This is very true. It is also possible that these concepts are much older than Moorcock ... Maat vs. Isfet.
Check out Robert Plant's symbol on Led Zeppelin's fourth album.
Absolutely. Moorcock took his inspiration from Zoroastrianism, which goes back to at least several centuries BCE, but there are similar concepts dating back even earlier.
There is another aspect to alignment that nobody here seems to be talking much about - it's historically always been an important part of the Forgotten Realms/D&D lore.
Alignment isn't just a label you slap on your character during character creation - it's a concept that exists within the D&D universe. Even while most of its inhabitants are unaware of it, it literally determines their afterlife, among other things.
I'm all for more moral complexity and all, and I get why Larian/WotC want alignment to play a lesser role. I just hope they won't ditch it altogether - to me, that would be shoving a large part of D&D down the drain.
I doubt they’ll dump the themes; it seems to me like they’re just backgrounding the specific labels. Heck, we’re starting in the middle of a Blood War battlefield, which is—coincidentally—probably the most prominent Law versus Chaos conflicts in the lore.
(Although in the Forgotten Realms, specifically, your afterlife is determined solely by your patron god and how well you served them. While some lore suggests that souls who didn’t worship a god are personally judged by the current god of the dead, most lore either strongly implies or outright states that they all end up as part of the Wall of the Faithless, there to slowly dissolve into nonexistence. It’s kind of messed up when you think about it.)
