Playing at war in heaven/Ascended Demons and Fallen Angels

[RadiantPhoenix]

For an RPG, it just isn't practical to throw down a genuinely valid set of reasons for a revolution. You pretty much have to cartoon it. Which means among other things that you need some short and simple set of intolerable acts that happened right before the declaration of war.

-Username17

• "They drafted one in ten able-bodied demons in my town"
• "The most popular demonic pop-star was arrested for sedition"
• "I ran out of money to pay for alcohol to try to forget about how my girlfriend dumped me. Y U NO pay for my drinks, heaven?"

[Prak]

• more than 80 children have been murdered in the UK and US in the last year alone...

[Chamomile]

• more than 80 children have been murdered in the UK and US in the last year alone...

And how many children do you think are going to be murdered if you wage actual, violent war against not only a religion with two billion mortal followers, but also have the support of legions of supernatural superbeings whose destructive capabilities are presumably pretty damn significant? If you want to come up with a list of grievances significant enough that waging a war of revolution that will slaughter tens of millions of civilians in the crossfire, you are going to need to come up with stuff that is much worse than what real world Christians get up to these days. There is really a fairly small number of situations in which actual prolonged warfare is preferable to alternatives by any sane metric.

And that's why something wacky like "arrested a popular demon pop-star" is preferable. Once you've got reasons for starting a war like that, everyone understands you're basically playing a cathartic cartoon and you no longer have to worry about things like civilian casualties while having superpowered showdowns in Manhattan.

[Mord]

All this "fuck you Angel Dad" stuff has me thinking that maybe the right way to go about telling stories where the protagonists are demons is to treat the whole thing as a metaphor for growing up, moving out, and finding your own way in life, eventually building your own life and your own family (that will eventually leave you too).

In this view, the divine creator is a parent figure, and unfallen angels are your siblings who are either too young, too much of an asskisser, or too something to move out and do things their own way. You as a demon have decided that you're going to do a better job running your own life than Angel Dad, so you've moved out into the world of humans to try to prove it. Heaven is your old family home and carrying out the Divine Will is the family business.

The goal could be to eventually attain sufficient maturity and wisdom to create your own planet, with blackjack and hookers. Maybe you will eventually feel a little bit more sympathetic towards the old man, once you're done having petty fights with your bitch archangel sister. Various dead ends and fail states would be things like getting stuck on the idea of being a babyeater to spite Dad, crawling back home to live in your Creator's basement, ending up working for some other demon (being one of Lucifer's goons is the demon equivalent of working retail)...

From this point of view, it's much easier to have lighthearted slice-of-life style games if that's what you want. Consult the animu "Devil is a Part-Timer" for the kind of thing I'm talking about.

[Occluded Sun]

There's a vague resemblance to Mormon theology there, only slightly inverted.

I would note, however, that moving out of Heaven and into Earth is still living in your divine parent's basement.

[Mord]

The resemblance is intentional, though from my brief wikicrawl, the tenets of the Mormon afterlife seem too vague to have many cool ideas to stripmine beyond the basic concept that created beings can grow to become creators themselves.

Life on Earth is still within the purview of Angel Dad, but not quite as directly under his divine thumb since there are all these stinky freewilled apes running around. Maybe Earth is more like the back forty than the house proper; it does belong to Angel Dad, but it's not like he's there all the time. Mostly the back yard is left to your irritating suck-up siblings to take care of.

I'd say it should be theoretically possible for a demon or organized group of them to overthrow Heaven and take the reins of Earth for themselves, but it's unlikely to work out that way - and psychologically it's way healthier to just acknowledge that Dad's house means Dad's rules and move on to do your own thing (e.g. your own better planet with blackjack and hookers).

The characters would be demons living on Earth because they're not ready yet to make the jump to forging their own worlds, so they're still trying to impose their will on Earth. Either they don't realize that what they're trying to do is probably futile and almost certainly a waste of time, or they don't have enough magic oomph charged up yet to zap off into the cosmos Dr. Manhattan-style. Maybe, for a demon, life on Earth is like going away to college.

Incidentally, this is also why Angel Dad doesn't smite the demon protagonists immediately using his omnipotence - he remembers what he was like at your age, so is willing, up to a point, to indulge your immaturity.

