Liche's Libram: alignment

Showing posts with label alignment. Show all posts

random factional alignment generator

Why still more posts on alignment? Maybe because as such an inherently slippery concept, there's so many ways to resolve it. Here I want to lean into the idea of alignments as really just being army factions to play Chainmail in. Those of you who grew up as the same time as me will likely recognize exactly where my conception of where Generic Fantasy Army Faction Components comes from.

d10x10 [adverb] [allegiance] alignments

Posts on the alignment tag on this blog just keep growing, but so far they haven't added up to an kind of project. This post will not add up to anything coherent either. This is similar to my random alignment generator but a little more lightweight - I'd use the former to generate initial ideas for NPCs and this in conjunction with other sources, as perhaps a kind of reaction roll.

style

fanatically
fastidiously
hypocritically
naively
nominally
self-loathingly
self-righteously
surprisingly
trying to be
unwittingly

allegiance

traditional
progressive
benevolent
patriotic
selfish
malevolent
communitarian
individualistic
peace-loving
nature-loving

cosmic alignment: Law, Chaos, & Evil

Why?

if alignments are cosmic "teams," then three factions are more interesting than two
am I saying that Good doesn't exist here? not as that kind of cosmic sports team, is all I'm saying. Goodness already exists in every universe with consciously choosing beings (see: Kant*) so you're letting things slide towards a naturalistic fallacy if you throw in like Goodonium particles or whatever
and if you're outright told a team is Good, that's boring. and also teams with that designator tend to be as well - we all know the lower planes sell way better than the higher ones
value is plural, really dedicated evil is all the same shit. evil is fundamentally monotonous, always interested in the same fundamental things, fascinating only in the way we can find other repetitive superstimuli fascinating. so one Evil and multiple things that can be good

I realized I accidentally re-created the Werewolf Triat, but I'm okay with that

Law

dangerous (Aslan is not a tame lion)
can be good
wants you to play a helpful role in building things you didn't really sign onto and might not really understand
cosmic realm: you're living in it, baby. notice all these stable laws keeping up up and down down? obviously not completely because the project isn't finished yet, not barely, that's why all the bad and confusing stuff exists obviously, but we'll get there
troops and tech: biblically accurate angels, ancient artifacts beneath the earth sending up dreams giving instructions for their repair, a keep with 5d100 men-at-arms clearing out a hex of monsters
organization: you might think Law is monotonous and cooperative but in fact in terms of politics Law is the most diverse, pretty much any "system" that can appeal to some idea of the general benefit (communism, neoliberalism, theocracy, even anarcho-whatever if it's like a system for social organization) is Lawful at its core and of course these different things don't necessarily play nice with each other (see realm above and note that this is why multiple universes exist)

Chaos

dangerous, in obvious ways
can be good
wants to make new things, go beyond, slip beyond the boundaries of what presently exists
cosmic realm: everything that hasn't been stitched into a cosmos in a way that law has - Faerie and the dreaming realm are nearby examples, on the periphery of our universe, and from there one can go into the Pure Chaos and perhaps find other islands of Law (to fuck up by bringing in your Out-of-Context Chaotic content)
troops and tech: gretchlings, rolling on the mutation table, recruiting 2d20 knaves who then leave, unexpectedly open gates,
organization: swarms, forming and splitting

