Thursday 12 April 2018

Touching Alignment Languages with a Barge Pole

One way to think of alignment languages is to think of them as a kind of slang or jargon - a special manner of speaking which people of certain classes or interest groups start to develop.

I was thinking about this earlier today while attending an academic conference at one of the UK's most elite "old school" universities. I won't mention which university or the subject, but it was one of those instances in which an ordinary person would be fully justified in leveling against academics the accusation that we are all ivory-tower-dwelling, clean-fingernailed, over-educated, lily-livered fantasists who ought to go out and get a real job rather than sponging off the state to support our meaningless, divorced-from-reality "scholarship". At various times, such ordinary people would come in to the hall to deliver coffee or sandwiches or croissants or whatever. And whenever I did so, I thought to myself, "They must be listening to this and wondering what on earth we are talking about." Academicspeak is in a sense a bit like what an alignment language might be like: the words are intelligible to anybody, but they are used in such a way to make the content of a conversation inscrutable to outsiders.

Hobbies are like this too: listen to two people talk about a genre of music you don't know about, or an art movement you've never heard of, or some obscure interest like koi carp, and you'll find it hard to follow the conversation because of its special vocabulary and subject matter. There is even something approaching this phenomenon in political discussions. The conversations between people who are united in the same political persuasion tend to have their own cadences, their own in-jokes and nods/winks and reference points, which will leave others cold or nonplussed.

This is really, I think, a sensible way to think of alignment languages. But it's also a bit boring and, more importantly, isn't really true to the source material: alignment languages aren't described as being jargons. They're described as actual languages of a sort (comprised of "passwords, hand-signals and other body motions", as the RC puts it) which, in a sense, transcend all borders, racial differences, and geographical features: if you're lawful evil, you can communicate with all lawful evil creatures even if you don't share a common spoken language.

What to make of this? It implies certain things which are very difficult to conceptualise or imagine working in reality:

1) Alignment is something which has a known existence within the game world itself: you know what alignments are, and you know what alignment you are. It's not just a shorthand way to describe character traits. It's a real phenomenon.
2) Once you change alignment, you stop understanding the previous alignment language and start understanding a different one.
3) You should be able to look at two people having a discussion in an alignment language that isn't your own, and know that they are conversing in their alignment language (because suddenly starting to use "passwords, hand-signals and other body motions" to chat to that hobgoblin must make it pretty obvious).
4) If you could see somebody speaking in their alignment language, and if you knew the alignment of the other party to the conversation, you could guess the first person's alignment. If A is speaking in an alignment language to a hobgoblin, you know that A is lawful evil.

And even setting that to one side, there's also the question: what do the "passwords, hand-signals and other body motions" look like? Apart from sounding vaguely dirty, there isn't a great deal of information there. Maybe Chaotic Evil involves maniacal a-rhythmic dancing, while Lawful Neutral is a highly circumscribed set of deliberate gestures which must be performed perfectly in order for the meaning to be communicated. Maybe Neutral Evil involves blood-letting and pain.

The notion that alignment is something which people in D&D worlds actually believe is something that needs further analysis. Today, having spent so long listening to ivory tower academic nonsense, I'm incapable of doing so, so the most you're getting out of me is this half-formed and somewhat half-arsed blog entry.

21 comments:

  1. I have never read the RC definition of alignment languages. I figured that they were artifacts from an early campaign, something similar to the Elric books where lords of order and chaos were very real and very active in the world, demanding that the mortals choose a side. I interpreted them the same as you regarding instinctively understanding them and losing that understanding if you change alignment.

    Assuming that I'm neutral, I assume that a good or lawful alignment language sounds like glossolalia while evil sounds something like the banter from a possession victim in a B horror film.

    The one hole in all of this is that assassins can learn alignment languages, which they wouldn't be able to do if they were some kind of cosmic knowledge. Unless there is a patron deity of assassins who plugs them into it.

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  2. Alignment, Assassins, and Shadowstuff Creatures and Illusions are all wonderful bits of AD&D in-game reality which I have loved for decades. Pondering them informs a great many quirks, and makes the greater Gygaxian Ecology a Top-Down, Cosmic, even more delightful. Tharizdun's Colours, too, say so much.

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    1. Yeah, I know what you mean. There's a lot of interesting stuff in there that tends to get glossed over or ignored.

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  3. While alignment language is problematic for a number of reasons, the main issue (for me) is it’s magical connection to a character’s alignment...in a game where characters can fairly easily change their alignments.

    I think an explanation of alignment language as jargon or dialect is perfectly reasonable...but then it should be learnable by any person (and retained by individuals who shift alignment). That makes for a sticky wicket.

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    1. Yeah. The thing is that it has to be actually literally incomprehensible to somebody not of that alignment.

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  4. I liked the idea the Lawful alignment language is like Latin in the church. So all the clerics and Paladins can talk to each other in the bits of Latin they have picked up from prayer and study.

    Meanwhile all those chaotic Mages have to learn the names of All The Things if they want to start fucking with the natural order of things. I assume these names are in Dragon tongue or infernal or an old elven language.

    For Neutral dealings there's thieves cant. I figure the druids speak it too to help with seeking their weed.

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    1. Another comparison I di is with the Lord of the Rings, where all the "good guys" speak elvish, and the servants of Sauron have the Black Speech.
      In the LBBs, orcs can be either Neutral or Chaotic. The neutral orcs would be the goblins of the Misty Mountains, and the chaotic, Black-Speech speaking orcs the orcs of Mordor.

