Lawful Evil

As I continue on with alignments, I will jump around a bit. Showing the extremes of a spectrum make it easier to understand how different things can be, and how neutrality is in between those extremes.

Where Lawful Good may be considered one of the most common alignments, one of the rarest is Lawful Evil. We generally think of laws as good things, so anyone who follows the laws must be good. You certainly can't do evil things if you follow the law.

Except that you totally can. In fact, we see it every day. The stereotypical evil CEO doesn't have to break the law. They find every loophole that exists within the law to do whatever they want without facing any punishment.

This hearkens back to the question: whose law? Or in this case, who makes the law? A character who gets to make the law can make any activity legal or illegal. Murder and theft can be legal. Singing and dancing could be illegal.

Tyrants often become lawful evil in that they never break the rules (sometimes because they change the rules right before doing it), but they also stop doing things in the best interest of their people. They care about themselves above all others. A king's adviser (like Jafar in Aladdin) is also classically lawful evil because they convince the king to make laws that act in the adviser's favor.

Evil alignments make easy antagonists, but they also can make interesting protagonists. Smart ones can make very compelling speeches to people. They can be master lawyers or salesmen (or con men), convincing people to do what they want, but having the people think they did a great service instead of assisting a shyster. It may not be pleasant to have a comrade who is always looking out for himself, but when he uses his abilities to help out the whole group (or protagonists), and knowing that he never technically broke the law, it can be hard to stay too angry at him.