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Total War: Three Kingdoms devs explain Lü Bu’s D&D alignment

Creative Assembly breaks down the good and evil of Three Kingdoms

Perhaps the greatest gift humanity got from Dungeons & Dragons was a three-by-three square – after all, mapping character alignments to a simple morality grid has proven a venerable pastime across the internet. We asked the developers of Total War: Three Kingdoms how the alignments of the game’s historical Chinese warlords should go, and they had answers ready.

Writer Pete Stewart says “we have done this already,” though they’ve tried to avoid pigeonholing the game’s versions of the characters into simplified morality. As he’s traditionally mythologised, Lü Bu would probably be chaotic evil, though he may lean slightly more toward chaotic neutral as he’s depicted in the game. Dong Zhuo, though, is definitely lawful evil – as Stewart says, “he’s doing bad things, but he thinks he’s doing them for all the good reasons.”

Liu Bei, on the other hand, is probably chaotic good. Senior designer Leif Walter says “he is not necessarily following the rules. Morally, he wants the best for the people.” Stewart, however, thinks Bei is probably closer to neutral good – and here we have the minutiae-filled debates that make D&D alignments so great.

Check out all the team’s answers in the video below.

Despite – or perhaps because of – the evilness, Lü Bu is fully capable of killing thousands in Three Kingdoms. Maybe the dark side of the chart is better after all.

Read more: Command in the best strategy games on PC

Check out our Total War: Three Kingdoms review if you’re looking for more on the game itself. It’s good, though it doesn’t quite outstep the heights reached by some of the best entries in the series.