Demons in Games

HERE is a discussion about demons in games that I thought was interesting, but lacking.

So here is the thing: demons (I believe) are first and foremost, rebels against the Creator of the universe.

They are fallen angels.  As such, they are:

1) Primordial sentient beings of super human power.
2) Former servants of the Almighty.
3) Beings who had the inordinate temerity to rebel against the Almighty...
4) ...and lost.

I infer from this that they are all at least:

1) Extremely capable.
2) Have the experience of extreme timespans.
3) Live with inhuman arrogance, inhuman denial, or both.
4) They have no hope, and live in a perpetual state of fear, anger, and malice.
5) Are essentially insane, and irrational no matter how smart they are.

None of this is really an amazing revelation.  Furthermore, while derived from the Bible directly, the medieval invention of the Seven Deadly Sins is not contrary to the character of the Bible either, so it is a useful model.  As noted though in the link, I like the earlier model of the Eight Evil Thoughts, and will work from those.  I don't think it is as interesting to link demons to elemental spheres, as their issues are moral and thus their "elements" are moral in character.  They may manifest incidentally in the world in an element, but this is incidental and personal to the individual.

So how would I go about designing a demon for a game?  I'm roughly thinking of Fate style mechanics, so assuming a d6-d6 or 4df die roll.

  1) Rate the Demon in each of the eight sins, with one at 6, one at 4, two at 3, two at 2, and two at 1. 

  - Gluttony
  - Lust
  - Greed
  - Pride
  - Despair
  - Wrath
  - Vanity
  - Sloth

  These are essentially the "skills" and "abilities" that the demon has.  Whenever they seek to take an   action that requires a roll in game, they choose which one they will use, so long as it can be justified.  It can obviously use any one of them in an effort to tempt a character, but it can also use them for itself.  It wishes to destroy the wagon-load of bread being sent as a charitable donation to a starving village?  It may use Gluttony to devour it all, or perhaps Wrath to strike the wagon with hellfire, or Despair, to blight it with mold.

  2) Choose two different species of animals.  These together give primary form to the demon.

  3) Choose an ordinary object that can be held, carried, or worn.  This is the primary tool for the demon, and through which it tempts, seduces, blasphemes, destroys, or fights.  It may or may not be integral to the body of the demon.

  4) Choose another object or place, without the limitation of size.  This is another focus through which the demon manifests both it's obsessions as well as it's power.

  5) Choose an abstract concept, role, function, or office.  This is one more focus for the demon to manifest it's obsessions and power.

  6) Items 2, 3, 4, and 5 are each defining personality traits for the demon.  Any time in which the demon may find one of them appropriate to a situation or action in the game, they may add a bonus +2 to the sin they are acting with.

So to spitball out a quick demon adversary for a game (and referring back to the original post for reference), I might come up with:

BLUE TOM

Gluttony: +2    Lust: +3    Greed: +1    Pride: +3    Despair: +6    Wrath: +2    Vanity: +1    Sloth: +4   

Demonic Form: (Toad and Chicken) Blue Tom appears in demonic form as a bloated, warty, slime covered beast with the feet of a chicken on the legs of a bull frog, with the body of a frog.  A rooster tail with scruffy feathers sprouts from the hind end, while the front legs are actually chicken wings.  It has a chicken head with enormous frog eyes.  When wearing a human shape, it is a skinny but pot bellied, haggard, slovenly man with stubble, and large watery eyes.

Object: (Guitar) Blue Tom lives as a blues musician with a heroine addiction.  In demonic form, unfolding one wing reveals a distorted guitar with exposed tendons for strings, and frets and keys out of bone.  In human shape, the guitar is a nauseous pearlescent crimson and venom green thing with unearthly haunting music coming from each string.  Each note sounds as if it is plucked from multiple instruments and resonates physically as palpably as it sounds upon the ear.

