D&D

Okay, today I’m going to write a bit more from my geeky side of things, because it’s been a while.

One of the most fascinating pieces of lore I’ve come across is D&D. I’ve never played the tabletop RPG itself, but I’ve played Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate 3. After a few playthroughs of BG3, I went down the rabbit hole and listened to dozens of hours of D&D lore videos—and my god. It’s really unlike any other fantasy setting I’ve encountered.

Most fantasy world-building gives you a relatively simple heaven-and-hell setup. Even the Abrahamic religions in our own world tend to work with some version of that dynamic. D&D takes the idea further by giving morality itself two independent axes. One is the familiar moral axis of good and evil—concern for others versus selfishness and cruelty. The other is an ethical axis of order and chaos: how much a being values rules, hierarchy, and structure versus freedom, individuality, and change. Because the two axes can combine in different ways, the setting ends up with a much richer range of characters and societies than a simple good-versus-evil story allows.

This shows up most clearly in its two different “hells.” On one side you have the orderly hell of the Nine Hells of Baator, run by devils who operate through strict hierarchies and binding contracts (funny they’re often portrayed almost like lawyers). On the other side you have the chaotic hell of the Abyss—an endless, multi-layered plane that constantly pours out hordes of demons whose only real goal is destruction. The two sides are locked in an eternal conflict known as the Blood War.

At the centre of that war is Asmodeus, the ruler of the Nine Hells. In some versions of the lore he is a kind of fallen god or celestial who chose to descend and take control of hell. What makes him interesting is that he isn’t simply a pure agent of evil for its own sake; he has a standing divine duty to keep the endless demons of the Abyss contained. The good side of the setting, by contrast, has no single counterpart to him. The “good” gods tend to be more decentralised, each watching over their own domain—magic, justice, the moon, darkness, and so on. Their portfolios aren’t always cleanly divided either, which gives the upper planes a looser, less unified feel.

Another thing I find beautiful about the lore is that nobody fully knows the truth. The setting has been written and rewritten by many different people over decades, so large parts of it have become myth in their own right. Some ideas are widely accepted by fans; others are believed by only a few. Even the alignment system itself has shifted over time—there were earlier periods when evil was simply treated as chaotic and good as orderly, before the two axes were formally separated.

I take this reflection into the real world and it humbles me. No single person or group knows the full truth here either. We are all constantly telling stories, forming research communities, and chasing better understanding, yet many things remain only partly explored. Realities also keep changing, so the search never really ends. The fact that even a long-running fictional setting can revise something as foundational as how it understands morality and ethics makes me more willing to hold my own certainties a little more lightly.