Evil

cannot be good. i mean, any given evil thing might later be good, but Evil cannot be good (duh) except when it's consciously hemmed in as a game or whatever
can be dangerous, but also a false feeling of security is one of the ways it sells shit to you
moreover. Evil lacks the fundamental danger that Law and Chaos do, because when you sign on to each of the others, you're placing trust and faith in something whose outcomes you can't really know. but if you've felt the pleasures of Evil you've kind of encountered all there is there, and you know what you're getting into
not everything immoral is Evil. cheating on your taxes because you want a beach vacation is bad but not Evil. Evil is about the high of omnipotence you get from cruelty and control over others.
cosmic realm: big black hole, concentrating power, incapable of seeing beyond itself, confident that it will draw everything into it, and for what? you can feel its rays peircing and its gravity pulling from anywhere in the multiverse, which it feels itself to be the center of, but especially its cosmic projections, dark dungeons where it draws the greedy deeper into darkness
troops and tech: turning yourself into a vampire, dumb Lawful troops who think you're the voice of God, sucking someone's soul out and using it to fuel _______
organization: Evil has two organizational forms, exoteric fascism and esoteric pyramid schemes. these are both a response to the fact that nobody, including the Evil, actually wants Evil to win in general, nobody benefits from it; so either you set up an organizational structure that allows you to concentrate power and abuse and manipulate innocents, or if you're recruiting people into Evil you're offering them power over these others alongside ways that limit their ability to turn back (you're immortal but you have to suck blood, you can suck my cool vampire blood but you become addicted to that, you've signed a contract that sends your soul straight to hell so hey kid no backing out now, etc). obviously these can be combined in any number of ways

*okay, maybe "read Kant" isn't the best advice because when he's wrong he speaks with all the clarity of your most misguided relative on Facebook and when he's right he speaks with all the clarity of a French literary critic, so uhhhhh read Cathy Korsgaard or something. all i'm saying is that good is doesn't need to give you spells to care about it

the Shaking Empress: the demon-queen who invented morality

(This is a Nietzschean myth about the invention of morality; I also have a Kantian one. Nothing says they can't both be true, even in the same setting.)

stage 0: egoist eden

Once upon a time there was no morality. All gods were demons and all men were knaves.

The world wasn't a guignol of horror: people loved their friends and families, they feared revenge. Far-sighted princes would pass laws saying we'll kill you if you kill someone else, and sometimes the guy who backstabbed his way into power after that would keep the law around (while carving an exception for themselves.) Neighbors often cooperated, both because it's more pleasant and less dangerous than the alternative. The rich might feed the poor, the same as you might feed some ducks, and the poor might feed the rich, same as you might feed a tiger. People told the truth often enough - to maintain a reputation, to economize on memory - that there was some evidential value to listening to them, under most circumstances.

But compared to today, life was nastier, more brutal, and shorter.

stage 1: masochist mystery cult

Back in those days, no more people were motivated by pure nastiness than they are today. But among those who were was the Shaking Empress. Like other petty abusers, she liked to hurt other beings to feel powerful. Like some of them, she was already plenty powerful herself (a demon-queen, in fact.)

Some such abusers offer a false pretense of love. Some offer power. The Shaking Empress offered - offers - nothing. She feels best when creatures grovel before her knowing they get nothing, zilch, nada in return. The Shaking Empress cannot hurt you if you do not pledge yourself to her, and if you do, all she gives you is hurt. Any deviation from making yourself as meek and pitiful as possible will result in you being tortured in your dreams, in your afterlife, and maybe even in your waking life.

If you hold yourself with pride and say you are better than the meekest worm - if you assert your power over the meanest churl - she'll hunt you down. Not because she disapproves of being prideful or cruel, but because she believes the supreme honor of these excellent things ought be reserved to herself.

None but a masochist would accept this offer. None but masochists did. At first.

stage 2: scale-dependent group selection effects

Places dominated by the cult of the Shaking Empress are not great. People are constantly getting attacked or forced to hurt themselves by the Empress themselves. There's a lot of pressure to engage in ugly self-criticism sessions. But her devoted are not likely to leave you for dead on the highway. Until they invent heroism (an advanced theological doctrine which the Shaking Goddess let out to defend her cult in a moment of weakness and has regretted ever since) they are easy to conquer and a positive delight to rule. Places with a bad case of the Shaking Goddess can, under some circumstances, become an enviable place to join, or to emulate.

stage 3: prison planet

I emphasized at the beginning that, before the Shaking Empress began her reign, people were not all nasty. But I emphasize this for a simple reason: to not pledge your soul to the Empress now is to mark yourself out as one who longs for nastiness. To be, yourself, proud and cruel, rather than offering those on up to the terrible demon-queen.