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  5. That's pretty much how I envision alignment languages for my game; I once tried to figure out some of the symbols, passwords, and gestures to give a basic description to players, and about all I came up with was that donkeys and hyenas are symbolic for Evil, dragons and Elves are symbolic for Chaos ... and didn't get anywhere further.

    I do call alignments "cults" to make it clear to everyone that they don't represent character traits--they're religious cults that entail certain objective requirements, the breaking of which comes with XP penalties (so like, Lawful characters must always make a reasonable effort to retrieve dead comrades for proper burial). If I were more inventive, I'd just come up with entire cults and do away with "law", "chaos", "good", etc., but I find the simple alignments too good a short hand to just drop.

    But the languages tend to get forgotten ... I think I'm the only player I've encountered who actually uses alignment tongues; which was helpful last game I played, when I spoke to some Chaotic cultists in Chaotic, and then they showed us their Chaos shrine where the mcguffin was.

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  6. It falls into the old problem of the absurdity of an all-universe alignment system though.

    Whilst I like your idea a lot ( as a veteran of many an anorak commie meeting I'm used to seeing words like 'proletariat' and 'bourgie' thrown around, references to Rosa Luxembourg or PLatformists or Leninism as though everyone present is fully comfortable with those terms) it falls into my big problem with alignment - Fey and Demons and human criminals are all 'Chaotic Evil', potentially - but there's no way these guys have a shared culture. Imagine some Tudor-style street-slang for the latter, all Prigger-of-Prancers and doxies - no self-respecting Demon is going to know what the fuck you're talking about unless they cast Comprehend Pidgin. I don't Red Dragons are down with your jive-talking either.

    I run with the idea that alignment doesn't exist in the game fabric, and noone in-game will ever speak the words Lawful Good, but that those are concepts useful to people in defining an ideology for their character. Plus you can write Lawful Good on your character sheet in big letters if you want - if you're a prick to the locals they're still going to think you're a prick.

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    1. What's interesting to think about his how fey and demons and human criminals could all somehow have a shared culture. I haven't done the legwork thinking about that, but it would be a fascinating project.

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  7. "The notion that alignment is something which people in D&D worlds actually believe is something that needs further analysis."

    Wouldn't that analysis conclude with a two-dimensional world-setting, lacking the depth and authenticity of our real world?

    Who would want to play in that world?

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    1. I'd say that the real Western world has been dominated for a long time by a binary world view. From the Carolingian Empire onward you could substitute Christian for Lawful Good and Pagan for Chaotic Evil. (from the Roman church's viewpoint of course).

      As to game settings, look at Pendragon, Solomon Kane, Gothic Horror, The Witcher, Diablo, Spawn, or for weird fiction go with Elric's world. They're all places where godlike beings are actively involved in the world and vying for mortal souls, with a very binary concept.

      Or, for that matter, Star Wars is a two-dimensional universe that is very popular for gaming.

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    2. I think there's a lot of depth to it, actually. Maybe there's another blog post coming on...

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    3. noisms: I'm curious to see where you think depth is possible. It's one of the problems I've always had with alignment: I love the concept (as a philosopher) but practical experience has taught me that players struggle to grasp the subtleties, leading to oversimplification (at one extreme) or outright rejection (at the other).

      Tom: I agree that Star Wars is very two-dimensional but, apart from the Jedi Order, it doesn't have hard-and-fast rules concerning prescribed behavior, so there's plenty of room to treat it as just another setting and add as much depth as your game allows for.

      What I'm referring to is the disconnect between the beliefs of NPCs in our D&D worlds and the beliefs of players in the real world.

      The alignment system implies that it's possible to categorize behavior and thoughts into these philosophical compartments of order, good, chaos and evil. This is all fine and good for a novel or work of fiction, but for an interactive game where the players' real-world perspective serve as a basis for their concepts of right and wrong...

      Now I'm talking myself into another blog post...

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  8. I mention it on my blog, but I think a more interesting way of thinking about Alignment-Languages is to consider using Languages-are-Alignments instead of Alignments-have-Languages, in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis sense that languages change how the brain functions.

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    1. S'here: http://goodberrymonthly.blogspot.com/2018/04/alternative-alignment-schemes.html

      In summary, it's fun to think of languages as active agents in the cosmological scheme. Kind of like, how above and below in the comments, some languages can drive you insane, some can be used to rebuke demons, some can give you a different sense of time, etc.

      This is operating under the assumption that Alignment is more than merely ones moral outlook or combination of character traits.

      To apply it to the original post, the Evil/Good Languages would be languages that define the boundaries and modes of thought of creatures that speak it, by limiting their vocabulary (on say, violence) or altering syntax in a way that affects subject-object relations, or whatever.

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  9. I did a post a lil while ago outlining some 'magical languages'- words that are supernaturally easy to learn in some way. It was intended to justify Common as a trope, but now that I think about it, it could definitely tie in to Alignment Languages.

    Maybe 'Chaotic Evil' doesn't exist as just a nebulous cosmic truth, maybe it's a kind of mind virus, and the language is the symptom or the vector

    Here's the post anyway, let me know what you think ;)

    http://roseandkingfisher.blogspot.ca/2018/02/the-red-curse-of-language.html?m=1

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    1. I am sure there are fantasy/horror stories that have been written about languages which, when learned, turn the learner insane. Just none spring to mind... Lovecraft or one of his imitators surely wrote something like that.

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    2. There's a cyberpunk story where Sumerian is a virus taht can infect people or computers.. Can't remember what it's called.

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    3. Sounds like "Snowcrash" by Neil Stephenson.

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