will side with each other briefly if a threat looms over all. Keith Baker highlighted that in Eberron "alignment is a spectrum". D&D 4th Edition, released in 2008, reduced the number of alignments to five: lawful good, good, evil, chaotic evil, and unaligned. In that edition, "good" replaced neutral good and did not encompass chaotic good; "evil" replaced neutral evil and did not encompass lawful evil; "unaligned" replaced true neutral and did not encompass lawful neutral and chaotic neutral. 4th Edition was the start of de-emphasizing alignment in D&D. Wired highlighted that 4th Edition's de-emphasis of "alignment and traditional racial stereotypes", along with other adjustments to the core races, allowed for more "PCs and NPCs with unknown and shifting motives". D&D 5th Edition, released in 2014, returned to the previous schema of nine alignments, and included a tenth option of "unaligned" for creatures that operate on instinct, not moral decision-making. With 5th Edition, alignment was decoupled from most of the D&D game mechanics, such as "no rules that limit certain classes to characters of a specific alignment, or spells that impact characters differently depending on" alignment. Players do not need to be rigid or "consistently faithful" to their alignment choice; alignment in this edition is more of a roleplaying guide. Starting with the publication of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden (2020) and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (2020), player and monster races no longer had preassigned alignments. In December 2021, official errata removed the suggested alignments for playable races in 5th Edition sourcebooks. Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse (2022), a sourcebook which revised roughly 250 previously published monsters, removed preassigned alignments for creatures except in the cases of specifically named characters. Creature stat blocks that also have playable races "now state that they can be any alignment" while "other monsters, such as demons, with a strong association to a given alignment feature the word 'typically' featured next to their alignment. This insinuates that exceptions to a preassigned alignment are possible, encouraging DMs to potentially subvert player expectations and utilize monsters in unanticipated ways". Function Richard Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds noted that alignment is a way to categorize players' characters, along with gender, race, character class, and sometimes nationality. Alignment was designed to help define role-playing, a character's alignment being seen as their outlook on life. A player decides how a character should behave in assigning an alignment, and should