Chaotic Alignment Archetypes

Chaotic Evil

- Gilles de Rais, pedophile, child-snatcher and murderer of 80-200 young boys. Took his greatest pleasure in letting his victims know that they were to die.
- Hannibal Lecter, from Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. "You can't reduce me to a set of influences." (The character was unfortunately ruined in the later books.)
- Iago, from Othello. "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word."

Chaotic Neutral

- Hunter S. Thompson, American journalist and narcotics lover. Most of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was true, you know.
- Q, from Star Trek: The Next Generation. 'He's devious and amoral and unreliable and irresponsible and definitely not to be trusted.'
- Lord Byron, 'Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know'.

Chaotic Good

- R2D2, from the Star Wars films.
- Tom Bombadil, from The Lord of the Rings.
- Asterix the Gaul.

Just Because

Author blogs are usually pretty awful affairs - rarely updated, and when they are, you get about a line. I've just discovered M. John Harrison's, and it seems at least slightly more interesting than most. This entry made me laugh:

Earlier this year C, who is 100% a literalist subeditor, managed to get through several HPL stories, including “The Haunter of the Dark” & “The Colour Out of Space”, as bedtime reading, without having a moment’s insomnia or a single nightmare.

“So, this ‘Goat with a Thousand Young’ business,” she says: “What’s scary about that ?”

I try to explain that it can’t really be a goat. It’s an attempt to describe something by one of its qualities, or–worse–to encode some quality it possesses which can’t be described any other way.

She says: “Bollocks. Goats can’t have a Thousand Young. & anyway, why’s that frightening ?” She’s Lovecraft-proof.

At 17, I couldn’t have the books in the house. If I owned them I’d read them. If I read them, I wouldn’t sleep for days. When did they stop doing that to me ?

Dead Magazines

On balance the internet is undoubtedly a good thing, but it is responsible for a lot that's wrong with the world. One of its greatest sins is that it drove the final stake through the heart of the print RPG magazine. Not even monolithic house organs like Dragon and Dungeon could resist its energy-draining wight touch.

The saddest loss of the print-net war was a magazine called Arcane, which for about two years in the mid 90s constituted my regular fix of RPG reading. Not only was it eclectic and general (its articles covered everything from D&D to d6 Star Wars to Harn to WoD), it was also written with the wit and verve that Future Publishing was rightly famous for in the 1990s. (Some of Arcane's regular contributors were or had been staff writers for other great and now sadly defunct FP titles, such as the unrivalled Amiga Power.) Even though I haven't even clapped eyes on a copy in around ten years at least, I can still remember some of its classic articles, and I credit it with more influence on my gaming habits than just about anything else.

There's often talk about the 'death of the industry' and the declining cultural importance of RPGs. Young people prefer World of Warcraft, it seems, and nothing signifies this more than the disappearance of magazines like Arcane. But was this trend a cause or a symptom? Which came first: the death of the magazines or the zenith of the industry?

Japan 2028 (Part II: Hitotsuyanagi Group - Corporate Profile)

A continuation of yesterday's post. I might leak out a few more of these little titbits (or what one American girl I used to know would charmingly refer to as "tidbids") on my 'Japan, 2028' Cyberpunk 2020 setting over the coming days and weeks.

Hitotsuyanagi Group （一柳グループ） - Corporate Profile

Hitotsuyanagi is one of the so-called 'new zaibatsu' which arose during the years directly leading up to the Great Kanto Earthquake. Founded in January 2009 by Toshiro Yanagisawa, it was originally a bio-technology firm operating out of the Yokohama docklands. Somewhat insulated from the damage caused by the quake and the chaos of the years that followed, it grew rapidly at the expense of Japan's collapsing old giants, though Yanagisawa's motto has always been 'intelligent expansion' and the Hitotsuyanagi Group is one of the smallest of the new zaibatsu in terms of employees and turnover. Its member companies are those specialising in ultra high technology fields such as genetic manipulation, cybernetics, nanoware and biochemical warfare.

Its companies employ around 74,000 personnel, not including a private 'security wing' consisting of a motorised infantry brigade of around 8,000 men, with an attached squadron of gyrocopter gunships. Hitotsuyanagi's military is the smallest corporate army in Japan, though it has a reputation for efficiency and brutality. Many of its members were originally soldiers of fortune, with the majority originating from Brazil and Peru and the rest South Africa, Fiji and the Former Australia.

