Apropos of nothing... (OOC discussion thread about the game)

[Goatkiller666]

So... my biggest concern is that the geography of that Hell is a mirror of Earth, only every damned soul from all of history is hanging around. Julius Caesar has has thousands of years to build up his army, and now has access to machine guns and stuff... Genghis Khan with his version of the Blitzkrieg.

But I'm kind of wanting to stay more in the fantastical... the souls of the damned aren't generally allowed to roam free, Julius Caesar isn't a noble anti-hero of hell. And, I want the geography to be fantastic as well.

And I'm thinking that the geography, as Dante described it, is too limiting. I really want more cities. Towns. Villages. Whatever. Named places, anyway.

I'm having ideas of:
1) There's one road that moves through Hell. You cross from one layer to the next, passing by all points along the way. Anyone can always get from where they are to the road (unless prevented), and can use the road to get anywhere else. And there's less reliance on adjacency... One may travel (or send one's armies) from one place, to the road, to another place... bypassing all the other places within that layer. That would avoid the problem of one player being stuck far away from the gate... but it would avoid the strategic benefit of one player making a point of controlling the part right by the gate. So... you know... I waffle on this.

2) I actually come up with 10 different maps, which are layered on top of each other. There are multiple points on each map that link to other points. This gives value to adjacency and strategy, but still allows for some cool 3-D movement stuff. It's also much more hugely complicated.

[As a kid, I used to play Risk with two boards. You could move from a country on one map to the same country on another map... assault your way around there, then drop down to the first map again, functionally being 'behind enemy lines'. I loved how that changed the gameplay... I didn't love how that made a single game take all weekend.]

[sgt.null]

an ever changing geography?

[Goatkiller666]

Well, more that travel depends on intent more than geography.

And really, as I try to more solidly define it, I realize I can't. It is sort of the absence of a rigid mechanic... it's all metaphorical, over there. So, you get on the Road... you take the Road, and you get somewhere. You got on it alone, so you were alone until you got there. Other people who got on it, going the other direction, wouldn't pass you, because you were alone.

But... I'm thinking that's going to be just weird. Nobody could defend their approaches, but they could defend the gates JUST OFF the road. So... no real benefit, but more complex getting everybody's head around.

[Goatkiller666]

I'm also fond of a land-based game. I don't want to preclude anyone from doing something water-based, though. But any kind of significant maritime space will be the outsides...

So anyway, for interest, let's get a roll call:

I know that these people have expressed opinions:
Caamora - pending a character idea
Fist - he's down for whatever
Seven Words - wants a land war in Asia
Avatar - might be interested
Menolly - agreed with Fist, but I'm not sure if that was agreement with the "I'm in" comment, or something else.
sgt.null - made a lot of conversation, does that mean interest in the game, or just interest in the topic of discussion?
Ore-Sama - "Sure, I guess."
Zxkuqyb - Might be, depending on how much time would be spent on it.
Kalindriel Ec'curb - Doesn't need any more time sucks

So, that's four for sure, and four more who haven't committed.

Anybody else want to convince me to do this?

[Goatkiller666]

So, how's this sound?

Between now and June, we'll get the world ready. I'll get the map(s) built, and the four (or eight) players can get their concepts sorted out. I'll try to get more details around the rules... or some details at all. I'll arrange for another sub-forum, if the Powers That Be will allow it.

I'll commit to having results done before the first Monday of the month.
Players have two weeks to work out their submissions and send them in.
That gives me two weeks, or three weeks if the Monday falls that way, to process and get turns back. My goal is to be more or less on a monthly schedule (all praises to Syl for setting the standard), but tweaked slightly so that we always get a weekend to do things.

For example, June's two weeks would start on June 6th, and turns would be due at the end of the day on June 19th. I'd get results out by July 3rd. Then the players would have between July 4th until July 17th to finish submissions. (And, I reserve the right to adjust those based on any assignments I have due, etc.)

So, based on some questions I got from people directly, here's a bit more info on how the world would work: the players, as the Princes of Hell, control territory across the various levels. They're not guaranteed to own a full level of Hell, unless they can conquor it from the others, and hold it. Souls are pretty much a static resource of the land. Capture the land, you get the souls who are on the land being cleansed of their sin. Once you have them, you can move them around, cleanse them of sin (i.e. - gain DRP from them), or whatever. Any new souls that arrive in Hell will be sent to their designated levels, and the owners of that land will gain new souls. If two people share a level, I'll split the souls between them. The math will be secret, so don't bother asking. There's nothing that says you can't move your souls to a different level, or choose not to inflict torture on them (though, then you'd gain no power from them).

