Alignment

"'DARK SUN campaigns call upon players to roleplay their characters according to alignments, just as in AD&D campaigns ... consider alignment as a tool, not a straightjacket'" - 2e Dark Sun rulebook Unfortunately, alignment tends to end up as either completely ignored, an awkward roleplaying accessory, or as an inevitable "straightjacket".

"Donnie: Okay. But you're not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account. Like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can't just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else. Kitty: If you don't complete the assignment you'll get a zero for the day." - Donnie Darko While it is certainly nicer to have two axes instead of one and the words at the ends of those axes are actually opposites, that still only leaves nine possible personality archetypes. And really only four of them are easily recognised: the Knight in Shining Armour, Robin Hood, the Tyrant, and the Destroyer.

Ultimately, I don't even want players to have more choice in personality archetype; I want them to choose the dimensions and properties of their character's alignment. In doing so, declaring both their characters' strongest motivations and the nature of their future moral dilemmas.

"'The Lawful cop whose heart causes him to make an exception for the hooker who needs to feed her kids, or the Chaotic cop who swears to his dying partner that he'll bring the bad guy in 'by the book' don't stop being lawful or chaotic just because they acted out of alignment once.'" - 1d4Chan on Alignment Also, I want to provide the capacity for players to make characters who are still acting in character even if they ostensibly breaking alignment much like in the quoted examples. Whether the reason the Lawful cop is letting the hooker off is out of respect of the difficulty of parenthood, having a soft spot for children, or he simply falls in love with every hooker he sleeps with, the Lawful cop is demonstrating there is more to his character than a two letter string in the alignment box and I'd like to strongly encourage this level of roleplaying.

With those things in mind, I have cobbled together these rules...

Loyalties
When you use the loyalties system to build a character, whether a PC or an NPC, decide on three (zero to five are the hard caps) loyalties. These can represent ideals, people, organisations, or anything else to which the character is loyal, and might be as abstract as "my honour" or as concrete as "my beloved mother". Optionally, rank these loyalties from strongest to weakest. One easy way to decide the order is to ask yourself what your character would do if these loyalties came into conflict. These loyalties then replace alignment as the standard by which characters' motivations are measured.

During play, a character might take an action that causes him to change loyalties, just as a character in a game with alignment might have to change alignment. Whether this has any mechanical impact depends on how the GM has chosen to deal with loyalty-based restrictions and effects.

Classes

 * Barbarian: Remove the alignment restriction. A barbarian may not have a loyalty to law, order, or any similar concepts.
 * Cleric: Remove the alignment restriction. Clerics must have a loyalty to their element.
 * Druid: Remove the alignment restriction. Druids must have a loyalty involving nature or the druidic code of conduct.

Subjective Morality
You can make your world extremely complex by replacing all alignment-based effects with subjective morality based on loyalties. In this kind of game, everyone is the hero of his own story.

The only alignment-based items and spells that exist are the ones named after the good alignment (such as holy weapons and holy word) plus detect evil. However, these effects apply not to good in the usual sense, but instead depend on the loyalties of their users. When someone uses detect evil, it detects others who have loyalties that oppose the caster's. When a character wields a holy weapon, it deals extra damage to those with conflicting loyalties, and so on.

It's up to the GM to decide when loyalties conflict. For instance, if a magus decides that his primary loyalty is to himself, he could not reasonably claim that everything that ever attacks him has a conflicting loyalty, but an enemy who constantly abused him in the past would have a conflicting loyalty. Against this enemy, the magus's holy attacks would strike true.