godz without limitz

You have a problem to solve and two ways to solve it.

The first way makes use of a circle of friends. You need to think of all the people you know who you could possibly call for help. Imagine the qualities and personalities of everyone close to you. Find the person whose nature makes them best suited to the task. Then call them and ask.

The second way involves calling a professional. Firstly, classify the task by its nature. Discover a profession that deals with the problem you have. Call an effective member of that profession. Prepare to make a transaction.

I think about gods like this. One one side rank the gods described by Homer and on the other stand the gods of Rome and the made-up gods of D&D.

Homer* does not describe gods of war or gods of love or of wisdom or of any other thing. He names them by what they do and how they act, not by their fucking job description. The necessary repetitive poetics of an orally-concieved story do not describe Athena as 'Goddess of Wisdom'. They call her grey-eyed Athena, or bright-eyed Athena, depending on how you translate it.

Homer gives us gods as people first, positions second. Athena does not represent calm, order, cunning, civilisation or craft. These qualities she has, calm, ordered, cunning, civilised and crafty.

Over the Greek period the gods decay somewhat. Polybius writes of the rise of Rome. He talks about Tyche in different ways. Later translators find themselves confused by his views on the role of fortune. Polybius does not recognise their confusion. He writes about a person and about a force. Tyche does the things that a person does. Sometimes present, sometimes not. This makes for bad and ill-defined history. But more truth.

By the Roman period the gods have been fully subdued to human will. No longer a separate self-contradictory relationship outside ourselves that we must struggle to understand. Ares, the thug and a terrifying violent killer to whom few prayed. The Romans made him Mars, potent, stable, and a firm defender of the state. No longer a gleeful anarchic Hobbsian.

The gods have jobs and roles. The job before the person every time. Like the second example above, they become plumbers we call when we need something done. Chained by the thoughts that called them to our mind. Mars cannot do certain things because they don't fit the role. But Ares has nothing he cannot do. He has no role to fill, Ares exists.

This describes why my insane made-up god who alternately hunts and flees through mazes eating ghosts and being chased by them cannot be called the god of mazes. I named ManPac 'Eater Of Ghosts' or 'He Who Flees'. His commands and prescriptions will never make clear rational sense. Because he embodies as a huge yellow ball of hunger fear and rage charging through an endless labyrinth, which, when escaped from, exits into another, more difficult labyrinth.

But they will be just on the edge of making sense, like an optical illusion just before it resolves, I will try to keep him just there, like the gods of Homer. Something larger, outside ourselves.

I pilot a person I created, who believes fervently in a supernatural being that I also created, in a world I did not create. Occasionally the supernatural being gives insane random answers to the person, who then has to make sense of them. I have to make sense of them both. For some reason this interests me.

*I describe the following theory from memory only and hold firmly and glum-handed the likelihood that I lock myself in utter wrongness.

Acting Dumb

I played someone more stupid than me in a game before he died. It took hard work and I enjoyed it.

Damodar worked on a slik farm and escaped to become an adventurer. He had intelligence of seven and wisdom of six. I like to think of my intelligence as twelve or thirteen, but apparently everyone does this so it's more likely I have an INT of ten, or, possibly eleven.

He didn't look like this, but this is how he would have thought of himself:-

Every time Damodar had a problem I had to think about how to solve it. I could never solve his problems like I solve my own. If I did things he couldn't do then the character wouldn't work.

We have lots of ways to think about someone less capable than ourselves. People like to talk and argue about this a lot. Very few of those ways involve you creating those people from random numbers and parts of yourself and then taking responsibility for both their survival and the integrity of thier personality. Except posibly becoming a parent.

I knew when bad things happened and Damodar didn't. I knew when people lied to him and he did not. I did not find it frustrating, but powerful and energising, my mind worked constantly. I had to protect him with the only tools I had. The ones inside his character.

He asked a LOT of direct questions, because he didn't know much. (I never do this, I remain silent.) People usually answered because he seemed obviously stupid and innocent. He happily accepted the social superiority of his co-adventurers. (You won't see me do this.) That made them happy and made him popular. I interpreted his low WIS as courage so he became impetuous.

I found him nicer than me. And a better human than most of my characters. And probably a better person than me. Perhaps that only happened because of the action, inside my mind, of protecting him.

Damodar died defending his friends. My next character rolled up as an angry eunach. I put most of my creative energy into his insane god.

In Dogs In The Vinyard I play a highly intelligent, fundementalist teenage girl.

click for link

With Basemeth most of the creative tension comes from her 19^th century pseudo-christian morality and my 21^st century vague liberalism. Again we must solve problems together. She thinks faster and deeper than I can. I have more time to think of her responses so she acts in the upper range of my own capabilities. But we have different perspectives on the world.

Like the same scene viewed from different points, we share only certain ground. When events moves out of this ground one of us will become upset. Since we live in the same person, this ruins things for both of us. But if I let her collapse into a sock-puppet for my own values then she dies. So we must work together on remaining creatively different.

Every character I play feels like a powerful living exchange between me and this created thing. A waterfall looping like a lemniscate through dual poles. I never know which parts of me will surface and crystalize. Like meeting a new person every time. 

I like randomness in character generation.

The body you just woke up in..

Coming back from the dead does not work with the ethos of LOTFP.

