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Thursday, June 9, 2011

The Priest of Chaos Said . . .

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.
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13 comments:

  1. christianJune 9, 2011 at 10:17 AM

    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!

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  2. TelecanterJune 9, 2011 at 12:34 PM

    Thanks Christian, I appreciate it. Use it. I'd be honored.

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  3. ze buletteJune 10, 2011 at 9:34 AM

    Verse! More please.

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  4. MarcusJune 10, 2011 at 11:08 AM

    Been 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!

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  5. TelecanterJune 11, 2011 at 8:41 AM

    Thanks to both of you.

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  6. Norman J. Harman Jr.June 18, 2011 at 6:21 PM

    Cool.

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  7. Alex SchroederJune 23, 2011 at 5:33 AM

    I love it.

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  8. Alex SchroederJune 23, 2011 at 6:46 AM

    I added an approximate German translation to my campaign wiki as new players have been asking me about alignment recently.

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  9. Alex SchroederJune 23, 2011 at 6:46 AM

    http://campaignwiki.org/wiki/FünfWinde/Gesinnung

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  10. Alex SchroederJune 24, 2011 at 8:24 AM

    The words kept coming back to me. I had to write a similar piece for Law: The Priest of Law Said….

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  11. TelecanterJune 24, 2011 at 4:58 PM

    Thanks, Norman.

    Awesome, 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.

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  12. AnonymousDecember 13, 2012 at 12:58 PM

    Awesome, so very awesome. I have Chaos be something like this in my setting as well.

    So cool!

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  13. TelecanterDecember 13, 2012 at 7:48 PM

    Thanks very much.

    ReplyDelete