So it turns out Anarcho-Geek Review is going to occasionally publish essays, either original ones, or mildly annotated ones. The following is an essay we have reproduced in full from a long-extinct Geocities page. We were unable to track down the author—we present this piece in good faith. It is perhaps the best exploration of the alignment system we have encountered. Our few notes are marked in red.

The Nine Alignments

In 1977, admittedly before I was born, the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons introduced the world to an ethical system known today as the nine alignments. A quarter of a century has gone by and millions of people have been exposed to this system. I was introduced to D&D in fourth grade and now, twenty years later, I still understand the world in this way. For many of us, in fact, with no formal training in philosophy, this is the only clearly-articulated understanding of ethics we’ve ever had. And this doesn’t bother me.
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