Blue-and-Orange Morality in Tabletop Games.
- The Champions scenario book The Sands of Time
plays with but ultimately averts this trope. Renewal and the Right Hand follow moral principles a little different to those of most heroes, but they are ultimately on the same side. Conversely, Belragor comes from very far outside most PCs' frame of reference, and his allies and followers are frequently just plain weird, and few of them define what they do as "evil", but ultimately his motives are all about uncomplicated greed and ambition. - Dungeons & Dragons:
- Many
True Neutral D&D characters are simply beings whose morality is incomprehensible to us. This becomes even more likely if the entity in question is a god, Eldritch Abomination, or Outsider (that is to say, alien from another dimension), or even just a normal person who has spent a lot of time around any of the above. - The various giant breeds have a morality system called the Ordning, essentially a Fantastic Caste System based on giants' roles in their old empire of Ostoria. Each giant type devotes themselves to a different virtue/trait, and giants are individually ranked within their tribes by their skill at their particular trait (i.e. frost giants were shock troops, so they value physical strength, and thus base their society on Asskicking Leads to Leadership). There's also a more general Ordning code based around upholding giant ideals; maat (roughly analogous to good/honorable/desirable) qualities include respecting Ordning positions of other giants, devotion to your breed's particular virtue (so a frost giant tribe raiding wouldn't be seen as evil because it's what they're supposed to do, though good-aligned giants might see it as distasteful, and good-aligned Frost giants will uphold the Ordning in other ways), and honoring the giant pantheon, while maug (bad) behaviors include worshiping deities like the troll god Vaprak, disobeying superiors, and forcing giants out of their territories (said lands are regarded as being gifts from their creator-deity Annam). Notably, tribal allegiances take precedence before general rank of other giants; while it's considered rude to disrespect or betray giants of another breed or tribe, it's not maug.
- On the subject of giants, the long-lived stone giants prefer to live entirely underground, and thus view the surface, with its variable seasons, day-night cycle, ever-changing weather, etc., as a dream world. While some stone giants may visit the surface to seek artistic inspiration, they understand that nothing that happens there is real, so any promises struck there can be freely broken, and giants can steal or destroy things on the surface without consequence.
- In the Mystara campaign setting, the Immortal (D&D's functional equivalent of AD&D's gods) Nyx was definitely this. All the other Immortals of Entropy were just straightforwardly evil. Nyx, on the other hand, loved every living thing in the universe as if they were her own children. It's just that she believed that living things were children who ought to be helped to mature into undead. She wanted to transform the world into one in which the undead would dominate the living. She wasn't evil in the sense of wanting to harm anyone; she genuinely believed that the world would be a better place if more people became vampires, liches, ghosts, or what have you, and if those undead beings ruled the world.
- Mystara's version of satyrs, as detailed in the "Tall Tales of the Wee Folk" game supplement, don't have any abstract concepts of "morality" to speak of, but follow their primal impulses without reflection or hesitancy. For instance, if you offer to ally with a satyr, he'll immediately pounce on and try to wrestle you into submission, because animal instinct tells him that to get along, both of you need to know who's stronger and should be the boss. If you wish to insult one, you're out of luck: whatever slurs you might sling at a satyr, he'll either cheerfully agree with if it's the literal truth — no moral judgement attached — or if it's not, dismiss the remark because you don't know what you're talking about.
- The Daelkyr from the Eberron setting. They invaded the mortal world several thousand years ago for some reason, wreaked a massive amount of havoc for little apparent benefit, and nobody really understands a thing they've done since. Word of God from setting creator Keith Baker indicates that this is what makes them so frightening and worthy of a place among the setting's top supernatural threats — sure, the Overlords of the Age of Demons are much more powerful, and the quori of the Dreaming Dark are more cunning, better organized, and have more influence, but nobody truly understands the Daelkyr or can predict their next movenote .
- This is represented strongly in the Dungeons & Dragons Online adaptation: when the Daelkyr show up, the entire context of the module usually shifts dramatically, and the players usually survive simply because the creature was doing something else. One of the deadliest modules in the game is actually two of them throwing a welcome-home party (for themselves), with players having to do things like carry helium for balloons by inflating themselves and awkwardly flying through a dense array of spinning blades.
- The aurads, in the third-party setting Oathbound, "can accept betrayal if it is explained eloquently, but might take issue at an excellent gift presented without proper ceremony."
- Planescape: Sigil's Factions are generally followers of a certain philosophy that banded together and took on some part of running the city that worked with their worldview, and given how weird Sigil is, those philosophies tend to be themselves strange by Prime Material standards, especially as they don't tend to restrict alignment; you'd have to come up with some really wild excuse to justify a Lawful Good Doomguard.
