HYPERBOREA / What's Your Alignment on Alignment?

**Posted by Spider of Leng** 4/29/2026 9:02 am

Another sort of thematic question here: what's your position on alignment? I started with B/X D&D, but as soon as I started playing AD&D I generally preferred what I considered the more nuanced 9 point system. When I first encountered the system used in Holmes/Hyperborea, I found it to be a sort of weird middle ground. But in recent years I've gravitated back towards Law, Neutrality, and Chaos in a sort of cosmic struggle. And I do like the classic idea of good versus evil; I'm not a huge fan of everything being morally gray.

Others? Or do you ignore it entirely?

**Posted by rhialto** 4/29/2026 6:44 pm

I prefer the three-point alignment system myself, and not so much as a moral alignment as a cosmic allegiance, thus allowing for good and evil to have a place in any of the allegiances.

**Posted by Spider of Leng** 4/29/2026 7:21 pm

Yeah, I forgot to mention that I also think you get a bit more flexibility with the 3-point alignment system in that Chaos isn't necessarily EVIL, nor is Lawful always GOOD. One can certainly have strict, harsh laws and views that are most definitely not what most would consider good for society, though some might.

**Posted by Carnby** 5/01/2026 4:46 pm

Honestly, I find the 3-point system, with the implication of cosmological struggle, to be the better choice. Once you add a good/evil system it starts to muddle the waters, shifts the system from a grand struggle with allegiances to personal ethics, and I think you can use it as a good starting point for character design but giving mechanical effects to something like that gets kinda weird and opens up all sorts of questions like "what is good and evil" that's not really well suited for table top gaming, or at least not for a game about robbing tombs.

I always think of Dragonlance, which should be a 3-point Law-Chaos setting, but by attempting to fit a 9-point alignment system it kinda falls apart. Shifting the Law-Chaos struggle to Good-Evil creates a weird and uncomfortable combination of Moorcockian dualism and American quasi-Protestant just-world-ism.

**Posted by Chainsaw** 5/01/2026 5:06 pm

Spider of Leng wrote:
Another sort of thematic question here: what's your position on alignment? I started with B/X D&D, but as soon as I started playing AD&D I generally preferred what I considered the more nuanced 9 point system. When I first encountered the system used in Holmes/Hyperborea, I found it to be a sort of weird middle ground. But in recent years I've gravitated back towards Law, Neutrality, and Chaos in a sort of cosmic struggle. And I do like the classic idea of good versus evil; I'm not a huge fan of everything being morally gray.

Others? Or do you ignore it entirely?

Pretty much use what's in the book, with players choosing LG, CG, N, LE, CE. Honestly though, it's usually not a super huge component at the table apart from perhaps some instances related to magical effects or reaction rolls, because I mainly run the game as a game, not a moral dilemma simulator. Granted, if I have someone consistently doing behavior out of alignment, like a LG that's continually torturing innocent people for money or something, I'd just ask them what's going on, what are we doing here? You can't have it both ways, as there are some mechanical benefits of being aligned a certain way (most obviously Paladin / Fell Paladin for example).

**Posted by demetrisathanasopoulos** 5/06/2026 1:41 am

for me, it's a narrative characteristic that many people have write too many words for it, for no reason.

i try to play it as is in the book and only once, since 2018 i started playing Hyperborea (2e then) i have said to my players that they should change your aligment to evil because you are too harsh to your mercenaries for a few sessions now.

otherwise, i treat it like it doesn't exist