Object: (Weeping Willows on River Banks) Blue Tom's hunting grounds are bars, clubs, midnight diners, street corners and bus stops.  However, the place that he finishes his business is at willows on river banks.  Those he finds to destroy he induces to meet him at his places of power, and there is always water deep enough to drown in, and he has more than enough spare guitar string for a noose.

Role: (Accuser of the Guilty) Blue Tom's favorite prey is the person who seeks to drown their indiscretion in drink, be they the adulterer discovered, the embezzler caught, the contractor who cut corners revealed by a fatal accident.  This is the person that Blue Tom promises to give relief to, if they are willing to meet him 'neath the Willow Tree.

That is my take.

Imaginary Pagan Religions

I have a problem with conventional fantasy games which take only a superficial effort to resemble the society they are meant to resemble.  Gary Gygax at least began with war games which grew out of historian's interest in imaginatively speculating on how things might have been different had battles in history ended differently.  It gets worse though when the people who play rpgs stop looking at history and just take whatever they see in a game book as good as history, and then others follow taking what they wrote till there is the current Pathfinder anything and kitchen sink approach to fantasy gaming.  You find Vikings sailing along side 17th century pirate ships as if there is no influence between them.

The particular gripe I have (being the topic of this post) is that Gary was interested in many things and offered a whole bunch of ideas, and many who had less interest in history than Gygax took it up, including issues of fantasy religion.  SO originally D&D introduced clerics as a character modeled on western medieval fighting clergy and martial orders like the Templars and Hospitalars.  They were clearly modeled on the Roman Catholic Church with the spells and prohibitions that one would expect of such cinematic versions of those fighting priests.  But with the advent of Deities and Demigods, bunches of pagan pantheons come into play, only the gods of those religions are merely treated the same as saints in the Catholic scheme, while the worldview does not cross over.  Furthermore, there is no game mechanic for encouraging anything theologic for the cleric's motives, so religion is pretty squishy in D&D and most fantasy games of that kind.

I contend that the problem, is that Christianity is a huge anomaly in it's view of God, sin, origins, teleology, and ethics compared to anything that came before.  Buddhism is the only thing that comes close, and it is problematic for other reasons.  If you are going to make a fantasy religion for a game, it should have something that it answers about spiritual life, not merely what temporal powers it can give you to smite others.  It should answer one or more of the following questions:

Where did we come from?
Why are we here?
What has gone wrong and why?
What do we do to live with that?
What happens to us after we die?

Not all real world religions handle all of these, but they should only believably exist when they answer some.  They should also, in general, provide some useful benefit to society in general, including moral, ethical, and social grounding and unity.  Anything that does not serve long term social value is unlikely to survive.  Cthulhu mythos cults may crop up here and there, but such nihilistic stuff does not build, but destroys.

This all in mind, here is an idea that comes to me for a pagan religion that is both very alien in flavor from the Roman Catholic model, but does both offer a social benefit, as well as answering some of the spiritual questions.  There is even a schismatic, heretical sub-cult.

Here is a sample of a realistic pagan religion, rooted in actual real world sects.  They are very different in worldview from the modern west, but they are heavily modeled on real religion nonetheless.

Beliefs and Practices

A soul in fear, anger, hatred, greed, and obsession ("The Five Follies" at death will not find rest and will become a devil spirit.

To insure peace at death, one must learn to become free of The Five Follies.

This is done through a process of increasing asceticism, and confrontation with and embrace of taboo practices.

 - They begin by living in cemataries, with initiates assuming the duties of grave diggers, and pall bearers, and those who accept and handle offerings for the dead
 - Novices assist with mortuary duties - cleaning the corpses, preparing food offerings for the sect, excarnation (defleshing) of cadavers, and preparing ritual meals for the priests
 - Priests perform ceremonies of pacification, inscribe the prayers on cadavers before defleshing, inscribe and bind the bones for burial, and burn what parts remain in order to collect the ash which they bless for ritual use
 - High Priests spend most of their time in meditation, but do perform the rituals of pacification for the whole of the cemataries, and occasionally venture out to perform the binding of unquiet ghosts which they keep in spirit jars which they prepare and keep in the center of the communities

Initiates to the order are distinguished by their brown robes and shawls, their shaved heads, and the ceremonial shovels which they keep.  This is the last time they will ever cut their hair.

