Alignment as Class

This is a translation of a post originally published in 2018. More posts in English here.

"Lalalala, I'm neutral"

Greetings, munificent readers. To OSR enthusiasts, the concept of race-as-class is something normal. For ACKS fans, even class-as-race-as-class is the usual, with elf warriors being a class. That's why I was thinking about extending a bit the concept and meditating about things like equipment-as-class or, even, alignment-as-class.

About this last one, Nirkhuz, great defender of alignments, pointed out at some point that a lot of people say that systems that use alignments have them as a layer on top of the rules and that it can't be an objective measurement. However, as he also pointed out, it is objective as long as things are cathegorized by it and there are effects and elements that depend on alignment. "Protection against evil" is there, on the spell list.

That's why I devoted a little more time to think how the characters alignment could be objectively reflected without having to take into account what the DM understands as good or evil, chaos or law. As such I pondered the concept of alignment-as-class, going a step beyond--it's not that you can have "Chaotic" as a class (even if it sounds cool) rather than that, I thought of another thing.

The idea would be to have 21 classes, three per each one of the basic classes in a trifect of law - neutrality - chaos. They would be the following:

• Knight, warrior, marauder.
• Cleric, druid, cultist.
• Mage, wizard, sorcerer.
• Vigilante, specialist, thief.
• High elf, wood elf, dark elf.
• Mountain dwarf, hill dwarf, deep dwarf.
• Halfling sheriff, halfling traveller, gollum.

Of course there are traces of this idea since the brown booklets of OD&D or in more recent games like Dungeon Crawl Classic. But I want to take it further as a thought experiment. I don't have anything concret for now, but, by Gox, I'm going to drop all my general ideas on you.

Given that they are for all intents and purposes different classes, not just different names for the same class or simple variants, each one would have its own advance tables, even for stuff like saves. And probably the usual thing would be that, while the neutral classes would be the average, chaotic classes would advance more quickly, while lawful ones would be slower, but they would get biggest benefits on the long term.

For example, chaotic classes would have a (relatively high) chance of developing mutations each time they level up. And let's say that 10% of them wouldn't be necessarily beneficial. There would be both physical and magical mutations--humans and gollums would have the same possibility of getting both (more physical for marauders and more magical for sorcerers), but dark elves would only get magical mutations while deep dwarves would only get physical mutations.

On the other hand, lawful classes would have the chance of acquiring extraordinary powers en exchange for quests, like the batyr, the steppe paladins of whom I already spoke here or the version of the paladins based on them that Nirkhuz made here. And, probably, they would have the chance of imposing taboos on themselves, because that's always fun.

Going on, about class types, variations would be relatively simple. Spell-casting classes would have different lists for each alignment, the sneaky ones would get bonuses to different skills (look at that thief with +666 to backstab or the vigilante with +9000 to climb walls). Martial classes would have a bonus if they use certain weapons and styles of combat. For example, knights would have a bonus while using swords, while marauders would favor axes a lot more. And, of course, non-human classes would have bonuses to adapt to their respetive environments--gollums would even have infravision.

As you can see, it's only some loose ideas for now, but maybe it's something I could develop more in the future. What do you think? What type of campaigns and setting do you think it would fit? What else could be done to distinguish further classes on the same subgroup? Who would NOT want to play a gollum? Thanks for reading me. Valmar Cerenor!