This post is gonna be different from my usuals. I'm not focusing on anything in-universe here, this is more of a game rules thing. It's also not using content original to me - rather, I am intended to port one system over from a completely different game to replace one in this.
This is less of a creative endeavor, more of a manifesto. This is my explanation as to why, for almost a year now, I have been thinking of D&D characters not in terms of alignment...
...but in Magic the Gathering's Color Pie.
This is that color pie. In clockwise order, the colors are White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green. (sidenote: blue is abbreviated as "U" due to its first two letters being the same as Black's). In Magic's lore, these are the colors of mana, a spiritual force that powers magic. In Magic's design, the mana colors serve as a way to limit the abilities of decks.
Red is naturally a very fast color, so it works well in aggressive decks. However, it's bad at playing the long game. Blue is the most reactive color, able to deal with anything once it gets its resources set up - but if something can get its foot in the door, Blue is unable to deal with it cleanly.
However, they also serve a philosophical purpose. Each of these colors gives us a different outlook on life.
White is the color of humility. It accepts that the world is scary and dangerous, and that pain and suffering are inevitable. It seeks to minimize these things. It is not afraid to kill - and it often will, if it means protecting people and society. But where possible, it will instead restrain, and rehabilitate. It also seeks to bolster its own defenses against the world by maintaining powerful, unshakable connections. White is the chain that keeps your bike locked up so that people can't steal it. White is also the chain that bonds you - for the greater good.
Blue is the color of memory. It is concerned with watching and waiting, and then learning from what it sees - to better anticipate the future. Given the proper resources to flourish, Blue can wield the heavy power that knowledge provides to a studious mind. It simply needs its time to pour over the past, so that it can confront the future. It is unconcerned with good and evil, and cares more about learning from what figures described in those terms did. Sure, Blue concedes, maybe this military dictator committed many atrocities. But have you seen his battlefield formations?
Black is the color of ambition. It is willing to sacrifice others in pursuit of its goals, or sacrifice its own short-term benefit towards its long-term desires. It plots and schemes and makes compromises to achieve what it believes to be "good" - not good as in it helps the most people, or as in something commonly accepted as morally righteous. Rather, what is good to Black is simply understood as fact, the culmination of one's experiences that inform one as to what is the correct course for the world - whether that world knows it or not.
Red is the color of passion. It measures lives not in length, but in experience. Going down swinging is far preferable to dying in your sleep to Red. Not swinging for a cause, but simply living - and dying - in the moment. It keeps moving forwards because it sees only the one time it emerges in a shower of exhilarating glory, not the 99 times it dies on the end of a spear, sputtering blood. It jumps immediately into action and throws everything it has at a problem, not worrying about the likely possibility of simply running out of steam and bleeding out. If you live for the future, Red would argue, you're scarcely living at all.
Green is the color of existence. It lives, period. It is much more concerned with the "how" of that statement than the "why." For it knows that understanding lives not in the brain - in things like comprehension and retention - but in the feet, feeling the earth under your toes that connects you to each other living thing. Not that it relies on them - Green is ferocious on its own - but it accepts that all living things have their place in the world. Sure, its own might be in the maws of a bear - but maybe it IS that bear. Truth be told, it's content either way.
(This pretty excellent article explains all of this in more detail, and is also where I lifted the above picture from. If you read it, be aware that it goes much more in-depth than I am, and also that it has some political undertones, if that would make you uncomfortable.)
Also important to these colors is the intersection of them. Refer back to the above chart - the colors are placed where they are for specific reasons. The colors they neighbor are their allies, and the colors they're across from are their enemies. Green gets along well with White and Red, but disagrees fundamentally with Blue and Black. That isn't to say that Blue and Green could never get along, but enemy colors being paired together is usually more volatile.
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| White is often depicted in gold, and Black in purple. Image from Wizards of the Coast. |
So, with these colors, it would be pretty easy to map out the alignment chart in their terms.
White is Good, Black is Evil.
Blue is Lawful, and Red is Chaotic.
Green is neutral, on both axes.
Your lawful neutral character is blue-green. The chaotic good ranger is red-white, and the lawful evil villain blue-black.
However, that isn't really satisfying.
In Magic the Gathering, there exists a setting called Ravnica. This ecumenopolis is based entirely around the color pairs, and they manifest in the form of ten guilds that run certain parts of the city's responsibilities.