Novices take gray robes, and begin to learn the inscriptions which they practice scribing with ink made of grave ash, lime, and resin onto their fellow novice's skin.

Priests receive their white robe - the last article of clothing they will ever wear.  It will never be repaired or replaced.  They begin to confront taboos more aggressively.  They begin to practice ritual cannibalism, sleep a night with corpses before final processing, and begin to live more and more removed from daily affairs.  They craft the skull bowls from which the order eats, drinks, and receives alms.  They may be called out to do healings when other medicine fails, acting as "sin eaters" who take the wounds ritually upon themselves.

High priests have little contact outside the sect, and largely live in meditation, naked, covered in grave ash.  They seek to destroy any fear and break every taboo to free their souls for the passage into death.  The final barrier is denial of even food and water, sustaining themselves only on the flesh and blood of their own bodies in a ritual fashion.  They prepare a final meal of their own flesh for those Priests that they choose to replace them.  Their bodies are not defleshed or cremated, but are buried in ash pits to mummify.  The new High Priests will eventually exhume the mummies, and place them in the Halls of Memory - catacombs below cemataries where the living priests may from time to time consult the dead through the mummies.

Schismatic Sect

A heretical branch practices more proactive rituals.  They may actively go out at ritual high holy days to find those they have been observing as exemplary of individuals bound to the Five Follies, and ritualistically murder them.  They perform ritual cannibalism, and then bind the ghosts into spirit jars in order to proactively prevent them from doing mischief in the future.  They may also actively seek out haunted communities to perform exorcisms (spirit binding) for money, and possibly use captive spirits from previous victims to create haunted places.  They also offer curses for money, and proactively seek to practice unspeakable rites, breaking taboos to speed their own ways to release from the Five Follies.

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Some other seeds of ideas:

A goddess of fertility, motherhood, and a tutelary household deity (surely a primary goddess for that society) calls all new brides to receive blessings by serving for a day as temple prostitutes (inspiration: Ishtar/Astarte)

A grain and harvest god of fertility and the fields, who also serves as a tutelary god protecting territory in a defensive war capacity calls for a spring sacrifice to consecrate the fields before planting by raising a chosen young man on a stake over the field who will serve as the vessel for the god to protect the field from ravage by beast or man; a bride is offered after harvest in thanks to the god for abundance (inspiration: several pagan religions, though not like any particular one)

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Now these are not particularly savory notions to those who enjoy the ripples of Roman Catholic virtues, but they are more realistic in that they offer a perceived service to the continuation of the society, and imply some ideas about the relationships between god and man, god and land.  Perhaps I will write more on this.

What Value Fantasy?...

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

--J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

Magic in RPGs

This is a perennial issue, and perhaps ties for first place with designing a combat system for rpgs.  Since a large portion of the action in an rpgs revolves around conflict, and much of that conflict is direct physical conflict with pointy pieces of steel or high velocity lumps of lead or even higher velocity packets of photons, combat takes a lot of ink, digital or otherwise.  Discussions on making magic systems in Fate on G+, for example never seem to be absent for long.

The other thing that takes up a lot of the page count of rpgs is magic.  This is probably because a large proportion of rpg gaming is still essentially fantasy based in some fashion, and thus, magic systems take a lot of work.  For purposes of discussion, I won't lump in rubber-science technology or superpowers or psionics in with magic, even though in play, there is often no real difference in use or function.  That, though, is part of the problem in my mind.  The second part of the problem comes from the first, in that, even though much of the function and use are the same across genres, there is in large part a materialist and particularly modernist flavor to all of it in a philosophical sense.

