Will Seitz's page

As a player I don't really like being told how my character really feels. I am not a particularly big fan of alignment, but here is how I see it:

Good/Evil and Law/Chaos in the fiction that D&D set about emulating are not based on complicated internal feelings and personal actions, but are instead palpable forces. In Lord of the Rings, Sauron is Evil. If you are on his side you are on the side of Evil. If you stand against him you are Good and if you get out of the way you are Neutral. In the Eric of Melnibone books if you worship a Chaos god you are Chaotic and if you worship a Law god you are Lawful. Elric himself was interesting because he worshipped a Chaos god but often fought for Law. In Dragonlance, Takhisis is Evil and Paladine is Good.

So I would put alignment more as which side your characters fight for. As for paladins and so on whose alignment must match their deity I would ask how involved are deities in your campaign world. If they are very involved they would frequently revoke powers from followers or give followers a sense of their displeasure. If not involved a follower might be able to keep their powers despite "straying from the path".

I often see alignment used the way you describe to try and get players to not act evilly, like torturing people for information. I think alignment is a heavy handed way to deal with this. My preference would be to hold up a mirror for the players. They torture someone for information. Well, maybe they return to the NPCs they interact with and find out they have been tortured by villains because they wanted information on them. Or you can have people throw their acts in their face. When the villain says, "Why are you attacking me, you have commited acts far more vile than mine?" they have to think about what they have done.

In the Fantasy genre, good vs. evil and law vs. chaos better describe allegiances to powerful forces instead of personal moral choices. For example, in LotR Sauron is evil. Those who side with him are evil. Those who are against him are good. Those who do not want to get involved are neutral.

Elric wields a Chaos weapon and serves a Chaos god, but largely fights for Law and balance. It isn't about his personal moral choices, it is about which universal forces he fights for.

In Darksiders there is a battle between Angels and Demons. The referee for this war is the Charred Council and the Four Horsemen. So you could say that War, Death, Strife, and Fury are neutral because they will happily destroy Angel or Demon or anything that threatens the "balance". (This includes basically committing genocide against their own people.)

In the Wheel of Time, the Great Lor... Dark One is evil and the Creator is good. Those who fight for the Dark One are evil while those who fight for the Creator are good. Note that many who are evil fight other who are evil (struggles between the Forsaken) and those who are 'good' often fight others who are 'good'. Whitecloaks are good, but the often oppose Rand and Aes Sedai who are also 'good'. In this case true neutral who be people sticking their heads in the sand and not worrying about battling the Great Lo... Dark One.

So true neutral would be people who don't want to get involved in the struggle between good and evil or want to balance these opposing forces.

Sauron's presence lay over the land of Mordor. Hobbits could sneak in, but if Gandalf or an Eagle entered Sauron's eye would be upon them. He would have then just psychically crushed the intruder. After all, he psychically corrupted Saruman just by Palantir contact.

Something to remember is that in LotR magic is mysterious and what it can do is never fully fleshed out while in D&D the capabilities of magic are fully detailed and known. Gandalf's and Sauron's abilities weren't access to the D&D spell lists. So let's just assume that Sauron could mystically locate and corrupt or kill any Eagle flying into Mordor.

It seems there is a strong world-builder trend that crushes the story teller trend. When you start a game you focus on the world. The PCs are just people who inhabit it. Another way of doing it is thinking about telling a story where the PCs are the main characters. In this approach the world exists to be a story element. You can obviously mix the two if you have a strong existing setting, but if you can't find a place for a story in your campaign world then you should toss it or at the very least shake it up. If you have players who are used to an established way of things in the world in can be great to shake them up by changing everything. "Hey, the bar we used to hang out in is now in a demonic wasteland..."

