Playing at war in heaven/Ascended Demons and Fallen Angels

[Prak]

I've always been intrigued by the idea of playing a demon. WW's Demon the Fallen pretty much instantly appealed to me when I became aware of it. In Nomine has always intrigued me, but I've never had a chance to play it.

WW's new Demon the Descent is... interesting, but gripe inducing. The use of the doom font is laughable. The Cold Era spy thriller milieu isn't really my thing. And the biotech thing is just... not what I picture when I think of angels and demons.

Plus there's the fact that the systems range from quirky to shitbad.

So I'm a bit inclined to just make my own game. The question is, though, what do people actually want from a game where the point is to play demons?

While the use of christian themes seems all but required, I would think the game would suffer from using anything but grey morality. Demons shouldn't spend all their time trying to push mortals to rape and murder other mortals, but it's also really dumb to make them angsty misunderstood martyrs. Also, if you make the side of angels all about passivity and goodness, you don't have opposition so much as punching bags, while if you make the angels full on knight templars, people will bitch--perhaps they've missed the point, but still.

How much should such a game focus on the war? Should it be more fantasy, taking place in a parallel dimension with the mortal realm barely mentioned? Or should it be almost entirely in the mortal realm, where the demons are picking up the pieces and only occasionally faced with the threat of angelic opponent?

In fact, what should be the role of angels and god? Should angels be playable? Should they only be opposition directed by an omniscient divine hand? Should the be a military force completely under their own command because God is missing/not interfering?

What should demon society look like? Are demons a bunch of loners who only join into small bands for safety? Are they like the mob? Are they a nation under masquerade? Are the big names like Lucifer, Belial and Behemoth in command, still sealed away awaiting their underlings to free them, missing, or enemies of the demons as much as the angels are?

[Grek]

Base the cosmology (very loosely) off the Gospel of Thomas. In the beginning, the Demiurge cast an evil spell that drew many angels into an illusory world of its own twisted design. There, separated from the Divine Truth and unable to fully remember their former lives, these angels struggle to escape the Endless Nightmare and return once more to the real world.

This leads to a number of advantages:

• The PCs have fallen and become separated from heaven in a way that is sympathetic to the players and specifically does not involve rebellion against an all-mighty, all-knowing Judeo-Christian God.
• The accuracy of any given religion is totally irrelevant to the plot. The PCs are specifically trapped in a hallucinatory nightmare world ruled over by an evil spirit that doesn't let people inside the nightmare world remember or communicate with the outside world. Anything from Islam to Hinduism to Atheism can be correct in the real world, and none of them are correct in this fake world.
• There is a clear Good side (that which the PCs are on) and a clear Bad side (the Demiurge the PCs oppose) without requiring that the Good side by wimpy pushovers or that the Bad side be murder-rapist-cannibals. You can have the Demiurge's world be evil and hellish and the PCs be holy champions overthrowing it, or the PCs can be apparently demonic monsters trying to escape their hellish prisons into an otherwise normal universe.
• You can have any number of big name angelic or demonic opponents without wondering why God or Lucifer aren't sending armies after you: The Demiurge wants to keep people from knowing about the possibility of escape, so it only sends opponents after the PCs in small numbers.
• The PCs can try to convert angelic enemies by sowing doubt in their ranks, tempt them to the side of evil or uplift them to the side of goodness and have any number of stereotypically angelic or demonic tactics make sense in context.
• Angelic characters can look like anything from a normal human to a black-feathered angel to a horrifying monster and still be on the same side: Any sort of weirdness with their appearances are merely yet another trick of the Demiurge that does not reflect the inner nature of the character.
• You get all of the benefits of a masquerade (such as the game world looking like the modern day real world) without mandating that the players be stealthy. Any masquerade-breaching shenanigans that happen can be hidden from non-PCs by the Demiurge.

