The original conception of alignment
in fantasy role-playing, as expressed in
the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS® rules —
Law, Neutral, and Chaos only, without a
Good-Evil access but with Law tending
to be good and Chaos tending to be evil
— has often been criticized as too simple
to adequately reflect the diverse motives
one finds in any human population. But
the introduction of alignment, an idea
not found in earlier wargames, did accomplish
what may have been its primary
purpose: to set the stage for the
political, social, philosophical, and religious
conflicts which gave characters a
reason for adventuring other than mere
lust for blood and gold.

When I first played and read the D&D®
rules, there was no doubt in my mind that
conflicts of this sort would dominate everything.
Perhaps those who had not
read Michael Moorcock’s Elric series,
from which the idea of alignment could
have been derived, could not appreciate
the intent. At any rate, in many of those
early D&D worlds, where players explored
“dungeons” and cared nothing
about the rest of the world, the idea of
large-scale conflicts was neither needed
nor heeded, and every character tended
to act neutrally, whatever his or her nominal
alignment.

Yet when you come to creating a world
or part of a world for your campaign, no
matter what game rules are used, you
must start to think about motivations and
about the struggles which dominate or
highlight the area where the player characters
live. As players gain experience
they want more than a run through a
dungeon, the very existence of which is
probably unexplained and most likely
inexplicable.

In particular, when a Good/Evil alignment
axis is part of the game, you will
have to explain to those who sincerely
play good-aligned characters why their
characters ‘spend much of their adventuring
time exterminating living beings.
Players of the older persuasion, the “Be
thee for Law or be thee for Chaos?”
crowd, don’t need explanations: they
know that, even if much of the world
seems to be at peace, the conflicts never
really end, and Evil (the new substitute
for Chaos) must be destroyed! But the
rest will undoubtedly enjoy the game
more and believe in it more if there is
some Important Struggle in which they
can participate, if only on the fringes.
Moreover, the very existence of this
struggle can help you devise new adventures,
as well as helping you persuade
the players to embark on quests. The
struggle isn’t necessary, but its existence
will certainly improve a campaign.

The purpose of the rest of this article is
to describe some Important Struggles
which might affect your world. Of course,
it is possible to change from one struggle
to another as time passes, depending
on how catastrophic you allow the old
conflict to become. A war between two
countries is the simplest example of an
Important Struggle which can be ended
quickly and cleanly by a victory, the
death of a leader, or some other nonobvious
deus ex machina. On the other
hand, the religious war is unlikely to end
without an apocalyptic battle among the
gods, a la Moorcock, although the war
may become a sitzkrieg for a while as all
sides regroup their forces.
<italicize Latin and Deutsch>

The five principal types of Important
Struggles are described below in order
of likely length, from longest to shortest.
Intensity might be related to length,
since the more intense struggle is likely
to exhaust all participants sooner than
the less intense, but intensity is something
the referee can manipulate with
relative ease.

Religious war
As mentioned above, the religious war
is likely to be very long, though not at all
times bloody. In a game world that uses
deities, it is almost certain that the religious
war will be instigated by the deities,
though minor struggles might be
solely the work of megalomaniacal or
fanatic priests or rulers. The term “religious
war” doesn’t mean a kind of conflict
between princes and high priests to
gain political advantages, or to subdue
competing religions. It defines a war of
extermination, in which adventurers act
as the agents of their deities. Most likely
the deities do not participate directly, unless
the potential benefit far outweighs
the risk, but they communicate with the
great men and women of the land and
require their devoted followers to work
incessantly toward the goal of defeating
the enemy. In a way, the war is a continuous,
perhaps never-ending Crusade,
with no quarter asked and none given. In
most cases it will be Good against Evil
rather than Law against Chaos, if formal
alignments are used, but complications
can certainly arise. Some true neutral
deities — if any exist — may attempt to
maintain a balance, while others will try
to ignore the whole thing; the same can
be said for true neutral people. Perhaps
the deities and their followers will have a
distinct objective, such as obtaining
some artifact left behind by the Elder
Gods (now thought to be dead). In
Moorcock, where the “Cosmic Balance”
is personified, the objective of both Law
and Chaos was the complete destruction
of the opposition so that their way could
dominate the world; and along with that,
the Cosmic Balance itself had to be
destroyed.

Now this kind of religious war may be
altogether too overwhelming for your
taste, and understandably so. It requires
from the deities an interest in men’s affairs
greater than some are willing to
credit to them, even though the deities
need not intervene directly on the material
plane. One might put this kind of war
in the background of a campaign —
though I can hardly believe that there
would be no competition at all — and
deal with lesser struggles.

Racial conflict
In this category, there’s always the old
standby, orcs vs. dwarves or elves. But
other races may become involved in war
against each other. The goblinoid races
as a whole could be at war with humans
and similar species such as elves. Or
some race relatively less prominent in
most worlds, such as ogres, might instead
be very numerous in a particular
milieu, and at war with humans.

