Alignment

Alignment. A system of quantifying a creature's mortality. A way of stating outloud someone's motivations and making sense of the values that guide their choices. Also something that has a very real impact on one's soul, when they die as it is the big thing that determines what dimension their soul will go when they die.

-A teacher's explanation of alignment

Alignments are a common aspect of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). The alignment table, which isn't always the same from TTRPG to TTRPG, commonly involves five quadrants on two axes, the good-evil axis, and the lawful-chaotic axis. The most common quadrants, which are the ones that Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and numerous other TTRPGs use, are the quadrants of good, evil, neutrality, law, and chaos.
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Common Understandings of each Quadrant:

Good: selfless concern for others, care for life, a desire to help & heal people, & a desire for a better, more equitable world. 
Evil: Selfish concern for the advancement and improvement of one's own lot in life, a desire to hurt and/or harm other people, & a willingness to inflict cruelty on others if it means one's own life (or the lives of people they care about) is made better in some conceivable way.
Neutrality (respective to good & evil): An indifference or neutrality to others, especially strangers, with respect to things like suffering, indignity, and injustice. 
Lawful: A concern for order, structure, tradition, and stability. Lawful characters tend to care about structure and specific institutions to some notable degree, and often place intense trust or faith in such structures, beliefs, and institutions. The institutions in question need not be government institutions either, any sort of institution with some sort of cultural power and respect afforded to it may count for the purpose of this alignment.
Chaotic: A disregard for order, structure, tradition, and stability. Chaotic characters tend to value freedom and flexibility above all things and view the world through lenses that downplay the power or legitimacy of structures or authorities, but this doesn't necessarily have to mean that they are anarchists (though they certainly can be). 
Neutrality (respective to chaoticness & lawfulness): An indifference to the structures that the lawful place their trust in, and a lack of a desire to downplay the power and legitimacy of structures or authorities that the chaotic exhibit.

The Alignments in Practice:

Chaotic Good: Someone who is chaotic good is concerned with the quality of life of others without an immense concern, or perhaps even some anger at, the institutions in play that help determine the quality of life of those they hold sway over. Such an individual would propose robbing a wealthy government official if the government official were known to be corrupt and redistributing their wealth to the poor people in the region that the government official holds sway over if such an action could be done without blowing back on the poor people in question, or even propose a revolution if they felt incensed enough at the misdeeds or apathy exhibited by those in charge of a particular nation or region.
True Neutral: A true neutral (someone who is neutral on both axes of the alignment system) person is concerned with their own lot in life and the lots in the lives of their friends and family over any particular concern for others or care for the institutions and structures that make society possible in its current form in their lives. They may not act maliciously against others, but they also won't go out of their way to protect a stranger unless they see some particularly motivating reason to do so. They also do not overly respect or trust structures and institutions but also won't go out of their way to undermine them unless the structures and institutions are overtly harmful to them. 
Lawful Evil: A lawful evil person seeks to advance their own lot in life through the manipulation of systems and institutions. They don't care who their actions harm, so long as such people are not people they care for in some capacity. A politician who changes laws and uses their authority to give their children and spouse jobs is likely a lawful evil character. As is a powerful guard captain who has a series of agreements with a city's criminal underbelly that allow criminals to get away with a set number of crimes a week in exchange for a sort of kickback for the guard captain (though such an official may also be neutral evil). 

The Alignments in-universe:

In A Solitary God, alignments are particularly important as they determine a number of things. 
For atheistic mortals, one's alignment is what determines what sort of afterlife their soul will go to when they die, and thus, in effect, what sort of extraplanar entity they'll eventually become after death (devils for lawful evil people, demons for chaotic evil people, leyes for lawful neutral people, etc.). For mortals who worshiped gods of sufficient power, their alignment still determines where they'll go when they die, as some gods can have multiple divine realms and thus more easily quantify and control the fates of mortals of different alignments. 
Beyond mortals, alignment has a real, material impact on deities at the start of their lives. Every god began life with a specific moral alignment. In Althos's case, he was born chaotic neutral. Deities that are born neutral, on the good-evil axis, begin life with access to the corruption and purity subdomains, as well as one innate virtue and one innate vice. Deities that are born good begin life with access to the purity subdomain and two innate virtues. Deities that are born evil begin life with access to the corruption subdomain and two innate vices. 
One other notable aspect of alignments is how they impact class acquisition, specifically the acquisition of religious classes. In A Solitary God, deities and some other higher beings are capable of bestowing specific, religious classes. Two such classes are the "Paladin" and "Dark Knight" classes. These classes are alignment-locked, based on the person receiving them. This means that an evil character cannot be a "Paladin" and a good character cannot become a "Dark Knight". 
It is also worth noting that alignment-locking doesn't really happen to entire species in A Solitary God with some exceptions. As an example of this, minor demons can be, in strict theory, any alignment even though they invariably begin their demonic lives as chaotic-evil beings. Sombra, Althos's pet praereptor demoness, is an example of a demon who is no longer chaotic evil. Some types of higher beings, with the exception being Althos, are alignment locked such as demon lords and archdevils who are locked in at chaotic evil and lawful evil respectively. 
Alignments are also domains and they are incredibly powerful ones with powers that extend beyond swaying living creatures to behave in particular ways. Sufficiently powerful deities with sufficient power over alignment domains can alter worlds and civilizations using their powers over goodness, evil, law, chaos, and neutrality. In the ancient past rules created and enforced by deities prohibited the gods from using powers over alignments that forced alignment shifts from mortals and extraplanar entities, but now with no one to enforce such restrictions in place, Althos can use such powers freely.