Even those who, in their hearts, reject her dominion, who do not sell themselves over to her - feign sleepless nights of being attacked, just so their neighbors know they are vulnerable. Some might feign being so meek that the Empress spares them - but few would believe that. Better to say you were under assault for lesser crimes, that no one could think you capable of greater ones.

The Shaking Empress could not be more pleased. When whole societies worship her, they punish each other for not being meek enough. When societies stray from her, they punish each other by not being meek enough - driving themselves back into her cruel, clutching arms. From the depths of her pride and greed, she crows, in a few short aeons she will be the only enlightened, the only evil, being left.

Antinomian alignment

Here are some facts about the world (i.e., the world I just made up.) They aren't pleasant, but too bad.

First, you should know that alignment objectively exists; people are either Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic - or if you want to be pretentious about it, Nomian, Anomian, and Counternomian. They are so from birth and this cannot change except for your Helm of Alignment Change and so on; notably, behavior cannot in any way affect alignment.

Secondly, the basic personality and motivational structure of people is completely orthogonal to alignment: people in each have your normal spread of selflessness, selfishness, Dunbar's number dynamics, that kind of thing.

Thirdly, if you were born with a Lawful soul (about 5-20% of the population), you'll go to heaven if you acted benevolently in life and hell if you acted malevolently in life, and you Know this, but not where the threshold is. If you were born with a Chaotic soul (about 1-5% of the population), you Know just the opposite - that some indeterminate about of badness will damn you up to heaven and goodness will bless you straight to hell. If you're Neutral you don't Know shit.

a fool sees not the same tree

If you're Lawful or Chaotic, you can speak an alignment language. Alignment languages contain concepts that cannot be grasped in other languages, but speaking them doesn't feel any different from speaking your other languages.

Moreover, hearing an alignment language, if you speak it, just sounds normal. If you don't speak an alignment language, it tends to sound like vague mystical patter, or people describing ineffable mystic concepts, which in fact they are - ineffable to you, anyway; they can be perfectly well effed by native speakers.

(What are these concepts? Unfortunately, I have a Neutral soul and can't tell you. But there are probably some spells and such you need them to grok.)

nor seeks to know / the law by which it prospers so

Lawful and Chaotic characters Know about their afterlife fates and Know their languages; they don't Know that alignment is a thing, or who has what, or that they're doing something unusual when they use Alignment languages, or that when people treat their alignment-talk as mystical nonsense or vague moralizing (n.b. many people like either or both of those things!) they're being anything other than just a bit dumb or lazy. People have to figure this out, and what they piece together is probably wrong.

Note that due to some perhaps obvious dynamics people of all alignments mostly grow up in societies where it's accepted that there's heaven for the good and hell for the bad, or one of the standard corruptions of this idea (living on in people's memories, heaven for the people who do the right rituals and hell for everyone else, rebirth into an infinite layer of heavens and hells around which this world is somewhere in the middle, whatever.) Chaotic souls Know this is incorrect but have a number of incentives not to say it out loud. Lawful souls Know it's true. Neutral souls hear everyone saying it and so, aside from a few village atheists, don't have a good reason to doubt consensus.

Magic that interacts with Alignment doesn't necessarily clear things up either. If you start using alignment detection spells, you'll get some interesting correlations, sure. You might even start burning people at the stake and feel good about it: the Universe is backing you up! There are scientific studies! But those correlations are going to miss out on a lot, and some of those Chaotic victims burnt at the stake are going to be, from any objective measure, good people who have passed the greatest of moral tests.

Cults of Chaos!

Chaotic souls often lead lives of quiet desperation and confusion, but they're especially likely to join weird cults. This has two basic reasons: one, they Know the dominant religious outlook is incorrect (the Chaotic outlook can almost never become the dominant one, outside of weird brief situations where a cult captures the state on some weird Chaos project), and two, they need one way or another to assuage their fears about the afterlife.

Remember, mind you, that Chaotic souls don't have inverted moral intuitions. They don't intuit that kicking puppies is good, they intuit that it's awful, just like you. But they also just intuit it's the kind of thing that gets them sent to Counternomian Heaven.

