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Let's look at the dragons in the first Monster Core.
Page 108 "Adamantine dragons are typically steadfast and loyal. Once they commit to a certain purpose, changing their minds is nigh impossible."
Page 110 "These dragons are schemers, always looking to manipulate and control others, either for personal gain or simply for the thrill of watching their machinations play out. Conspirator dragons see themselves above others and typically speak with infantilizing tones and words."
Page 112 "Whether this is true or whether diabolical dragons are simply the reborn souls of dragons sent to Hell, the fact remains that these dragons are powerful, cunning, and tyrannical. Every diabolic dragon’s goal is to further Hell’s will, though how this happens can vary."
Page 114 "Using the blessings of Heaven, empyreal dragons protect others and intercede against wickedness. Empyreal dragons are wise, considerate, and compassionate. When speaking with others, empyreal dragons are patient and understanding."
Page 117 "Fortune dragons are seekers of novel experiences. This desire for originality leads fortune dragons to approach visitors of other ancestries with curiosity, though this initial interest quickly wanes if a visitor lacks exciting qualities."
Page 119 "They are generally contemplative and have a fixation on knowledge and self-discipline, traits belied by their bestial appearance. As a result, horned dragons are generally more open to speaking with outsiders."
Page 121 "Mirage dragons are vain and egotistical figures. They ultimately care more about themselves than others."
Page 123 "Omen dragons have a natural compulsion to share the futures they see. These dragons have no compunctions about what the visions show and share their knowledge equally with innocent villagers as they do with wicked tyrants."
Those descriptions provide more roleplaying information than alignments did.
In Monster Core 2 we find:
Page 118 "Among the largest and fiercest dragons, cinder dragons are typically volatile, demanding respect—even deference—from lesser creatures. Cinder dragons’ appearance evokes their flame, often in scales with mixed patterns of red, orange, and yellow. Many cinder dragons dwell in active volcanoes and similarly fiery locales. Cinder dragons prefer treasures that can withstand the heat of their bodies and lairs, with gemstones, gold, and silver common among their hoards."
The description outright states that a cinder dragon is fierce and volatile. Are they selfish? Their demand for deference probably means that they like gifts from supplicants, but the description does not label them as selfish. Are they kind-hearted? Even if a particular cinder dragon is kind-hearted, their volatile nature means that their anger will often overrule their kindness. They may apologize later. Are they stern yet fair? No, too volatile for that. Are they reckless? That is one way of roleplaying volatile. Are they passionate? That is one way of roleplaying fierce.
Culture matters especially in fantasy because it is about the great conflict Good vs Evil, Law vs Chaos. Alignment was a shorthand that helped to flesh all of that out.
Cinder Dragons are CE, Ok the are cruel and selfish like a red dragon, LE ok then they are ordered and believe in discipline and conquest, N, they are balanced and react as mother nature, their personality dormant until they erupt.
Culture matters less in Pathfinder because most dragons are opponents to defeat. But my players like to interact more, often negotiating with hostile creatures, so I do have to consider culture.
For example, in my Strength of Thousands campaign, the PCs will soon fight a Graveknight. They are students of the Magaambya Academy and will likely recall, "A graveknight can only be permanently destroyed by obliterating their armor (such as with disintegrate), transporting it to the Forge of Creation, or throwing it into the heart of a volcano." One PC took a Magaambya course named, "Making the Undead Stay Dead." Fortunately, they are near the Shackles, which has volcanic islands. Imagine they headed to a volcanic island and encountered a young cinder dragon.
The cinder dragon would fiercely demand that the party explain their intrusion on his volcano. The party is good at Diplomacy and if they roll Recall Knowledge well they will learn, "Cinder dragons are fierce and volatile, demanding respect—even deference—from lesser creatures." The Diplomatic members are also performers (Theater majors), so they might offer the dragon the gift of songs that praise dragons, altering lines to make the songs specifically about cinder dragons. They will point out that only the power of a volcano, which reflects the power of the cinder dragon living there, can destroy the cursed graveknight armor (leaving off the other two possibilities).