[Username17]

Western concepts of demons are almost wholly terrible when put into an RPG context. While Christian and Islamic concepts of god and devil may come easily to people exposed to western culture, the demonic revolt in those traditions is ultimately futile and stupid. Specifically.

Christians and Muslims believe in a powerful and active Devil with a bunch of demons running around causing mischief, but they also believe in a divine plan and an omnipotent god, so the whole thing is some sort of "just as keikaku" bullshit. Further, to the extent that westerners believe that demons have any agency at all, it is to be embodiments of "ultimate evil." And ultimate evil is boring and also upsetting. It's boring because there's no moral questions about what you should do, and it's upsetting because nine times out of ten the way people describe evil as being "ultimate" is simply by finding behavior that is transgressive and taboo enough that they are personally at least slightly offended by the prospect. So it's really just a race to the bottom to see whether the writer or the reader has a stronger stomach.

In a cooperative storytelling game, you'll have four to six people at the table, and at least one of them is going to start waxing poetic about guro bullshit about pustulent cannibal rape with spine penis tentacles or something equally disgusting and retarded. Because if you ask a group of people to name the most offensive thing they can think of, chances are at least one of them is going to unnerve you. And if you aren't squicked out by the offerings of any of the other players, chances are that you're the asshole that everyone else at the table now wants to keep a healthy distance from.

Much better, I think, is to go with Eastern sources. Demons in Indian and Chinese traditions have a lot more for "demons" to do. No one claims omnipotence or omniscience for Vishnu or the Celestial Emperor, and your Asura or Umwa can stab the servants of heaven in the face and accomplish stuff. Disgaea is a lot of fun, and no one feels bad about Laharl winning or losing.

Of course, even with Eastern sources, there's still a lot of revolting options on the table. Demon Beast Invasion is an actual thing with "demon" in the name. As is Legend of the Overfiend, which has the word "fiend" in it. But at least Eastern sources have non-bullshit demon heroes that don't reach for the cheap gross-outs like Zhu Wuneng and Vibhishana.



-Username17

[TheFlatline]

I like Frank's approach because it isn't something particularly plumbed by western RPGs all that often, and I am an admitted member of the Cult of the New.

*IF* you're going to do Judeo/Christian/Muslim celestial RPGs, you've got a number of hurdles to overcome. In Nomine resolves this by making "the war" a war over humanity. The disagreement that led to Lucifer being cast out in IN was that Humanity *deserved* to be God's chosen and most beloved. Lucifer suggested that celestial, who never questioned, and never disobeyed God, were far more worthy of love, and God simply said "nope". So there was a wager/rebellion. If Lucifer can show that humanity will drift towards pettiness and selfishness, he "wins". What he wins is up to debate. But the goal isn't to make people Black Dog child raping evil, but just to make them... petty... There's even musings that Lucifer *might* be still doing the will of God, and all the other demons that fell with him or since the Fall just "didn't get it".

There's also the whole thing about demons choosing to rebel and exercise free will, mimicking humanity and therefore being more worth of God's love (to which the counter-argument is that free will is intrinsic to humanity, while celestials deny their nature to exercise free will).

You're basically going to be roleplaying a metric assload of daddy issues and glorified sibling rivalry.

In In Nomine you pretty much are promised to know and converse pretty frequently with your patron Archangel or Demon Prince. It's assumed that they either made you, or took you in if/when you fell.

The game also takes place on Earth, the Marches (dream lands where literally Odin and the old gods are still wandering around), and Heaven & Hell. There's a higher level than Heaven, but... once God summons you up, you never, ever come back. So nobody knows what the fuck goes on up there. So from an RPG standpoint you can do whatever you want and it'll probably work.

Also, the game did acknowledge that if Odin exists along side Ra and Zeus, that Jehovah might not be the one true god of creation. The general response is to be destroyed by the celestial inquisition or for demons they don't want to admit the possibility because if that's the case then they bet everything on an argument that doesn't even matter.