Accordingly, Chaos Cults often really play up the aesthetics of evil, because it's the kind of thing that "feels" like it would damn you without inspiring actual guilt. Many Chaos Cults are just play-acting in this sense: they're made up of decent people who don't have what it takes for real-deal evil. Just shit on some holy symbols, gurgle the names of some demons, and call it a night: that should be enough, right? Right?

Then you've got cults that are actually, efficiently trying to do as much evil in as short a span as possible. They've done the math. But note that in some way's they're often just as reluctant to descend into snuff-film stuff as the cosplayers: it's unpleasant, after all, and there are more efficient and less risky ways to make the world a worse place.

Sadistic jerks exist, of course. Neutral or Chaotic sadistic jerks often end up as the leaders of Chaos Cults for the same reason sadistic jerks end up as the leaders of cults generally. Base rates mean there are many more Neutral ones, so you’ll frequently have a Chaos Cult led by a jerk whose attempts to give religious explanations are pure gibberish. The speakers of the Chaos language will have to do some work kludging it into something workable.

Then there are the really ambitious ones. Some Chaos Cults, reasoning that everyone is like them, work to corrupt the rest of the world into permanent immorality to save as many souls as possible. Others form gnostic cells to overthrow an obviously unfair universe.

All of these can and are combined.

feywild and shadowfell

If you like these, they might, potentially, work as Counternomian Heaven and Counternomian Hell, respectively.

the inside-outer planes

Never let it be said that the cosmos lacks a sense of justice: it wants to balance the scales of a great many things exactly equal. e must equal mc2. PV must balance nRT. A ship's displacement is its weight. A refrigerator must create heat exhaust. An action has an equal and opposite reaction, and a concentration of good souls must be balanced by an evil environment, and visa-versa.

Prophets, priests, and public schoolteachers little like to acknowledge this fact. Doesn't the cosmos know that people respond to incentives? No, it does not. It does not know anything. It just plugs along with a sense of harmony generally better appreciated by architects than apologues.

Foredurance is the abode of the saints. They are assailed by tropical diseases, frost, plagues of frogs, cluster outbreaks of lycanthropy, humidity. However, the victims of Foredurance are a naturally cooperative lot, and have made a community in the midst of the abbatoir.

When the Outsiders native to Foredurance make their way to the prime material plane, they tend to go about finding people they admire and making life hard for them to prove a very important if rather obscure point. The Book of Job almost certainly records such a breach, aside from the Hollywood ending at the end, which was almost certainly added by marketers.

Emmurdegris is the reward of the damned. Near its center, the multiverses' most evil souls are so blessed that they cannot feel pain, and thus must come up with truly ingenious ways of torturing each other. Across its suburbs, a temperate, fructiferous paradise of rolling hills, mere jerks mostly play lonesome pioneer on their own little plot of land, congregating every so often to play social status games.

When the Outsiders native to Emmurdegris make their way to the prime material plane, they take manifold blessings and bestow them on someone who absolutely, positively will not get any use out of them. Some of these people are bound to go to Emmurdegris themselves, but others are just idiots.

Dunnore is a featureless, unchanging Pamenidean sphere. Its inhabitants can’t so much as throw graffiti on the walls. But some have figured out ways to communicate with each other, however subtly, and beneath the monochrome surface hyphae-like networks teem as new artistic movements are proposed and abandoned.

When outsiders native to Dunnore visit the prime material plane, they preside over not Interesting Times but grace people with the calm to do something interesting: whether that take the form of imprisonment, prosperity, convalescing a broken leg, or whole decadent ages which can reap the fruits of Autumn. It is said that they are present, too, for the fashioning of worlds; for their having laws that will inspire artistic reflection or scientific speculation.

Cataplysis is Dunnore’s cardinal opposite: a riot of unpredictable stimulation and changing physical principles. Its inhabitants make the best of it that they can: like the Foredurants, they are a naturally cooperative lot, though their form of cooperation depends more on formal structures and a heavy application of those incentives the cosmos likes to ignore. It is said that Cataplysis has a sense of humor, but that its jokes are always just beyond or below what the inhabitants would recognize as such. Near the center it is downright hilarious.