And if Diplomacy and Performance fail due to bad dice rolls, then the fierce dragon will declare that his volcano is not a trash dump and he will destroy the party for the insult. Yet he will plan that if he is victorious, he will dump the graveknight armor into the volcano himself rather than deal with a graveknight rejuvenating nearby. The 9th-level party will be able to defeat the dragon. If they spare him (they hate killing intelligent creatures), he will keep his humiliation secret, never telling another dragon and never seeking revenge.
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So someone decided they did not like alignment and convinced everyone else to leave it out of the game.
Well, not quite. It was more legal reasons than anything else. But close enough.
Reading through the rest of the OP, it feels like you are already answering your own questions. You just don't like the answer.
What is a Cinder dragon, what make it tick. What is the culture of Cinder dragons? Are they selfish, kind hearted, stern but fair, reckless and passionate. ... what drives them. Sometimes the description on monsters for whatever reason is light on these aspects meaning I guess I have to fill that in.
Yes. That is the point. You get to fill in the culture and motivations of each creature that you put in there as an NPC with screen time.
If the PCs don't ever interact with the Cinder Dragon other than to roll initiative and kill it, does it matter what their culture or motivations are?
Culture matters especially in fantasy because it is about the great conflict Good vs Evil, Law vs Chaos.
Well, not necessarily. The great conflict between Good and Evil is a common trope, but is hardly mandatory.
Alignment was a shorthand that helped to flesh all of that out.
Cinder Dragons are CE, Ok the are cruel and selfish like a red dragon, LE ok then they are ordered and believe in discipline and conquest, N, they are balanced and react as mother nature, their personality dormant until they erupt.Sure, I agree that alignment did not force a creature to be one way or another
This seems contradictory. You want alignment as a shorthand for the creature's personality, but also need to mention that alignment doesn't really indicate a creature's personality.
So, I'm not entirely sure that you actually understand what you really want.
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Essentially, removing alignment is cutting out an unnecessary and confusing indicator that doesn't really indicate anything.
It also has the effect that we no longer subconsciously try to shoehorn every enemy of the same type to be clones of each other. While most people would at least cautiously, and maybe grudgingly, agree that alignment was not an inviolable creature stat, it still caused a lot of subconscious racism by proxy... and comics mocking that. Goblins were evil and were remorselessly attacked on sight. As were Kobolds, Drow, Troglodytes, ... simply because that was their race.
I don't think Pathfinder2e or tabletop gaming in general is worse because of the removal of alignment and having to at least consider some sort of morality of your own choices based on something other than easily visible physical characteristics of the creature in front of you. It is a life lesson that is best shown rather than told. And a TTRPG game is a place to learn such lessons with no legal consequences if you get it wrong a few times.
You're going to have to build the culture of a given area of the world or creatures on a case by case basis in PF2.
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I did enjoy the theme of the axiomites vs proteans, law vs chaos. But I can just add that back in if I want. The game system doesn't stop me from having a great conflict like that, but it's more opt-in now, the rules don't depend on it so much.
For describing creatures, alignment was always a very very short shorthand. The lawful evil of a kobold was not the same lawful evil of a devil; one of them is just describing a typical member of a culture, while the other was fundamentally made out of law and evil. It's comparing apples and perfect mathematical spheres.
The place where I find myself missing it a bit was in partitioning which gods were somewhat aligned with each other. It made for interesting tidbits when someone was out of place, too, like Gorum and Calistria having their realms in Elysium, or Arazni accepting chaotic good champions.
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Not all creatures with an alignment had an ideology much less have to share them with others of the same alignment. And most ideologies could manifest among various alignments, even conflicting ones. So there's been no "existential loss of ideology" in PF. If anything, removing the shorthand of alignment has created space/need for ideologies to stand out.
In a keystone 2nd ed D&D module there was a group of wizards puzzled by how alignment wasn't the best determiner of which species got along with one another. They were so puzzled they oversaw several dungeon levels monitoring and mixing to figure this out. Which is to say even in-game some had recognized culture > alignment. I believe Planescape made this even clearer with all the internal fighting in the Outer Ring, including violence among Lawful Good factions (which still kind of baffles me, but RPGs did spawn from war games). And on aligned planes there were pantheons with diverse alignments making their homes there, "aligned" more by their roots than what a Know Alignment spell would say.
