A couple of weeks back, Zak reposted an idea that Zzarchov had tossed out about “Each star is a sun in its own right.”
This sounded really cool to me… some ideas were tossed around about it, but none of them really clicked for me. Last week, stuck on a plane, I noodled out my take on that gem and, since things have been pretty dead around here, I figured I’d regurgitate them here.
ALL STARS ARE LAWFUL
- Lawfulness varies from star to star; no two stars are the same. Lawfulness is harmony with the natural order of a star.
- Chaoticness is disharmony with a star, because it is an expression of harmony with a different star.
- What is natural to Sol, our sun, is unnatural to all other stars, and vice versa.
- Chaos of one star is different from that of every other. Every star’s law is unique.
- Chaos is common. Specific types of Chaos is rare.
- Places, people, and creatures can be Chaotic.
- The more divergent a type of Chaos is from the Law, the more extremely different a place, person, or creature obeying it will be. A Chaotic human: subtly different. A demonic, seven-headed Gnoll, unsubtly different.
- Although this means that monsters and such are Chaotic, it also means that, by the light of a different sun, Lawful characters and creatures are the monsters. Perhaps subtly, perhaps not.
- Stars are not conscious of this. Chaos is the radiation of another star’s rules, not an active, deliberate incursion.
- This is why the Chaos symbol is the 8-pointed star.
- Laws of nature behave differently around Chaotic places, people, and creatures, as they’re beholden to their own laws. This differs from one to another. Gravity works wrong, colors shift, synthesia occurrs, etc. as their Chaos subverts local Law.
I don’t know that that results in anything especially gameable, beyond maybe insisting that strange things be strange and have strange things happen around them. Maybe there’s something going with the idea of PCs getting dumped on a different world and radiating their own strangeness on an unwitting far-flung land.