Fantasy diets

All creatures in the fantasy world require sustenance to survive. That said, these diets do not necessarily resemble conventional diets.

• Physical diets: the creature feeds on something physical, such as air, food, drink, soil, fire, warmth, etc.
• Abstract diets: the creature feeds on something abstract, such as color, shadows, emotions, memories, life force, psi energy, etc.
• Passions: the creature does not feed per se, but must fulfill a specific series of actions in order to sustain itself, such as mimicking a diet despite otherwise lacking any sign of digestion, tormenting victims in a specific fashion or pursuing unfinished business.
• Anchor: the creature has no diet or passions, but its continued existence is dependent on a physical or abstract anchor such as an amulet, a temple, a bloodline, or faith in an institution.

Disambiguating taxonomies

D&D has a problem where it uses the same words to refer to monster types as well as specific families within those types. For example, the types dragon, elemental, giant and ooze are divided into "true" and "false" or "kin" families. The distinctions are often minor: "true" dragons have age categories, "true" elementals are amorphous blobs of one or more elements, "true" giants are prettier, and "true" oozes are fast moving. I'm going to devise some alternative terminology that is not ad hoc.

Three axis alignment

13th Age and 5e have largely dispensed with alignment mechanics. That said, alignments could serve as a useful guide to behavior for characters to follow. However, the traditional two axis alignment is too confining due to the confusion of methodical with law-abiding. Therefore, I propose dropping neutral entirely and splitting the law/chaos axis into orderly/chaotic and lawful/unlawful. The orderly/chaotic axis represents a character's general thought processes, while the lawful/unlawful axis represents their respect for society's laws. This gives a total of 2×2×2=8 alignments, one less than the three axis model.

For example: a demon barbarian would be chaotic unlawful evil, a demon manipulator would be orderly unlawful evil, and a demon bureaucrat would be orderly lawful evil.

While I feel alignments are too simplistic to represent realistic moral divisions, I do find them useful as a guide for distinguishing general categories behavior. I will be using them in the future as a means of differentiating between, say, demons and devils and deuces and whatever.

The Corrupting Chaos of Tarássein

The Shadowfell: Too Spooky For Me

Fiends are fiends

Demons and devils have always have more similarities than differences. Their hierarchies, their goals, their appearances, etc. Some of them are chaotic, others lawful, but in the end fiends are fiends. AD&D DMG Appendix D used the same random generation tables for demons, devils and daemons. Why equivocate? To coincide with my condensing of the Lower Planes into one plane of arbitrary size, I am likewise condensing the various differences between fiends.

Alignment factions primer

I do not think the two-axis alignment system really makes much sense, but unfortunately for me it is baked into the design of the game. Even if PCs do not need to select alignments, the monsters and cosmology (including my homebrew) are still informed by alignment. So I am going to reframe the alignments of chaos, evil, good and law into allegiances loosely based on "Essences" from Mage: The Ascension or "Urges" from Nine Worlds or the factions from Age of Sigmar.