Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums VideosJoin Login

Search

Follow TV Tropes
Edit Page Related History Discussion More
Follow
Blue And Orange Morality / Tabletop Games
Main

Awesome

Characters

Discontinuity

FanWorks

Fridge

Funny

Headscratchers

Heartwarming

Horrible

Laconic

NightmareFuel

Pantheon

Quotes

ShoutOut

TearJerker

WMG

More
- More -

Create New

- Create New -
The Champions scenario book The Sands of Time plays with but ultimately averts this
trope. Renewal and the Right Hand follow moral principles a little different to
those of most heroes, but they are ultimately on the same side. Conversely,
Belragor comes from very far outside most PCs' frame of reference, and his allies
and followers are frequently just plain weird, and few of them define what they do
as "evil", but ultimately his motives are all about uncomplicated greed and
ambition.
Dungeons & Dragons:
Many This example contains a FlameBait entry. It should be moved to the FlameBait
tab.True Neutral D&D characters are simply beings whose morality is
incomprehensible to us. This becomes even more likely if the entity in question is
a god, Eldritch Abomination, or Outsider (that is to say, alien from another
dimension), or even just a normal person who has spent a lot of time around any of
the above.
The various giant breeds have a morality system called the Ordning, essentially a
Fantastic Caste System based on giants' roles in their old empire of Ostoria. Each
giant type devotes themselves to a different virtue/trait, and giants are
individually ranked within their tribes by their skill at their particular trait
(i.e. frost giants were shock troops, so they value physical strength, and thus
base their society on Asskicking Equals Authority). There's also a more general
Ordning code based around upholding giant ideals; maat (roughly analogous to
good/honorable/desirable) qualities include respecting Ordning positions of other
giants, devotion to your breed's particular virtue (so a frost giant tribe raiding
wouldn't be seen as evil because it's what they're supposed to do, though good-
aligned giants might see it as distasteful, and good-aligned Frost giants will
uphold the Ordning in other ways), and honoring the giant pantheon, while maug
(bad) behaviors include worshiping deities like the troll god Vaprak, disobeying
superiors, and forcing giants out of their territories (said lands are regarded as
being gifts from their creator-deity Annam). Notably, tribal allegiances take
precedence before general rank of other giants; while it's considered rude to
disrespect or betray giants of another breed or tribe, it's not maug.
On the subject of giants, the long-lived stone giants prefer to live entirely
underground, and thus view the surface, with its variable seasons, day-night cycle,
ever-changing weather, etc., as a dream world. While some stone giants may visit
the surface to seek artistic inspiration, they understand that nothing that happens
there is real, so any promises struck there can be freely broken, and giants can
steal or destroy things on the surface without consequence.
In the Mystara campaign setting, the Immortal (D&D's functional equivalent of
AD&D's gods) Nyx was definitely this. All the other Immortals of Entropy were just
straightforwardly evil. Nyx, on the other hand, loved every living thing in the
universe as if they were her own children. It's just that she believed that living
things were children who ought to be helped to mature into undead. She wanted to
transform the world into one in which the undead would dominate the living. She
wasn't evil in the sense of wanting to harm anyone; she genuinely believed that the
world would be a better place if more people became vampires, liches, ghosts, or
what have you, and if those undead beings ruled the world.
Mystara's version of satyrs, as detailed in the "Tall Tales of the Wee Folk" game
supplement, don't have any abstract concepts of "morality" to speak of, but follow
their primal impulses without reflection or hesitancy. For instance, if you offer
to ally with a satyr, he'll immediately pounce on and try to wrestle you into
submission, because animal instinct tells him that to get along, both of you need
to know who's stronger and should be the boss. If you wish to insult one, you're
out of luck: whatever slurs you might sling at a satyr, he'll either cheerfully
agree with if it's the literal truth — no moral judgement attached — or if it's
not, dismiss the remark because you don't know what you're talking about.
The Daelkyr from the Eberron setting. They invaded the mortal world several
thousand years ago for some reason, wreaked a massive amount of havoc for little
apparent benefit, and nobody really understands a thing they've done since. Word of
God from setting creator Keith Baker indicates that this is what makes them so
frightening and worthy of a place among the setting's top supernatural threats —
sure, the Overlords of the Age of Demons are much more powerful, and the quori of
the Dreaming Dark are more cunning, better organized, and have more influence, but
nobody truly understands the Daelkyr or can predict their next movenote .
This is represented strongly in the Dungeons & Dragons Online adaptation: when the
Daelkyr show up, the entire context of the module usually shifts dramatically, and
the players usually survive simply because the creature was doing something else.