Native Cataplysts come to the prime to provide the soupçon of chaos that provoked the higher order. Species evolve, fetters on the forces of production are superseded, buildings stand or totter on the strength of their design. These anarchons are among the least discriminating of encroachments - they assume that any unanticipated threat or opportunity will most benefit the highly structured.

These are just the cardinal directions - or some of them; the inside-outer planes may have more than two dimensions. Further planes, their guests, and their hosts are left as an exercise for the reader. After all, you should know what's in store for you.

Holothuroid’s 3 precept alignments

Holothuroid has a post on bespoke alignments with three precepts, with six sample alignments appropriate for heroic characters.

More of these

(Note that unlike the originals some of these are less appropriate for heroes than villains or civilians - though I’ve tried to give all potential for each - and some may contradict each other.)

Axe

Everything in time grows decrepit, decadent, or obsolete; and must be cleared away.
Hack not at the branches, save to get to the roots.
Do not worry about what new things arise in place of the old; the earth is bountiful and mortals ingenious.

Banner

Study the true doctrine and persuade others to it by rational argument.
Conform your personal life to the true doctrine.
Be prepared to overcome your personal moral reservations and other selfish concerns for the demands of what is objectively right.

Bell

Convivality is a state of mind and does not require any money or other resources. Convivality can be two old men singing in a gutter without coin to drink or one good leg to hop on. However, once the party has started, indifference to spending resources is essential; lack of coin will not stop the party but stinginess will.
If someone wants to join the convivality, welcome them. Once inside it, let no quarrel pass between people; if quarrel arises, help it be resolved smoothly.
External considerations may sometimes force the party to be paused. But "serious" life is a gap in and serves the party, not the other way around.

Censer

The world most of us experience is in some way fundamentally fake; do not let yourself be too immersed in it.
Seek out experiences of contact with deeper reality, though these experiences may not be pleasant or advantageous in any traditional sense.
The majority will never seek to walk your path, but accept those who are willing as students and fellow travelers.

Coin

Always fulfill your contract.
Don’t question the purposes towards which you’re used, but do insist on going about them in a way you can be proud of.
Don’t slander or hold a vendetta against someone else in the business. If you feel the need to hold something against them, do it better.

Crown

Some people have a great destiny. If you are someone with a great destiny you must not forget that you have one, if someone around you does you must not let them forget it.
It is not wrong for someone with a great destiny to prioritize the accumulation of skill, resources, allies. They will need those to accomplish it.
It is not wrong for someone with a great destiny to prioritize the preservation of their life. They will need that accomplish it.

Dirk

Never let anybody push you around.
Friends sometimes fight, but they never judge each other.
Friends share risks and rewards.

Escutcheon

Society is held together by bonds of deference and affection. An insult to you, however little you may “privately” care, is an attack on society that must not be tolerated.
That you should not maintain your accustomed standard of living, or that you should work by the sweat of your brow to do so, is an insult to you.
That those whose labor feeds and clothes you should come to harm is an insult to you.

Lamp

Share known truths.
Seek unknown truths.
When one challenges you, welcome it as a sign of their health.

Lyre

Create culture for everyone to enjoy, regardless of whether it wins you commercial success or popular acclaim in your lifetime.
Seek out unusual experiences so you have more to draw on and express.
Seek a sympathetic understanding of why everyone acts and thinks the way they do, especially when it is initially disturbing.

Noose

All are liable to evil, which is kept at bay by terror.
Violence must be terrifying, in response to a clear wrongdoing, and regular.
You are no better than any person at heart; hold yourself in terror to another that you yourself are restrained.

Plow

The best of all lives is to live to a ripe old age with many grandchildren. Anything more sophisticated is a fleeting ghost and chicanery.
The realms of men must be extended.
So that their community can live good lives, all decent people engage in patient labor, and young women and men step up to fight the outside chaos that would attack the community, even if they would thus live short lives.

