Chaotic Neutral

Remember Dungeons and Dragons? When my big brother discovered it and taught it to me back in school, it was the best game ever. I’d liked rummy until I got too good at making my short-tempered little brother furious. I liked Trivial Pursuit but I could never win—I’d get all the pie pieces, then wander the board trying to get in the middle until someone passed me by to win. Monopoly always ended in my big brother owning EVERYTHING.

Hey, if you had my brothers, you’d have a real problem with losing too.

But D&D? We all played on the same team, working together to create something awesome—a campaign full of joy and anguish, excitement and satisfaction. It was like writing, only with people!

I had a lot of fun with those characters way back when, but deep down they were all just me as I acted out dreams of having magic, of bringing justice (or at least treasure) with my sword…

Later I had a regular group with whom I played D&D on Sunday mornings. By then I was getting experimental. My characters had backstories. Emotions of their own. Reasons beyond “gold!” to go adventuring. Sometimes my group went along with it and sometimes they just looked at me funny until I kept it to myself, but I still made up the stories. You might guess this made the best game even better. Then one day…

My DM in that group was given to pronouncements. New people could not play mages or clerics because those classes were “harder.” Playing a half-elf was a cop-out. If you rolled a character with not-good stats, you had to give him/her a name and a job (smith, tavern wench, et cetera) before you could roll another. We could never have enough dice or books, we had to have the right figurines, snacks, atmosphere…yeah, like that. But he was my friend, and we all had a lot of fun.

Anyway. One of his pronouncements was that I could only play good characters. Not that I wasn’t allowed others, but that I would never be any good at them, so I shouldn’t try.

I argued that I could play evil characters, I just didn’t want to. I would not enjoy putting myself in that mindset for four hours a week. It would poison my weekends. His answer was “yeah, right.” I didn’t want to because I couldn’t.

In D&D, the alignments aren’t simply good and evil. There’s also neutral. I pointed that out, so he dared me to play Chaotic Neutral, and do it well. According to him, that was actually the hardest alignment to play.

Chaotic Neutral is…well, according to Wikipedia, chaotic neutral is “an individualist who follows his or her own heart.”

For the record, my character looked nothing like Captain Jack Sparrow. She was a redheaded elven thief named Silk, and before I was done everyone in game and out of it hated her. To me, though, she was the most fun I’d had in years. She stole a scroll from a vampire, and when he had just about tracked it to her (because my DM was trying to kill her, not because she flubbed the burglary!) Silk reverse-pick-pocketed a party-member and stuck it on him. Which party member? Oh, the paladin.

Did it occur to the vampire that a paladin pretty much could not have stolen something? No, of course not. And besides, it’s in a paladin’s job description to get rid of undead. Silk was just…helping him see his duty.

She stole from a dragon too, and got away with it. She seduced a dark lord and saved a kingdom, then helped herself to rewards when they weren’t piled on her. And through it all, my friend the DM was trying to kill her and failing and we both knew it and I (should I admit this? I shall!) I loved it. Even cursed treasure didn’t slow her down. Silk got herself robbed by a highwayman and only lost the cursed ring and a couple gold coins.

For various reasons (not only my annoying character!) the game eventually passed on. I regretfully put Silk’s character sheet away.

Then I remembered I’m a writer and took it out again.

Silk had been created in D&D, very much a licensed property, so basically everything but her personality had to go. That, and her elf-ness. D&D doesn’t hold a copyright on elves (at least I hope not, considering all the elves running around out there). Her name was in honor of a favorite fictional character, so that had to go too. And she needed more backstory as well as more likeability, if I wanted to put her in a story.

I took everything I’d created and twisted it a bit. I took the old tropes—elves, dwarves, the animosity between them—and gave those a twist too. I added a couple more races, and their backstory. I created a world, constructed languages and history and maps, and threw in everything I love about D&D: heroic quests, magical monsters, mysterious ruins, amazing treasure, enchanted swords, unknowable danger…

Flame was born. Not much of an elvish name? No, but she doesn’t consider herself much of an elf. Her name is Flame Isfree, and if you use that other name you’re likely to get stabbed. She is clever, practical, sarcastic, and self-centered. She’s also a damn good treasure-hunter, so smart people tend to put up with her because they know being on her team can make them rich.

I can’t wait for you meet her. On July 1^st, her story begins.