An interesting slant might be something kind of cribbed from Vampire, where the Demons and Angels are having their "war", but there's a detent of sorts going on and both sides kind of cooperate to keep the archangels and the big guns from getting involved, since everyone kind of digs this existence thing and armageddon will bring an end to things right quick. Therefore, keeping Michael and Yves and Lucifer and Gabriel out of action is good for everyone.

[OgreBattle]

Dangit, Frank already said what I was going to.

You can look at the Shin Megami Tensei games as an idea of how the Judeo-Christian worldview looks in an Eastern setting (Angels are jerks and YHWH is their jerk boss).

So I'm a bit inclined to just make my own game. The question is, though, what do people actually want from a game where the point is to play demons?

Why do humans matter in the context of your demon/angel war? Are they a source of power through worship? Are they eggs waiting to hatch into angels/demons in the next world?

[crasskris]

I've had a couple of games of In Nomine (the french version though) and we've concluded that if you run as a group of demons, it works best with the following assumptions:

• You all serve a Demonic Prince and are mainly opposed by forces of the other Princes. Killing a demon or a worshiper is fair game and about as penalized as vehicular mayhem in GTA.
  Killing innocents or revealing themselves to them is OK as long as you keep it down and cover your tracks.
• Angels are bad news that you don't want to get. More importantly, all Princes avoid conflict because the other side has repeatedly shown that it will happily escalate any conflict into an all-out war, because they are confident that they will win it again. So if you rock the boat to much, expect hellish Enforcers to arrive to break up the conflict; go into confrontation some more, and the winged cavalry will get called in, and you can bet your spiked tail that your Prince will cut you loose. On the same note: if you run into someone with a (for you) notable halo, smile, wave and walk away slowly.
• Stuff like corrupting humans for no reason and being a scaly sociopath with killrapemurderdeath appendages are considered child's play and is looked down upon, partly because it is so laughably easy, partly because your Prince prefers you to stay on target and not faff about so much. The main reminder that you are a demon comes when using your powers – you can't, for example, use Suggestion to make a person be more kind, you can only use it to corrupt somehow.

A typical campaign could be watching over a NPC for your Prince, the Lord of Coin. Your target is a known investment banker with a large mansion and a small family that sees him/herself as a devout christian and, due to his/her success, one of god's chosen. Your Prince wants to maintain that status quo so the target will continue to go to work and worship in his temple, delivering countless sorrow in the process.
Typical missions might be:

• Identify and take out agents from the Lord of Hunger that try to addict your and thus gain control over him/her.
• The Lord of Lust is trying to diminish your Princes' influence by destroying the target's family and then the target. In a first step, he tries to seduce the daughter and turn her into a porn starlet. Go to the studio disguised as Mafia and collect a few souls, scaring the girl away for good.
• Your target made a bet on a bad harvest that threatens to turn out very good. Make a deal with the Lord of Plagues to change that, sabotage the delivery of food, and so on.
• A rival is getting dangerous for your target. Addict her to gambling, then ruin her.

[Koumei]

Yeah, given what I know of your view of Christianity, Prak, you don't want something actually set in the canon of the Bible. Because that involves either playing as ridiculous ultimate evil, or playing as people who are fighting omnipotent jerks and doomed to failure - you can make a good argument that Yahweh is a fucklord and not the good guy of the books, but he is still the Designated Winner.

Japan has shown us what fun can be had dicking around with "demons as somewhat-good-guys", and that's mainly because they've had much more influence from Chinese and Indian mythology than European (the main take-home message of Christianity being "there was a zombie and he was a good guy, so we get an extra holiday in December. I think it's like another Valentine's Day?"). And sure, Andromalius is totally crazy, but there are mental Eastern demons people can use as well. For starters: most Christian demons actually are gods, angels, demons or mythological beasts from other religions, stolen and renamed.

[Prak]

yeah, pretty much. As I said, I liked Demon the Fallen, I just hated the wangst and wanted the game to be more about turning into columns of fire and kicking angelic ass and telling god to screw off.