[Prak]

"Heaven is run by an oppressive monarch who proclaims to love his subjects and yet maintains a secret police, a torture palace, and demands that his subjects live one specific way and propitiate him daily."

There, is that more adult?

Only slightly. The problem with fighting "the creator" is that among those who haven't committed suicide it is generally considered to be not particularly controversial that "existence" beats "non-existence." So the creator of the universe gets an intuitive free pass on almost any conceivable shitty thing about the way the universe is, because the alternative is apparently to not have a universe. Saying that revolution is required because the universe as-is "sucks" really comes off as petulant teenage rebellion.

You really need some sort of rallying cry for revolt that's better than "Dad's a jerk! The world sucks!"

Also, what would you think a game where you played Thor, Tyr, Baldur and Uller and went around fighting giants? A game where you played Zeus, Ares, Hades and Athena fighting Titans?

See, that would be much better because the rebellion has a more viscerally understandable rallying cry: infanticide. The Rimtursar tried to wipe out the Aesir. Chronos ate his children. The whole "existence is better than non-existence" thing excuses nothing if the creator is already trying to kill you.

You really need some sort of event that justifies fighting a war in Heaven, on Earth, and in all the Underworlds to upset the order of the spheres. The Olympians and Aesir had that. And while "We've entered the Medieval Era and have now unlocked Commerce civics" is probably a genuinely justifiable reason to have a period of anarchy, your five minute pitch is going to need something less technical.

-Username17

So, it didn't occur to me when we having this conversation years back, but... The Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Passover... I think there are more cases of infanticide, certainly mass infanticide, in Christianity than in Norse or Greek mythology, but I may just be ignorant of instances of such in those mythologies beyond the creation myths.

So, basically, you seriously could present "Angel Dad keeps killing hundred of thousands of human infants at a time, we should probably do something about this" as a reason for rebelling. Especially when Demon Dad has only killed, like, five people.

[name_here]

Norse and Greek mythology have plenty of mass killings. Hell, Greek mythology has a bit where the gods curse Thebes with a plague for Oedipus's crimes even though literally none of the affected people have any knowledge of them or complicity in them whatsoever. Demeter made crops fail and the world freeze because Hades kidnapped her daughter. Zeus exterminates mankind entirely and starts over twice. In Norse mythology, the antagonists Frank is referring to will bring about Ragnarok and kill everyone.

[Prak]

Forgot about Demeter freezing the world. Wasn't thinking about Ragnarok, but Christianity posits an end of the world too, so we're just dealing with a difference of "All of humanity minus two" vrs "All of humanity minus a few thousand"

But thank you.

[name_here]

Uh, the Christian version has higher survival rates than that. The variant believed in by the apocalypse cultists actually has no infanticide at all because everyone under like twelve (depending on which apocalypse cultist you ask) gets teleported to safety before the apocalypse kicks off.

Most of the other denominations parse that entire book as in some way metaphorical. Probably for the end of Christian persecution in Rome, since there's a bit where the narrator explains that a woman riding the seven-headed beast is a metaphor for a great city that rules over the kings of the earth and the seven hills on which the woman sits, and there's kind of only one city that could possibly fit that description.

[Prak]

Right, no, I'm not counting Revelations as a case of Infanticide, I'm saying that it's the Christian myth on equal footing to Ragnarok, except that instead of the devil figure of the religion starting it (ok, debatable), it's the father figure.

It's something more like-

	Norse	Greek	Christian
Infanticide	Rimtursar attempting to wipe out the Aesir	Chronus eating his children	The Flood, Sodom and Gommorah, Passover
World Ending Apocalypse	Ragnarok	The Sorrow of Demeter (averted)	Revelations (parable)

Where each mythology has cases of Infanticide, and an apocalypse (Greek is notable in that their apocalyptic events tend to have "happened" in the past and either averted or recovered from... which makes a sort of sense when you consider that apocalypse is a greek word meaning to disclose knowledge).

And here's the thing- virtually every (western and near-eastern) mythology has a story about how a new generation of gods war with the older generation. Usually the new generation wins, kills or imprisons the older generation, and are worshiped by the people telling the story. But Christianity has to be all hipster about it, and so their Divine Intergenerational War story is about a third of the angels (who are definition-ally gods as they are a higher power to humans) war with their father, God, and lose.

