If you’re unhappy with the traditional alignment spectrum from Dungeons & Dragons and don’t want to dumb it down to good/neutral/evil, there’s another way to think of morality in your RPG: a two-part spectrum of spirit and soul.

As described in my metaphysics for ghosts and other spirits, all natural creatures consist of a body with a mind made up of spirit and soul.

At the quickening, spirit is drawn into the body from the Ethereal plane, a place of the ceaseless, swirling energy that manifests on the Material plane as ambition, enthusiasm, desire for mastery of an art or knowledge, and hunger for power.

At the same time, soul is captured from the Astral plane, a place of the placid, potential energy that manifests on the Material plane as devotion, heart, contentment, and passiveness. Together, these two energies determine the nature of a creature.

• Those with much spirit and much soul are heroic but can be judgmental.
• Those with little spirit and little soul are cold and unambitious.
• Those with much spirit but little soul are cold and scheming.
• Those with little spirit and much soul are altruistic but can be self-denying.

In the table below, you can think of the central area as “normal” and the colored areas as increasingly extreme. There’s no need to try to quantify these (spirit of 4 and soul of 6 or whatever). Just play around with the words themselves as ways to understand what a character or creature wants and how it would behave.

For purposes of game mechanics (protection from evil, etc.), you can think of the white center rectangle as equating to “good” and anything in red, blue, and gray as “evil”. Orange, yellow, and green are neutral. Note that this system doesn’t try to quantify the degree to which a character or creature is lawful or chaotic.

This concept may also be helpful for defining characters in a story. You might think of characters as primarily exhibiting one trait but, under stress or toward strangers, exhibiting another nearby trait. A character can easily exhibit a trait one or even two steps away from their typical trait, depending on the circumstances. So a character who is normally cool might sometimes be aloof and another rather curious. But under heavy stress, the character might become mean-spirited or underhanded, or when infused with community spirit, heroic.