[Whipstitch]

You'd obviously have to back down from the omnipotence shit, but I do think it's vaguely posssible that you could make a Judeo-Christian themed Demon game that suited Prak's tastes and culminates in bitch slapping a statted Yahweh. It's just that finding an audience for it is difficult, both because lots of people believe in Big Y and because Prak isn't really particularly interested in making a game with room for "heroes" in the traditional sense. I mean, let's take a recent quote from another Demon thread:

I actually really liked DtF, because I'm totally into that whole "the demons are the good guys, and god is an evil bastard" thing. I could do with less angst and more embracing the "Lets be bad guys" thing, though.

Those sentences only begin to make even a lick of sense if you're familiar with Prak's particular flavor of moral relativism and personal baggage. Even then it's unclear if Prak wants players to be Disgaea evil, grimderp anti-heroes, ruthless fanatics or to actually be as bad or worse than Yahweh and are merely motivated by a power struggle.

[Prak]

I'm not sure what the traditional sense of heroes is that I don't want room for.

Also.... yeah, ok, that sentence about me liking DtF is heavily steeped in my admittedly really dumb moral relativism. I'm not altogether sure what a couple of those "Not sure whether Prak wants..." concepts imply to you.

I'm not sure how many are familiar with DtF's background, so here it is:

God is supposedly too much pure unadulterated power to actually do anything directly. Him trying to create the world would be akin to working on circuitry with the entire output of a power plant.

So he made the angels, in seven ranks, to filter his power. The highest house carried his orders to the others, who then crafted parts of the world. The world and everything in it was thus made by the angels, not God, and God is only the creator in the sense that Rupert Murdoch makes each copy of Wall Street Journal.

Man was basically just taller, more erect walking low primates. The angels had a special love for them for one reason or another, but could not directly interfere so they tried to use creation to let humans know. Unfortunately humanity could not recognize beautiful music created through specially formed glades with purpose placed waterfalls and birds (seriously).

An angel foresaw the apocalypse, or something which would spell disaster for mankind. God would not allow the angels to do anything about, and would do nothing himself. So a bunch of angels rebelled because they loved man too much.

The rebel angels uplifted man and enlightened him and gave him a bunch of knowledge. God sent down Michael to tell the rebel angels "You are fallen, you are cast from the celestial houses, here are your new names, now come quietly and be destroyed."

War, demons lose, get locked away, Lucifer's nowhere to be found, eventually find cracks, small weak demons slip through cracks into the mortal realm and are sent at the behest of more powerful demons to widen the cracks.

That's the basics of DtF. My groups blatantly ignored the whole "you're sent by a stronger demon to get them out" thing, but then they also ignored most of the WoD metaplot. Your opposition was supposed to be demons who were bound to the earth and became lovecraftian horrors, the occasional angel, and maybe demons opposed to your philosophy. Some demons want to find Lucifer and restart the war, others want to overthrow God with a new god formed from the divine spark in mortals, others just want to wreck up the place (this was a PC faction, surprisingly), others think they should all apologize and throw themselves on the mercy of God, and a fifth just sit around treating the world like a big puzzle. You got your power points by convincing mortals to believe in you, which you generally did through making pacts with them.

I'd have to think a while on how to translate that into what I precisely want. However, I know what I didn't like about the setting:

There was the concept of torment, which worked sort of like Humanity in Vampire. The worse shit you did, the higher your torment would rise. High torment, however, is how you unlocked half your apocalyptic form abilities, and being generally high torment would make your magic generally stronger. Of course if you hit 10 torment, your character basically became an unthinking monster. So your best case scenario was to be Torment 9, and never do anything which would make you roll torment, except that the benefits of torment made you roll torment.

That's what I don't want. I don't want to be taunted with awesome powers and then penalized if I use them.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, white wolf's whole "hidden in plain sight!" shtick is probably a bad fit in general then.