- Speaking of the Doomguard, their faction belief can be basically summed up as Entropy= Good. Their writeups point out that while the evil Doomguards tend to fall into the Straw Nihilist and Omnicidal Maniac stereotypes, good Doomguards take the passive belief that because doing anything increases entropy (2nd law of thermodynamics), then acceptance and encouragement of entropy is a necessary part of mortal existence.
- The Mercykillers' views on law and justice come from being formed out of a Lawful Good faction (Sons of Mercy) and a Lawful Evil one (Sodkillers). In an attempt to formulate a philosophy that didn't result in one half of the faction murdering the other half, they came up with the idea that justice is the most perfect pursuit in the universe, and that things like mercy are distractions that must be purged (hence the name). Mercykillers aren't allowed to fight except in service of the law or in self-defense, may only pass judgement in terms of 'just' and 'unjust' rather than good and evil, and will take on anyone who they judge as breaking the law.
- The Sign of One is a faction based on Mass Solipism (yes, everyone knows it's an oxymoron- just go with it). They believe that belief forms reality, that anyone can change their immediate reality by imagining it so, and that ultimately, the entire multiverse is the imagination of one individual (the titular One, who most Signers like to believe is them). Under this worldview, good and evil are pointless, because if you aren't the One, you're a figment of their imagination and ultimately nothing you do matters, and if you are the One, violence against your own imagination is pointless and you'd be better off just imagining the world to be more to your liking.
- The Xaosectists believe that since the Multiverse is fundementally chaotic, you should also be chaotic in everything you do... and I do mean everything. Xaosectists don't care if you're doing something good or evil, but hate doing anything that requires planning ahead.
- The Neogi in Spelljammer are absolutely incapable of understanding any social bond except for Master and Slave. They can occasionally trade with the other races by studiously ignoring the implications, but they inevitably betray their partners because the idea of equality simply doesn't compute; amongst themselves, the social structure is basically 'everybody is enslaved to everybody else'. Somebody who isn't your master being able to tell you 'no' and leave at their whim, and someone who isn't your slave not being your master, is horrifyingly alien.
- The Lizard Folk race comes off as unknowable to other races because they are emotionless and practical to the extreme. They don't form emotional connections and judge everything based on whether it aids in survival, is irrelevant to survival, or is dangerous.
- Many
- In Exalted, The Fair Folk fall into this; at base, the unshaped (and many shaped) raksha simply have trouble comprehending that anyone else is a separate being that might not care about their agenda, and they don't see why humans are so afraid of the chaotic madness of the Wyld. Those who do comprehend humanity still tend to subscribe to alien (read: soul-eatingly dangerous) morality, but there are exceptions. Graceful Wicked Masques puts it best:All other characters in the Exalted setting are unique beings with their own unique Motivations, personalities and memories. A raksha is not a being like that — not really. Instead, a raksha is actually an incoherent and incomprehensible mass of seething chaos that — for some impenetrable reason of its own — pretends to be a unique being with its Motivation, personality and memories. The first step in understanding and creating a raksha character is to understand that everything about that character is a deception engineered to facilitate an interaction between a shaped being of Creation and an entity so far removed from Creation as to be utterly beyond mortal comprehension.
- The Yozis are not much different in application. They are manifestations of complex, broad concepts. They are made up of not only themselves, but the tiers of sub-demons that define all aspects of their idea.
- A similar deal goes with many of the Primordials in 2e. They are, at their very core, pure, undefiled concepts, which means they have trouble understanding anything outside their purview. She Who Lives in Her Name honestly thinks everyone would be better as mindless pieces in a hierarchical machine, the Ebon Dragon can't understand why anyone would do something that doesn't hurt someone else (unless they're setting up for the inevitable betrayal), and Autochthon views innate progress and innovation as awesomesauce but can't possibly foresee the consequences (though unlike the other Primordials, he actually tries). Adorjan has a particularly impressive case, since she's redefined her Compassion so that killing someone in an agonisingly painful fashion is, to her, a compassionate act because they're so quiet afterwards and silence is the greatest gift.
- Interestingly, while true of almost all primordials, this is explicitly not the case for the Ebon Dragon, who is statted with standard virtues at rock-bottom levels rather then an alien interpretation like his fellows. He's not following some alien code, he's just an evil bastard.
- The Fair Folk in Halt Evil Doer! for Mutants & Masterminds. Convention has it that the Lords of Winter are the "bad guys" and the Lords of Summer the "good guys". Word of God is that convention is completely wrong — it's just that the Lords of Summer happen to be the Anthropomorphic Personification of happy dreams and the Lords of Winter of nightmares. But that doesn't mean the Lords of Summer care about humans, or the Lords of Winter are actively malevolent. (However the current leader of the Lords of Winter is a human villain who is a straight-up bad guy.)