What I mean is this:  the powers, whatever the game genre, are essentially analogues for the machines and systems that we are familiar with now; guns, cars, television, cell phones...  On the flip side, magic ever since classic D&D has almost always had wizards as the back up toolbox that could do any number of possible things, but much of their use in a game that was rooted in tactical miniatures games, was to be the substitute for the artillery, which is why the majority of magic systems in rpgs have some form of blasting, zapping, incendiary, and explosive spell.  Even some of the more interesting spells meant for nothing but killing your enemy (e.g. stinking cloud or cloud kill) resemble a mustard gas attack.

What is interesting, is how little of that I actually find in pre-modern literature...

Now it is not surprising that more recent games still carry over the tradition of the fireball and lightning bolt spells, since so many have D&D style adventure gaming somewhere in their design DNA, and thus a tactical war game idea about how magic works.  Furthermore, it is not surprising that from the war game roots with budgets of points made to balance armies, you get balanced levels and wizards that (in a better or worse fashion) are likewise balanced with the rest of the troops in power.  There have been many ways in which this power has been balanced either by equal levels and level matched numbers of spells, or scales of effect.  Possibly the first major deviation from that was making the limiting factor some kind of "mana" system by whatever name, in which magic is more flexible, but limited like a battery, with the wizard being the battery and the spell using so much charge.  But this is still essentially, a mechanistic, materialistic approach to magic, and thus I stand by my notion that this is really not very interesting as magic.  I know, I know - Arthur C. Clark blah, blah, suitably advanced technology, blah.  He was an engineer, and an atheist.  Not a given, but a pretty fair bet that he would, as it turns out, think of magic like an engineer.

Once more, how little of that I actually find in pre-modern literature...

Now I am not suggesting that anyone cannot play with that kind of magic system, nor even that anyone can have fun doing it.  Even I can, so that is not my point.  My point is that there is a difference between a cheap pseudo-meat fast food burger, and a Red Robin burger, or a perfectly cooked fillet mignon.  There are magic systems that merely fill a place and some that do much better than that.  I can look at how some other games have tackled magic systems and discover ways that those designs feel very different, and the stand out.  Call of Cthulhu feels much more authentic in how it does magic, and there is very little that prevents a perfect neophyte from using a spell of unspeakable power without understanding the cost, and nearly all magic has a cost beyond merely eroding sanity.  This design approach makes magic feel like something other, and somehow more dangerous than a mere (yawn) fireball.  Ars Magica of course has a lengthy intro to the philosophy of what magic is and how it works from a worldview that is feudal and spiritual rather than mechanical.  Magic is not limited quite so much like a battery (though there is a bit of this in the design), and the capabilities have at least as much to do with the spiritual position of the magician to the object as with the mechanical effect.  For instance, you cannot raise the dead with magic, since life and death are above the sphere of Man.

What it comes down to in my opinion, is that good fictional magic, just like good fictional science fiction, should bow to verisimilitude, and for magic systems in rpgs to have no relationship to pre-industrial thinking is to make poor fiction.  So there are a few things that I think are essential to making a good magic system that makes for meaningful fiction in an rpg.  For an excellent discussion on this elsewhere, go HERE.  My take is in the same ballpark, and I certainly found it a useful discussion from the indi side of game design.

1) I think that Tolkien had a better view of magic in that he discussed it as arch-natural rather than super-natural.  In other words, magic is the highest peak of nature, or the essence of a thing without flaws.  This very much flies in the face of a Clarke assumption (held by many modernist worldview gamers who nonetheless still like magic in their games no matter the genre).  Clarke could not reconcile magic as reasonable because he assumed that it was a force that broke the laws of nature rather than transcended the limits of a flawed nature.

So with that idea in mind, and linking it to the realization that magic in actual human history has been conceived to be present in the nature of things themselves rather than separate, in a game, I assert that magic should not be a separate force but a force intrinsic to what is meaningful about that thing.  More specifically, if we are using a game like Fate, aspects give you bonuses because they are not only what you are about, but because what you are about is magical in that way.  This kind of magic is not the flashy-bangy technologic magic of artillery wizards, but it has more verisimilitude to magical societies.