[Korwin]

Possible background for an Demon/Angel RPG:
A Demon Bound

There Angels are not good guys.
There is no God (but some hints about an Creator, who doesnt do anything).
Angels and Demons (two different kinds of angels at that point) fought an war, but got into an stalemate. (something like 2 Million years ago.)

Angels need Demons to procreate, so no new Angels since the war.
Demons can procreate without Angels, but the offspring (supposedly) de-evolves.

[Username17]

There are people who unironically wear Bad Religion t-shirts without knowing that it's for a band, so there is presumably some kind of market for an RPG powered by Prak's hipster-Nietzsche moral relativism. For fuck's sake, there was a market for FATAL. We're talking about a very small market, and I think Prak is the only person who is in it on this board, but it's a market that clearly exists.


Hipster Nietzche has dumb moral relativism.

Such a game would probably go over better as comedy, made in the image of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. Anti-moral protagonists can really work in comedy. But let's be honest: "Good is bad and bad is good!" was the tagline of "Bad Hand" the evil sock puppet my father would let me wrestle when I was 4. It's not so much offensive as retarded to try to present that as a serious ethical philosophy.


Not serious.

Now what you could do if you wanted to be taken seriously is do a Spawn/Dante thing where you fight demons and angels in the name of humanity with your unwanted demon powers. That is something that obviously has a lot of traction.

But clearly easier is to just go Eastern from the start. It's not weird that Nyarlathotep and Mammon are sexy combat school girls in Japanese anime. I mean, given Eastern concepts of demons, why wouldn't they be? You could go for some comedic moral inversions like in Disgaea, or play it dead serious like in Journey to the West. But either way, heroic demons saving the day while fighting a corrupt celestial bureaucracy is totally a thing in Eastern demonology.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

I just re-read the DtF synopsis and it made my head hurt.

Basically, according to Prak, Angels got hardons for humans before humans were sentient more or less (it took demons to do that).

So why humans and not dogs, dolphins, or any other species? I could I guess see if all life was threatened and the celestials loved creation so much that some of them rebelled and figured "these naked apes are starting to make tools, they seem to be the smartest of the bunch, let's give them a kick start, and maybe they can do something to avoid this impending doom".

In which case you have this *really* fucked up metaphysical version of Arthur C Clark's 2001, only you're demons instead of aliens. Might as well call it Others: The Vigil.

Wait, come to think of it, I'd actually really dig playing aliens who are the shepherds of species that are on the brink of formal contact with extraterrestrials. You're assigned to earth, and you can't violate essentially the prime directive, and you've either got psionics or super advanced technology that is indistinguishable from magic, and you're trying to usher humanity into a position to reveal themselves to the universe. Of course, you can have philosophical and even economical factions with different views on where species *should* be when they make contact, and you'd have other tribal factions trying to manipulate humanity or even exploit resources on earth before they're supposed to. And of course your dark evil opposition just is down with racial purity or whatever and finds the idea that humans are sentient to be a real laugh.

I'd actually dig that a lot quicker than I'd dig DtF.

[Whipstitch]

So why humans and not dogs, dolphins, or any other species?

Because God ordered them to. Dude trolls hard.

[Maxus]

This seems an apt time to bring a little Preacher into this.

So, for those five of you who don't know: Preacher. Graphic novel. Texas preacher gets inhabited by a half-demon, half-angel entirely new entity and finds out

1) God is real. He made the world. There's angels and demons.

2) God's left Earth in care of the angels and gone, essentially saying 'I'll be back when I'm back'.

The preacher decides this is unacceptable, and goes on a quest to find God and make Him get His butt in gear to fix some things, because he sees God as having forsaken his duty to his creation.

Now for the relevant part. I'll spoiler it.

The preacher finds out that everything was made by God as an ego trip. God was alone, so he made the world so he wouldn't be alone. He has a huge case of narcissism, but also desperately wants love and validation. So the angels were made first. With the express purpose of serving and loving him. Except angels don't have free will, and it occurred to him that they probably just love him because he made them to.