- In KULT, reality itself is an illusion, and the true reality behind it is very different. Any character who knows anything about the truth and acts on this knowledge rather then just playing normal will be perceived as insane at best. One basic rule is that you need to achieve as extreme a mental balance as possible in order to break free from the illusion. A normal person has a mental balance of zero, the weakest and most vulnerable position possible. Thus, helping people with negative mental balance climbing back up to zero is actually doing them a disfavor, unless you can keep pushing them upwards to high levels of positive mental balance. This means that it's usually a bad thing to heal a trauma or cure a mental disorder. It also means that any person with negative mental balance (or positive balance very close to zero) potentially has a lot to gain from getting tortured, raped, or even murdered. Positive mental balance is even more alien, although much neater.
- In Mystic Empyrean every player is an Eidolon who is defined by a Creed. This creed is a set of 3 rules that the Eidolon swears to uphold at the cost of their very existence, and when they break any of them, their very soul starts to fall apart. Then there are traits, which are facets of an Eidolon's personality given form. In the game, the players have to roleplay these traits to improve them, and as they 'level up' to more and more intense levels, the players are expected to roleplay them more and more. For example, the trait "Weapon For the Strong" is connected to Obedience. An eidolon with this trait starts off being able to change into mundane weapons, but has to obey the one they recognize as their master, later on they get into tank sized and equivalent powered weapons, and can even operate a single function of themselves (like drive the tank or shoot the cannon), but have to obey anybody they see as having legitimate authority over them. At the final levels, they can become city and world destroying space ships, mechs, and legendary weapons of colossal magical power, and can even act independently, but they cannot act at all unless given an order to do so. This obviously gives many Eidolons some very strange morality systems when you combine traits and creeds.
- Nobilis thrives on this trope, particularly in the sidebar "microfiction" vignettes. While the Nobles have an ultimately good goal (they want to save the universe), some want to destroy humanity as well. The Nobilis, even the more traditional "good guy" types, see things in a different way than you or me. They are, after all, living personifications of concepts. And then there are the Excrucians, who have a morality that freaks out the Nobilis. Yipe.
- To give some pertinent examples: Hell believes in total, unconditional love and acceptance, and are thus morally opposed to justice and redemption. If you're a sadistic monster, well, that's who you are and they won't think any less of you for it or expect you to change. Heaven, meanwhile, has a code of morality based entirely around making the world more beautiful, and wiped out the dinosaurs for shitting near them. The Dark promotes total self-autonomy and thus want everyone to commit suicide because "no-one should control when you die but you", and The Light wants humans - and only humans - to live forever no matter the cost. On the Excrucian side, the Deceivers think that your passive acceptance of "being a person" and "living in a world" is harming you, and thus they need to tear those things away from you to free you from the delusion of being you, while the Strategists think that existence itself is a crime against nothingness that must be reversed.
- Some source material from Paranoia suggests that Friend Computer works on this system. Either that, or its goals are just really screwy. No one can be quite sure, and trying to be is treason. Even setting aside its frequent misinformation and insanity, while it genuinely wants to help the citizens, it prioritizes the group over the individual, whom it considers much like we consider computers: they can be restored from backup, or replaced if needed.
- Fey in Pathfinder are native to the chaotic First World, where they're immortal: killing them there is only a temporary inconvenience. As such, they often have trouble grasping the concept that the kinds of pranks they play on each other can actually have permanent consequences when played on mortals in the Prime Material Plane.
- In Rocket Age the Europans in particular have morality and values that are completely at odds with everyone else, though this may just be simple arrogance. The Ganymedians can also be incomprehensible to outsiders due to being plant-based organisms.
- Singular Entities and Prime Aspects in Sentinels of the Multiverse are beings with cosmic levels of power who are devoted to a single concept, such as chaos, entropy, and progress, to name a few. As such, they tend to define "good" as anything that promotes and supports their chosen concept and "evil" as anything that removes or opposes it. Sometimes these concepts overlap with what mortals would consider "good" or "evil", such as Wellspring creating the Legacy line in the name of Progress and OblivAeon wanting to destroy everything in the name of entropy, but it's only ever a coincidence, and even "good" entities are generally still creepy and eldritch.
- Systems Malfunction: A seemingly angelic group of creatures called the Deva are this trope. Their morality is based around doing things for the greater good of humanity as a whole. However, they have little — if any — concern for the lives of individual humans, and their attitudes toward non-humans range from apathetic to Absolute Xenophobe.