Robe

Preserve those rites and cults which have been kept since time immemorial; they may needs be adapted, but never abolished or forgotten.
Rebuke men when they do not give what is due to the divine.
Rebuke the divine when they do not give what is due to men.

Rose

Make yourself genuinely worthy of the love and approval of _______.
Permit no insult to their name or honor.
Even if they are alive, never ask if you have achieved worthiness, and assume you have not.

Trowel

Contribute to the building of things that will last beyond your lifetime.
Tear down nothing that has been built by generations before, unless you build something better in its stead.
Take part in no conflicts save when one side unambiguously threatens what you build, and the other promises to protect it.

Uses

(Free square: paladin oaths, etc.)

Experience

My favorite form of experience is checklist experience, the kind you see in Apocalypse World or Into the Depths. I’d say you can check something off when: you could have checked off some deed but didn’t because it would violate your principles, or when another PC checks something off because they approached things your way rather than in the way they were used to.

Character prompts

Obviously, you can just plug these into your favorite generator. My preferred way to exploit these, however would be to exploit how most of these have a narrow obvious route to go on and then a wider set of interpretations that are more stretches and don’t announce themselves. Most of us (more or less by definition) live rather mediocre lives, but comfort ourselves with more heroic narratives on top of it. That innkeeper is the last person who should be an adherent of the Escutcheon (he doesn’t even own the inn), but inwardly that’s his narrative: he’s a pillar of the community, he has a bit of a chip on his shoulder, he likes the day-to-day aspects of the job that it’s not “real” work, and he takes it as a real responsibility to protect those drinking there. He’d never call himself a lord, but treat him just a bit like one and he’ll always be on your good side. Or someone is living a more extraordinary life you’d stereotypically associate with another path, but the narrative is different.

Or unlikely allies and enemies: two people may pursue the same goal for very different reasons. A fanatical religious movement may summon genuine religious energies from adherents of the Censer, Robe, Noose, Rose.

Also: everybody needs people to care for them, and most of these ideals involve looking out for someone (either someone weaker, stronger, or on the same level as you.) We're all subconsciously rewarding each other and encouraging certain values. What does it mean to get by by inspiring others to one ideal vs. another?

delightful demons and angels of awful purpose

Outsiders in D&D are connected to alignment system, but the alignment system has always been ambiguous about whether it refers to psychology or behavior. This opens the room for outsiders whose psychology conforms to the core concept, but with behavior that isn't necessarily expected.

Evil angels are the easiest one, because you've seen them all before. Angels do whatever God asks of them, because God is good. God is indeed the fullness of being, and most of reality is contained within the godhead; all creatures are just a sort of ephemeral leftover. But it must be emphasized that even the angel who commits terrible atrocities, pouring out their philters of doom over Sodom or Jericho, weeps genuinely as they do so. How tragic, that the greatest good should require such! Like an abusive parent, they say "this hurts me more than you," and they are right. They are genuinely eager to avoid as much wrong as can be managed, and will be thankful to anyone who can point out creative solutions to the dilemmas ahead of them.

1d4 Angels of Awful Purpose

He announces himself to prophets, holy men, and other worthies, and reveals the Divine Plan; these plans are lies, the prophecies false, that the face of the God might remain hidden, and faith remain faith. He smuggles in worthy moral teachings and the like when possible.
She is tasked with ending intelligent life on this plane and has been spending the last few centuries disseminating information on birth control, celibacy, and the like. Her archangelic superior is coming, bearing a heavy heart and the news that the timetable must be moved forward.
They tempt men and women with lust, money, and power, that their souls might be tempered, and that the halls of heaven may remain unpolluted. They may every attempt possible to choose those who will be tempted enough for it to be a difficult decision that forces them to bend, but not be broken. But sometimes they miscallibrate.
It seethes with hatred for all life, for all justice, and for all goodness. It does this because there is another angel - its dear friend, in fact - who has been assigned the awful task of torturing the most wicked soul available, and it therefore needs a way to be wicked (and thus spare others) without hurting anyone. It plays a dangerous game of doublethink, for its wicked thoughts must be intense without being genuine enough to inspire it to truly act on them. Looking at the increasing evil of men, it binds itself in chains that it might go deeper into depravity and yet not become harmful, but no chain lasts as long as intended.

