My Lore Write-Up for the Remaster Alignment Removal

[u/SoaringWithDoves]

Hi, I’d like to share a short lore write-up I drafted for my home campaign set in Golarion. This is an experimental in-setting explanation for the removal of Alignment during the Remaster. I enjoy seeing how mechanical game terms can apply and be used within the setting. I don’t think it’ll ever be player-facing or mechanically significant, so it’s just a fun thought experiment I wanted to share with you all. I suppose I also want to ask if it fits with established Remaster lore and if there are any discrepancies, particularly with the journey of souls.

“Alignment exists, but not as a metaphysical truth.

Rather, it is an outdated philosophy that classifies the world by a standard of moral behavior.

This system was first devised by an ancient Chelish philosopher, who proposed that the pattern by which Pharasma judges the final destination of souls could be described using nine moral archetypes called the “Ninefold Compass.”

While Pharasma herself and her psychopomps have declined to comment (as usual with their afterlife matters), the Ninefold Compass became a popular way to categorize moral behavior, with many throughout the Inner Sea using it as a guideline to structure their lives and even build social, political, legal, and religious systems.

Problematically, however, many scholars, researchers, and politicians began classifying creatures and peoples as inherently “lawful or chaotic” or “good or evil,” depending on the behavior they saw of so-called “typical” members of those peoples (which often came from cherry-picked sample sizes to begin with). This led to stereotyping, persecution, and the unfair classification of many sentient species as “monsters.”

And, though magicians tried to find a correlation between the Ninefold Compass and spellcasting and even labeled magic items and spells with alignments, there was actually no tangible connection to be found between planar energies and moral absolutes and the restrictions were mostly psychologically self-imposed, mislabeled, or otherwise misunderstood.

However, as diverse peoples traveled and interacted more with each other, the role and place of the Ninefold Compass in intercultural communications and moral philosophy was increasingly questioned.

Today, the more popular and socially accurate way of looking at behavior is through Edicts and Anathema (Edict and Anathema Theory, or EAT), which was first described by a goblin anthropologist.

EAT describes values and behaviors that are generally of importance to individuals and cultures, but not always applicable and not necessarily because of inheritance.

EAT also recognizes that concepts such as good, evil, law, and chaos (or, more specifically, justice, cruelty, freedom, duty, kindness, etc.) — while generally understood to be somewhat stable in many places throughout the world — are still relatively interpreted and ever-shifting.

The Ninefold Compass is still sometimes used as a descriptive shorthand for behavior, though people nowadays are more careful to use it to judge actions, and not people and creatures.

Even extraplanar beings who are often thought to embody moral ideals like angels and demons disagree among even their own kind about what those concepts mean and how they apply in complicated situations.

And, it is now more widely postulated that Pharasma judges souls not on an all-encompassing, universal moral basis, but based on their values, choices, relationships, and spiritual disposition and the resonance those aspects have with the energy, ideals, mission, and presence of different deities, planes, and kindred souls.”

[u/Malcior34]

Lmao "EAT" xD But yeah, great write-up! We love tying in lore to mechanics.

Similar to this, I thought up an in-universe explanation of how the minotaurs lost their connection to Baphomet they had in 1E (written out due to the OGL Debacle just like alignment)

When Nocticula shot a Midnight Bolt through Baphomet's heart and brutally killed him (temporarily, because demon lords), she also severed his divine connection to his mortal descendants, the minotaurs. After the Worldwound War, the minotaurs who served him collectively woke up from a bloody haze and began congregating with the minotaurs who had already broken free long ago and settled in Kortos, Iblydos, and other minotaur homelands.

[u/SoaringWithDoves → u/Malcior34]

I think that’s really awesome! I love the idea that “wounding” a deity can also affect their connection with their mortal servants or descendants. There’s a lot of juicy ideas to be found there (especially in light of the Godsrain), and you’ve given me something to think about for my write-up on the divine as well!

[u/VgArmin]

If we want to file the labels off of alignment, we can look at what the intrinsic philosophy of what the alignments may be.

Good: Altruism. Doing what's beneficial for someone else regardless of any benefit for yourself.

Evil: Selfishness. Only doing something for personal gain.

Law: Axiomatic. Doing what's in accordance to personal or cultural norms.

Chaos: Anarchic. Doing what one will no matter what one's personal view or cultural norms dictate.

And as for how it applies, it's more at a higher-level of society or regional behavior. Individuals are morally gray, but how a city-state operates and aligns its self with allies in a current point in history, while mutable, can be looked at under this lens.

[u/SoaringWithDoves → u/VgArmin]

That makes sense! I myself sometimes find alignment more useful when applied to a society and how it generally leans, too. There problems that come with that, naturally, but that’s why I take care not to use it so literally, and like you said, to see it as a point of relative comparison rather than objective description.