A) Governments infiltrated - spy type plots with intrigue
B) Invasion from another world causes worldwide havok
C) Peace actually comes from insidious Mind Flayer plot turning humanity in to easily controlled cattle

1) In your world, how hard is it to become a spell caster? Can anyone with cash go to school? Is it a rare talent?
2) How much education is required? Is this education expensive? Are their 'colleges' or do a handful of masters pass on the knowledge to a limited few?
3) How does the range of ability play out? Are there lots of low-level casters who can cast Prestidigitation? Are there lots of high-level casters?
4) Who controls the casting of spells? Is their some form of guild? Do nobles basically have contracts with every caster? Does the government regulate what can be cast?

The pay rates on casters will depend on labor supply. The labor supply depends on the answers to the questions above.

Since you said fairly magic-rich let's come up with some test answer.

1) Everyone can cast spells, it just requires education and lots of time.
2) Enormous amounts of education are required. This education occurs in large institutions and is very expensive. Many casters come out with large amounts of debt or make deals to serve during their education or for some time after it.
3) Their are many low-level wizards who make a comfortable living doing magic, but only a few who are truly powerful and they command large salaries.
4) Casters are free agents, but have strict ties to colleges and may owe a lot of money or favors to patrons.

In this case I would say that competent casters command elite craftsmen type wages while the elite have significant wealth and power and are like nobles. If you want to limit (or just tightly control) the players ability to hire people to cast spells you might want to have some sort of guild that all spell casters have to belong to. Having access to guild wizards might have a hefty price tag.

Also note that if magic is a profession that doesn't necessarily mean that magic users want to go adventuring. Hiring a wizard to cast a spell is much cheaper than hiring a wizard to risk his life, especially when that wizard can live a good life working a normal job.

i think PC deaths can be meaningful, they can be remembered and recalled,

their lives and stories can continue to be known by NPCs in the world,
and the presence can still be felt by new (replacement) PCs.
heroic deaths are part of heroism. ...

Okay, but do you understand that sometimes D&D campaigns are ABOUT the characters and characters aren't the nameless people observing the story. One unfortunate thing that has happened with D&D and other games is that the characters are very separate from the story. This is because published modules are largely character agnostic because they want you to be able to insert any character you want. As someone who writes a lot of his own material I can tell you that the way I run a game is that I have each character write something, maybe a piece of background or some piece of a story, and then I combine and expand on it to create a campaign that is a story about those specific characters. When they die the story gets derailed because the story is about the characters

http://creativitygames.net/random-word-generator/randomwords/2

Rhinoceros, envelope.

He was known by many names. Some called him the Collector, the Preserver, some called him the Folder. He played by differently rules. Reality seemed to not fully apply to him, but this allowed him to continue on his task. He traveled from world to world stepping across the vastness of space in a single step. He sought out the species about to end. He sought out miraculous beauty just as it was about to end. Instead of letting a species end he would find the last few and preserve them. He had a gift for folding things up. Not just paper of sheets, but anything. He could take anything and fold it up shifting it from three dimensions to two. He would fold up the last few animals in a species and stick them in an envelope, preserving them for eternity, never letting the miracle of their existence fade from the universe. He took these envelopes and stored them in unassuming places. On Earth he had a old house on a hill. It was the perfect place until neighborhood kids stole into his place on a dare. They rifled through his things and one of them took something. A small little envelope labelled "Western Black Rhino of Africa". The folding man now has to search out this troublesome child and retrieve his rhino in an envelope.

1. the deep and abiding moral conflict confronting a paladin living under a lawful-evil true and rightful monarch.

2. flatulence

The people were starving. The crops failed and Pally-man felt helpless. All his training was useless against this simple threat. But then a savior came. EvilMonarch came and he was more than a man. His touch brought the crops to life and the people were fed. Pally-man was grateful, but he became disturbed as EvilMonarch took over and people began to almost worship him with a slavish devotion. Pally-man also detected a strange scent to the people who ate the crops. He investigated and found that EvilMonarch was just a puppet to a strange fungal creature living in the soil. It infected the food which when digested by a human released a powerful gas that numbed the will. EvilMonarch and FungalElderGod brought an age of peace and prosperity, but at the cost of freedom...