So far, I'm leaning towards souls being basically indestructible. You gain power by stripping the sin from a soul... the sin is what got the soul sent down here, and the sin is what feeds you. Once a soul is stripped of all its sins, it will rise up to Heaven. (In this, I'm merging Dante's Hell and Purgatory into a single function... damnation is NOT eternal, though it can take a long time to be cleansed, depending on the amount of sin.) Though you are Princes of Hell, you don't know everything about the place. You don't know why different souls are sent to different levels, or why different punishments are meted out to them.

I like the idea that the game starts out just as Christ leaves Hell. Not that He had any sin to be stripped from Him, but His being there and being punished caused a change. There was now something of the divine in Hell, and this is what caused various demons to become empowered. Each of you somehow acquired some glimmer of this divinity, and it has raised you up above the common ranks of demons. You, unlike most of your peers, now possess something akin to free will. You are no longer limited to simply performing your functions, of giving out some form of punishment or other. And you discover that the suffering of normal souls is nothing compared to that of Christ, it will feed you ever so slightly. If you can do it enough, you can amass great strength. And you find that you enjoy this process.

There are some beings in Hell who are neither souls being cleansed, nor demons to do the cleansing. The Minotaur, the Furies, and Medusa are all specifically listed as being there (usually as guards for various levels). These will be NPCs. Additional NPCs also exist, if you can discover them. You may form alliances, or feuds with them, or ignore them entirely.

And, just as a reminder... while I'm drawing on Dante for inspiration, just because it's in his work doesn't guarantee that its canonical for the game. I'm also drawing heavily on Neil Gaiman's views of Hell from the Sandman comics (and Mike Carey's expansion in the Lucifer comic series).

[sgt.null]

i am willing to try - have not done it before - so as long as i can get explanations on the way.

my roto baseball i s2nd from last - hoping that is not an omen.

[Fist and Faith]

You say we gain power by inflicting torture on a soul.
You say we gain power by stripping the sin from a soul.


Also. An incoming soul automatically goes to a specific level, and gets a specific punishment. These systems - presumably, guides to take the soul to the appropriate level, torturers of whatever type - are in place. Possibly they've been in place for time out of memory. Now several beings, the Princes, gain some degree of power and understanding.


Right so far?

[sgt.null]

but i thought each person devises their own torment?

are people that limited in imagination - the have commenly themed damnations?

[Gedeminas]

but i thought each person devises their own torment?

are people that limited in imagination - the have commenly themed damnations?

Look at the descriptions of the layers. It's based on Dante's Inferno, where there were common themes to the punishments.

[Goatkiller666]

I'm answering these topics out of order, because something I say to sgt.null actuall then leads into something I say to Fist.

but i thought each person devises their own torment?

are people that limited in imagination - the have commenly themed damnations?

You're thinking of "What Dreams May Come"... also might be a basis for themes here. And, nobody has explained WHY torment frees a soul from sin... perhaps the fires literally remove the sin from a person, but only one kind of sin... and intense cold works on other types of sin. Or, maybe the type of torment doesn't matter, and we've always been doing this because someone made an arbitrary decision back in the day, and we just never questioned it. Or, perhaps you're really using literal fire to cause pain, because you know the person BELIEVES that fire will strip away his sin. And all it realy takes is convincing a person to release their sins. (This is more like "Jacob's Ladder", I think.)

There's probably some value to looking over the souls in Hell... one might be able to deduce something, based on the number of pious people who end up there anyway... perhaps one can relinquish one's sin before coming to Hell. Perhaps this is through literally accepting Jesus as your savior, so that his torment will have already paid for (released) your sin from you. Or maybe just firmly believing that you've done nothing wrong is enough... so count the number of psychopaths, who truly cannot tell that bad stuff is bad. Maybe a truly bad person is tormented, and no sin rises up from her... this could lend evidence to the idea that only certain types of torment work on certain types of sin... or it could support that the person truly believes that she is unworthy of Heaven, and so never releases her sin, no matter how much you torment her.

You say we gain power by inflicting torture on a soul.
You say we gain power by stripping the sin from a soul.

Both are correct, as one statement: torture will strip sin from a soul, and you gain power from that sin.

Also. An incoming soul automatically goes to a specific level, and gets a specific punishment. These systems - presumably, guides to take the soul to the appropriate level, torturers of whatever type - are in place. Possibly they've been in place for time out of memory. Now several beings, the Princes, gain some degree of power and understanding.

