setting — and in fact this is one of the things I love most about D&D — but all these assumptions about the hypothetical setting, like alignment, are baked into the rules.

      Delete
    2. As long as the setting supports characters requesting intercession from a supernatural power, Fantasy Wargaming provided one approach that was modular.

      A character’s Piety score fluctuates with their actions. The score helps determine the likelihood of intercession when it is requested. The supernatural powers intervene within the game system, usually via magic, and so need stats (as the game infamously provided for the Virgin Mary, among other higher and infernal powers, along with the Norse gods):

      The setting would provide the collection of powers and what actions they favor and disfavor. In Fantasy Wargaming, if you followed the Christian god you had to resist temptation but the Norse gods cared more about bravery. And there were rules to handle temptation and morale, tied to stats like Lust and Bravery, which the GM could exercise if they thought PCs were behaving way out-of-character.

      Anyway, that’s one way it could be done.

      Delete
  2. And remember that the first printing of D&D didn't include the 7th level clause. It simply said "Note that Clerics are either Law or Chaos..."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Correct. I always forget that. Thanks for reminding me.

      Delete
  3. Frankly, I'm glad roleplaying in general has trended away from alignment systems. Never seen one that had much nuance, and if you've just got to have something similar "personality trait" mechanics like Pandragon's are more to my tastes. Moorcock's approach is also interesting, where your "alignment" was more fate (or doom) than choice and neither extreme can be said to have a moral high ground - but what works in literature doesn't always work in gaming.

    Leiber and howard had the better approach for adventurer mentality IMO. Self-interest levied with personal ethics derived from your culture and your experiences, not abstract philosophy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Agree. In this way, Conan's personal ethics seem similar to other pulp magazine heroes of the day, especially Hammett's hard-boiled detectives; the personal code as a rebuke against the norms of the corrupt societies in which these characters operate, and their readers live.

      Delete
    2. Absolutely. I've often wondered what Howard would have written if he'd lived. He missed WW2 by just a few years, and would undoubtedly have served if he'd still been alive. Not hard to imagine him taking a stab at using various veteran protagonists to tell war stories, detective noir, contemporary tales set in exotic locales during the unsettled postwar era, maybe even espionage stories. The man did like to jump from genre to genre and character to character during his career without ever losing a certain Howard feel to things.

      Delete
    3. Very true. My favorite Conan story, Beyond the Black River, feels more like a wild west frontier story.

      Delete
  4. I had overlooked that opening caveat, “For convenience's sake (and not to reflect reality necessarily)...”. Deliberately simplifying a complex mythology in the introduction to Tékumel makes sense, treating the twenty Tsolyáni deities as the sole divine entities. It explains why barbarians fresh-off-the-boat would worship one of these, despite foreign lands in later publications having other gods or amalgams of Tsolyáni ones (like Julius Caesar described the Gaulish gods as versions of Roman ones?).

    I’m not sure what to make of “[the nonhumans’] alignments should be apparent from the above list.” Do Hostile-to-Man species worship Evil gods? (Which makes sense in light of the sacrifices you can make to the Good and Evil gods to increase the chances of Divine Intervention.). What happens to a Ssú hit by an Eye of Transformation?

    I think the Divine Intervention rules are where the mechanics of alignment show up the strongest in EPT. The choice of God vs Cohort affects likelihood and relative effect of Intervention, while Good vs Evil specifies allowable sacrifices. Along with some bloodthirsty advice to players to keep prisoners just in case you need sacrifices for Divine Intervention later.

    Also note that the Gods and Cohorts section of EPT contains somewhat different and more elaborate rules for Alignment change than the Alignment section itself.

    Has anyone adapted Gardásiyal-style magic (e.g., Temple spells) to EPT beyond something like this?

    https://web.archive.org/web/20170227221847/http://home.earthlink.net/~djackson24/EPT_Spells.htm

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Re: spells

      I'm in the midst of doing this right now, but it's a bigger project than I anticipated and it'll be a while before it's fully done.

      Delete
    2. Do you plan to publish that? It would be a great service to EPT players.

      And are you also addressing the differences between priests and other magic useers? The thing I find oddest in the EPT rules are the disjoint sets of basic professional skills for those two professions. Something needs to differentiate the two but I am not familiar enough with Tékumel to know what. What benefits do sorcerers get for not belonging to the priesthood? They lose access to Temple spells but does their freedom give them any additional benefits? Perhaps they are more free to use demonology, e.g., to learn magics not available to priests?

      Delete
    3. If I ever finish it, it'll certainly be published. As for the differences between priests and sorcerers, it's mostly social, though that has more wide-ranging consequences. By gaining a greater degree of personal freedom, sorcerers (or lay priests, as they're called) don't have easy access to the temple's resources, including the most potent spells. It's more a question of "Do you want freedom or power?"

      Delete
    4. Thanks. That’s interesting but leaves me even more puzzled why those two basic professional skills sets are completely different. Why would, say, “normal” priests have ESP and lay priests clairvoyance but neither get the other? It just seems weird, especially since they share the bonus spells.

      Delete
  5. I find one important thing to remember about the OD&D alignment chart is that it first appears in Chainmail, where it serves to provide the sources that either side (Law and Chaos) may use in the fantasy tabletop battle. Either side may use creatures marked as Neutral, but they may only appear on one side of any given battle.

    In fact those strange blank spaces in the list were where Chainmail specific creatures (Hero, Superhero, Antihero) were blanked out. [Also interesting to note was the Superhero was a "creature" only available to the forces of Law.]

    ReplyDelete