2) Magic should not be limited in a precise mechanistic fashion, run by energy like a battery, or interruptible like electricity or a radio wave.  It should work on some much deeper and more potent level, and should be less about material constrain than moral or spiritual constraint on the wizard. Whether this is power granted by a more powerful force (a la Faust), or at a cost in ability (a spell may require the loss of an eye, a la Odin), or it may have a condition related to the spell (the sleep will be permanent and unbreakable except on condition of true love's kiss).

In fact, the same general kind of fire magic used by a wizard may have slightly different constraints based on the context of when and where it is cast.  The basic effect may be for the wizard to summon a fire salamander out of a jar of burning coals, but the cost when cast inside a smithy may be very slight but that they cannot cross the threshold to the outside, while done in a tavern, the salamanders may light everything they touch on fire if you choose to summon them.

I will have to write up more later, but this at least, should give some kind of flavor to the magic in game that has more verisimilitude.

Games and Art and Myth

I really like Jared Sorensen's three questions for game design.

1) What is my game about?
2) How does my game do that?
3) What behaviors does my game reward and punish?

I keep mulling over aspects for my political build in Fate through the lenses of those three questions. I have changed my mind a number of times, but at this point I am thinking about the aspects that I want to really define the kind of stories that this build is intended to make.  So, I want a sense of history to this... the feeling that the faces and events are part of a much larger tapestry.  I want something that explores the themes of history, and legacy, and sacrifice.

I have not read Greg Stafford's game Pendragon, but I read about him playing with a group that included his son, and every time the characters came in to meet with King Arthur after a quest, they saw him aging and still the throne to his right was empty, and he and the Queen without a child as the land crumbled around them, slouching toward the fatal battle of Camlann.  Over months of play, Stafford's son mostly ignored it until one day, it clicked, and they saw the tragedy of Arthur for the first time.  They went from simply having a good time, to feeling a deeper sympathy for the man that was Arthur.

In Stafford's words: "Roleplaying is a way for humans to interact with our deep, hidden mythological selves.  They are a way to feed our souls."

Notorious designer, John Wick wrote about running his players through the ringer in one supers campaign that he describes in his book Play Dirty,  For 19 months, his villain defeated a dozen different characters.  Only one of them died in the game, but John milked every last drop out of the character builds to make the players quit thinking mechanically and really pause to think about what their characters stood for.  One was a Wolverine style combat monster who wrecked super villains left and right... until John had him go berserk in a crowded public street and the civilians were the collateral damage.  Another masked vigilante had a very prim and proper grandmother who did not approve of the tramp running around beating people up... and died of a heart attack when a villain paralyzed her and unmasked her in front of grandma in a restaurant.  A third very noble hero retired after falling in love with the girl who turned out to secretly be a super villain who he pulverized before unmasking her.  One player spent six weeks (that is game sessions) in prison on a life sentence because he knew too much about the mastermind.  The player never gave up, and when the characters finally sprung him after the murder of the one hero that John killed in game, John asked him what he was going to do, and he described putting the cowl on and the players, who all had each others backs now, went after the BigBad that had given the characters and players so much grief... and they caught him, arrested him, and turned him over to the law with all the evidence.  The players who 19 months before happily played a game about casual mayhem made a sober team decision to choose moral restraint.

Robin D. Laws has often asserted that role playing is the only art in which the author and audience are one and the same.

I find these stories interesting because while they only exist in imagination, I am seeing a closer and closer relationship between games and art, and I have for a long time thought that art inspires us to follow where our head navigates.  I like the idea that the whimsy of games and art can weave together to reveal something to us about ourselves or the world or other people.  It may not all the time, or even most of the time... but what medium of art ever does?  

So I have no idea if I achieve that in what I am designing.  But that is what I want to shoot for, but I like the idea that thoughts in play can make for better thoughts in work.