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[Heron TSG]

Long story short, I run a Dungeons and Dragons game, and I need character ideas. My players have an encounter coming up that will involve a powerful foe of each alignment. Each is level 10 and uses gestalt rules and whatnot (as do the players), but I don't really need much help making them mechanically, I'm just plumb out of ideas for characters, at least for the weekend. Characters human unless otherwise noted.

What I have for each alignment:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Lawful Good: Groenig Zweibrücken the Paladin//Knight of the Iron Glacier/Wild Plains Outrider, a heavily armored knight that rides around on an even more heavily armored Megaloceros. (extinct-but-gigantic elk) Lost of Frostburn stuff, but otherwise pretty standard paladin fare.

Neutral Good: Arcana Goldthunder the gray-elven Enchantress/Master Specialist/Archmage, master of willing and unwilling friendship. Focuses primarily on using such spells as Suggestion and Charm Person to make the enemy fight itself, though of course there are simpler disabling spells in there for if that fails. (Stuff like Hold Person, Tasha's Hideous Laughter, etc.) Tries to avoid directly attacking when possible. The spells are nigh-impossible to resist, though this character is weak against anything mindless.

Chaotic Good: Georges de Nanton the half-elven Marshal//Healer/Bard, adventurer and swordsman. While not particularly powerful on his own, he is accompanied by Tâneryr the Giant Eagle, his wild cohort. (It's fairly powerful.) He provides ridiculous bonuses to various checks and saves, but is mainly support. Think Cyrano de Bergerac.

Lawful Neutral:

Neutral: Cadogan Canthurir the Kobold Sorcerer, the admittedly bland blaster caster. He uses metamagic to cast a lot of spells really dang fast, but I couldn't think of much flavor for such a character. (This is the last one I made before grinding to a halt.)

Chaotic Neutral: Blast Manface the Swashbuckler//Ninja/Hellbreaker (water variant), master infiltrator and poison master. Human, but with snake fangs due to a regional feat. Uses his water ninja powers to create clouds of fog - which are then poisoned. Uses shurikens and a pair of shortswords loaded with poison. (Three at a time on the swords.) Can become invisible due to his Hide In Plain Sight ability, not to mention he is immune to every alternate form of detection due to a combination of a feat (Darkstalker) and a level of the Hellbreaker class that makes him immune to telepathy. Willing to take any sort of job that will benefit him. Even constructs and undead will be slowly worn away via knifing, regardless of their immunity to sneak attacks and poison. You can't hit what you can't find.

Lawful Evil: Lord Schwarzschild the Knight//Hexblade, evil with honor. Rides around on a winter wolf, wears armor made of ice that allows for arcane casting of cold based spells while wearing it, has a feat to turn everything into cold spells... you get the idea. A somewhat mediocre caster, he uses his spells to augment his melee fighting. He throws his huge harpoons (more Frostburn stuff!) into people, where they stick and keep doing damage until they waste time taking the harpoons out. The harpoon ropes are tied to the saddle of the wolf, and he has a dozen backup harpoons to slowly drag the enemy into an impossible mire of nets and harpoons. (One net is even made of adamantine chain and has its own antimagic field!) Made to be the evil counterpart of his fellow honorable Frostburn cavalry guy, the paladin above.

Neutral Evil: Nemesis Saberhawk the Ardent, mechwarrior and psion. Summons an Astral Construct with a hole in it, rides around inside. Orders the construct to fly, punch, and what have you while using his own actions to use formidable psychic powers. He's a bit terrifying when he does this, and knows it.

Chaotic Evil:

So, yeah. There are holes in Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Evil, plus Neutral has a fairly crapical character in it. Anyone have ideas? I'll even take ideas for filled slots, I can always use more NPCs.

(And perhaps other people need ideas, too!)

[Heron TSG]

Now that I'm not incredibly tired, I'll clarify a little. I'm primarily looking for motivations and the like that will help me produce a good character. I'm just not sure how to make a truly neutral character without it running over to some other alignment. I don't even understand chaotic evil, so it's been difficult to come up with a character. (Lawful evil or even neutral evil aren't hard, but a self-serving variety is a bit harder to do without going into baby-stomping territory, which is just plain weird. Every campaign needs villains, I guess.)

So, what kind of motivation does a neutral character have? What kind of actions constitute chaotic evil?

[rarborman]

Chaotic evil, best describes as bat shit insane, will attack just about anything for no reason at all, thinking not at all for strategy or if the target is too powerful, just full on DF aventurer style, licking blood off this and biting on that, throwing cats at bronze colosii.

Neutral characters want balance in everything and will switch sides in a battle if a monster is outnumbered by his party, they will often waste time thinking and observing sides and not really fight on their own as long as they think things are balanced.

Lawful neutral is the kind of character that will uphold the law, any law, every law, to the letter, and pound you if you dont, as long as its not ageinst the law, doesnt care if the law is just or unfair, you break it your getting the punishment, I always imagine hammerers as this.

[_DivideByZero_]

Trying having some kind of killer plant monster/zombie plague/cosmic horror or the like as your chaotic evil, I think that would count.

For your Lawful Neutral you could have some kind of pacifist hippy who doesn't side with anyone but wants peace...

[Soadreqm]

I haven't played tabletop Dungeons and Dragons, but I've probably sunk like a hundred hours into Baldur's Gate, so I'm sorta familiar with it. That said, I think the DnD alignment system is inherently flawed and suggest you don't worry too much if the alignments don't quite match what the books say they're supposed to be.

Anyway, Lawful Neutral is typically for Inspector Javert style characters, but I think anyone who feels like a robot in a cast of humans would work. A calm, polite and professional mercenary/assassin/whatever who would never ever break a contract a finds the very thought completely alien. A ruthlessly efficient ruler who sees his subjects as statistics rather than people, but feels obligated to guarantee their well-being nonetheless. An actual robot, ie. some kind of intelligent construct, who's spent the last several centuries trying to complete a fetch quest for his long-dead master. Or Inspector Javert, of course. Someone who's going to chase the party to the edge of the world for an unpaid traffic violation and would rather die than let them get away, no matter how justified it would be.

Chaotic Evil seems pretty straightforward to me. A schizophrenic who wants to kill the party because the Voices told him to. A paranoid who wants to kill the party because he thinks the they are in league with the Mind Flayers. A monomaniac who wants to kill the party so he can have their teeth. A sociopathic adventurer who wants to kill the party for experience. Just have a guy who wants to kill the protagonists for some arbitrary reason that doesn't really make sense, and does not necessarily involve any kind of obvious benefit for the killer.

Or you could take the Planescape: Torment approach, and make True Neutral the "batshit insane" alignment, reserving Chaotic Evil for people who are purposefully and and selflessly trying to further the cause of Evil. Maybe a cultist who worships an evil deity/fiend/Great Old One, or perhaps just a freelance puppy-kicker who has dedicated his life to the pursuit of evil and feels compelled to do evil regardless of its utility. Hey, it works for good-aligned characters. In this case, flat Neutral would be anyone who doesn't think about the consequences of his actions enough to have an alignment. Lunatics, soulless automations and generally people who are incapable of thinking that the act of attacking the party could have some kind of moral ramifications.