Now combinations like the noble-hearted hero with a greedy streak (i.e. Dwarf tropes) don't contend with a LG/CN imbalance. The rascal hero isn't obliged to demonstrate the whole set of chaotic traits, nor is the stoic one obliged to respect law & order.
I hope Paizo & adventure authors recognize the need to fill the gap, and it appears with dragons they have. I'd like most creatures (and all named individuals) to have a sentence describing their basic worldview, perhaps even a quote that epitomizes their nature, their voice. But that's not a new need IMO, I've appreciated that for decades when authors add that, even when it's just tactical.
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I have noticed that, within remastered adventures, not having some kind of easy flag for “hostile” or “friendly” on NPCs (preferably as a bit of a nuanced spectrum), can slow me down a step as a GM, especially if it is an encounter I prepped a while ago and I am mostly just looking back at a stat block and not carefully reading the lead in text again. Alignment used to kinda serve this function, but it wasn’t particularly good at it.
I do which NPC stat blocks in adventures had a presumed starting attitude stat for quick reference, since that is something the game is technically supposed to track and the destination between hostile and unfriendly is really helpful to know. I do recognize that one of the complications there is that it is a lever that can change quickly for players, but a “see text, pg. xyz” option would at least flag and remind GMs where to look to figure that out, and really HP being a full number all the time is about as likely as a creature having g a different starting attitude. (I haven’t read some of the newest APs yet, so if this has already been added, awesome!)
The biggest problem with alignment in Golarion, especially when it could be considered both core cosmic attribute and Ideology, is that Golarion is way too diverse of a setting to have a unified definition of good. Like Holy slightly overlaps, but that is specifically about a cosmic battle and there are lots of good people who have nothing to do with that battle so there can be lots of conflicting goods (great for story telling) without preventing any stories you want to tell about forces of cosmic goodness. It is nice to have those stories separated from “tales of conflicting nations” where a GM might really not want a spell like detect alignment just providing a bypass to any player decision making.
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If you want some shorthand, Paizo replaced some alignments with edicts and anathema.
For NPC entries, there's a one-word description instead- where it would once say "Soandso, LN Merchant", it is now "Soandso, Forthright Merchant".
And, in some cases, like for monsters, there isn't a replacement shorthand. The CE dragon with a description of what kind of CE they were is now just a dragon with a description of what kind of dragon they are.
Those seem to be the tools that Paizo is using.
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One the other hand no short hand what so ever means a lot of work to classify it ahead of time. Creatures will have a cultural set of beliefs which define them. Even if they break from the norm it would define that break. Maybe the best way to handle this is have the gods each have their own philosophy tied to the religion they preach and this formulates the ideologies which then defines the enemies and allies of each god.
The edicts and anathema of each god serve as a shorthand for their philosophy.
For example, at the moment Uvuko (The Diamond Ring) is important in my Strength of Thousands campaign. His edicts are, "Embrace change and the future, master adversity with flexibility, foster freedom and progress for others." His anathema are, "Allow yourself and your surroundings to stagnate, crush an egg, use vile or cruel language." The party met some Mbe'ke dwarves whose great-grandparents migrated from Cloudspire and one is a cleric of Uvuko. The party is studying the ruins of Bloodsalt, a dead city that once had several Dragon Disciples. An archaeological secret I am adding is that the city was settled by human and cloud dragon worshipers of Uvuko to embrace a future in which dragons and humans work together. The city is in an area of natural disasters, which spelled its doom, but they were hopeful that the interspecies cooperation could overcome the disasters. The anathema against crushing an egg is symbolic, because to dragons their eggs represent the future, but it resulted in the weird custom that followers of Uvuko do not eat eggs, not even chicken eggs.
