Alignments, part 1: the origins

You're probably familiar with the nine-box-style alignment system found in modern versions of Dungeons & Dragons. Widely (and rightly) criticized for various reasons, that system is a perennial source of in-game awkwardness and has become its own meme format. 

This post is not about the nine-box system. 

The goal of this series of posts (parts 2, 3 and 4 here) is to explain how alignments worked in the 1974 version of the game (known as original D&D, or OD&D for short) and to present a workable solution around its limitations. 

OD&D's alignment system was quite different from its modern counterpart, and had its own problems and incongruencies. The original system is worth looking at not so much because of how it ended up in the published game, but because of the things it was trying to do, especially in regards to faction play and to non-combat interactions between player characters and monsters. 

Before OD&D: the origins of alignment

The roots of the concept can be traced back to Chainmail (1971), a wargame where each player typically controled a medieval army. The game had a section called "Historical Characteristics" which presented fictional versions of military powers that existed in the Middle Ages for use as in-game factions or armies.

Importantly, Chainmail also included a Fantasy Supplement which supported the reanactment of battles found in works of fantasy such as the Lord of the Rings. As an alternative to the factions found in the "Historical Characteristics" section, this supplement listed fantastic creatures that could be part of an army of "Law" (humanoids and fantastic creatures that are generally friendly to humans) and fantastic creatures that could be part of an army of "Chaos" (monstrous humanoids and other fearsome monsters that are hostile to most humans).

To make a video game comparison, if one played Chainmail without the Fantasy Supplement, the factions available to players (armies of the Middle Ages) would be much the same as those available in games such as Age of Empires II or Age of Empires IV. Cool! With the Fantasy Supplement, the factions available ("team Law" and "team Chaos") would instead be similar to those in Warcraft or Warcraft II. Very cool!

Side note: do Chainmail's historical factions exist in OD&D? Possibly. Vikings, for example, are mentioned both in Chainmail, pages 10, 14, 18 and 26, and in U&WA (see Acronyms), pages 28, 29, 32 and 33. This, however, is a topic for another time.

Back to alignments: in Chainmail, Law and Chaos were not moral or cosmic principles but simply opposing factions in a wargame. Before listing which creatures belong to each faction, Chainmail makes it explicit that being part of an army does not equate with a strict notion of morality:

It is impossible to draw a distinct line between "good" and "evil" fantastic figures. Three categories are listed below as a general guide for the wargamer designing orders of battle involving fantastic creatures (Chainmail, p. 39).

Apart from the armies of Law and Chaos, the Fantasy Supplement also presented "Neutral" fantastical creatures. Not siding with any faction at the start of the game, they could however be convinced to join either side through play:  

Neutral figures can be diced for to determine on which side they will fight, with ties meaning they remain neutral (Chainmail, p. 39).

Neutral units were just that—uncommitted forces that had not yet decided to join either side. Interestingly, there's also hints at internal divisions within the fantastical factions, suggesting that the alliances of Law and Chaos might be more precarious than they would seem at first glance. The most notable example of faction in-fighting is found in the description of orcs:

Orcs are quarrelsome and factious. According to the best authority, there are at least five kinds (tribes or perhaps clans) of them. (...) If Orcs of different kinds approach within a charge move of each other, and they are not meleed by the enemy, they will attack each other unless a score of 4 or better is rolled (Chainmail, p. 30).

my ridiculous depiction of a 1974-style Orc

In Part 2 of this series, we will look at how the factions suggested by Chainmail's Fantasy Supplement carried over to OD&D and how it changed into something else.

In Part 3 (coming soon), I will discuss ways of dealing with the inconsistencies of OD&D's alignment system as written. This will be followed by Part 4 (coming soon), the final post in this series, where a proposed tweak of the alignement system will be applied to each monster in OD&D.