Law and Chaos

Law and Chaos are the dominant metaphysical forces in the fantasy stories of Michael Moorcock. Law and Chaos are in constant struggle, but they are kept in check by the Cosmic Balance, an even more powerful force for neutrality. The Eternal Champion acts to balance the advances of Law and Chaos as a servant of the Cosmic Balance, reincarnated or summoned to the worlds of the Multiverse where Chaos or Law is becoming dominant.
The Elric series contains the most information about Law, Chaos, and the Balance, as well as the beings called the Lords of the Higher Worlds: the deities who serve and represent Chaos or Law. In Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Law, Chaos and Neutral (Balance) are combined with Good, Evil and Neutral to create a total of nine alignments.
The spell preparation system in the 1998 video game Magic and Mayhem operates by combining magical ingredients with "talismans" characterized by Law, Chaos or Neutrality.
Moorcock's conception of Chaos also heavily inspired Games Workshop in the creation of its Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 fictional settings. Notably, however, they only briefly used Moorcock's conceptions of Order or the Balance. The descriptions of Chaos, of the eight-pointed star, of the Chaos Lords, the strange multicolored hues of energies, mutations and warping of matter and flesh, and so forth found in the Warhammer settings are all derived directly from Moorcock's works.
The eight-pointed star symbol is used by some writers on chaos magic.
 
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