Another point to consider when making the Hordes of Hell a sympathetic faction is that the cause of Lucifer's fall is never really specified in the Bible.

I mean, Lucifer is called proud, is said to have desired to be like God, and called a murderer, but the specific cause of the fall isn't called out. Even "seeking to be like God" doesn't really narrow things down, because the Tower of Babel is about humans "seeking to be like God" by building a giant tower, and I've been accused of similar just by asking logical questions of my mother on the subject of life on other planets like "Why would God create a people just to watch them die?" (She was thinking of life in terms of human life and its limitations) So the sin of seeking to be like God is really, really broad in Christianity and seems to come down to "not falling on your knees and sucking his divine dick."

Now, because the whole of divine texts presumed to come from God is "The Bible," Christian storytellers have come up with their own stuff, and some suggest that Lucifer fell because of a case of contradictory orders. The gist is that God first created the angels and gave them one command- "love me above all else." Then a while later, he created man, and gave his angels one command- "love man above all else." And Lucifer piped up and said, "Um, sir, which order do we follow?" and God said "GTFO you prick."

Another similar story is that when God made the angels, he commanded them to bow to him, and they did. When God made Adam, he commanded the angels bow to him, and Lucifer said, "Fuck that, man's living clay, I'm living fire. He should bow to me." And God said "GTFO you prick."

I kind of prefer the first story, since it casts God as an idiot who gives contradictory orders, and we know how full of contradictions the Bible is, so this is believable. The second story rather well enables a story about demons working against humans, because they're jealous of the lesser beings who their father loves more.

There is of course the possibility of saying that Lucifer fell for his love of man. This is more or less what Demon the Fallen did, where the angels were given some reason to have to choose who they would serve, God or man, and Lucifer and his friends chose man, because God is omnipotent and man ain't.

Really, so long as you don't decide that a being created by God specifically to be his servant rebelled because "LOL FUK U," you can ascribe the "known actions" of Lucifer to a motive of defying God, or helping man. The serpent isn't literally Satan, but most people think of it as such, and you can explain it's actions as either "Fuck God, Imma go corrupt his slaves" or "Oh man, you deserve better than being a thought slave." His persecution of Job could be "Fuck you God, I'm going to show you that man only worships you because they get cash and prizes" of "Sorry, Job, you're an acceptable loss if I can show other people how easily God abandons them." The temptation of Christ could be trying to turn God's son away from him, out of spite or to deny God a powerful ally, or to gain one for himself, or trying to save the human half of God from sacrifice. The Anti-Christ could be a warrior trying to deny his enemy a support network, or it could be Lucifer trying to save humanity from slavery.

So long as you don't give the Fallen too antagonistic a reason to rebel, you can also always cite God's many atrocities as reasons for them to fight for sympathetic reasons. Even if you start with "And Lucifer spake, 'NO U," and did fall" you can say that witnessing the Flood, where all but a single family was drowned for their sins, even those whose only sin was "reaching puberty and masturbating furiously," convinced the Fallen that God was dangerous psychopath who needed to be stopped. Or they could have seen the slaughter of the first born of Egypt and decided it, or they could have seen Sodom and decided it. Basically, even if Lucifer fell purely because he wanted to be worshiped as God's equal, there is no shortage of crimes that could turn him and his people into sympathetic enemies of The Most High.

[Chamomile]

Lucifer fell with a third of the angelic host, so you can and should make the exact reasons for Lucifer's fall vague as an intentional move on his part to unite multiple different dissenting factions of angels under one banner.

So, God created humans, who were weaker than angels and also more petty and banal. When angels rebel it's due to irreconcilable philosophical differences and fiery passions, but when humans rebel it's usually because of laziness or cowardice. It is, by default, easier to not obey someone than to obey them, so the root of most human rebellion is unbelief. People cease to believe there will be retribution for disobedience and just kind of go off and do their own thing, and then when retribution comes almost none of the humans stand up and say that God is a psychopathic tyrant who must be thwarted. Instead, the glorified clay-monkeys all fall in line and praise God for his mercy out of fear of eternal torment.

