Le Guinian Neutral
In my teens and twenties I eschewed fantasy fiction, but lately I’ve been catching up. In the last couple of years I’ve read, for the first time, works by J.R.R Tolkien, Mervyn Peake, a smattering of the Appendix N and Weird Tales authors, and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Alignment isn’t a going issue in my campaigns - and frankly I bet it’s not in yours either -, but reading The Farthest Shore, Le Guin’s third Earthsea novel, I was struck by these two passages, and how they show, to me, a new way of interpreting Neutrality in D&D.
In Chapter 3, the Archmage reflects to his young companion Arren:
“Try to choose carefully, Arren, when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.”
And in Chapter 4, when asked by Arren why the Archmage did not kill slavers who were at his mercy:
“Was I to join them therefore? To let their acts rule my own? I will not make their choices for them, nor will I let them make mine for me!”
Arren was silent, pondering this. Presently the mage said, speaking softly, “Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the Balance of the Whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the Balance of the Whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the Balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I—though I have the power to do it—to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?”
“But then,” the boy said, frowning at the stars, “is the Balance to be kept by doing nothing? Surely a man must act, even not knowing all the consequences of his act, if anything is to be done at all?”
“Never fear. It is much easier for men to act than to refrain from acting. We will continue to do good and to do evil…But if there were a king over us all again and he sought counsel of a mage, as in the days of old, and I were that mage, I would say to him: My lord, do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.”
A quick polemic history:
In OD&D, the cosmic battlefield of Law and Chaos is set up for the purposes of a fun wargame. Neutral is present but not really explained - none of the alignments are.1
In the various iterations of the Basic line, Neutrality is generally described as political unconsciousness. Neutrals act in self-interest (e.g., accruing wealth) and basic survival instinct (tellingly of Neutrality’s lesser status, Mentzer Basic gives the example of animals as Neutral). I think this is the interpretation that the D&D community generally runs with.
In AD&D, the focus is on maintaining a cosmic status quo between the four poles (Good/Evil, Law/Chaos) where the Neutral is interested in Balance. Taken to its logical extreme, a Neutral may have to oppose a Good act simply because Good is gaining ground. This makes them anti-Good and unpredictable. Depending on how proactive the Neutral is in pursuing Balance, the character is passive at best, and abhorrent at worst.
Fast forwarding, 5e returns to the Basic conception of Neutrality as political unconsciousness.
In D&D’s binary ethical and cosmological system, Neutrality has the options of either oscillating between one and zero, or shutting down. It is defined negatively, by absence.
In contrast, Le Guin’s Archmage has a Neutral framework that is defined positively, as its own set of values. In the Arhcmage's philosophy, we see echoes of Taoism (see chapters 8 and 15 of the Tao Te Ching for the merits of not-doing), and Stoicism (Chapter 1 of the Enchiridion of Epictetus explains why one might not kill a slaver; Chapter 15’s famous dinner party analogy shows us the divinity of appropriate and moderated action).2 There are also political and ecological implications in the Archmage’s statements.
So the question becomes: how do we put this into our games? Part of me says that, in a gold for XP game, maybe we can’t. Going into the dungeon to kill and loot is not very Tao. It might work in a heroic fantasy like 5e or Daggerheart, though, or a Lord of the Rings game.3
However, with a bit of massaging - and taking inspiration from the vows of poverty undertaken by the OD&D Ranger and the Dolmenwood Friar - we might get something like this:
The Le Guinian Neutral
Characters who are Neutral believe in the Balance of the Whole: the notion of the world as an interconnected system. When a stone is thrown into the water, the earth is left lighter and the water disturbed, and the Whole is changed. Man’s intelligence allows him to impose on the world, and to shake the Balance. As such, man must weigh their acts carefully.
Neutrals adventure to discover the world, to learn through hardship, to become themselves, and, only when it is necessary, to act decisively. Unlike Lawfuls and Chaotics, they are philosophically opposed to remaking the world in their image or to reacting to evil in kind.
For example, a Neutral will not necessarily kill a slaver who is at their mercy - not, first and foremost, because to spare them is moral, but because, one, the Neutral does not let the evil man's actions dictate their own; and two, the Neutral does not, when reasonably possible, presume to decide matters of life and death.
As such, Neutral characters make eager and curious adventurers, but are opposed to needless violence and needless accumulation of power and wealth. The Neutral must spend their accrued wealth thusly:
- Spent on beauty, celebration, excitement, and other things whose value lies in being experienced rather than possessed.
- Gifted to a stranger or a community. A true gift has no strings attached.
- Spent in pursuit of curiosity: books, expeditions, tutors, etc.
- Gold must not be hoarded.
- Gold must not be spent on vengeance, domination, or other acts by which the Neutral’s will is imposed on others: hiring assassins, acquiring political power, raising armies, defacing the land, etc.
Note: the Neutral position is a rigorous one. In a typical fantasy milieu, Neutrals might be as rare as Clerics; or they may be common followers of a religious doctrine, in which case their execution of said doctrine will typically be imperfect.
As is often the case, OD&D’s free-wheeling nature works beautifully in and of itself, but sets up landmines for future editions wishing to explain and adjudicate further.↩
An honest disclaimer: I am neither a Taoist, nor a Stoic. I am reading these texts for the first time as I prepare this post, so my reading is, necessarily, surface level.↩
There are some parallels between the ethical stance of the Archmage and of Gandalf, for instance.↩