So he came up with a test. He announced that angels would have competition in the near future: the world and humanity. So a third of the angels rebelled, and were cast down into Hell.

And then God got to work on the world. He -intentionally- made it flawed, so that human beings would have valid reasons to NOT love and worship him, just to make a bigger ego boost when they do. And it sorta implies God works at keeping the world a shithole. So the preacher eventually comes to the realization that the only way the world -can- improve, is if they got rid of God. So he makes that happen.

[nockermensch]

<snip The Preacher explanation>
Now for the relevant part. I'll spoiler it.

The preacher finds out that everything was made by God as an ego trip. God was alone, so he made the world so he wouldn't be alone. He has a huge case of narcissism, but also desperately wants love and validation. So the angels were made first. With the express purpose of serving and loving him. Except angels don't have free will, and it occurred to him that they probably just love him because he made them to.

So he came up with a test. He announced that angels would have competition in the near future: the world and humanity. So a third of the angels rebelled, and were cast down into Hell.

And then God got to work on the world. He -intentionally- made it flawed, so that human beings would have valid reasons to NOT love and worship him, just to make a bigger ego boost when they do. And it sorta implies God works at keeping the world a shithole. So the preacher eventually comes to the realization that the only way the world -can- improve, is if they got rid of God. So he makes that happen.

You should handle Prak some tissues after that.

[Maxus]

<snip The Preacher explanation>
Now for the relevant part. I'll spoiler it.

The preacher finds out that everything was made by God as an ego trip. God was alone, so he made the world so he wouldn't be alone. He has a huge case of narcissism, but also desperately wants love and validation. So the angels were made first. With the express purpose of serving and loving him. Except angels don't have free will, and it occurred to him that they probably just love him because he made them to.

So he came up with a test. He announced that angels would have competition in the near future: the world and humanity. So a third of the angels rebelled, and were cast down into Hell.

And then God got to work on the world. He -intentionally- made it flawed, so that human beings would have valid reasons to NOT love and worship him, just to make a bigger ego boost when they do. And it sorta implies God works at keeping the world a shithole. So the preacher eventually comes to the realization that the only way the world -can- improve, is if they got rid of God. So he makes that happen.

You should handle Prak some tissues after that.

I notice he hasn't posted in the many hours since I put that up. I think we need to give Prak his privacy...

[Prak]

There are people who unironically wear Bad Religion t-shirts without knowing that it's for a band, so there is presumably some kind of market for an RPG powered by Prak's hipster-Nietzsche moral relativism. For fuck's sake, there was a market for FATAL. We're talking about a very small market, and I think Prak is the only person who is in it on this board, but it's a market that clearly exists.

I take a bit of umbrage with the idea that my hipster-Nietzsche moral relativism is somehow as reprehensible as FATAL. We're talking about a moral code that says "fuck whoever you want, so long as they consent and are legally capable of consenting." Just because it prefaces that statement with "Christianity is dumb, so-" doesn't make it really much weirder, and the fact that it continues by saying "If someone is stopping you from fucking the person you want (other than that person not consenting), smack 'em" doesn't make it much weirder either.

Such a game would probably go over better as comedy, made in the image of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. Anti-moral protagonists can really work in comedy. But let's be honest: "Good is bad and bad is good!" was the tagline of "Bad Hand" the evil sock puppet my father would let me wrestle when I was 4. It's not so much offensive as retarded to try to present that as a serious ethical philosophy.

I've tried running JtHM based games. No one got it. Also... what part of anything I've said would be anti-moral?

Now what you could do if you wanted to be taken seriously is do a Spawn/Dante thing where you fight demons and angels in the name of humanity with your unwanted demon powers. That is something that obviously has a lot of traction.