Devils are conniving bootlickers, looking for the best bargain for themselves and holding to it assiduously; they are nothing if not consummate game theorists. Good devils have read Kant and know that, if you're like most beings (and most beings are), choosing to cooperate means that most beings are willing to cooperate. Like angels, "good" devils are smug about their goodness, but they're smug about it because they think they've found a particularly effective trick in the nature of decision theory, and are pleased to have exploited this loophole in the nature of reality. It must be emphasized that even "good" devils don't give a rat's ass about anything that happens to anyone else; indeed, they generally find others' suffering as funny as the normal kind of devil. It's just that they'll alleviate it, given the chance, and grumble about it too.

Chaotic devils have recognized the antagonistic rather than cooperative nature of reality, and that mixed and random strategies are often the right way to deal with an opponent, especially the omnipresent opponent of "everyone who isn't me." "Chaotic" devils employ these mixed strategies every bit as methodically as any other kind of devil; they forgo pleasurable opportunities, think about the long term, keep records of their behavior to spot and correct the existence of observable patterns.

1d4 disconcerting devils

He is the Prince of Darkness, the classical Satan. When he first came into being he resolved he would cooperate with God if God cooperated with him, and (to maximize the chance of being cooperated with) to retaliate at any cost to himself if God did not cooperate. God then commanded him to do something other than what he really wanted, so he's at war with an omnipotent being. God works in mysterious ways, doesn't he? Anything you do can and will be turned against you. He tries to sow as much chaos as possible to interfere with the divine's plans; currently, he considers that doing good (or what would immediately seem to a mortal like good) mostly results in this moreso than evil.
She rides with an order of paladins, righting wrongs and working justice. To let off steam she tortures animals and defiles corpses, since animals and corpses can't rationally commit to any decision theory so you don't need to include them in your Kantian calculations.
It had a great gig torturing sinners in the depths below - eternal torture of sinners is good altruistic game theory after all, it's committment to a tit-for-tat equilibrium of the grim trigger type. And its fun! Now it's on earth for some reason and doing the rational thing isn't fun anymore. It can deal with this but doesn't like it.
They cut a deal with a good god, and a deal's a deal.

Demons always do whatever they feel like, without any regard for their own or anyone else's interests. "Good" demons feel like helping people, and "lawful" ones feel like obeying particular rules or particular persons, but these are fundamentally whimsies and compulsions, not values or commitments. Some people believe that faeries are actually misclassified demons.

1d4 delightful demons

He is a kindly doctor who follows the army, healing all regardless of who they fought for. He loves healing and, if he were ever placed in a long-term situation in which there were no wounded or dying around, he would make some for himself. However, under current conditions, he doesn't need to waste time on that - there are already plenty! If the war ends he might start following another band of violent miscreants, like the PCs.
She sings at the local tavern for free. She's not especially talented on a technical level, but she enjoys it so much, it's infectious. Every so often she sings something truly beautiful, and when this happens, halfway around the world an innocent drops dead of a heart attack. She is not aware of this, and if made aware of it would not find it interesting.
It loves to see children laugh and play! It is kidnapping them to its personal Hell where it stuffs them with candy, never have the iPad taken away, and never grow old!
They whip themselves in the street: "repent! repent!" Everyone snickers that they don't really care about any of that religious stuff and just get off on the whole bit, and everyone is right.

1d4 other oddities

Being of axiomatic law and logic that just discovered a flaw in the nature of logic itself, and feels obliged to eliminate it as it sought to eliminate other irregularities.
Being of pure balance, gone excessively meta.
Negative energy elemental who just found out that life furthers entropy.
Positive energy elemental who just found out that life furthers entropy.

random alignment generator

another day working at the alignment language museum

Everybody wants to know what an alignment is.