Goodman Games

Should a wizard's alignment dictate some of the initial spell picks ?

Part of me says no, Vance's wizards made do with the spells they could find, especially lesser wizards. On the other hand the magic section describes wizards as specialising in a type of magic.

so

Should a wizard's initial spell picks dictate his alignment ?

But then alignment has been decided at 0 level.

Perhaps there should be chaotic, neutral, and lawful spells. If you share their alignment, you get a d3 bonus to spell fumbles, if not, a d3 penalty.

Looking at the source literature, I think Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were very disrespectful to their patrons, as part of Leiber's typical emphasis of thumbing his nose at religion in general. One story has the heroes neglecting their religions until their gods curse them with bad luck, and then the gods lift the curse because the heroes profane the gods' names.

Elric was a highly conflicted character. He was sworn to fight for Chaos, and he broke that oath for reasons many people would call noble. So could one call him Neutral? In fact, I don't think "Chaos" in Moorcock's world was really an "alignment" in the D&D sense. I think Moorcock's "Balo" (the demigod of humorous balance) was a very different "neutral" than Cthulhu's "neutral."

Moral and ethical stances in the source literature were often personalized issues of loyalty. Elric's relationship to Arioch was like a dysfunctional family relationship more than a normal oath of fealty. Vance's Dying Earth characters rarely had any sense of connection to cosmic ideals of any kind - certainly they did not believe in Law and Chaos like the characters in "Three Hearts and Three Lions."

So my point is that if the DCC game wants to be true to the inspiring works of Appendix N, it might have to sacrifice some of D&D's notions of alignment.

claytonian wrote:Perhaps there should be chaotic, neutral, and lawful spells. If you share their alignment, you get a d3 bonus to spell fumbles, if not, a d3 penalty.

I'm probably going to try a houserule like this because I see some Appendix N wizards as specialists such as Necromancers, Seers, Summoners rather than all being generalists defined by their spells.