And that's the point: The powerful and fierce angels made of fire weren't entirely free of conflict, but they weren't very petty and thus when they fought it was usually over something important, and God found that boring and thought that watching creatures struggle to achieve virtue against horrors of their own invention was more entertaining. It just wasn't until the second time around that he realized that a million monkeys on typewriters stumbled into greater horrors than a handful of very powerful and very dedicated super-beings. In order to prevent the angels from stepping in to guide/rule the humans and ruin God's new reality TV show, he commanded them to serve humans rather than vice-versa.

This command creates three rebel factions: Those who feel compassion for humans whom God created to suffer and struggle and want to make the humans more independent, those who feel outraged at God for commanding them to bow to creatures who are clearly less capable but don't really care about the fate of humans, and those who feel betrayed at the callousness with which their interests were discarded once God grew bored of them, are jealous towards the humans, and want to destroy them out of spite for God. The second faction just wants to GTFO of God's will, the first are trying to help humanity which incidentally requires thwarting God's will, and the third are actively trying to undermine God's will because it is God's will. Since all told they're only a third of the total angels, Lucifer needs to keep all three of these factions working towards the same goal, even though the first and third are opposed.

This set up lets characters have different opinions on the issue without branding any particular perspective as that of the demonic orthodoxy, because Lucifer intentionally keeps his opinion secret, and it also bakes in a culture of cooperation despite individual differences into demonic society, which allows those differing opinions to be in the same party without needing to contrive a reason as to why the way you need to twist your plot into pretzels to get Camarilla, Anarchs, and Sabbat working together.

[hyzmarca]

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.

Honestly, you can go all kinds of subtle with the evil temptation gig. Killfuck soulshitter may be obviously evil, but your demons don't have to try to turn everyone into Charles Manson in order to be evil. Nope.

Remember, the Seven deadly sins.
Lust: Uncontrolled desire. Not just sexual desire. Desire for anything. A person might lust after food, clothes, extreme sports. Anything. It's about impulsiveness at its core. The demon whispering to go for it, even if going for it is stupid.

Glutony: Excess consumption of any sort. It doesn't have to include food. Someone who buys games that they never intend to play can be guilty of gluttony, for example.

Sloth: Any sort of laziness. Mental, spiritual, intellectual. Anyone who takes short cuts to make his life easier is guilty of this. So is anyone who procrastinates. Labor saving devices can be abused.

Wrath: Anger, not just violence. Self-destructive anger, at that. The sort of thing that makes you refuse help out of spite, or whatever.

Envy: Of course, that's the obvious one.

Pride: The classic.




Demons who turn people into killfuck soulshitters are bad, as I said. But the little temptations, the every day stuff, there's space in there for interesting moral conflicts.


Indeed, things that seem good on the surface can be sinful in this paradigm. Someone who compulsively gives money to charity is just as much a glutton as one who compulsively hoards money. They're just gluttons for different things.


I'd actually play Touched By An Angel/ Highway to Heaven with it.

Basically, you've got Demons and Angels who don't' directly intervene, but act as guides to push people in one direction or the other. And both directions are positive on their surface, but both have distinct consequences. Demons aren't out to ruin people's lives, and Angels aren't going to make people's lives perfect. Rather, they're about influencing a person's way of life, which is ultimately what matters to them.

Their conflict is purely philosophical. It's not something that can be one with giant bone-penises.

Ultimately, the conflict between heaven and hell is one to convince people to follow their philosophy of their own free will. Both have good points and flaws.


The basic idea is that you'd pick a side to play for, roll up a party, and then at the beginning of play you'd be given a list of clients, mortals that you have to help solve their problems.

You're powers are going to be subtle and non-obvious and easy to dismiss as coincidence. The setting would be rather realistic. There are probably opposing forces also working on your clients.



-------------------------

Or to put it another way, Heaven and Hell are corporations. Your characters are front-line employees and your job is to sell your corporation's products. Those products are moderation, temperence, spiritual salvation and sex, drugs, and rock&roll, respectively.


God and the Devil don't exist, per se. They did exist at one point, but they changed. By the time of the game, they're basically just corporate mascots. The originals are probably retired somewhere, but no one knows.