One of the deadliest modules in the game is actually two of them throwing a
welcome-home party (for themselves), with players having to do things like carry
helium for balloons by inflating themselves and awkwardly flying through a dense
array of spinning blades.
The aurads, in the third-party setting Oathbound, "can accept betrayal if it is
explained eloquently, but might take issue at an excellent gift presented without
proper ceremony."
Planescape: Sigil's Factions are generally followers of a certain philosophy that
banded together and took on some part of running the city that worked with their
worldview, and given how weird Sigil is, those philosophies tend to be themselves
strange by Prime Material standards, especially as they don't tend to restrict
alignment; you'd have to come up with some really wild excuse to justify a Lawful
Good Doomguard.
Speaking of the Doomguard, their faction belief can be basically summed up as
Entropy= Good. Their writeups point out that while the evil Doomguards tend to fall
into the Straw Nihilist and Omnicidal Maniac stereotypes, good Doomguards take the
passive belief that because doing anything increases entropy (2nd law of
thermodynamics), then acceptance and encouragement of entropy is a necessary part
of mortal existence.
The Mercykillers' views on law and justice come from being formed out of a Lawful
Good faction (Sons of Mercy) and a Lawful Evil one (Sodkillers). In an attempt to
formulate a philosophy that didn't result in one half of the faction murdering the
other half, they came up with the idea that justice is the most perfect pursuit in
the universe, and that things like mercy are distractions that must be purged
(hence the name). Mercykillers aren't allowed to fight except in service of the law
or in self-defense, may only pass judgement in terms of 'just' and 'unjust' rather
than good and evil, and will take on anyone who they judge as breaking the law.
The Sign of One is a faction based on Mass Solipism (yes, everyone knows it's an
oxymoron- just go with it). They believe that belief forms reality, that anyone can
change their immediate reality by imagining it so, and that ultimately, the entire
multiverse is the imagination of one individual (the titular One, who most Signers
like to believe is them). Under this worldview, good and evil are pointless,
because if you aren't the One, you're a figment of their imagination and ultimately
nothing you do matters, and if you are the One, violence against your own
imagination is pointless and you'd be better off just imagining the world to be
more to your liking.
The Xaosectists believe that since the Multiverse is fundementally chaotic, you
should also be chaotic in everything you do... and I do mean everything.
Xaosectists don't care if you're doing something good or evil, but hate doing
anything that requires planning ahead.
The Neogi in Spelljammer are absolutely incapable of understanding any social bond
except for Master and Slave. They can occasionally trade with the other races by
studiously ignoring the implications, but they inevitably betray their partners
because the idea of equality simply doesn't compute; amongst themselves, the social
structure is basically 'everybody is enslaved to everybody else'. Somebody who
isn't your master being able to tell you 'no' and leave at their whim, and someone
who isn't your slave not being your master, is horrifyingly alien.
In Exalted, The Fair Folk fall into this; at base, the unshaped (and many shaped)
raksha simply have trouble comprehending that anyone else is a separate being that
might not care about their agenda, and they don't see why humans are so afraid of
the chaotic madness of the Wyld. Those who do comprehend humanity still tend to
subscribe to alien (read: soul-eatingly dangerous) morality, but there are
exceptions. Graceful Wicked Masques puts it best:
All other characters in the Exalted setting are unique beings with their own unique
Motivations, personalities and memories. A raksha is not a being like that — not
really. Instead, a raksha is actually an incoherent and incomprehensible mass of
seething chaos that — for some impenetrable reason of its own — pretends to be a
unique being with its Motivation, personality and memories. The first step in
understanding and creating a raksha character is to understand that everything
about that character is a deception engineered to facilitate an interaction between
a shaped being of Creation and an entity so far removed from Creation as to be
utterly beyond mortal comprehension.
The Yozis are not much different in application. They are manifestations of
complex, broad concepts. They are made up of not only themselves, but the tiers of
sub-demons that define all aspects of their idea.
A similar deal goes with many of the Primordials in 2e. They are, at their very
core, pure, undefiled concepts, which means they have trouble understanding
anything outside their purview. She Who Lives in Her Name honestly thinks everyone
would be better as mindless pieces in a hierarchical machine, the Ebon Dragon can't
understand why anyone would do something that doesn't hurt someone else (unless
they're setting up for the inevitable betrayal), and Autochthon views innate
progress and innovation as awesomesauce but can't possibly foresee the consequences
(though unlike the other Primordials, he actually tries). Adorjan has a
particularly impressive case, since she's redefined her Compassion so that killing
