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Glagha posted:I feel like the neutral balances good and evil thing is the result of people completely misunderstand some assorted light/dark yin/yang positive/negative duality poo poo without realizing that good and evil do not map onto that. No one should want to balance evil with good. It probably made more sense back when law/chaos was the only alignment axis. Early D&D derived the whole alignment system from Moorcock. Moorcock intended Law and Chaos as cosmic forces that influenced human agency invarious ways. His characters were often bound to follow one path or the other, never being happy in having their lives dictated by forces beyond their control. Moorcock’s point was, as you point out, that the best way was a then trendy new-age inspired ideal of finding a balance within the self, independent of outside forces. Following on what Dwarf74 wrote, the idea of a law/chaos dichotomy becamse an artefact in D&D, being kept from the earlier editions without the creators really understanding the point. The idea of neutrality being ‘there much be as much good as evil’ being the utterly dumb end result. You see, neutrals must believe that if you get a nice ice cream cone then you should also get punched in the face, to balance things out. A totally sensible position.
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Jul 22, 2019 20:03
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:Re: Moorcock, are the Elric books any good? Do they hold up at all? I love the Elric books and can only recommend them. They are very imaginative, and while you can see how a lot of them has become cliches, it is interesting to see how differently the original ideas play out compared to what later became the accpeted trope. Also they are generally short, 120-150 pages is the norm, which is nice as a contrast to modern fantasy fiction where the publishers apperantly insist that a book cannot be wrapped up in less than 500 pages. If you are into that kind of thing, there’s an excellent French comic adaptation currently coming out, published in english by Titan comics. Beautifully drawn and captured the character to a point where Moorcock himself has said he now consider the comics better than his own work. If you read an Elric book and like it, or just want to dig deeper, I would recommend some of Moorcock’s other fantasy heroes, all part of the same multiverse. There’s the Corum series that I enjoyed greatly. Also Hawkmoon is some epic fantasy set in post-apocalyptic Europe being menaced by a resurgent British Empire ruled by aristocrats that might be the most unambiguously evil human characters ever written in fantasy.
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Jul 23, 2019 06:36
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