Kimura Biotech Corporation (Kimura Seimeikougaku Kabushikigaisha, or Kimura Seimei for short) is a key member of the Hitotsuyanagi Group and the favoured supplier of biological warfare components to the Armed Forces of Japan. Because of this, it and the other Hitotsuyanagi companies enjoy high levels of freedom and influence within Japanese politics and industry. Toshiro Yanagisawa is a prominent member of the so-called 'Wednesday Club' (Suiyoukai) of industralists, generals and politicians who meet on the first Wednesday of every month at the Tokyo Hilton hotel to formulate government policy.

It is well known that there is a considerably less than cordial relationship between Yanagisawa and the head of the Hoshino Group, Yuutaka Hoshino - who also happens to be a member of the Wednesday Club. The men loathe each other. The rivalry stems from before the war, when the Hitotsuyanagi Group launched a 'dawn raid' hostile takeover of a medical research company which Hoshino had been just about to approach. In retaliation Hoshino arranged the corporate defection of two of Kimura Seimei's top researchers to one of its affiliates, in a botched move which resulted in the destruction of a Kimura facility and several deaths. Since that time there have been a dozen assassinations and three car bomb attacks, widely attributed to the rivalry between Toshino Yanagisawa and Yuutaka Hoshino.

Yanagisawa has made it clear that the Hitotsuyanagi Group (like the vast majority of the new zaibatsu) is actively working towards an end to the occupation of Western Japan. What the clause 'actively working towards' refers to is unclear.

[RPG Blog Carnival] Transitions and Transformations - Japan 2028 (Part 1: Overview)

I was thinking of posting this anyway, but it turns out the RPG Blog Carnival for this month has been given the title Transitions and Transformations, and it definitely qualifies for that. So what the heck.

This is a Cyberpunk 2020 setting that I developed a year or so ago when thinking about running a game for the local gaming group. For one reason or another I ended up doing something else instead, but I liked the setting so much I kept it. Today I'll put up a historical overview; tomorrow a 'current situation' one will follow.

Japan, 2028

It started with the Great Kanto Earthquake (Kanto Daijishin) of 2010. The quake, centred on Chofu - a satellite city of Greater Tokyo - measured 8.9 at the surface on the JMA's seismic intensity scale, and caused an estimated $6 trillion in damage (with over 900,000 deaths). Tokyo was effectively levelled, although certain quake-resistant high-rise buildings in the Shinjuku and Tokyo-station areas remained standing. Most seismologists consider it extremely fortunate that the quake did not trigger an eruption of Mt. Fuji, which underwent a period of activity shortly before and after the quake. If that had happened, the consequences for Japan would have been utterly catastrophic, as opposed to merely disastrous.

But disastrous they were, and in the aftermath the archipelago underwent a period of political upheaval which rivaled the quake itself in intensity. The years between 2010 and 2015, known now as the Great Tumult (daikonran), saw an estimated 18 different governments and a huge growth in membership of extremist splinter groups from the Japanese Communist Party (Nihon Kyousan-tou) and the New Komeito Party (Shin-Komei-tou), amidst economic collapse and localised starvation. 2015 saw the deposition of the ruling LDP government and the execution of the Imperial Family by the military wing of a group called the Nishi-Funabashi Socialist Party, who modelled themselves on the proletarian revolutionaries of the 1917 Bolsheviks. Their provisional government, set up to "create democratic structures to usher in the new socialist era", lasted 34 days, during which time they accomplished little other than the murder of some 160 Diet representatives and the Governor of Tokyo. On 6th September 2015 a motorized infantry division of the Japanese Self Defence Forces, backed by US air strikes, launched an attack to regain control of the capital, and within a week most of the other SDF units in the Kanto region had joined them. After a 20-day street battle, reminiscent of the destruction of the Paris Commune, approximately 70,000 of Tokyo's citizens had been killed and the country had a new military government. By 2016 that government was firmly entrenched, though now officially ruled by the centre-right Buddhist New Komeito Party.

Stability followed, and by 2020 Japan had regained some semblance of a functioning modern state. In 2019 the Izu-shoto Autonomous Economic Region was set up in the volcanic islands stretching to the South of the capital. Essentially a playground for Japan's new conglomerates (the shin-keiretsu such as Hoshino, Shinrai, Hitotsuyanagi and Rakusho), the AER is a tax-free haven for research and development which has reinvigorated Japan's image as a high-tech economy.