- Warhammer has a few examples of this:
- Ogres have almost no concept of morality beyond Might Makes Right. In their culture, iron is more valuable than gold, because, with a bag of gold, you can buy an iron weapon and lose the gold, but, with an iron weapon, you can kill someone and take their gold and keep the weapon. They're willing to do basically anything they deem necessary to get what they want; if working as mercenaries gets them paid and fed, they'll do it, and if burning down a few human villages would get them the same thing, they see no real distinction between the two. Eating is pretty much their shtick, to the point that their religion revolves around it; they worship a personification of hunger called the Great Maw, and, to advance in society, you have to kill and devour the Ogre above you. Their females view a particularly large paunch as the most attractive trait in a male (although in all but the fattest it's mostly muscle in any case), and they view disembowelment as the absolute worst way to die (in fact, one of them, Bragg, is The Dreaded among their kind because disembowelment is his favoured method of execution). Admittedly, the disembowelment thing is because the sheer quantity of entrails in an Ogre means it's an agonising death they can't treat and which can take days to kill them.
- The Dwarfs are obsessed with revenge, to the point of Too Dumb to Live territory. They never forgive and never forget insults and injuries, no matter how trivial the slight — every Dwarfen Hold records each instance into a Book of Grudges, the entries of which get transferred to the Great Book of Grudges held by their High King. All grudges have set conditions for fulfillment, usually disproportionately high. When a grudge's conditions are fulfilled, the matter is settled and the Dwarfs abandon the conflict halfway through and return home secure of their success. Case in point: they once went to a war against a human lord, destroyed his castle, and slaughtered his men by the hundreds because six years before, when Dwarfen workers were building his castle, he underpaid by twelve pennies. They also take the casualties from their vengeance-seeking campaigns and place them in the Book of Grudges as grudges to be paid back later. This all means that Dwarfs are in a near-constant state of war with everyone and can't breed fast enough to make up the losses. They also really love their beards. Shaving them is a dire insult. One of the old Elven kings shaved the beard of a Dwarf emissary and sent him back to his High King, which resulted in Elves Versus Dwarves on the scale of a Guilt-Free Extermination War that went on for centuries (there was more to it of course; the emissary was there to try and settle the real issues peacefully until the insult was taken as a declaration of war). When the Dwarfs finally killed the offending king, they kept his crown in lieu of the Elves paying their expenses for the war and otherwise called it settled; by this point both empires were in ruins, and have basically never recovered from the conflict.
- The Beastmen who lurk in the forests of the Old World are this when not just depicted as Always Chaotic Evil. They're highly primal and the ideas of building anything, technology in general, and taming and settling land are so vulgar to their sensibilities that it drives them to a maddening, enraged disgust. All of their weapons and armour are looted or stolen from other races (which means that heavy armour is a rarity in the army) and poorly maintained by their lesser members, and it would take a highly charismatic leader to get these savages to fashion together a crude siege ladder from wood and rope without turning on him. There are effectively two rules to Beastman society: the chieftain must not be killed except in a proper challenge, and the shaman is not to be so much as harmed. Everything else is acceptable.
- The Lizardmen are firmly opposed to Chaos, are totally incorruptible, and are biologically immortal, with some individual members being listed as over 8000 years old. By all accounts they should be on the side of good, and they are... the problem is, they are essentially organic robots spawned to oppose Chaos and fulfill the plans of the Precursors known as the Old Ones. Like robots, they'll do exactly what they've been programmed to do, even if that plan requires genocide on a continental scale to achieve. This plan entails putting all of the Humans back in the Old World, all of the Elves back in Ulthuan, all of the Dwarfs back in the mountains, and exterminating basically everyone and anything else not designated in the plans. In one instance, the Slann moved a mountain range back where it was supposed to be according to the plan, accidentally destroying the Dwarf empire that had formed beneath it.
- If you pilfer so much as a single coin or gem from a Tomb King's trove, he and all his forces will do whatever it takes to hunt you down to the ends of the earth to get it back. It would come across as a Silly Reason for War, but, much like the Dwarfs, from the perspective of the undead, the affront in such an act of theft supersedes the value of whatever was taken from them. One particular ongoing war is over a Dwarf-made hammer with a single Tomb King coin among its decorations, with both sides insisting the other are the thieves.
- Warhammer 40,000 throws in some of this to spice up all the Evil Versus Evil.
