Life is Chaos: the weeds in the plowed fields, the orchards gone to woods, the shore worn away by the sea. Chaos is long patterns: the rivers unfurl, the clouds move as they will but each with their own way.
The Elves make homes in the trees, but not by killing them and cutting them into sharp-edged planks then watching those rot and weather. No, they watch for the trees' patterns and shape them slowly and live among them; the tree living, the Elf living.
Order is the hubris that mans' whims can be imposed on the world, and dooms them-- man, woman, and child-- to a lifetime of wearying burden. Chaos is not the burning of cities, but realizing the foolishness of building such at all. Chaos is not lawlessness, but realizing that men, like trees, have their ways, and to lay laws upon them without acknowledging this, is to cut them down and bury them in plank-sided boxes. Come with me. I know not where I'm going, but we will learn along the way.
Dude, you knocked that one way out of the park. So epic. I think I'll have to message you about using that for an NPC in Haldane. So subversive!
ReplyDeleteThanks Christian, I appreciate it. Use it. I'd be honored.
ReplyDeleteVerse! More please.
ReplyDeleteBeen a big fan of your blog for a while now, and this piece does a better job of defining what the Chaotic alignment really means than any of the other recent posts dealing with this subject. Bravo!
ReplyDeleteThanks to both of you.
ReplyDeleteCool.
ReplyDeleteI love it.
ReplyDeleteI added an approximate German translation to my campaign wiki as new players have been asking me about alignment recently.
ReplyDeletehttp://campaignwiki.org/wiki/FünfWinde/Gesinnung
ReplyDeleteThe words kept coming back to me. I had to write a similar piece for Law: The Priest of Law Said….
ReplyDeleteThanks, Norman.
ReplyDeleteAwesome, Alex. I like this approach: to find the most persuasive aspects of each ideology, so that it is understandable that many people would be swayed to both.
As a monolingual, it is also pretty wonderful to see my words translated.
Awesome, so very awesome. I have Chaos be something like this in my setting as well.
ReplyDeleteSo cool!
Thanks very much.
ReplyDelete