someone in an agonisingly painful fashion is, to her, a compassionate act because
they're so quiet afterwards and silence is the greatest gift.
The Fair Folk in Halt Evil Doer! for Mutants & Masterminds. Convention has it that
the Lords of Winter are the "bad guys" and the Lords of Summer the "good guys".
Word of God is that convention is completely wrong — it's just that the Lords of
Summer happen to be the Anthropomorphic Personification of happy dreams and the
Lords of Winter of nightmares. But that doesn't mean the Lords of Summer care about
humans, or the Lords of Winter are actively malevolent. (However the current leader
of the Lords of Winter is a human villain who is a straight-up bad guy.)
In KULT, reality itself is an illusion, and the true reality behind it is very
different. Any character who knows anything about the truth and acts on this
knowledge rather then just playing normal will be perceived as insane at best. One
basic rule is that you need to achieve as extreme a mental balance as possible in
order to break free from the illusion. A normal person has a mental balance of
zero, the weakest and most vulnerable position possible. Thus, helping people with
negative mental balance climbing back up to zero is actually doing them a disfavor,
unless you can keep pushing them upwards to high levels of positive mental balance.
This means that it's usually a bad thing to heal a trauma or cure a mental
disorder. It also means that any person with negative mental balance (or positive
balance very close to zero) potentially has a lot to gain from getting tortured,
raped, or even murdered. Positive mental balance is even more alien, although much
neater.
In Mystic Empyrean every player is an Eidolon who is defined by a Creed. This creed
is a set of 3 rules that the Eidolon swears to uphold at the cost of their very
existence, and when they break any of them, their very soul starts to fall apart.
Then there are traits, which are facets of an Eidolon's personality given form. In
the game, the players have to roleplay these traits to improve them, and as they
'level up' to more and more intense levels, the players are expected to roleplay
them more and more. For example, the trait "Weapon For the Strong" is connected to
Obedience. An eidolon with this trait starts off being able to change into mundane
weapons, but has to obey the one they recognize as their master, later on they get
into tank sized and equivalent powered weapons, and can even operate a single
function of themselves (like drive the tank or shoot the cannon), but have to obey
anybody they see as having legitimate authority over them. At the final levels,
they can become city and world destroying space ships, mechs, and legendary weapons
of colossal magical power, and can even act independently, but they cannot act at
all unless given an order to do so. This obviously gives many Eidolons some very
strange morality systems when you combine traits and creeds.
Nobilis thrives on this trope, particularly in the sidebar "microfiction"
vignettes. While the Nobles have an ultimately good goal (they want to save the
universe), some want to destroy humanity as well. The Nobilis, even the more
traditional "good guy" types, see things in a different way than you or me. They
are, after all, living personifications of concepts. And then there are the
Excrucians, who have a morality that freaks out the Nobilis. Yipe.
Some source material from Paranoia suggests that Friend Computer works on this
system. Either that, or its goals are just really screwy. No one can be quite sure,
and trying to be is treason.
Fey in Pathfinder are native to the chaotic First World, where they're immortal:
killing them there is only a temporary inconvenience. As such, they often have
trouble grasping the concept that the kinds of pranks they play on each other can
actually have permanent consequences when played on mortals in the Prime Material
Plane.
In Rocket Age the Europans in particular have morality and values that are
completely at odds with everyone else, though this may just be simple arrogance.
The Ganymedians can also be incomprehensible to outsiders due to being plant-based
organisms.
In SystemsMalfunction, a seemingly angelic group of creatures called the Deva are
this trope. Their morality is based around doing things for the For The Greater
Good of humanity as a whole. However, they have little — if any — concern for the
lives of individual humans, and their attitudes toward non-humans range from
apathetic to Kill 'em All.
Warhammer has a few examples of this:
Ogres have almost no concept of morality beyond Might Makes Right. In their
culture, iron is more valuable than gold, because with a bag of gold, you can buy
an iron weapon and lose the gold, but with an iron weapon, you can kill someone and
take their gold and keep the weapon. They're willing to do basically anything they
deem necessary to get what they want; if working as mercenaries gets them paid and
fed, they'll do it, and if burning down a few human villages would get them the
same thing, they see no real distinction between the two. Eating is pretty much
their shtick, to the point where their religion revolves around it; they worship a
being called the Great Maw, which is the personification of hunger, and to advance
in society, you have to kill and devour the Ogre above you. Their females view a
particularly large paunch as the most attractive trait in a male (although in all