- Da Orks were created by long-dead Precursors as Living Weapons, and so enthusiastically wage WAAAGH!!! on anyone they encounter, or failing that, other Orks. They don't understand morality; for Orks the only limits are what their boss lets them get away with. Orks don't understand friendship, but some have "favourite enemies". And they don't understand that other races might prefer not to fight; why would you build a big killy fortress in the first place if you weren't hoping that someone would come along and attack it? Endless war for the sake of war is all the Orks know how to do. This mentality is in part due to them being genetically engineered for war, and because they were late to the party when the Nightbringer hammered the fear of death into all other sapient species. To most races including humans, decapitating a defeated enemy, sticking the head onto the end of a sharpened stake and wearing it on your back into battles is desecration of the dead and an act of supreme barbarity. To an Ork, doing this is a mark of respect to the defeated opponent.
- The Tau qualify due to their devotion to the Greater Good. The Ciaphas Cain novel For The Emperor spends a bit of time on this, stating that even the suggestion of any action that goes contrary to the Greater Good is detested almost to a physical revulsion, and Tau can't understand why others would willfully refuse to follow it. Also, several Tau belief systems are contrary to the Imperium's: Tau have little to no individuality, view personal ambition to be the greatest of sins, and consider Last Stands to be foolish (if the top brass ordered it) or an ordinary sacrifice (if the foot soldiers are resorting to it) rather than heroic.
- The Imperium itself can be this towards modern humans, especially when the novels remember to portray the Deliberate Values Dissonance of a superstitious, theocratic, fascistic martyr culture. This isn't helped by the fact that the God-Emperor himself is completely out of touch with mortals and relating to them on an individual level, and unable to understand the emotional needs of others. In a subtle way, Imperium and Tau are some of the most morally jarring factions, since both are just close enough to recognize by human morals, yet still highly alien. Especially when contrasted to each other — the Imperium will sacrifice humans by the millions for no greater purpose than clearing minefields or building defensive walls out of their corpses, whilst the Tau consider the concept of the Last Stand to be foolish, unimaginative and immoral, but are fanatically loyal the Ethereal leaders and to disobey them is a practical death sentence.
- The Dark Eldar as well, when they aren't outright evil. They see absolutely nothing wrong with brutally torturing, raping and killing people for their gratification. They greatly enjoy being tortured themselves, but they think being bored in a locked room with nothing to do is a Fate Worse than Death. For this reason, Dark Eldar are often punished by being forced into Commorragh's factories and slave pits, where they find little to stimulate them. Also, as Andy Chambers' Path of the Dark Eldar series shows, they have a sense of personal honour, if a very perverse and twisted one, and it doesn't apply to anyone who isn't an Eldar; even Craftworld and Exodite Eldar are considered pathetic weaklings denying the truth of their heritage and rural hicks, respectively.
- All of the Chaos gods fall into this. They do what they do because they are made from a particular concept/emotion, and exist to propagate the ideology that they feed on. While they're the 'verse's Big Bads, the fact that they're also fed by positive emotions such as honor or hope adds some twisted nuance. According to the Liber Chaotica books, they are actually (or at least originally) the personifications of four base emotions in two pairs — love and hate, hope and despair. All else about them came from these being fully explored, and the strongest parts (the negative, destructive ones) being dominant. Thus, technically ALL love is under the purview of Slaanesh, but it is pride (self love), depravity (love of sensation and extreme), and the skills that result in self-obsessed perfection that yield the greatest strength. The strongest source and manifestation of despair is in incurable disease. Continually planning and looking toward the future (no matter the consequence) unlocks the massive power-at-a-price that defines Tzeentch, and the martial pride and rage of Khorne is so aggressive as to be dominant over all other forms. Each is all manifestations of all aspects of a given emotion — and their greater daemons are aspects of their own form in specific forms.
- Khorne offers his followers incredible strength and determination, asking for nothing more than spilled blood and skulls offered in his name; from your enemies, from your friends, from you, he's not picky. That said, Khorne also has a martial code of sorts, and despises cowards who flee from battle or who exclusively use magic to win. In some accounts he even rejects bloody offerings made from defenseless noncombatants, or favors those who kill with melee weapons over those who use heavy ordnance.
- Tzeentch is often praised as the greatest Chessmaster in existence, but this is a misconception. Tzeentch has no great end goal, and doesn't particularly care if his plans succeed or fail; as an incarnation of ambition and change, were he ever to win in any of his infinite schemes, there would be nothing to scheme against and he would immediately cease existing. To this end, Tzeentch deliberately sets up all of his plots to crash into each other, and while he's willing to grant his followers a portion of his arcane might and intellect, he's just as likely to bless them with a mutation or two. Or twenty.
