D&D alignment is famously dumb, to the point where in literal decades I've only ever heard it discussed to dump on it or joke about it, but designing esoteric cosmic alignment systems for RPGs is very fun in that it appeals to the nerd's natural delight in taxonomy and mysticism. anyway my favourite one that I ever came up with, which I have yet to deploy in a finished work but still want to, is an alignment trinity that goes like this:
ROCK: associated with moralistic heroes and heroism, personal virtue, romanticism, himbos, babyface wrestlers, beach bodies, unarmed combat or purely cosmetic weapons, doing the simplest or most ethical thing without regard for the consequences, hot-blooded shonen protagonists who are 14, even numbers, the colours red and green
SCISSORS: associated with "bad guys", cunning, pragmatic and ruthless self-interest, heel wrestlers, "edginess"/antiheroics, lethal weapons (especially blades and guns), surprise attacks, lies and betrayal, decisive lateral solutions, the ends justifying the means, odd numbers, the colours black and blue
PAPER: associated with bureaucrats and institutions, "The Man", proceduralism for its own sake, dense codes of law, deciding what to do on the basis of abstract theory, Ayn Rand villains, inconvenient traditions, intellectualism and pseudointellectualism, co-optation by the establishment, art that only makes sense if you know art history, nonsense as distinct from lies, domestication of conflict, non-integers, the colours white and yellow
These form a kind of daoist element phase pattern where one is considered to "beat" the other and things transition according to that pattern, in the expected way.
This hits what I think is a sweet spot for design, where it feels plausibly transcendental in the sense that you can kind of let your eyes unfocus and genuinely imagine that these categories embody deep wisdom about the nature of the world, and it's elegant in that the aesthetics line up with the names of the categories in both metaphorical and literal ways, but it's also just visibly incredibly stupid and a joke, so you can enter into a superposition of taking it seriously within the narrative while considering it stupid and deflating.
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