reveal your alignment.

When I was 7, my buckos & I would play Dungeons & Dragons during lunch, seated on the cold concrete of the schoolyard, wearing out erasers on queer looking forms and tossing the funny polyhedral dice as fast as our imaginations could swing cruelly spiked morning stars into the heads of pretty elves.

For those of you who aren't familiar with role-playing games, one assumes the identity of a character which you verbally play, while another narrates the setting in which the characters move about & directs the results. Most RPGs are traditionally based in some Tolkienesque fantasy world. Mechanics of chance & combat are determined by attributes held by the characters represented by numerical values which are then brought to bear against the values of your adversaries & the dice sort out who is left standing, but strategy & creativity also play a large part.

In these mansions of imagination, a man named Gary Gygax created the construct known as Alignment to describe a character's moral & ethical compass, which determines how the character should behave and act so the narrator can then duly reward the player for being true to form in the gaming world. Usually most characters are good or neutral with chaotic & lawful striations, but you sometimes find players select evil. These selections are just you filling in a box on a character sheet for an alter ego.

But what if this box was really about you?

A few months ago I found an official online quiz that reverse engineers your Alignment selection:

D&D Official Online Alignment Test.

It's a multiple choice 36-question test. Maybe that's a simplistic system, filing all of human decisionmaking into 9 categories, but I found it interesting & thought provoking to actually answer these queries as best applied to myself. After all, for centuries we've been taking game-like devices & applying them as divinatory tools to real life, like the I Ching or Tarot or Runes or Ouija or Magic 8-Ball or Tasseography or the Enneagram or The Cube or the DSM-IV, and using them to relay personal insights from within & without ourselves.

Some of the questions will twist your noodle & hurt your brain, others will seem not to apply, but if you substitute say the word "king" for "president" or "governor" on the assassination question then they can easily relate. The "magic spell that makes copper coins look like gold" can be translated as "retail accepted fake credit card", and so on and so forth.

My results? To confess, my "character"'s alignment is Neutral Evil. This is the closest to "True Evil", where both law & ethics are non-factors, tools to be used indiscriminately for personal ends, and what matters most is one's own gain & self-preservation. At first I was a bit disturbed by that result (who honestly views themselves as evil?), so I've gotten many of my co-workers to take the test for perspective, and a few have cashed out as Chaotic Evil, where schadenfreude & harmful mischief for evil's sake hold the reigns of persona, which one might consider worse, given the purposelessness of such actions. Most seem to be Neutral. This Alignment can either be viewed as striking a balance or a lack of convictions, depending. But even some of the Neutral Good, the "True Good", folks answered many questions in a not-so-courageous way.

So maybe I'm the baddest of the bad, but bear in mind that I will testify on your behalf despite death threats from the powerful & corrupt judge, and if the orcs come to Arizona, you bet your hit points I'll go to Gate's Pass & defend Tucson against the orcish hordes, unlike all of those spineless Neutral/Lawful/Chaotic do-Gooders. (My derringer & 500 hollow-points are ready, you pigfaced baconheads! Bring it, I'll crush it!) This difference implies that perhaps it takes the latitudes evil allows to accomplish things for the greater good. Besides, Alignment's really like the car -- it may pull a certain direction, but you're still at the wheel and can compensate for that tendency (i.e. you don't have to gleefully run over the rabbit, unless your party likes eating freshly treadmarked coney). Take it, see what it reveals about yourself, and let us know where you land on the Alignment field. You may be surprised.

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

Underworld is the Star Wars of vampire movies.

"Underworld" surpasses the idea of the creature feature. It personalizes the horror the way Anne Rice did, additionally throwing it back out into a greater context of conflicts. It's not just "Dracula vs the Wolf-Man", an indefatigable will slugging it out against uncontrollable beast -- it's an implication that these forces secretly dictate the workings of man. Michael Corvin's journey is the discovery of the darkness that underlies the mundane. And despite his every noble intention to practice medicine and save lives, the dark is in his blood and it's in our blood. This uneasy truth is what makes the film important & significant.

As primary example the first film gives its viewers Selene, a vampire warrior, a monster you root for and identify with. "Hunt them down and kill them off, one by one," Selene states as her joy. "I lived for it." Selene's accepted her darkness, using its inherent strength for a centuries long crusade of vengeance, and the virtue of that darkness attracts Michael. Corvin could instead turn his interest to the girl he helped save from the subway shootout, but the obsidian shadow he detects in himself, and in the nature of the world, appeals to him more.

While this edgy theme's the most insightful reason a studio-backed small budget film of $27 million unexpectedly garnered so much commercial success that it was re-issued in a sexy slipcased double DVD Unrated Extended Cut, there was quite alot more to it than that.

There's the litigation framing the picture to consider: White Wolf, makers of a roleplaying game wherein vampires & werewolves also happen to be bitter enemies, sues media giant Sony Pictures -- a losing battle. What the RPGers in Stone Mountain, Georgia, later forgot as the money kept rolling in over 13 prolific years was that they too built upon the mythic edifices which came before them: Augustine Calmet, Montague Summers, Bram Stoker, Richard Matheson, Whitley Streiber, Marv Wolfman, and of course Anne Rice. Director Len Wiseman denies he & his co-writers had any familiarity with the game, which is a legally safe answer (as legally safe as White Wolf stating their gaming books had no bearing on the vampiric murders committed by Roderick Ferrell in 1996). But even if writers Wiseman, Kevin Grevioux & Danny McBride had read the RPG sourcebooks, they took the archetypes and made them their own, exactly as all their predecessors had done, which is why there's a common set of similarities. The major divergence is the scientific: that both vampirism & lycanthropy spread from a mutagenic virus that only a small percentage of victims are susceptible to, cleverly accounting for why the mortal population hasn't been converted in epidemic proportions, and also why the urban decay endemic to the setting's ever present.

Plus, there's all the offscreen drama within the drama. Kate Beckinsale, respected for her roles in historical films, works against type by signing on to "Underworld" along with her longtime live-in boyfriend & father of her child Michael Sheen, who plays Lucian. While acting together might seem designed to ensure domestic tranquillity, during filming Kate and director Len Wiseman connect, and the British tabloids have a field day with the triangle as Kate relocates to LA to begin a new life with her new man. All this tension must have been channeled into the performances. When Lucian chases Selene's car, catches up to it, and punctures the roof with his sword to bury it in her shoulder, perhaps we're not just seeing a werewolf attack a vampire -- maybe we're witnessing a former lover stab his ex-girlfriend with relish as well.

A few months ago while waking up to one neighbor's brood cavorting on their back porch, my first reaction while lying in bed was to wish all the brats a painful loss of feet & tongues. "Hiss! Hiss!" a boy said. Then, "I'm a vampire!" And the girl also suddenly empowered said, "Now I'm a vampire too!" It made me want to go to Lown's and get all of them a pair of those cheap plastic fangs (but then I reconsidered as it might change their fearful impressions of me as the Goth next door). This mass influence, context & insight is why the 2003 "Underworld"'s achieved such cult status, meriting its hard-hitting 2006 sequel and this 2009's third medieval installment. Like the vampire, they will endure the test of time.

[Amelia, look out!]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.