A Treatise on the Nature of Chaotic Outsiders

From the outside we may occasionally make the mistake of attempting to order these beings. Entities of primal chaos embodied. We may call them demons, fey, or primordials. We may rank them in power and assign a hierarchy amongst their ranks. We, as mortals, can pretend all day that there is a logic to these beings, that we can pin them down and name them. The embodiments of law applaud our efforts as we construct complete taxonomies of the forces of chaos. This is, of course, dangerously naive.

These beings have no such name for themself. They simply are. They may occasionally adopt forms and names that comply with our understanding of them but this is at their pleasure only. A whim to indulge in the droll mundanity of mortal understanding.

Over the course of their existence any one of these beings may wear countless faces and forms and bear countless names. They may raise themselves to the highest power and rank among their kind only to topple down to meaningless and rise up again. One may embody the concept of good for thousands of years only to, on a whim, embrace the darkest depravity for an hour, a day, or a millennium.

They do, however, have limits. They are embodiments of chaos, as a philosophical concept. They are neither gibbering madness nor completely inconceivable eldritch horror. They are born of mortal philosophy, or at least embody its ideals. Their ‘logic’ may be ephemeral, whimsical, and inconsistent but there is something recognizable in their core. This creates trends and probabilities, if never hard rules, which we can use to describe them.

They prefer forms representative of change and transformation. They are things ‘between.’ Saurians, therapsids, amphibians, fungi, and primordial insects provide natural inspirations. Sometimes they take the forms of adolescents or elderly on the verge of death. Melting wax, flowing magma, sublimating ice, and any other changes of physical state may inspire their form. Any one of them may choose to use any of these as it’s form, or choose to mix them in new convoluted ways. They defy binaries at all opportunities, adoring the combination of perceived discrete categories and merging them or ignoring them all together.

They are not stupid, usually. They work to defy order and law wherever they can. The fey lord whose twisted whimsical logic runs in contrived circles of convoluted rules does not behave this way because they do not understand proper logic or rationality. Instead, they impose contrived rules as farce, a satire of the madness of law. The demon does not perform acts of cruelty merely for it’s own satisfaction. It does this to inspire rebellion and resistance so that the order of things may change. The status quo must be undone. The weak must overcome the strong. The righteous and malicious must be torn down in equal measure. Anarchy transformed into civilization only be torn down again. There is no rightness in this world beyond freedom and there are no guarantees except for change.

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So this is a bit of a divergence from what I’ve usually posted here but this got stuck in my brain. Planescape started bouncing around in my brain because it is objectively one of the most indulgently creative of D&D’s properties, right alongside spelljammer. Specifically I was contemplating the cosmology of alignment.

Now, alignment is, itself, a flawed system but it almost works for cosmological beings where it kind of falls flat for being a good way of defining real people. That’s a whole other rant and I’m not joining in that though. Instead I’m suggesting, I suppose, a better way of looking at good, evil, law, and chaos as cosmological forces. Well, I say better, but what I really mean is ‘more appealing to me in this exact moment.’

So here is my thesis: Chaotic Good, and Chaotic Evil, should not exist as cosmic concepts.

If we’re looking at Planescape’s great wheel one should just take the whole anarchic side of the wheel and turn it into soup. Chaos didn’t consent to this whole ‘bifurcated into discrete planes’ nonsense. This is one area I think Pathfinder did better. If I recall correctly, they put law in the center of the cosmos and chaos on the outside.

Fundamentally, this comes from a poor understanding of chaos as a concept. Law breaks things down into discreet packages. Law will define one thing as good, and another as evil. So will mortal humans. But the chaos as its own cosmic force? That simply won’t fly. Chaos does it’s own thing. Always.

While I don’t think these are necessarily bad concepts, I decided to throw out slaadi, proteans, eladrin, and demons and describe a cosmic entity of chaos with this new thought process.

Maybe later I’ll build on this idea for an RPG setting or just for some fiction writing. I’m curious what people think of my largely unedited babbling nonsense.

Also have a fun song!