Basic Information
Wrath is the deadly sin that comprises unjustified, disproportionate or misdirected anger and resulting violence. This does not include anger which is justified, proportionate and correctly directed, even if it results in violence (see, for example, Christ driving the merchants from the Temple Courts). Wrath is opposed by the virtue of patience.
The sinful nature of wrath lies, unsurprisingly in its opposition of the duty of love towards one's fellow Man, and of good stewardship towards Creation in general (as the wrathful are often violent towards animals and objects as well as other humans).
Emblematically wrath is associated with the colour red and with animals such as the bear. The Dragon is also associated with wrath, as it is with most of the deadly sins.
Sources
Game and Story Use
- This, again, is a common but under emphasised flaw for PCs … especially anyone who has the classic backstory of "swore vengeance on all orcs after one stole my pocket money as a kid" (or whatever). Any excessive tendency towards solving problems with violence could be seen as falling within the pale of wrath.
- Of course, given the systemic values-dissonance inherent to some fRPGs, violence against some species may turn out to be arbitrarily justified. Maybe killing orcs really is a moral act.
- Characters that take flaws such as "bloodthirsty", "bad temper" or "berserker" can be considered the legitimate prey of the demons who govern wrath.
- In the Warhammer Fantasy universe, this is the essence of the demon-god Khorne.
- For a vice/virtue alignment system, a wrathful character will indulge their vice whenever they fail to control their anger, or when they default to violence rather than expend effort to avoid it.
- For systems with meta-currency, the GM may burn accumulated "bad stuff" to force a wrathful PC to indulge their vice, even if it is merely to the extent of smashing an inanimate object on which they have failed a task (beating a computer against the desk, kicking in the panels of a car, battering a door) or the player may burn "good stuff" to swallow it.