So... I kind of like the idea of the Princes of Hell not knowing all the rules... at least until they get figured out. But, what you know (and I've just settled on this right now...) that souls arrive in Limbo, and there's some guy there (not a fallen angel, maybe a demon, he's an NPC) who sorts the souls into where they should go. He sends them to those levels.

So far, it's always worked. The souls just go where they're supposed to go. (Maybe he's got a group of demons who just shuttle people around?)

But that was before the White God ("Christ", some other power... who knows?) came through and left some of his power around. All of you Princes are thinking for yourselves... you're changing things, every turn. So any statement I make about how things work... you cannot be sure, until you go poke at it, if that's because things MUST be that way, or simply because things just were that way and it worked smoothly until now. Clearly, somebody set things up originally. All of the demons remember their duties... they remember applying their own flavors of torture to various souls. They know that the souls would eventually become cleaned, and fly up out of here. Nobody knows why, or how it started. Then things changed... some of you started having free will, and making choice... once there was difference in the place, memories of those differences mattered.

So, go out and explore your world. Question what must be, in case it only happens to be that way instead of another way. That's really just my way of saying that I don't want to limit people's creativity by making hard and fast rules. Interesting or creative ideas will be rewarded, though I'd appreciate it if people could take the approach of saying "<this> is how something is... we found that it is this way because of <this reason>. Based on <this reason>, we realized that we could change <this> to be like <that>, and gain <some benefit>."

• Example: Gravity pulls us all downwards. But notice that cleansed souls fly upwards. Our studies have found that this is because Heaven a place of such purity, it exerts a force that literally repells sin. Souls bearing sin will be pushed away from Heaven, until that sin is removed from them. Without the sin, the souls are free to approach Heaven. Hell is a place of sin, filled with sinner... therefore, we will all be pushed by the weight of Heaven towards the ground (which is "down"). Even objects in Hell bear the taint of sin, so they are likewise repulsed. Notice that even smoke rises... burning an object frees it of that sin, and makes an immaterial object, which you can't really see well (clean souls are also hard to see), and that hard-to see object will float upwards... that's smoke. Souls with the most sin end up at the lower levels, too...

Anyway, that's just an example of taking basic stuff we know (gravity pulls downwards; sin-free souls fly upwards) inventing some kind of weird relationship around them, and then extrapolating what else might be true. And we'll even say that the above is canonical.

Hopefully, that won't turn into Calvinball, where everyone starts making weird rules that favor themselves, or thay in other ways break rationality. I sort of debate if I want to get final approval on stuff before it's official... 'cause that means you'd each need to bounce ideas off me before you could submit a turn with power dedicated to something. That seems needlessly tedious for everyone involved. On the other hand, I envision someone coming up with some weird loophole thing, that totally unbalances the game, and then I have to rewind time, etc... Also, what happens if two people come up with mutually exclusive ideas on the same turn?

Based on my examples for sgt.null, I guess I should just go with the premise that, as the GM, this is my world, based on my vision. So, to some extent, I need to decide on some of this stuff, even if I don't necessarily tell you right away. So, it's up to you to explore which of those options (or maybe some other choice) is real... do things to figure it out, then act on what you know.

On the other hand, I saw this bit of awesome spontaneous creation between Syl and Fist. And I don't want to lock stuff down so much that others can't contribute to it.

So, opinions on how to handle that? Am I just overthinking stuff?

[sgt.null]

i maintain that if there is a way in - there must be a way out. some flaw in the design.

if it were perfect it would be heaven.

so i guess one can not escape heaven? that creates questions.

[Gedeminas]

i maintain that if there is a way in - there must be a way out. some flaw in the design.

Sure! Follow the clean souls, end up in heaven, and be burned to death by the contradiction between a demon's "evil" and the purity of heaven!

if it were perfect it would be heaven.

so i guess one can not escape heaven? that creates questions.

...
...
...Yes, it does...

[Fist and Faith]

You say we gain power by inflicting torture on a soul.
You say we gain power by stripping the sin from a soul.

Both are correct, as one statement: torture will strip sin from a soul, and you gain power from that sin.

OOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I gotcha!

[Zxkuqyb]

i maintain that if there is a way in - there must be a way out. some flaw in the design.

if it were perfect it would be heaven.

so i guess one can not escape heaven? that creates questions.

By definition of the Judeo-Christian belief in Heaven, it's perfection, bliss, and all sorts of happy stuff. Having gotten to that point, you would not want to leave. Wanting to leave would undermine the idea that "all Christian want to go to Heaven", if anything was wrong in said place, it would undermine God's infallibility.

