How should I handle alignment in Microlite75? I handled it in Microlite74 by simply ignoring it. While that does work and is how a minority of campaigns handled alignment back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it probably does not represent the old school feel all that well. There are many possible ways to put alignment into M75, here are a few:

1) A Good – Neutral – Evil axis. This is probably the easiest set of alignments to understand although it does lend itself to arguments over what actions are good and what actions are truly evil and whether good is an absolute or only in the eye of the beholder. It probably lends itself best to campaigns with a “high fantasy” good vs evil feel.

2) A Law – Neutral – Chaos axis. This can either be interpreted with law as “civilization” and chaos as “barbarism” which has a sort of swords and sorcery feel or as a conflict between the gods of law who support the world and the gods of chaos who want to destroy it with mortals as their pawns.

3) Use both the Good – Neutral – Evil axis and the Law – Neutral – Chaos axis as most versions of D&D and games based on it did. While this is standard and what many people thing of when they think of alignment, it is fairly complex and can be hard to implement well in play.

4) Replace alignment with a series of different goals and have players select 2 to 4 goals they strongly support. Deities and organizations within the campaign also support some of these goals (and might strongly oppose others). I used something like this to replace alignment in some of BECMI games in the 1980s. It works well for PCs, NPCs, and religions and organizations in the campaign world, but does not make much sense for monsters. As many GMs use monster alignment as a fast guide to how the monster will react, this may not be the best option for “alignment” in a generic set of rules.

Or I could just ignore alignment completely as I did in Microlite74. How would you like to see alignment handled in Microlite75 and why? Options other than those listed in this post are welcome too.