but the fattest it's mostly muscle in any case), and they view disembowelment as
the absolute worst way to die (in fact, one of them, Bragg, is The Dreaded among
their kind because disembowelment is his favoured method of execution). Admittedly,
the disembowelment thing is because the sheer quantity of entrails in an Ogre means
it's an agonising death they can't treat and which can take days to kill them.
The Dwarfs of this setting are obsessed by Revenge Before Reason, to the point of
Too Dumb to Live territory. They never forgive and never forget insults and
injuries to them, no matter how trivial the slight, with every Dwarfen Hold
recording each instance into a Book of Grudges, the entries of which get
transferred to the Great Book of Grudges held by their High King. All grudges have
set conditions for fulfillment, usually disproportionately high. When a grudge's
conditions are fulfilled, the matter is settled, with the Dwarfs abandoning a
conflict halfway through and returning home secure of their success. Case in point:
they once went to a war against a human lord, destroyed his castle, and slaughtered
his men by the hundreds because six years ago, when Dwarfen workers were building
his castle, he underpaid by twelve pennies. They also take the casualties from
their vengeance-seeking campaigns and place them in the Book of Grudges as grudges
to be paid back later. This all means that Dwarfs are in a near-constant state of
war with everyone and can't breed fast enough to make up the losses. They also
really love their beards. Shaving them is a dire insult. One of the old Elven kings
shaved the beard of a Dwarf emissary and sent him back to his High King, which
resulted in Elves Versus Dwarves on the scale of a Guilt-Free Extermination War
that went on for centuries (there was more to it of course; the emissary was there
to try and settle the real issues peacefully until the insult was taken as a
declaration of war). When the Dwarfs finally killed the offending king, they kept
his crown in lieu of the Elves paying their expenses for the war and otherwise
called it settled; by this point both empires were in ruins, and have basically
never recovered from the conflict.
There's more to the first story as well. Initially the Dwarfs simply sent a group
of emissaries to politely demand that the missing coins be paid up, as would be
expected for such a minor grudge. It was only when the humans treated the diplomats
with absolute contempt and insultingly turned them away without paying (from the
humans' perspective, the matter wasn't worth recording, extraordinarily petty and
the lord who underpaid died years ago) that the grudge escalated, the throngs were
rallied and the castle razed to the ground.
The Beastmen who lurk in the forests of the Old World are this when not just
depicted as Always Chaotic Evil. They're highly primal and the ideas of building
anything, technology in general, and taming and settling land are so vulgar to
their sensibilities that it drives them to a maddening, enraged disgust. All of
their weapons and armour are looted or stolen from other races (which unfortunately
means that heavy armour is a rarity in the army) and poorly maintained by their
lesser members, and it would take a highly charismatic leader to get these savages
to fashion together a crude siege ladder from wood and rope without turning on him.
The Lizardmen are firmly opposed to Chaos, are totally incorruptible, and are
biologically immortal, with some individual members being listed as over 8000 years
old. By all accounts they should be on the side of good, and they are... the
problem is, they follow the plans of the Precursors known as the Old Ones to the
letter, even if that plan requires genocide on a continental scale to achieve.
Basically the plan entails putting all of the Humans back in the Old World, all of
the Elves back in Ulthuan, returning all of the Dwarfs back to the mountains, and
exterminating basically everyone and anything else not designated in the plans. In
one instance, the Slann moved a mountain range back where it was supposed to be
according to the plan, accidentally destroying the Dwarf Empire that had formed
beneath it.
Said earthquake wave came just after the War of the Beard and when combined with
the Skaven attempting to expand their Under Empire through dangerous experiments
and the Orcs and Goblins having just recovered enough from Old One purges to wage
war again meant that the Dwarfs were overwhelmed and the Karaz Ankor has not
recovered from this.
If you pilfer so much as a single coin or gem from a Tomb Kings' trove, he and all
his forces will do whatever it takes to hunt you down to the ends of the earth to
get it back. It would come across as a Silly Reason for War, but much like the
Dwarfs, from the perspective of the undead, the affront in such an act of theft
supersedes the value of whatever was taken from them. One particular ongoing war is
over a Dwarf-made hammer with a single Tomb King coin among its decorations, with
both sides insisting the other are the thieves.
Warhammer 40,000 throws in some of this to spice up all the Evil Versus Evil.
Da Orks were created by long-dead Precursors as Living Weapons, and so
enthusiastically wage WAAAGH!!! on anyone they encounter, or failing that, other
Orks. They don't understand morality; for Orks the only limits are what their boss
lets them get away with. Orks don't understand friendship, but some have "favourite
