Alignment

There are a variety of game mechanics used in roleplaying games to represent the characters’ morals and attitudes. These are often called “alignment”. Dungeons & Dragons has the “Lawful-Chaotic” dimension and often the “Good-Evil” dimension of alignment. Storyteller games use some form of “Humanity-Monster” dimension. Palladium has its Principled, Scrupulous, Unprincipled, Anarchist, Miscreant, Aberrant, and Diabolic alignments.

Since the PCs usually take on the roles of individual heroes and adventurers, PC alignments tend to be away from the “evil”, “monstrous”, or “miscreant” and more towards the “good” and “human”. Though there are exceptions, by and large most PCs tend to be good or at worst neutral.

The game master, meanwhile, plays the balance of the characters in the world across the wide spectrum of alignments. It’s like one PC is Frodo, another is Sam, and the game master is Sauron, Gandalf, Gollum, Saruman, the orcs, the ents, the elves, and so on, good guys and bad guys alike.

In Gurdjieff’s writings, in terms of “alignment”, humans have subjective morality and objective morality. Subjective morality is acquired from external factors of upbringing, parents, teachers, siblings, and peers. Since it is acquired, it has a very local or tribal character. To give an extreme example, it would be immoral for a member of the Korowai tribe of Papua New Guinea to not engage in ritual cannibalism. Whereas a typical Westerner views cannibalism as immoral. Both are doing what they believe is “good”.

Objective morality is different. It is not acquired, and as such, is universal. 

There have been attempts in religion to codify objective morality, with greater or lesser success. This is mainly because the driver of objective morality is not laws but objective conscience, an innate faculty humans can possess but have buried in exchange for an inner state free of any sting of remorse or organic shame.

Most alignment systems in roleplaying games posit a system of objective morality. Cannibalism would be on the “evil” end of the spectrum in an alignment system. Goblins who want to kill and eat your character are sensibly regarded as “evil” in such games. And if such fictional beings had consciences, their subjective morality would do the heavy lifting of justifying to themselves why killing and eating people is good.

But beyond having subjective and objective conscience and morality, another possibility exists: to have entirely no objective conscience in oneself at all.

Villains

Gurdjieff called such persons “Hasnamus”, and their imitators, “candidate-Hasnamus”. In contemporary terms, we might call them psychopaths. For some reason, they are born without the factors that would form objective conscience in them, like some kind of moral birth defect. They may pretend to have subjective morality to fit in, but when they wish or when their guard is down, they demonstrate their utter lack of conscience. 

In roleplaying games, these would be the real villains. 

Characteristic impulses of such villains are outlined in Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson:

“If these separate aspects of the entire ‘spectrum’ of Naloo-osnian-impulses are described according to the notions of your favorites and expressed in their language, they might then be defined as follows:

(1) Every kind of depravity, conscious as well as unconscious

(2)The feeling of self-satisfaction from leading others astray

(3) The irresistible inclination to destroy the existence of other breathing creatures

(4) The urge to become free from the necessity of actualizing the being-efforts demanded by Nature

(5) The attempt by every kind of artificiality to conceal from others what in their opinion are one’s physical defects

(6) The calm self-contentment in the use of what is not personally deserved

(7) The striving to be not what one is.”

Beelzebub’s Tales, p. 405-6

For a game master, it’s worth considering these impulses as key to the overall makeup of your villains when creating and roleplaying them.