But the outbreak of war between the People's Republic of China and USA, precipitated by the seizure of Taiwan, saw Japan once again dragged into chaos. Both it and the United Republic of Korea, as the USA's key allies in the region, quickly became involved in the fighting. In March 2022 the first PRC Marines landed on Ishigaki-jima in the Okinawa archipelago, and the last US base on Okinawa was destroyed before the end of the year. The PRC juggernaut continued through to the mainland islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, ironically basing their invasion plan on Nimitz and MacArthur's Operation Olympic. With Japanese industry crippled and organised defences failing, the US Army and the military of the Republic of Korea launched their own invasions of Honshu to prevent the entire country falling under the occupation of the Chinese. They halted the invasion at a line running across the extreme North of Kyushu and Shikoku, and a general armistice was signed on Christmas Day, 2026. Over a million Japanese had lost their lives.

Since that day, Japan has remained divided, and there is little sign of either Chinese, Korean or American troops leaving their occupied zones. Ostensibly the Koreans and Americans cannot leave while the Chinese threat remains, but many in the islands now suspect that retaining control of Japan is as much a priority as protecting it. While the Eastern half of Honshu and Hokkaido retains its independence and has undergone something of an economic revival in the past year and a half, the rest of the islands were devestated by war and miliary occupancy and have little hope of restoration.

The main 'winners' of the war were undoubtedly the shin-keiretsu. As the primary suppliers of the reformed Military of Japan, their economic strength and political importance have increased immensely. Independent competitors have almost entirely disappeared and the Izu-shoto organisations have taken on the power and significance of the zaibatsu of old. Most commentators believe that they are already working towards bringing about independence for the entirety of Japan, whether through stealth or force. With future conflict considered a certainty, it seems clear that the shin-keiretsu will be at the heart of it.

Of All the Girls I've Loved Before...

Sourcebooks. Some are bad, some are good, most are indifferent. Here are my favourites.


1. Pacific Rim Sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020. There are lots of flaws in this book, not least that the section on Japan is far too long and those on the really interesting countries (Korea, the Phillippines, Indonesia, Myanmar) are far too short. But it does a brilliant job of setting out a detailed, cohesive, believable futuristic Pacific Rim - not at all far-fetched, and with just a touch of imaginative flair. The post-apocalyptic Australia in particular is a great Mad Max rip-off and a perfect place for a down and dirty Cyberpunk 2020 campaign. The book also contains an expansion for the detailed martial arts rules for which the game is rightly famed, together with glossaries of major East Asian languages (although I'm not sure how accurate they are if the Japanese one is anything to go by) and lots of new guns.


2. The Planewalker's Handbook for 2e AD&D. This is definitely my favourite TSR-produced sourcebook, mainly because I love its scrapbook, ad hoc approach, where on one page you'll find rules for Genasi player characters, on the next baatezu green steel, then a kit for wizards who fly around in hot air balloons after that... It's like a treasure trove. Not only that, it contains the rules for Belief Points, which were one of the major innovations in late-era TSR D&D and just about perfect for the Planescape setting.


3. Changeling: The Dreaming, The Player's Guide. Changeling: The Dreaming was always the most interesting of the World of Darkness settings (in fact the only one I ever really liked), and the player's guide was like the icing on the cake - more detail about the major races, plus a whole shedload of material on Native American fae. Best of all was the final section on the Autumn People; the idea of individuals who can kill fae through their sheer banality was way more scary in its own way than anything in Vampire or Werewolf.


4. The Orcs of Thar, for BECMI D&D. Evil humanoid races as player characters for classic D&D. Need one say more? Well, throw in rules for humanoid shamans, a ridiculous board game that nobody ever played, background info on all the races, and sheafs of maps. What more could a person want?


5. The Northwestern Middle Earth Map Set, for MERP. One of the cornerstones of being a Tolkien fan is the love of the geography, and one of the main pleasures of that occupation is poring over maps and imagining what might be found in the places illustrated. This book fulfils that need to connect with Middle Earth cartography in style.

Dice Man

These were posted earlier today at Grognardia, but just in case there are any readers of my blog who don't also visit that esteemed online resource (unlikely), here is a two part film about dice.