[TheFlatline]

So, it didn't occur to me when we having this conversation years back, but... The Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Passover... I think there are more cases of infanticide, certainly mass infanticide, in Christianity than in Norse or Greek mythology, but I may just be ignorant of instances of such in those mythologies beyond the creation myths.

Wouldn't this be Judaism instead of Christianity? I know that it's kind of splitting hairs, but the Old Testament is basically a major part of the Torah & all that crap concerned the Jewish people.

The Jews had the pissed off wrathful god that would lay waste to cities and strike men down for not impregnating their dead brother's widow. The New Testament's God is a lot less fire & brimstone and widow-fucking.

[MGuy]

So, it didn't occur to me when we having this conversation years back, but... The Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, Passover... I think there are more cases of infanticide, certainly mass infanticide, in Christianity than in Norse or Greek mythology, but I may just be ignorant of instances of such in those mythologies beyond the creation myths.

Wouldn't this be Judaism instead of Christianity? I know that it's kind of splitting hairs, but the Old Testament is basically a major part of the Torah & all that crap concerned the Jewish people.

The Jews had the pissed off wrathful god that would lay waste to cities and strike men down for not impregnating their dead brother's widow. The New Testament's God is a lot less fire & brimstone and widow-fucking.

Does it matter? Christians tend to reference New AND Old Testament anyway plus shit that's not even in the bible.

[Prak]

And they tend to get everything beyond "Love Jebus" from the old testament.

[shinimasu]

Basically christians keep the old testament around because it provides important historical and textual context (a lot of people in the new testament make allusions to the old testament so unless you study both you're not going to understant what they're getting at) and because there are bits in that they think were divinely inspired and thus worth hanging on to. The ten commandments would be an example of the latter.

Largely though christianity views itself as the new covenant not beholden to the old covenant. Which is why if anyone tries to argue about the gays using leviticus they're full of shit and don't actually know what they're talking about. If you ask them for the reason why God mellowed out so much between books you'll probably get a shrug and something about jesus, you could probably find someone who's written about it somewhere but it's not something the average layman gives much thought.

Did being human give god a new perspective and he came to the conclusion his previous standards were much too high? Did he give up on us? Did he leave to go sit in a corner and think about what he did? Who knows.

[name_here]

Christianity is the largest religion on the planet and comes in all kinds of forms and interprets things in a lot of different ways, and your average Christian likely listens to their pastor rather than reading the entire bible and generating their own theology.

Some of them hold to the Old Testament, others consider all of its laws to have been superseded by the New Testament and treat it as of purely historical interest. Some believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, others believe that it was written and translated by humans and contains a number of errors, and is most accurate in the parts where multiple Gospels agree. Some believe in eternal torment for any transgression, others believe that if you are a complete and total asshole you get set on fire instead of getting eternal life. Some believe in the trinity and others don't.

Here, let's go to Wikipedia. These numbers are uncertain, but so are estimates for membership in other religious groups.

Largest denomination: Catholics at 1.2 billion. Defining feature is that Saint Peter was named head of the Church and the only fully valid Church is the organization descended from the one he founded. Have a Pope.

Protestants make up 800 million but are basically just defined as having broken from the Catholic Church and not being sorted into one of the other categories and come in many varieties as follows. Baptists make up 100 million, believe that baptism is only valid for adults. Lutherans at 80 million believe that the Bible is necessary and sufficient for salvation. Calvinists at 55-85 million believe in predestination and have variable views on the trinity. Methodists at 30-80 million believe laymen can administer baptism and communion. Pentecostals at 280 million are the faith healing and speaking in tongues guys; most other denominations believe that God is more hands-off these days and will answer a prayer to be saved from drowning by making sure the Coast Guard shows up in time. Nondenominational evangelicals make up 80 million and contribute many of the apocalypse cultists and are the most likely to harass people with pamphlets, along with Jehova's Witnesses, who are different.

Eastern Orthodox is 225-300 million, holds that they're the real church descended from Saint Peter and do not have a Pope or analogue.

Oriental Orthodox at 80 million splintered in 453 over disagreements about the nature of Christ.

Anglicans are 85 million, loosely affiliated. Notable for having a denomination that sued to overturn gay marriage bans on religious freedom grounds.