enemies". And they don't understand that other races might prefer not to fight; why
would you build a big killy fortress in the first place if you weren't hoping that
someone would come along and attack it? Endless war for the sake of war is all the
Orks know how to do. This mentality is in part due to them being genetically
engineered for war, and because they were late to the party when the Nightbringer
hammered the fear of death into all other sapient species. To most races including
humans, decapitating a defeated enemy, sticking the head onto the end of a
sharpened stake and wearing it on your back into battles is desecration of the dead
and an act of supreme barbarity. To an Ork, doing this is a mark of respect to the
defeated opponent.
The Tau qualify due to their devotion to the Greater Good. The Ciaphas Cain novel
For The Emperor spends a bit of time on this, stating that even the suggestion of
any action that goes contrary to the Greater Good is detested almost to a physical
revulsion, and Tau can't understand why others would willfully refuse to follow it.
Also, several Tau belief systems are contrary to the Imperium's: Tau have little to
no individuality, view personal ambition to be the greatest of sins, and consider
Last Stands to be foolish (if the top brass ordered it) or an ordinary sacrifice
(if the foot soldiers are resorting to it) rather than heroic.
The Imperium itself can be this towards modern humans, especially when the novels
remember to portray the Deliberate Values Dissonance of a superstitious,
theocratic, fascistic martyr culture. In a subtle way, Imperium and Tau are some of
the most morally jarring factions, since both are just close enough to recognize by
human morals, yet still highly alien. Especially when contrasted to each other —
the Imperium will sacrifice humans by the millions for no greater purpose than
clearing minefields or building defensive walls out of their corpses, whilst the
Tau consider the concept of the Last Stand to be foolish, unimaginative and
immoral, but are fanatically loyal the Ethereal leaders and to disobey them is a
practical death sentence.
The Dark Eldar as well, when they aren't outright evil. They see absolutely nothing
wrong with brutally torturing, raping and killing people for their gratification.
They greatly enjoy being tortured themselves, but they think being bored in a
locked room with nothing to do is a Fate Worse than Death. For this reason, Dark
Eldar are often punished by being forced into Commorragh's factories and slave
pits, where they find little to stimulate them. Also, as Andy Chambers' Path of the
Dark Eldar series shows, they have a sense of personal honour, if a very perverse
and twisted one, and it doesn't apply to anyone who isn't an Eldar, even Craftworld
and Exodite Eldar are considered in turn pathetic weaklings denying the truth of
their heritage to be mocked and rural hicks, respectively.
All of the Chaos gods fall into this. They do what they do because they are made
from a particular concept/emotion, and exist to propagate the ideology that they
feed on. While they're the 'verse's Ultimate Evils, the fact that they're also fed
by positive emotions such as honor or hope adds some twisted nuance. According to
the Liber Chaotica books, they are actually (or at least originally) the
personifications of four base emotions in two pairs — love and hate, hope and
despair. All else about them came from these being fully explored, and the
strongest parts (the negative, destructive ones) being dominant. Thus, technically
ALL love is under the purview of Slaanesh, but it is pride (self love), depravity
(love of sensation and extreme), and the skills that result in self-obsessed
perfection that yield the greatest strength. The strongest source and manifestation
of despair is in incurable disease. Continually planning and looking toward the
future (no matter the consequence) unlocks the massive power-at-a-price that
defines Tzeentch, and the martial pride and rage of Khorne is so aggressive as to
be dominant over all other forms. Each is all manifestations of all aspects of a
given emotion — and their greater daemons are aspects of their own form in specific
forms.
Khorne offers his followers incredible strength and determination, asking for
nothing more than spilled blood and skulls offered in his name; from your enemies,
from your friends, from you, he's not picky. That said, Khorne also has a martial
code of sorts, and despises cowards who flee from battle or who exclusively use
magic to win. In some accounts he even rejects bloody offerings made from
defenseless noncombatants, or favors those who kill with melee weapons over those
who use heavy ordnance.
Tzeentch is often praised as the greatest Chessmaster in existence, but this is a
misconception. Tzeentch has no great end goal, and doesn't particularly care if his
plans succeed or fail; as an incarnation of ambition and change, were he ever to
win in any of his infinite schemes, there would be nothing to scheme against and he
would immediately cease existing. To this end, Tzeentch deliberately sets up all of
his plots to crash into each other, and while he's willing to grant his followers a
portion of his arcane might and intellect, he's just as likely to bless them with a
mutation or two. Or twenty.
Nurgle loves life, and wants to cram as much of it into the universe as he can;
unfortunately this includes bacteria, viruses, and diseases. His idea of affection