Yeah, DtF is a bit like that, actually. I just want to remove the "unwanted" part, or at least replace the "I dun wanna be a demon..." angst with "holy shit, this is awesome!" exultation.

But clearly easier is to just go Eastern from the start. It's not weird that Nyarlathotep and Mammon are sexy combat school girls in Japanese anime. I mean, given Eastern concepts of demons, why wouldn't they be? You could go for some comedic moral inversions like in Disgaea, or play it dead serious like in Journey to the West. But either way, heroic demons saving the day while fighting a corrupt celestial bureaucracy is totally a thing in Eastern demonology.

I've been giving it a bit of thought and am leaning towards something like that. I'm actually wondering if the motive for the war in heaven even needs to be explicit, or if you can just say "no one really remembers. The pretty dudes with wings don't talk about it much, and we all got tormented for a couple millenia, which makes memories hazy."

I just re-read the DtF synopsis and it made my head hurt.

Basically, according to Prak, Angels got hardons for humans before humans were sentient more or less (it took demons to do that).

So why humans and not dogs, dolphins, or any other species? I could I guess see if all life was threatened and the celestials loved creation so much that some of them rebelled and figured "these naked apes are starting to make tools, they seem to be the smartest of the bunch, let's give them a kick start, and maybe they can do something to avoid this impending doom".

I'd forgotten, but humans were tool users prior to rebel angel interference. So it was more like they were slightly taller chimps who knew how to turn a rock into a spear head, but couldn't understand art or beauty.

In which case you have this *really* fucked up metaphysical version of Arthur C Clark's 2001, only you're demons instead of aliens. Might as well call it Others: The Vigil.

[snip]

I'd actually dig that a lot quicker than I'd dig DtF.

That's a completely different game, though. It could be an interesting one, but basically you play vulcans watching humanity cobble together the federation, or whatever.

<snip The Preacher explanation>
Now for the relevant part. I'll spoiler it.

The preacher finds out that everything was made by God as an ego trip. God was alone, so he made the world so he wouldn't be alone. He has a huge case of narcissism, but also desperately wants love and validation. So the angels were made first. With the express purpose of serving and loving him. Except angels don't have free will, and it occurred to him that they probably just love him because he made them to.

So he came up with a test. He announced that angels would have competition in the near future: the world and humanity. So a third of the angels rebelled, and were cast down into Hell.

And then God got to work on the world. He -intentionally- made it flawed, so that human beings would have valid reasons to NOT love and worship him, just to make a bigger ego boost when they do. And it sorta implies God works at keeping the world a shithole. So the preacher eventually comes to the realization that the only way the world -can- improve, is if they got rid of God. So he makes that happen.

You should handle Prak some tissues after that.

I notice he hasn't posted in the many hours since I put that up. I think we need to give Prak his privacy...

cool story, though

Playing Arkham Asylum, sleeping, showering.... as hard as it may be to believe, I do have something resembling a life outside this forum.

Seriously, I do find Frank's summation of my psuedo-religion as hipster-Nietzsche moral relativism amusing. I can admit that it's a bit dumb to be a LaVeyan Satanist, but "Secular Humanist with a vague belief in magic" is a much longer title.

Satanism basically posits:
1) Doing what you want is good for you
2) So you should do that, provided you're not hurting anyone (or at least they're consenting to the hurt, in the case of bdsm)
3) If someone's trying to stop you from doing what you want, or attacking you, pop them one.

Yes there's a lot of ranting about Christians and wanking about nietzschian power visualization, or whatever, but the first is something we do on this very board a lot, and the second isn't much weirder than other religions, including Buddhism and Taoism.

As far as the demons I want to play, I'm envisioning something more along the lines of playing rebelling supernaturals fighting a less than omnipotent/niscient god who basically is all about controlling and oppressing people. The Spawn thing would totally work, I'd just tweak it so that the demon powers are seen as fucking awesome, and rather than "fight demons and angels for humanity" it's about "fight the forces of the big bad who seek to control humanity either through draconian oppression in the guise of religion, or torment and pain"

[JigokuBosatsu]

Did somebody call for a Buddhist?