- Nurgle loves life, and wants to cram as much of it into the universe as he can; unfortunately this includes bacteria, viruses, and diseases. His idea of affection is to bless you with some horrible affliction, and considers your misery and pain a form of gratitude. Nurgle is the Chaos God of Despair, yet the most fatherly or avuncular of the Dark Gods, since his followers are so resigned to their gruesome fate that they develop a sense of morbid good humor about their rotting flesh and disease-bloated bodies.
- Slaanesh's motivations can be seen as a devotion to sensation, and devotion to devotion itself. His/her followers are granted all the pleasure and excess they desire, be it music, women or men, food, whatever. Unfortunately a mortal body can only take so much of this, so that Slaanesh's followers eventually become burnt-out husks of men and women forced to partake in increasingly exotic and extreme diversions to titillate their jaded senses. They also think that they should offer excess to everyone else, and that is not a good thing.
- Malice is the chaos god of anti chaos while also being the god of anarchy (as in chaos) His very existence is a contradiction since both he and his followers insist he doesn't exist (which would normally mean he wouldn't exist in 40k but believing something doesn't exist hard enough would ironically cause it to exist or not exist at the same time or AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!. Effectively Malice's purpose is purposelessness, his very existence is somewhat of a Reality-Breaking Paradox since he can manifest in reality despite not existing (and even if he did exist as a chaos god he would have to both exist and not exist in both the warp and the real world at the same time). With this brief description of Malice being the complete Mind Screw it is you can imagine he and his followers sense of morality are just as contradictory and nonsensical (and perfectly straight forwards and making perfect sense).
- Tyranids generally are not malicious to whomever they attack. Although there is the occasional old grudge from a hive tyrant or the Death Leaper employing cruel tactics, these are all ultimately to neutralize untouchable targets and rarely done out of pure spite. This is because the Tyranids have an all-consuming drive to devour and expand provided by the Tyranid Hive Mind, so anything done towards that goal is good, anything contrary to that is bad.
- The RPG spinoffs include a minor Proud Merchant Race called the Stryxis. While they'll happily trade anything from information to rare technologies to slaves with anyone willing to bargain, their concept of value is so incomprehensible to humans that figuring out what a particular Stryxis will accept in payment is the real challenge.
- World of Darkness and the Chronicles of Darkness:
- The Old World of Darkness features a detailed description of a great many alternate moralities of vampires, called Paths of Enlightenment, in a supplement named Chaining The Beast. Joining one requires a tutor and some serious mental gymnastics, but promises to allow vampires to stay sane without holding on to a morality that they seem to break just by existing. They're popular amongst the Sabbat, but the Camarilla prefer Humanity.
- The Path of the Beast (mostly followed by Gangrel) says that vampires are predators who should prioritize their need to survive and shouldn't feel ashamed about what they need to do to prey, but who should be pragmatic and not do anything for the sake of cruelty.
- The Path of Self-Focus is Zen Buddhism for vampires, focusing on reducing conflict within oneself by accepting the world as it is and seeking to change the self because it's the only thing you can control.
- The Path of the Scorched Heart is The Spock on steroids, teaching that all emotions only serve the Beast.
- The Path of Bones is all about death, encouraging it and studying it 'in the wild', so to speak. Compassion and preventing death are sins (because suffering leads to death, Life Will Kill You, and the cycle shouldn't be meddled with), but so is killing without study, because the purpose of the path is to increase one's knowledge about life and death, and letting an opportunity to do so pass by is anathema to that.
- The Path of Metamorphosis (followed by most Tzimisce) is about being a magic vampire Evilutionary Biologist.
- The Path of Orion is a relatively new one, focusing on how vampires are the ultimate hunters and must hone their abilities by Hunting the Most Dangerous Game (which, given that this is the World of Darkness, tends not to be humans).
- The Path of Power and the Inner Voice is basically the Path of the Übermensch. It's based on gaining power for oneself, with sins such as being a Bad Boss (punishing subordinates who do well weakens you), turning down opportunities for power, and denying one's own faults.
- The Path of Blood, followed by the Assamites, is pretty simple. Vampires are evil. The world would be better off without them. So get off your lazy bum and start killing vampires to make the world a better place.
- Some paths are less 'strange' than they are Good Is Bad And Bad Is Good or Card-Carrying Villain, falling into a general formula of 'Vampires are evil. You are a vampire. Therefore, you should be as evil as you can be.' There are nuances, of course (Cathars, who see themselves as anti-Gnostics, aren't supposed to kill innocents because innocents should be tempted into depravity, while Setites focus more on breaking your own moral taboos to achieve gnosis than corrupting others), but they're generally a trouble magnet and most other vampires (and out of universe, most Storytellers) don't tolerate them and kill them at any opportunity.