is to bless you with some horrible affliction, and considers your misery and pain a
form of gratitude. Nurgle is the Chaos God of Despair, yet the most fatherly or
avuncular of the Dark Gods, since his followers are so resigned to their gruesome
fate that they develop a sense of morbid good humor about their rotting flesh and
disease-bloated bodies.
Slaanesh's motivations can be seen as a devotion to sensation, and devotion to
devotion itself. His/her followers are granted all the pleasure and excess they
desire, be it music, women or men, food, whatever. Unfortunately a mortal body can
only take so much of this, so that Slaanesh's followers eventually become burnt-out
husks of men and women forced to partake in increasingly exotic and extreme
diversions to titillate their jaded senses. They also think that they should offer
excess to everyone else, and that is not a good thing.
Malice is the chaos god of anti chaos while also being the god of anarchy (as in
chaos) His very existence is a contradiction since both he and his followers insist
he doesn't exist (which would normally mean he wouldn't exist in 40k but believing
something doesn't exist hard enough would ironically cause it to exist or not exist
at the same time or AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!. Effectively Malice's purpose is
purposelessness, his very existence is somewhat of a Reality-Breaking Paradox since
he can manifest in reality despite not existing (and even if he did exist as a
chaos god he would have to both exist and not exist in both the warp and the real
world at the same time). With this brief description of Malice being the complete
Mind Screw it is you can imagine he and his followers sense of morality are just as
contradictory and nonsensical (and perfectly straight forwards and making perfect
sense).
Tyranids generally are not malicious to whomever they attack. Although there is the
occasional old grudge from a hive tyrant or the Death Leaper employing cruel
tactics, these are all ultimately to neutralize untouchable targets and rarely done
out of pure spite. This is because the Tyranids have an all-consuming drive to
devour and expand provided by the Tyranid Hive Mind, so anything done towards that
goal is good, anything contrary to that is bad.
The RPG spinoffs include a minor Proud Merchant Race called the Stryxis. While
they'll happily trade anything from information to rare technologies to slaves with
anyone willing to bargain, their concept of value is so incomprehensible to humans
that figuring out what a particular Stryxis will accept in payment is the real
challenge.
World of Darkness and the Chronicles of Darkness:
The Old World of Darkness features a detailed description of a great many alternate
moralities of vampires, called Paths of Enlightenment, in a supplement named
Chaining The Beast. Joining one requires a tutor and some serious mental
gymnastics, but promises to allow vampires to stay sane without holding on to a
morality that they seem to break just by existing. They're popular amongst the
Sabbat, but the Camarilla prefer Humanity.
The Path of the Beast (mostly followed by Gangrel) says that vampires are predators
who should prioritize their need to survive and shouldn't feel ashamed about what
they need to do to prey, but who should be pragmatic and not do anything for the
sake of cruelty.
The Path of Self-Focus is Zen Buddhism for vampires, focusing on reducing conflict
within oneself by accepting the world as it is and seeking to change the self
because it's the only thing you can control.
The Path of the Scorched Heart is The Spock on steroids, teaching that all emotions
only serve the Beast.
The Path of Bones is all about death, encouraging it and studying it 'in the wild',
so to speak. Compassion and preventing death are sins (because suffering leads to
death, Life Will Kill You, and the cycle shouldn't be meddled with), but so is
killing without study, because the purpose of the path is to increase one's
knowledge about life and death, and letting an opportunity to do so pass by is
anathema to that.
The Path of Metamorphosis (followed by most Tzimisce) is about being a magic
vampire Evilutonary Biologist.
The Path of Orion is a relatively new one, focusing on how vampires are the
ultimate hunters and must hone their abilities by Hunting the Most Dangerous Game
(Which, given that this is the World of Darkness, tends not to be humans).
The Path of Power and the Inner Voice is basically the Path of the Übermensch. It's
based on gaining power for oneself, with sins such as being a Bad Boss (punishing
subordinates who do well weakens you), turning down opportunities for power, and
denying one's own faults.
The Path of Blood, followed by the Assamites, is pretty simple. Vampires are evil.
The world would be better off without them. So get off your lazy bum and start
killing vampires to make the world a better place.
Some paths are less 'strange' than Card Carrying Villain, falling into a general
formula of 'Vampires are evil. You are a vampire. Therefore, you should be as evil
as you can be.' There are nuances, of course (Cathars, who see themselves as anti-
Gnostics, aren't supposed to kill innocents because innocents should be tempted
into depravity, while Setites focus more on breaking your own moral taboos to
achieve gnosis than corrupting others), but they're generally a trouble magnet and
most other vampires (and out of universe, most Storytellers) don't tolerate them