Seriously, tho, I second and third the suggestion of basing this thang on Eastern mythology. Because when you include that, you get both the hantu belian and the Rakshasa.

(And that's not because I have some sort of weird fetish for tigers, they're just awesome. My real fetish is girls biting their own arms, and I will continue to blame heavy metal/D&D/the Simon Necronomicon for that.)

[JonSetanta]

Really, keep it comedy. Don't make me pull out my Tripp bondage pants from the 90s for being too weighty with philosophy.

[TheFlatline]

I just re-read the DtF synopsis and it made my head hurt.

Basically, according to Prak, Angels got hardons for humans before humans were sentient more or less (it took demons to do that).

So why humans and not dogs, dolphins, or any other species? I could I guess see if all life was threatened and the celestials loved creation so much that some of them rebelled and figured "these naked apes are starting to make tools, they seem to be the smartest of the bunch, let's give them a kick start, and maybe they can do something to avoid this impending doom".

I'd forgotten, but humans were tool users prior to rebel angel interference. So it was more like they were slightly taller chimps who knew how to turn a rock into a spear head, but couldn't understand art or beauty.

The problem with *that* is that we have humans burying their dead in a ritualistic manner as clear back as pretty much all our tools go in the historical record. And what is ritual if it's not art? I know it's fucking tilting at windmills to try to bring reality to creation myth, but WW does it so fuck it they open that door. The whole point of the Eden story and the fall from paradise is that humans acquired knowledge, not art.

Humans aren't the only tool-making/using species out there either. Dolphins:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... tools.html

Crows/Ravens:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41Z6Mvjd9w0

Primates:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01007.html

Elephants:
http://www.livescience.com/4272-elephan ... umans.html

Even fucking Octopuses use tools:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/ ... pus-tools/

If we're talking self-awareness and empathy, elephants and dolphins especially qualify, and while I was about to say the only thing that differentiated our ancestors from other animals was how we treated our dead, I remembered that's not even unique in the animal kingdom and that elephants grieve and try to bury their dead:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ke-us.html

I know I'm taking this way too far. But as I said, Demon was a stupid fucking premise.

[TheFlatline]

Satanism basically posits:
1) Doing what you want is good for you
2) So you should do that, provided you're not hurting anyone (or at least they're consenting to the hurt, in the case of bdsm)
3) If someone's trying to stop you from doing what you want, or attacking you, pop them one.

Amazing how close Satanism corresponds to Objectivism.

[Koumei]

Amazing how close Satanism corresponds to Objectivism.

[Mask_De_H]

Prak, I don't think Frank is saying your hipster-Nietzschean moral relativism is as reprehensible as FATAL but it sure as fuck is as stupid as FATAL.

A quickie hypothetical: you have a sadist and a masochist who are both Satanists. The sadist wants to hurt and not be hurt, the masochists want to be hurt and not hurt. The sadist hurts the masochist because it's good for them, but it violates tenet #2. If the masochist allows himself to be hurt, he's violating tenet #3 and needs to attack, which would violate #1 (not doing what you want) and #2 (trying to get back what you want through hurt).

Now a neutral Satanist sees the sadomaso couple and starts throwing bones at everybody because this Satanist is a SEIGI NO MIKATA. This causes the sadomaso couple to attack back, which makes the SEIGI NO MIKATA fight back, creating a feedback loop of assbeating and completely fucking the distribution of pleasure.

If you want to get really absurd, the way to cut this Gordian Knot is to fucking kill everybody with a high-powered sniper rifle to the dome because you want to, you are able to do so, are justified if they try to stop you and the dead don't hurt anymore.

Anywho, going Asian bricoleur with demon mythology is probably the best way to go about a game like this. You could even go full Eva with it and have the "good guys" be trying to forcibly bring about world destruction.