What the Public Wants is the Image of Passion, not Passion Itself

One more thing: don’t spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy! - Gary Gygax

In another life, I took what literary theorists said seriously - seriously enough at least to disagree with many of them and consider them a blight on humanity; very well educated but fundamentally not-very-intelligent people are responsible for a lot of what's bad in the world. George Steiner in particular always struck me as a very eloquent and very widely read fool, but I reserved a special place in hell for Roland Barthes, a man I considered not far removed from Satan. I was a very angry and far-too-intellectual-for-my-own-good 20 year old. (One of my favourite quotes is by the writer Jonathan Franzen, who said that he spends around ten minutes a day fretting about the fact that, when he was in his 20s, he used to spend ten minutes a day fretting about things like the fact that Americans have substituted medical products for genuine psychological healing. I understand what he means in a very deep and meaningful sense - why was I so serious about things like that?)

Anyway, these days I'm a lot mellower and I think I can see a little bit of what Barthes was getting at, especially regarding Death of the Author. This was a famous essay by him in which he basically argued that in interpreting a text, it is the text and the reader's understanding of it alone which matters - not the author's intent. As soon as the author has produced a piece of writing he no longer owns it and no longer should be seen as having any relation to it - it is not his or her history or views which inform analysis of it, but the reader's. And each new reading by each new reader, or even each re-reading, is a new interpretation of a new text with a new meaning.



We can see this process in Dungeons & Dragons, you see. When Gygax and Arneson and their circle created the game, they had an idea of what they wanted to do, and a whole history of reading and playing and thinking behind that idea - a witch's brew of Tolkien, Moorcock, Howard, Leiber, Avalon Hill and a thousand other cultural artefacts from their own experiences. But if we interpret that in light of Barthes, where the author has 'died' the minute he has produced the text (and I should say straight away at this point that I refer to this in a purely metaphorical sense which has nothing to do with Gary Gygax's actual regrettable and very sad death), we should really throw all of that out of the window and ignore it. The text of Original D&D and 1e are for us to take meaning from for ourselves, irrespective of the intentions of the authors; if we want to use it to play games utterly different to what they envisaged, then we can do so. In fact, it could be argued that we ought to do so.

This is one of the reasons, really, why I'm not a great fan of stick-in-the-mud-ism when it comes to 'old schoolers', although I've never previously thought to articulate it in reference to Roland Barthes! The vast majority of old schoolers are, of course, creative individuals who just like to play. But there is a certain section who seem unduly wedded to what the orginators intended and to their vision of the game. Indeed I wrote a long rant about the very topic back in June, which I still mostly agree with, even if the painful stridency of the piece irks me. (I think I tend towards the painfully strident a little too much.) Gary Gygax and his generation created a great game, but it's not theirs anymore; they were the 'scriptors', to use Barthes' term, but we are the readers, the interpreters, and the ones who give the game meaning for ourselves. If we want to use the OD&D rules to play a campaign about mutant monkeys invading the star ship Enterprise at the edge of the universe, or about heroic halflings saving the world from the Dark Lord, then we should just go for it and devil take the hindmost.

Beware the Were Stuff

Here's what we're lacking: a random generator for lycanthropes. (Okay, okay, for the pedants out there: therianthropes). Let me be the one to provide it.

Therianthrope Generator

Step 1: Determine human form.

Roll a d10 and d6+2 to determine class and level.

1-3 - Fighter
4-5 - Thief
6-7 - Wizard
8-9 - Cleric
10 - Bard

Then roll a d12 to determine alignment.

1-8 - Chaotic Evil
9-10 - Neutral Evil
11 - Chaotic Neutral
12 - Chaotic Good

Step 2: Determine Animal/Hybrid Form.

In animal form, the therianthrope will have an AC d3 points better than the standard for its type, and damage per attack is that of the standard animal +2. HD are that of the character class level of the human form (for example, 6 HD for a level 6 human), and movement is the same as the standard animal type.

In hybrid form HD and AC are boosted by 1 point above that of the human form, and the therianthrope can use either weapons or the natural attacks of the animal form (but not both).

Spellcasters may not use magic in their animal form.

Roll a d20 and consult the tables for the base animal type. Damage, AC and movement are of the standard animal.