and kill them at any opportunity.
The Path of Honorable Accord is one of the most human-like of the paths, being
basically vampire Bushido/Chivalry. It's not humane because humans are seen as
resources (much like a knight would see their horse) and To Be Lawful or Good is
always answered with 'lawful', but it's close enough that they don't have to switch
out their virtues (see below).
Most characters (including non-vampires) in Vampire: The Masquerade have three
Virtues — Conscience, Self-Control and Courage. On the alternate paths of Morality,
vampires often switch out Conscience and Self-Control with Conviction and Instinct.
Not only do they no longer see virtue in human terms, they don't see it in other
supernaturals' terms. (Old world mechanics were not designed to work across
venues.)
In Dark Ages: Vampire, there are five major Roads of vampiric morality: the Road of
the Beast, the Road of Heaven, the Road of Humanity, the Road of Kings, and the
Road of Sin. All of them, being ways to keep the Beast in check, differ from human
expectations — even Humanity, which expects you to be a better human than some
actual humans.
Example: One of the sins on the Road of Kings (a Level 8 sin, equivalent to "Injury
to another, accidental or otherwise" on the Road of Humanity) is "Treating an
inferior as an equal" (the explanation given being "Everyone should know their
place, including you.")
The Laibon, the vampires of Africa, don't have Virtues, and must follow two paths
of morality simultaneously. Aya (Earth), which is similar to Western Kindred's code
of Humanity, represents a vampire's connection with mortality, while Orun (Heaven)
represents a vampire's connection to spiritual power.
The Kuei-jin, the Kindred of the East, are a different kind of vampire altogether,
being damned escapees from the Thousand Hells. They pursue Dharmas, paths to
enlightenment, and most Dharmas don't resemble mortal moralities in the least — one
expects you to be the greatest devil you can, one expects you to create, live
through, and destroy a succession of mortal identities, and another claims you're a
reincarnated god and must reclaim your divine identity. The closest to a human
perspective, the Flame of the Rising Phoenix, seeks to settle the dues of their
mortal lives and live as a human would, encourage others to appreciate the value of
humanity and experience, and resist the inner demon.
Mage: The Ascension makes this a part of the mechanics (such as they are) of the
game's magic system. For example: Playing a Euthanatos mage might mean that you
need to kill a bunch of people at certain times and certain places in order to keep
the world balanced and working properly. As a Cultist of Ecstasy, you might need to
do a lot of drugs and sleep with a lot of people in order to transcend your
limitations. Even if you're not playing a stereotype of the Traditions, your Avatar
might have a wholly different outlook on the world from its host and may not work
properly for the mage unless he/she brings his/her perspective more in line with
the Avatar's.
In the New World of Darkness, the base human Karma Meter is called Morality. All
supernaturals have their own uniquely named Karma Meter, which has slightly
different purposes for them. For most of them, these meters ultimately are
identical to human moral behavior, simply adding unique sins and crimes that aren't
an option for a mortal but make sense in human terms (e.g. magical compulsion of a
sentient being for a mage). Some, however, are more alien...
For The God-Machine Chronicle, the Morality system was overhauled, going from a
Karma Meter to a Sanity Meter. The Morality trait was renamed Integrity, and the
list of sins was removed; it now handles how well ordinary people deal with events
they can't rationalize or cope with. With this in mind, presumably all of the
supernaturals will end up with this upon re-release, instead of the majority of
them being "human morality with some extra sins" like they are.
Werewolves have Harmony, how in tune they are with themselves. Since they're half
spirit and part wolf, killing humans isn't even a blip on their conscience unless
it was just done for the hell of it. Being disloyal to their pack is far more
troubling than even pointless murder of humans. Other human sins like stealing are
also notably absent, but as spirits elements of etiquette frequently take their
place. EATING a human is forbidden but only because it dishonors half of your
heritage, and being impolite to a social superior is a sin that can result in so
much inner guilt and conflict that it can literally drive you insane.
Second edition Harmony gets really weird. First, the ideal point to be isn't at the
top, it's in the middle. Some actions make you lose Harmony points, but others make
you gain it and whether either is good or bad depends on where you're sitting at
the time.
Sin-Eaters have Synergy, measuring how in tune the Sin-Eater is with their geist,
and with the balance between life and death. Deliberate killing is absolutely no
problem for a Sin-Eater, emblematic of 'clean' death, but serial killing and mass
murder are seriously disruptive, emblematic of 'unclean' death, while any means of
attempting to resuscitate a dying person plays havoc with the balance of life and
death. And attempted suicide will piss your geist right off. And accidentally
killing someone is a no-no, as well. If you meant to, no problem.
