Now Available: Aristotle’s Alignment 2nd Edition

Roleplaying has always been a playground for curiosity and exploration. If you’ve ever looked up a mythological creature because you fought one in a dungeon, or fallen down a historical rabbit hole because of a campaign setting, you’ll understand. For me, that rabbit hole led to Aristotle, ethics, virtue, and all that philosophical heavy lifting. At the same time, alignment systems have been living rent-free in my brain for decades. Love them or hate them, they’re impossible to ignore if you’ve spent any time with Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t even use alignment at my table anymore, and yet here I am, trying to make sense of it. Again.

Aristotle’s Alignment isn’t your typical alignment system dissection, nor is it a regurgitation of tired debates about Good versus Evil or Law versus Chaos. Nope, this is a weird little book that takes the nine-point alignment grid of classic fantasy roleplaying and smashes it against Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics. Why? Because I could. And because someone should.

Let me be clear, I don’t expect this book to set the roleplaying world on fire. People will probably side-eye it, and a few will mutter that I’ve wasted my time. And yet, here it is, because sometimes you write the book that you want to read. Sometimes you create because the thing calls to you, even when you know most people won’t get it.

My hope is simple: that a few curious souls will pick this up and come away with something to chew on. Ethics is how we live and the choices we make. It reflects the ways that we understand the world, and right now, the world could use a little more of that. If Aristotle’s take on alignment makes one person think a little harder about what ethics really means, at the table or in their own life, I’ll consider it a win.

So, if you’re ready to look at alignment through a fresh, ancient lens, or if you’re curious about what the heck Aristotle has to do with roleplaying, this book might be for you. Or maybe it’s not. Either way, it’s here, and I had fun writing it.