So it's perfect, you'll love it there. Trust us. No refunds.

[sgt.null]

i was talking this with week with an inmate about free will and if it exists in heaven.

the crux was that we had two different views of heaven and that if God loves us would we not be happy in heaven.

i contended that yes we are to be happy and do as we wanted. including being married, having sex and living a perfect life according to what made us happy.

he contends that we are stripped of corperal form and we spend all day bathing in God's perfect light.

i am not sure how being enslaved to another's vision would make us happy and why God would need that.

the i/m's view of heaven disturbs me.

[Menolly]

*not to take this game thread and change it in to a Close topic, but*

he contends that we are stripped of corperal form and we spend all day bathing in God's perfect light.

I agree more with the inmate. Not quite the same as where I'm at in regards to an afterlife, but definitely more in sync with my views than the afterlife being a "human happy land."

[sgt.null]

but God wants us to be happy forever? what fun is there floating about with nothing to do?

is that what i would be fighting to get out of hell ofr - or am i trying to get back to the land of the living?>

[Goatkiller666]

Let me start with the game's views on this entire topic, since this is GT.

Nobody knows didly about Heaven. The fallen angels might, but they're not talking. You might want to go ask them.

... some stuff about actual religion, and not my game...

I had an interesting conversation with some Jehovah's Witnesses one time. Which by no means makes me an expert on the nuances of their sect, and really... the ones who go walking around knocking on your door aren't necessarily experts themselves... so... there may be flaws in this story. But, their view was that when they get to heaven, not only will they have nothing to do, but they will enjoy having nothing to do. In fact, all of the wants / desires / urges we have now are derived from our bodies, which has a level of corruption included in it. Hormones, limited perspective, etc... all these things cause us to want / not want various things. In Heaven, not only our bodies change, but most everything about us. We lose all that reliance on flesh / hormones / material objects. Our perceptions will change, so that we can see more of (but not all of, maybe?) the bigger picture.

But more importantly, you'll be RIGHT THERE WITH GOD. Simply being in His presence will be awesome and glorious. You might want to recall that the original meaning of the word 'ecstasy' was 'achieving one-ness with God'... originally reserved for when one was praying, or otherwise having a deep religious experience. One assumes that being actually in Heaven would be even more like that. Forever.

So, in that light, I imagine that Heaven would be something like the ultimate heroin high, only infinitely better, infinitely long, and without any of the drawbacks. 'Cause really, in spite of all the problems with taking heroin, the actual experience of being high on the stuff is amazing... so much so that lots and lots of people are willing to give up every other thing they find important in order to go chase it. If heroin never wore off, you couldn't be hurt or die from it, and nobody looked down on you for taking it... then it's okay to just bask in the awesome. That's heaven.

And just to make her day, I'll point out that Menolly might have a better view on things than the rest of us. We look at Heaven as just our souls, and our personalities, going somewhere else. She, on the other hand, is thinking of transcendence... Joining with the creator (or perhaps returning to / rejoining), instead of "going to stand next to". I suspect that our merely four dimensional paradigm simply cannot properly deal with all of the ways that Heaven is different from here (or Hell). And those differences are probably the root of our general inability to be happy where / when we are...

Still, Dante's view of the first level of Hell was probably where most of us Athiests / Agnostics would like to go. It's still Hell, so it means that God isn't there. But those souls, with their limited perspective, enjoy human centered stuff. And they're in Limbo, forever, being humans. They're missing out on the Ecstasy, but they don't mind, 'cause they don't realize just how awesome that is. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

[sgt.null]

goatkiller - is it ok that we discuss these things here? if not that is ok.

if it is ok - the great thing about a morphine high is that compared to normal life it is better - if short.

but if you were high all the time what would be better than that? would you just want to maintain that?

[Menolly]

And just to make her day, I'll point out that Menolly might have a better view on things than the rest of us. We look at Heaven as just our souls, and our personalities, going somewhere else. She, on the other hand, is thinking of transcendence... Joining with the creator (or perhaps returning to / rejoining), instead of "going to stand next to". I suspect that our merely four dimensional paradigm simply cannot properly deal with all of the ways that Heaven is different from here (or Hell). And those differences are probably the root of our general inability to be happy where / when we are...

Wow, someone (other than SD) has been reading my panentheism GwYtK posts on Facebook and understands what I am trying to say? Coolness!!

To add briefly to that, I wish to point out that in my personal belief, there is no heaven nor hell. We all return to the same source. One which we have never left, actually. One which we have merely forgotten and some seek throughout their various experiences when forgetfulness is upon them.