A bigger plot about the philosphy of a god was my PF2-converted Ironfang Invasion campaign. The Monster Division of the Molthune military, led by hobgoblin General Azaersi, rebelled against the Molthunes, who treated them as third-class citizens, and sought to carve their own nation of monstrous humanoids out of parts of Nirmathas and Molthune. Most of her hobgoblins followed Hadregash, the Lawful Evil barghest hero-god of tyranny and slavery. The other three hero-gods and their boss Lamashtu were Chaotic Evil, but tyranny controls through lawful authority. The campaign was supposed to end with a treaty between Azaersi and Nirmathas, but my players rejected any truce while the Ironfang Legion still held war captives as slave labor. I had to enact cultural change on the Ironfang Legion by letting the party defeat Hadregash himself to strip slavery from his domains. Amusingly, the Remastered PF2 version of Hadregash is no longer a god of slavery, but still has chain and manacle as his holy symbol.
Edicts Conquer everything you see, rule with an iron fist, fight tactically
Anathema Bow before others, let others control your actions, permit insubordination
Areas of Concern Conquest, invasion, war
Domains ambition, might, pain, tyranny
Culture as defined by Schien is made of Artifacts, Espoused Values and Basic Assumptions. Artifacts are the physical aspects one notices, music, stories, sporting games, clothing, food, manner of speaking, etc.
Espoused Values are the direct morals and teachings that make up a culture.
Basic Assumptions are the deep unwritten and often unspoken shared zeitgeist members of a culture have.
I looked up Edgar Henry Schein and found descriptions of Schein’s Model of Organizational Culture.
I used to work for a United States government agency and we had subcultures inside the bureaucratic culture to protect our people from the flaws of bureaucracy. No culture is monolithic.
As an example I would point to the Aztec Indians. We can talk about the brutality of their sacrifice but from their perspective their culture demanded this. They felt there was a need for wide spread bloodshed through human sacrifice or the world would not continue.
From this they justified raids and forced tribute of slaves and the sacrifice of slaves as required for various things.
Now based on critical deconstruction we must accept this as their culture and somehow not judge it against other cultures. I would submit this overlooks the reality of where that culture drove them.
My players and their characters judged the culture of the Ironfang Legion and found it wanting. The halfling rogue/sorcerer Sam had grown up as a slave in Nidal. The Bellflower Network rescued him and relocated him to Nirmathas. The others followed Nirmathi espoused values about independence.
What I am getting at is what shorthand can I use to define the basic assumptions of the culture of each group that is shown in the game.
This is because trying to write up each individual culture for every race and monster would be overwhelming
It would be overwhelming for a single person, but Paizo has teams writing the Lost Omens lore books that describe cultures for regional groups on Golarion.
Currently I am running the Strength of Thousands adventure path, in which the PCs start as students of the Magaambya Academy of Arcane and Primal Magic. The 1st module occurs on campus, the 2nd module moves out to the city of Nantambu surrounding campus, the 3rd module is an archaeological expedition to Bloodsalt that ends up visiting other nations, too, etc. The 1st module sends the PCs on many service projects, because the Magaambya has a culture of study and service.
In the Magaambya, it’s said that a wizard learns both by reading and by doing—a philosophy sometimes termed “the Word and the Way”—and thus to shut oneself off from the world in perpetual study is at best counterproductive, and at worst miserly. In [founder] Jatembe’s tradition, study is ultimately less important than using what you learn to serve others.
The Magaambyan emphasis on service is the source of Nantambu’s strength, with the resident mages ensuring that no invading force has ever managed to come within 20 miles of the city.
Descriptions of the Magaambya can be found in the Lost Omens World Guide, Lost Omens Character Guide, Lost Omens The Mwangi Expanse, and Lost Omens Rival Academies.
My players worked hard to embrace the service culture of the Magaambya. I learned in my thread Common Sense Versus The Plot that other GMs interpreted the culture of the Magaambya differently, because non-combat service does not necessarily mesh with standard adventuring PCs.Nantambu has a separate culture, since they are not a college devoted to the study of magic. Instead, they are a cosmopolitan democracy reaping benefits of working with the Magaambya.