There's about 50 million more Christians.

To put those numbers in perspective, if you counted Catholics and Protestants as separate religions, they'd be the second and third/fourth largest religions respectively. The "other" category outnumbers Sikhs and Jews combined. There are too many Christians in too many denominations to safely generalize about, and their disagreements are extensive and open. Approximately the only thing they agree on is the Crucifixion and the existence of a paradise in the afterlife.

[shinimasu]

It might be interesting in a heavenly war game, to focus on the reason why modern day god is so much more hands off than old testament god. No one's been turned into a pillar of salt lately, or swallowed by a whale, or had all their firstborns killed.

Maybe the game is set after the big fight with god and the devils actually won and have been trying to run earth to the best of their ability, and the main conflict starts when the heavenly host starts trying to reassert itself after a couple thousand years licking its wounds.

[name_here]

That would certainly be an interesting intepretation, especially for an angel protagonist game. A demon game would probably be better off reversing it; they had a big throwdown and the demons lost decisively, so now big miracles to alter the status quo aren't a preferred method because the winners like the status quo. That provides a nice reason for slow escalation; the angels have deep reserves of firepower for the dramatic end-game confrontation but would rather lose early-game fights than win them by having their elites descend into Time Square in a storm of fire.

A third position would be that most of the real heavy hitters actually died during a previous war and neither side can burn a city to ash in an instant anymore. Honestly, I sort of prefer this one from a storytelling perspective because it means that there isn't an omnipotent guy specifically aligned with one of the factions who would presumably just fiat victory for his preferred side if they're losing too badly.

[Prak]

Could be interesting to do the "God needs prayer badly" trope to explain why there isn't so much intervention these days. Of course, you get into "it needs to be a percentage of belief, like it's fucking parliament," given comparative numbers of modern/ancient judeochristians, so maybe that doesn't actually work.

[name_here]

Nah, works if anything better that way. Now that God has billions of worshipers he doesn't need to make dramatic moves to recruit more and can coast on church inertia. Christian tradition classically puts most of the flashy miracles before the Edict Of Milan, and has that as motivated by divine aid for Constantine, so the timeline even works out.

[erik]

If you want something for a short pitch on the overlying conflict just have it be that team angel force wants to shut this fucker down and purge the planet with another flood of what have you to get rid of team demon's corruption of the people. Team demon are a bunch of shitheads but they don't want to have the work undone so they oppose team angel.

So you have good reasons to fight against both sides and support each side on limited bases.

Falling into more specific stuff like mortal sins or denominations just feels like a trap to me. I game to have a fantasy trip not to have some rpg dipshit writer spew what they think about religion.

Specific angels and demons are driven by their personal goals/assignments/portfolio or that of their superior. So some angels are on task force global flood, others are on plague duty. Demons aren't concerned about collateral damage so long as they thwart an apocalypse.

[Occluded Sun]

Could be interesting to do the "God needs prayer badly" trope to explain why there isn't so much intervention these days.

Given human history, it seems more likely that the more a divine entity is believed in, the less they can do.

Perhaps it's like heroin, or perhaps humanity's beliefs imprison deities, forcing them to conform to how they're expected to act.

[shinimasu]

I like the idea of demons having won the battle for who gets earth being the reason for God having functionally vanished for a few reasons.

1. It negates the "stop telling me what to do space dad" problem by having the demons coming from a place of relative power at the start. Instead of rebellious teens who don't know what they're doing you can have full grown adults who don't know what they're doing. They've got the keys to the world but they haven't gotten the hang of driving it yet which gives returning angels a home field advantage without making it a sure thing.

2. It allows for degrees of conflict. a GM can decide if players have a pretty good shot at taking back/maintaining their turf, what losing a battle means for the world at large, and both sides would be viable Player Characters. Plus if we're defining Demon as "angel that fell" then you even get defectors, demons who think maybe kicking god off the throne was a mistake, or angels who feel like ultimately the demons are doing a better job at this.

3. It keeps God himself off the playing field and his ultimate fate (or even existence) something the GM gets to decide on. Did the demons imprison him somewhere? Did they just steal his house keys and lock him out of the universe? Is he dead? Did he decide he'd just let them have it if they wanted it that badly?