The Simic Conclave (Blue/Green) is, officially, in charge of medicine and the plane's waterways. However, they also have a penchant for genetically splicing various animals together to create monstrosities that often escape captivity and wreak havoc on the rest of the plane.
The Boros Legion (White/Red) is Ravnica's military force, which recruits and trains from almost anywhere. Its members are fiercely loyal and dedicated to the idea of the Legion, unable to see any of its flaws - the rest of the plane is simply in the wrong, as they see it.
And finally, the House Dimir (Blue/Black) are shadowy agents who deal in secrets. Officially, they circulate information, serving as the humble newspeople of the plane. But unofficially - and the unofficial is the crux of what being Dimir is - they have eyes everywhere. They run surveillance on every other guild, and plot in the shadows to bring about... well, nobody really knows what their goals are. But it is agreed that they intend to keep it that way.
And that... doesn't really map to my proposed alignments, does it? The monster-unleashing Simic are hardly lawful in any capacity. Meanwhile, the supposedly-chaotic Boros DO value law and order above most other things. And the Dimir are too enigmatic to even describe.
But that doesn't mean that a blue/green character couldn't ever be "lawful neutral," nor a red/white character "chaotic good." It just means that D&D's alignment system isn't a great descriptor for complex characters.
This is why I have let MtG's color pie usurp the position that alignment was supposed to fill. I find that my characters, both when I am a player and a DM, benefit greatly from this. Two Neutral Good characters are "supposed to" act the same in a given situation, but two White/Green characters may behave totally differently based on a number of different factors - such as the people they are with, or which color they lean more towards in that given moment.
It also allows you to inject different factors into your character's color identity. An elf in traditional D&D settings might be drawn more towards White, Blue and Green. A bard is naturally going to connect more with Red, the color-patron of the arts.
The point is to break away from alignment as a system. I've disliked it for a long time, and I've written before about attempts to rationalize character decisions in-universe through different means. And while simply translating a character's alignment into colors is a good place to start for people with attachment to that system, ultimately I would like to see alignment as a concept go away.
It's just good character writing. I don't act the way I do in real life because I'm some abstract concept of good or evil, lawful or chaotic. However, I find it fairly easy to describe myself as Green-Black.
A few miscellaneous things:
- I find that most player characters are two-color or more. When doing this thought experiment, don't limit yourself to trying to pin a character down in just one color. A character might take a few features from two or three colors, or synthesize something unique to a color pair that the individual colors simply don't yield. Here is a list of the "canonical" names for the two, three, and four-color groups, for those interested.
- That being said, there's nothing wrong with mono-colored characters. Each of the five colors is a deep well of concepts and tropes that can be drawn from, and a character being mono-colored just means they dive deeper into that well, whereas a multicolored character pulls specific things from each well. Notice that almost all alignments are color pairs, and they're more than capable of being basic and uninteresting.
- Characters of the same color identity can be radically different. Pulling from MtG again, the Merfolk of Ixalan are a race of indigenous people dedicated to protecting a secret city. They were tasked with this endeavor by a godlike being millennium ago, and the task is strongly rooted in tradition. Their associated colors are Blue and Green. Notice that they are nothing like the Simic Conclave mentioned earlier. That is an advantage of the system, not a downside of it.
Hello! Thank you for reading this long-winded post. It's something I've been meaning to discuss for awhile, and I hope if nothing else it gives you something to think about.
The second edition of Colorful Replies was what finally got me to get off my ass and write this thing. It's written by Mark Rosewater, the head designer of Magic. It's a great way to familiarize yourself with the colors on a more personal level. The first edition of it is here. I really cannot recommend these posts enough - they are funny and super insightful.
Another inspiration to start writing again was my friend Anders, who started their own D&D blog, Robot of Dawn. They are a fellow Loom DM, and the influence their writing and roleplay has had on my own is staggering. Their stuff is great, and I cannot recommend it enough.
Finally, I'm tagging this post as MtG because I might blog about it more in the future. It's grown as an interest of mine, almost rivaling D&D's ability to captivate me. And hey, they're both made by the same company, but made great by the communities who fuel them. We'll see if that shakes out.
Again, thank you for reading. Have a nice day!