- The Path of Honorable Accord is one of the most human-like of the paths, being basically vampire Bushido/Chivalry. It's not humane because humans are seen as resources (much like a knight would see their horse) and To Be Lawful or Good is always answered with 'lawful', but it's close enough that they don't have to switch out their virtues (see below).
- Most characters (including non-vampires) in Vampire: The Masquerade have three Virtues— Conscience, Self-Control and Courage. On the alternate paths of Morality, vampires often switch out Conscience with Conviction, Self-Control with Instinct, or both. Not only do they no longer see virtue in human terms, they don't see it in other supernaturals' terms. (Old World of Darkness mechanics were not designed to work across venues.)
- In Dark Ages: Vampire, there are five major Roads of vampiric morality: the Road of the Beast, the Road of Heaven, the Road of Humanity, the Road of Kings, and the Road of Sin. All of them, being ways to keep the Beast in check, differ from human expectations— even Humanity, which expects you to be a better human than some actual humans.
- Example: One of the sins on the Road of Kings (a Level 8 sin, equivalent to "Injury to another, accidental or otherwise" on the Road of Humanity) is "Treating an inferior as an equal" (the explanation given being "Everyone should know their place, including you.")
- The Laibon, the vampires of Africa, don't have Virtues, and must follow two paths of morality simultaneously. Aya (Earth), which is similar to Western Kindred's code of Humanity, represents a vampire's connection with mortality, while Orun (Heaven) represents a vampire's connection to spiritual power.
- The Kuei-jin, the Kindred of the East, are a different kind of vampire altogether, being damned escapees from the Thousand Hells. They pursue Dharmas, paths to enlightenment, and most Dharmas don't resemble mortal moralities in the least— one expects you to be the greatest devil you can, one expects you to create, live through, and destroy a succession of mortal identities, and another claims you're a reincarnated god and must reclaim your divine identity. The closest to a human perspective, the Flame of the Rising Phoenix, seeks to settle the dues of their mortal lives and live as a human would, encourage others to appreciate the value of humanity and experience, and resist the inner demon.
- Mage: The Ascension makes this a part of the mechanics (such as they are) of the game's magic system. For example: Playing a Euthanatos mage might mean that you need to kill a bunch of people at certain times and certain places in order to keep the world balanced and working properly. As a Cultist of Ecstasy, you might need to do a lot of drugs and sleep with a lot of people in order to transcend your limitations. Even if you're not playing a stereotype of the Traditions, your Avatar might have a wholly different outlook on the world from its host and may not work properly for the mage unless he/she brings his/her perspective more in line with the Avatar's.
- In the New World of Darkness, the base human Karma Meter is called Morality. All supernaturals have their own uniquely named Karma Meter, which has slightly different purposes for them. For most of them, these meters are ultimately identical to human moral behavior, simply adding unique sins and crimes that aren't an option for a mortal but make sense in human terms (e.g. magical compulsion of a sentient being for a mage). Some, however, are more alien...
- For The God-Machine Chronicle, the Morality system was overhauled, going from a Karma Meter to a Sanity Meter. The Morality trait was renamed Integrity, and the list of sins was removed; it now handles how well ordinary people deal with events they can't rationalize or cope with. With this in mind, presumably all of the supernaturals will end up with this upon re-release, instead of the majority of them being "human morality with some extra sins" like they are.
- Werewolves have Harmony, how in tune they are with themselves. Since they're half spirit and part wolf, killing humans isn't even a blip on their conscience unless it was just done for the hell of it. Being disloyal to their pack is far more troubling than even pointless murder of humans. Other human sins like stealing are also notably absent, but as spirits, elements of etiquette frequently take their place. EATING a human is forbidden but only because it dishonors half of your heritage, and being impolite to a social superior is a sin that can result in so much inner guilt and conflict that it can literally drive you insane.
- Second edition Harmony gets really weird. First, the ideal point to be isn't at the top, it's in the middle. Both very high and very low Harmony are equally bad. Some actions make you lose Harmony points, making you tend towards your Spirit side, but others make you gain it, making you tend towards your Flesh side. Whether either is good or bad depends on where you're sitting at the time, but getting down to Harmony 0(losing yourself to the Spirit) or up to Harmony 10(losing yourself to the Flesh) opens up the risk of permanently becoming a "broken wolf", or Zi'Ir. Like first edition, stealing and kidnapping are not considered so much as a blip on the Harmony radar. Unlike first edition, killing a human is a breaking point towards Spirit. What gets weird is the extreme harmony breaking points. Eating processed food, mating with a human, failing to enter the Shadow(spirit world) once a day or allowing spirits into the Material are breaking points towards Flesh for low-harmony werewolves. For high-harmony werewolves, spending extended periods in the Shadow or away from their pack, leading the Sacred Hunt or inflicting Lunacy on a loved one are breaking points towards Spirit.