1 - Gorilla (DMG 1-4/1-4/1-8, AC 6, MOVE 12)
2 - Yak (DMG 1-3/1-3 or 2-8, AC 7, MOVE 24)
3 - Hyena (DMG 2-8, AC 7, MOVE 15)
4 - Crocodile (DMG 2-8/1-12, AC 5, MOVE 6/12 SWIM)
5 - Hippopotamus (DMG 2-12, AC 4, MOVE 6/12 SWIM)
6 - Jaguar (DMG 1-3/1-3/1-6, AC 6, MOVE 15/6 CLIMB)
7 - Orang-Utan (DMG 1-4/1-4/1-6, AC 5, MOVE 6/12 CLIMB)
8 - Secretary Bird (DMG 1-3/1-3/1-4, AC 6, MOVE 12/FLY 24B)
9 - Cassowary (DMG 1-3/1-10, AC 6, MOVE 18)
10 - Dingo (DMG 2-6, AC 7, MOVE 18)
11 - Tasmanian Wolf (DMG 2-8, AC 7, MOVE 18)
12 - Gila Monster (DMG 1-4, AC 6, MOVE 6 - Special attack: Poison, which causes d6 STR loss, d12 hit points damage, and paralysis for d3 hours on a failed saving throw)
13 - Komodo Dragon (DMG 1-8, AC 5, MOVE 12 - Special attack: Potentially fatal disease which causes death after d6 days on a failed save, or d6 STR loss on success)
14 - Hunting Dog (DMG 2-8, AC 7, MOVE 18)
15 - Baboon (DMG 1-3/1-3/1-6, AC 7, MOVE 15/CLIMB 12)
16 - Condor (DMG 1-4, AC 6, MOVE 3/FLY 36D)
17 - Warthog (DMG 2-12, AC 6, MOVE 15)
18 - Cheetah (DMG 1-2/1-2/1-8, AC 5, MOVE 15/SPRINT 24)
19 - Lion (DMG 1-4/1-4/1-10, AC 5, MOVE 15)
20 - Snapping Turtle (DMG 1-6, AC 4, MOVE 6/SWIM 15 - Special Attack: On a successful bite, can cling on to cause 6hp damage per turn; 50% hit point loss causes removal)

Roll a d10 to determine special therianthrope ability:

1 - Charm person by gaze, once per day
2 - Cause Fear, once per day
3 - Psionicist abilities, level 1-6
4 - Sleep, once per day
5 - Darkness, 15' Radius, once per day
6 - Blur, once per day
7 - Blink, once per day
8 - Pass without trace, once per day
9 - Can vampirically drain d3 hit points with each successful hit from a natural attack
10 - Has a d3 bonus to AC when in hybrid form from exceptionally tough skin

Three therianthropes created with this method:

Munvaya Bhalangraloo, Level 5 Chaotic Evil Thief and were-komodo dragon. Can cast blur once per day. Works as an assassin in the city of Blacksand, and is known to eat his victims alive.

Ghaji Vimsak, Level 6 Chaotic Evil Wizardress and were-orang-utan. Can cast charm person once per day. Lives in a tree-house complex in the jungle, served by captured children.

Domu-domu Jilibree, Level 3 Chaotic Evil Cleric and were-baboon. Can cast charm person once per day. Lives with the rest of his troop in a rocky area on the outskirts of town, ambushing travelers.

Were-secretary bird in animal form

Death and Difficulty

I think part of the reason why I'm attracted to the rpg's I really love and have played the most (BECMI and 2e AD&D, Cyberpunk 2020, MERP, RuneQuest, early Shadowrun) is Death. That is to say, in those games, it's tough for characters to live through even one adventure or mission - they are fragile entities whose capacity for survival is limited. High level PCs are treasured rarities who you come to have great affection for merely by dint of their luck or toughness.

Thinking about it, I rather like the few computer games I do for the same reasons. ToME, Oolite and Dwarf Fortress have incredibly steep learning curves which result in restart after restart; my list of beginning characters who never got beyond the first dungeon crawl in ToME runs into the hundreds, and even docking a spacecraft in Oolite is a difficult process to master.

Is it a kind of vicarious masochism? Possibly. But I'm more inclined to put it down to respect. BECMI and ToME are proper games who are difficult to master, and rewarding only through effort and luck; they don't mollycoddle and success in them must be earned. You have to appreciate a game like that - it's the difference, I suppose, between Monopoly and The Game of Life. One is an amusing diversion for kids. The other is a fun and interesting activity for all ages.