In Beyond Ragnarok, we distinguish between two different notions of a creature or character’s “alignment”:

• Natural Alignment: The alignment on your character sheet.
• Official Alignment: The alignment used by magical alignment-based effects to determine how they react with regards to you.

For the purposes of spells that operate on the basis of alignment, the character or creature’s natural alignment is not used. Simply because on the character sheet, you have written Lawful Evil, does not mean that detect law or detect evil will discern an aura from you.

For the purposes of spells, a character or creature has an alignment if he has one of the following:

• An alignment subtype (as celestials are Outsider (Good), for example). In this case the official alignment is the subtype; a Humanoid (Good) is Good, but neither Lawful nor Chaotic.
• A class feature such as a cleric’s Aura (Ex). In this case the official alignment is that of the cleric’s deity or otherwise as specified by the class. For example, a cleric of Volos is Lawful and Evil; a blackguard is Evil but neither Chaotic nor Lawful.
• The character or creature has chosen to acquire an official alignment. This can be done either with the use of the atonement spell, or by officially aligning himself with a sufficient force, organization, power, or divinity of the appropriate alignment. This official alignment can be removed via another use of the atonement spell.

For the purpose of detection spells, natural alignment is ignored. If a creature has an official alignment from a type, subtype or class feature, use the table provided in the spell. If the creature has an official alignment only from having chosen to acquire one, the aura strength is always Dim. The number of hit dice of a creature with only a voluntary official alignment has no effect on his aura strength.

For the purpose of spells that affect or do not affect creatures based on their alignment, use the official alignment. For example, holy smite deals no damage to good creatures, full to evil, and half to neutral. Any creature with an official alignment of Good takes no damage. Any creature with an official alignment of Evil is fully affected. Any creature with neither official alignment (though it may have Lawful or Chaotic with no impact on this spell) takes half damage.