However, if you work directly for an evil Liche who has laughingly boasted of cheating death and if your twitchy and terrified manservant can drag your ruined corpse to the Liche's tower, then you can do this:-

FIRST – You wake up with your own eyes looking at you. Passirk has taken them. He liked the look of them.

SECOND – You now live in someone else’s body. You can keep your memories, personality, XP, class levels and skill points. BUT..

THIRD - Re-roll everything else. ALL stats and Hit Points*. AND..

FOURTH – Gender. Roll a dice. Odds male, evens female. Unless you find that gender essentialist, in which case do it the other way. round.

FIFTH – Your are now 10+ 5d20 years old.

SIXTH – Something has gone a bit weird with this body. Roll on this table to find out what.

(The table was made by mattgusta, Nathan Ryder and myself.)

SEVENTH – your soul is now a random object, the first thing Passarisk pulled off the shelf. If you lose it, you die. If you break it, you die. If it gets damaged, it will damage your stats. This utterly normal object gives no magical benefit in any way. It never shows up as magical to any examination.

*'But what about intelligence and wisdom and even dexterity being functions of thought and training as much as'.... blahblahblah all or nothing, live or die CHOOSE.

It seems a little frustrating

This is in answer to a comment in the last post by mattgusta. It consists mainly of links and rambling, only tangentally about RPG's

"What's your interest in E-Prime?"

Well.. the idea grew in a series of connections.

I found an article on E-Prime via a tumblr called Daily Idioms, Annotated. (Which you should avoid if you fear procrastination.) That linked up with something I read a while ago and blogged about here. (The last half in particular about the lack of use of 'is' in greek drama, and everything from there to 'ceaseless flow'.

I suspect all that stuff hid inside my mind because I have a few half-finished projects scattered around written in iambic pentameter. One a play, the other, a choose-your-own-adventure story for smartphones with each choice a block of verse. Writing those made me obsessed with something, something to do with describing the world as a series of relations between living things always acting on each other, presenting choices as dynamic living options. That vague but powerful feeling leapt into one kind of form when I read Havelocks book on literacy and changed again when I read about E-Prime.

I go on for a loooong time about orality here.

It seemed interesting, that I might learn something from doing it. It might make me focus more on my writing, become more direct, less fuzzy. Sometimes just focusing on a kind of grammatical or rhythmic challenge can change the way you write. Even if the challenge has little importance in itself, it gives the left-brain something to worry about and lets the rest of you loose.

The Verbs Of Madness

(I wrote this in E.Prime for reasons even I do not understand.)

Isle of the Unknown presents some problems. 

I need to make a random generator so my players know what their Dark Lord wants them to do.

But the things presented by the Isle and the things that grew through play do not go together well. 

We find each monster alone and in the centre of a ten mile hex, and encounter each Zodiacal Mage in one particualr position. They do not move.

Some clerics have a place.

We find some clerics and lesser mages in a state of movement, but always in the same place for the first time, after that we can find them anywhere.

Lesser NPC's have a town where they live and once found they can move between towns. I don't think it likely the players will find them anywhere else.

High level NPC's lock into particular positions. The story will only find them elsewhere for important reasons. 

I made an elegant and simple chart. The elegant chart did not do what I need it to. I made this ugly chart instead. I tried to use only evil verbs. Below I talk about how it works.

I used a D7 because, in the words of James Raggi 'fuck you, that's why'.

IN A PLACE	1 HEX#	PASSIRISK WANTS YOU TO	1 MINDFUCK	IN ORDER TO	1 MINDFUCK	1 HEX#
			2 KILL		2 KILL
			3 TAKE		3 TAKE
	2 TOWN#		4 STEAL		4 STEAL	2 TOWN#
			5 CORRUPT		5 CORRUPT
			6 TERRORIZE		6 TERRORIZE
	3 OOG		7 DISCOVER		7 DISCOVER	3 OOG
			8 HIDE		8 HIDE
			9 IMPLICATE		9 IMPLICATE
THERE IS A PERSON	4 MAGE		10 SEDUCE/PERSUADE		10 SEDUCE/PERSUADE	4 MAGE
			11 BURN		11 BURN
			12 DESTROY		12 DESTROY
	5 CLERIC		13 BURN		13 BURN	5 CLERIC
			14 MUTILATE		14 MUTILATE
			15 RETREIVE		15 RETREIVE
	6 MONSTER		16 ASSASINATE		16 ASSASINATE	6 MONSTER
			17 CONTROL		17 CONTROL
			18 KIDNAP		18 KIDNAP
	7 NPC		19 MOCK AND SNEER AT		19 MOCK AND SNEER AT	7 NPC
			20 EXPOSE		20 EXPOSE

HEX# Use description, or roll bandits, or add dungeon.
TOWN# Roll district/then profession/then person
OOG# The Capital. Roll Strata/then Mystery/Profession/Person
MAGE# Roll Mage/assign name if neccessary
CLERIC# Random roll/assign name
MONSTER# Roll HD/Roll Monster/Assign name if cool or very big/possibly roll lair, dungeon, caves, ruin.
NPC# use big list of people met so far. 

Roll a d7 and a d20 to find someone/something and what Passirisk wants you to do to them. Choose whatever makes sense. The roll a d7 and d20 again to find out what he intends to achieve by this.

Things needed. Monster Name List. plan of Oog. Master NPC name list.

Questions - Will this get them into enough dungeons? Have I trigger-warining'd myself with too many bad verbs? Can I see some of this shit through? Should I?