Hunters can inflict this on themselves with the optional rules for setting up a
hunter's code. One provided example ends up with a personal duty to kill every mage
she meets, lest she suffer the same psychological effect as a normal person would
get for accidentally murdering someone.
Demons have extremely alien morality, such that they can reverse Vices and Virtues;
Generosity becomes a sin because it endangers the demon's life or sacrifices
resources he and/or his friends need, whilst Pride is good because it helps him
assert his self-will and inherent right to be a free entity.
The True Fae are most definitely this. They come from a world of utter chaos where
everyone must strike their own stake to avoid fading into oblivion; ergo, their
lives are consumed by conflict and the eternal struggle for more glory. They adopt
emotions as passing fancies, but don't understand them; the book cites a True Fae
falling in love with a changeling, only to snap his neck when he hesitates to pass
the salt and recalling the burbling of a brook in summer when it hears the
changeling's dying gurgles. This is NICE for a True Fae. You really, really,
really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really don't want to know
what "Nasty" is. Oh, and if they ever try to understand humanity, they lose most of
their power and all of their memories of Faerie.
As with the True Fae, as said in the Werewolf: The Forsaken: Predators supplement,
Spirits have inherently alien morality; they are not human, never were human, and
even the most intelligent of all spirits are fundamentally alien beings. The
closest one can get to defining a spirit's morality is the basic assumption
"promotes my area of influence = good" and "denies my area of influence = bad".
Plus whatever unique character quirks of motivation and Ban (a forbidden action,
literally the closest thing a spirit has to an unforgivable sin) drive a given
spirit. This obsessiveness that they can't be truly reasoned with, even by other
spirits; a fire spirit would have no idea why a house spirit would be pissed at it
for setting the former spirit's house on fire- to the fire spirit, a house being on
fire is a good thing, because if something is inflammable, then its highest purpose
is to produce fire, and anything else done with said fuel source is either
meaningless playing around, or a way to make it more burnable. A Spirit of Love
sees Love as a good thing, but because it can't understand human moral subtleties,
would see no reason to dislike the kind of love that makes you crazy or evil. This
is why there are no "Good Guy" Spirits, and some of the most innocuous seeming
spirits are actually some of the most dangerous — playground spirits, in
particular, tend to be monsters fed on a diet of intense conflict, sorrow and
cruelty, thus actively promoting or sheltering everything from common bullies to
pedophiles and other child molesters.
In contrast to Masquerade, this is averted in Vampire: The Requiem. Paths of
Enlightenment are gone, and rejecting your Humanity simply means that you become a
mindless, animalistic monster.
In the fanlines, Geniuses have Obligation, which is more along the lines of how in-
tune they are with the rest of humanity. The lower it dips, or the more powerful
the Genius gets, the more likely they are to drift toward Blue And Orange Morality.
When that happens, they tend to start viewing people more as collections of spare
parts.
This is also why Unmada tend to have lower Obligation than rational (relatively
speaking) Geniuses. There's nothing stopping an Unmada from caring for others or
working for the common good... but Unmada firmly believe that reality is in line
with their own delusions, which can be quite odd. So, for an Unmada, caring for
people might mean uploading them into the Matrix and turning their bodies into a
support structure for said Matrix, and an Unmada who firmly believes Humans Are the
Real Monsters might think making the world a better place involves enslaving humans
to AI so they can't mess things up. These are all Obligation sins no matter how the
Genius sees them, so Unmada have a strong tendency to slide down the slippery slope
no matter how well-intentioned they are.
In Mage: The Awakening lore, the Franklin Working — a persistent enchantment
created by a homophobic and sex-negative mage — causes this in the people exposed
to it, particularly those who get so messed-up that they end up as Serial Killers.
It's not impossible for them to, for example, come to believe that rules against
violence are secondary to rules about when you're supposed to cross the street, so
they think it's entirely acceptable to stab a jaywalker.
Previous
Index
Next
Live-Action TV
Blue-and-Orange Morality
Video Games
Show Spoilers
Night Vision
Sticky Header
Wide Load
Advertisement:
IMPORTANT LINKS

Ask The Tropers

Trope Finder
You Know That Show...
Trope Launch Pad
Reviews
Live Blogs
Go Ad Free!
Advertisement:
CRUCIAL BROWSING

Genre
Media
Narrative
Other Categories
Topical Tropes
COMMUNITY SHOWCASEMORE

Advertisement:
Top
Edit Page Related History Discussion More
TV Tropes

Subscribe
TVTropes
About TVTropes
TVTropes Goals
Troping Code
TVTropes Customs
Tropes of Legend
Go Ad-Free
Community
Ask The Tropers
Trope Launch Pad
Trope Finder
You Know That Show
Live Blogs
Reviews
Forum
Tropes HQ
About Us
Contact Us
DMCA Notice
Privacy Policy
TVTropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from
thestaff@tvtropes.org.