Wednesday Words-Wisdom and Alignment

Wisdom-Wisdom measures the character’s mental acuity.  It is a kind of intellectual dexterity and like dexterity is used for To-Hit multipliers, but for spell attacks with a target:  (3d6)*wis/10.  Points in wisdom increase the character’s total spell points by 2*level per point of wisdom(half as effective as intelligence).  Wisdom is also the primary factor for spell point recovery, each point of wisdom recovering level/2 per hour(2.5 times as effective as intelligence).

Wisdom is important for all casters, but especially for religious characters, like clerics and priests.  These types of casters generally have more reservation and a steady demand on their powers to heal and empower their companions.  Monks also use it as a basis for their healing through meditation.  Other casters of course benefit from faster spell point recovery and higher spell point capacity.

Alignment-Within a character is a constant conflict between good and evil, Alignmentchaos and order.  The state of this conflict is reflected in the character’s alignment as charted on the good-evil and lawful-chaotic axes.  A character’s alignment consists of two values, each between -10 and 10.  Negative values indicate the extremity of the character’s chaos or evil while positive values indicate the extremity of his lawfulness or good.  A character with alignment 0,0 would be truly neutral with regard to both law and chaos and good and evil.

On the chart to the right, these axes can be seen represented as a pattern of colors. The green area in the top left represents Chaotic Good and is called Vigilante. The orange area on the far left near the chaotic-lawful axis represents Chaotic Neutral and is called Wild. The red area in the bottom left represents Chaotic Evil and is called Anarchist. The purple area at the bottom near the good-evil axis represents Neutral Evil and is called Villainous. The black area in the bottom right corner represents Lawful Evil and is called Diabolic. The blue area on the far right near the chaotic-lawful axis represents Lawful Neutral and is called Bureaucratic. The gold area in the upper right represents Lawful Good and is called Just. The yellow area on the top near the good-evil axis represents Neutral Good and is called Heroic. Finally, the white area in the center represents True Neutral and is called Natural, Transient, or Apathetic.

At the Master Weaver’s discretion, character actions effect alignment and it can change fluidly over time.  As one might suspect, evil acts do less to effect an evil character’s alignment than they would a good character’s, and so on for all the other combinations.

Alignment can be detected with Sense Alignment.  It also factors into the Turn ability.  Spells can be designed to effect only good or only evil and some magical or divine artifacts differentiate between alignments in the benefits they give their users.  Certain deities may expect a certain alignment of their followers, but most will only expect followers to act according to their tenets, which actions will often affect alignment.


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s