- Sin-Eaters have Synergy, measuring how in tune the Sin-Eater is with their geist, and with the balance between life and death. Deliberate killing is absolutely no problem for a Sin-Eater, emblematic of 'clean' death, but serial killing and mass murder are seriously disruptive, emblematic of 'unclean' death, while any means of attempting to resuscitate a dying person plays havoc with the balance of life and death. And attempted suicide will piss your geist right off. And accidentally killing someone is a no-no, as well. If you meant to, no problem.
- Hunters can inflict this on themselves with the optional rules for setting up a hunter's code. One provided example ends up with a personal duty to kill every mage she meets, lest she suffer the same psychological effect as a normal person would get for accidentally murdering someone.
- Demons have extremely alien morality, such that they can reverse Vices and Virtues; Generosity becomes a sin because it endangers the demon's life or sacrifices resources he and/or his friends need, whilst Pride is good because it helps him assert his self-will and inherent right to be a free entity.
- The True Fae are most definitely this. They come from a world of utter chaos where everyone must strike their own stake to avoid fading into oblivion; ergo, their lives are consumed by conflict and the eternal struggle for more glory. They adopt emotions as passing fancies, but don't understand them; the book cites a True Fae falling in love with a changeling, only to snap his neck when he hesitates to pass the salt and recalling the burbling of a brook in summer when it hears the changeling's dying gurgles. This is NICE for a True Fae. You really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really don't want to know what "Nasty" is. Oh, and if they ever try to understand humanity, they lose most of their power and all of their memories of Faerie.
- As with the True Fae, as said in the Werewolf: The Forsaken: Predators supplement, Spirits have inherently alien morality; they are not human, never were human, and even the most intelligent of all spirits are fundamentally alien beings. The closest one can get to defining a spirit's morality is the basic assumption "promotes my area of influence = good" and "denies my area of influence = bad". Plus whatever unique character quirks of motivation and Ban (a forbidden action, literally the closest thing a spirit has to an unforgivable sin) drive a given spirit. This obsessiveness means that they can't be truly reasoned with, even by other spirits; a fire spirit would have no idea why a house spirit would be pissed at it for setting the former spirit's house on fire— to the fire spirit, a house being on fire is a good thing, because if something is inflammable, then its highest purpose is to produce fire, and anything else done with said fuel source is either meaningless playing around, or a way to make it more burnable. A Spirit of Love sees Love as a good thing, but because it can't understand human moral subtleties, would see no reason to dislike the kind of love that makes you crazy or evil. This is why there are no "Good Guy" Spirits, and some of the most innocuous seeming spirits are actually some of the most dangerous— playground spirits, in particular, tend to be monsters fed on a diet of intense conflict, sorrow and cruelty, thus actively promoting or sheltering everything from common bullies to pedophiles and other child molesters.
- In contrast to Masquerade, this is averted in Vampire: The Requiem. Paths of Enlightenment are gone, and rejecting your Humanity simply means that you become a mindless, animalistic monster.
- Or you may be lucky and transform into new mental state, becoming new member of Belial`s Brood. You are now more kindred than human.
- In the fanlines, Geniuses have Obligation, which is more along the lines of how in-tune they are with the rest of humanity. The lower it dips, or the more powerful the Genius gets, the more likely they are to drift toward Blue And Orange Morality. When that happens, they tend to start viewing people more as collections of spare parts.
- This is also why Unmada tend to have lower Obligation than rational (relatively speaking) Geniuses. There's nothing stopping an Unmada from caring for others or working for the common good... but Unmada firmly believe that reality is in line with their own delusions, which can be quite odd. So, for an Unmada, caring for people might mean uploading them into the Matrix and turning their bodies into a support structure for said Matrix, and an Unmada who firmly believes Humans Are the Real Monsters might think making the world a better place involves enslaving humans to AI so they can't mess things up. These are all Obligation sins no matter how the Genius sees them, so Unmada have a strong tendency to slide down the slippery slope no matter how well-intentioned they are.
- In Mage: The Awakening lore, the Franklin Working — a persistent enchantment created by a homophobic and sex-negative mage — causes this in the people exposed to it, particularly those who get so messed-up that they end up as Serial Killers. It's not impossible for them to, for example, come to believe that rules against violence are secondary to rules about when you're supposed to cross the street, so they think it's entirely acceptable to stab a jaywalker.