Probably most satisfying is to develop
adversary races more capable than the
goblinoids, perhaps a race able to use
magic. The drow (dark elves) used in
some D&D modules are of this category.
Then the racial war really amounts to
something, because the non-human race
needn’t rely solely on numbers in order
to give the humans problems.

Of course, some humans are going to
prefer to cooperate with the enemy rather
than with the establishment (whatever
that might be); one could even arrange
things so that the adversary race seems a
more deserving winner than the humans,
as in Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. Or,
humans need not be directly involved, as
in the struggle between dwarves and
orcs. As long as the two races engaged
are numerous or powerful, there are opportunities
for small groups of humans
— the adventurers — to be drawn into
the conflict. In general, the larger the
number of intelligent races you have in
your world, the greater the chance of a
racial conflict of major proportions.

Heresy
The next struggle again returns to the
topic of religion, but only within an area
dominated by one organized sect. This is
the struggle between an orthodox establishment
and heretics — that is, those
who profess to worship the same god but
who do so in a manner condemned by
the establishment.

If the religious establishment has the
support of the political state — or governs
the state — then it can persecute the
heretics without fear of retribution from
the law. This situation can be particularly
interesting when the establishment
seems to be reprehensible in some way,
so that many of the PCs are
seen by the establishment as heretics.

It is possible for an entire religious organization
to fall away from the deity’s
“true path” (there are many examples in
recent history), so that a group professing
to worship a lawful good deity might
actually be lawful neutral. The deity will
recognize this, and refuse to deal with
the establishment, but the common
people won’t realize it, or be able to do
anything about it if they do. The establishment
will go on collecting tithes,
building temples, and persecuting heretics.
(It is left to the reader to decide
whether any church which professes to
be Good could condone persecution of
heretics; certainly, it would seem, minor
heresy would have to be tolerated, if not
approved, even in a lawful good church.
At worst, the church might exclude minor
heretics from its formal worship.)

This is a type of conflict good for putting
players in unusual situations, and
one which you can heat up or cool down
as you wish, merely through a change in
church leadership or a change of heart
by a church’s ecumenical council (or
whatever body determines church policy).
It’s also a struggle which can be
conducted simultaneously with some of
the others.

Internal political struggle
It’s not only in matters of religion or
race that intelligent beings can have disagreements.
In the political sphere, one
can find a country’s nobles aligned in a
power struggle against the monarch and
his or her supporters. This can also take
the modified form of a three-way struggle,
among the nobles on one hand, a
divine emperor on the second, and a
shogun (de facto dictator or warlord) on
the third, as in medieval Japan.

The emperor is too sacred to be
harmed, but there is a struggle to arrange
the succession. The emperor tries
to gain support from the nobles in order
to regain rule of the country. The nobles,
meanwhile, want to rule their domains
without interference from any central
government (though some may arrange
this by selling their support to the shogun
in return for a free hand at home).

Depending on the commercial and industrial
level of the area, other factions
may become involved: the middle class,
guilds, or the professional army, for instance.
The situation can be beautifully
confused and confusing, and the players
can be frequently faced with decisions
which may affect their characters’ standing
with one political group or another.
Insofar as the situation is more than twosided,
however, it is somewhat harder to
run effectively than some of the other
conflicts discussed above.

Many political struggles have economic
components or roots; in some cases
there may be no armed struggle at all,
except covertly, but PCs
can be profoundly affected nonetheless.

A somewhat different form of political
struggle within a country is modeled on
the old Persian Empire. A local governor
(satrap) might attempt to raise a rebellion
against the emperor, probably to
overthrow him, possibly to form an independent
nation. If the distances involved
are great enough (requiring a quite large
empire so that communication by horse
takes weeks) this struggle can go on for
several years. And more than one satrap
might rebel, of course. The player characters,
caught in the middle, must decide
whether to try to ignore the conflict
— which would be difficult unless they
leave the empire — or to support the
satrap or the emperor. If they wholeheartedly
support the eventual victor,
this could be their opportunity to be
awarded land for a barony.

War between states
Finally, there’s the good, old-fashioned
war between two countries. This will be
more interesting if the player characters
are living in a country where they are
foreigners, or which they dislike (or are
disliked in) for some reason. Do they
abandon their friends and associates to
move to another country at war with the
first one? Do they stay and risk becoming
involved fighting for a country they
dislike?

As an alternative, the PCs
might live in a border area, while the
two warring countries lie just beyond the
border. Do the characters sympathize
with one country enough to help it
against the other? Do they mind their
own business — or at least try to? Does
one country try to hire them for espionage
or other intelligence operations?
Will the government in their area of residence
allow them to become involved?

When you create a world, as opposed
to a dungeon-plus-village environment,
keep the Important Struggle idea in
mind. This approach to game mastering
can add motivation and meaning to a
campaign beyond the “usual” thievery
and purposeless violence.