Devilish Culture

Having completed the work I mean to do on the background of demons, I am still cleaning up the background of devils.  This has been a long, hard fight but I am getting it under control.  Thankfully, I don't have to do any background like this again until I get to giants.  And I will probably put monster making on a shelf long before then.  If nothing else, some readers are learning some interesting things about the profound depths of human mythology.

So, the culture of devils.

Devils are beings from the Lower Planes of Existence, dwelling almost exclusively in the planes of Hades and Hell, who serve the purpose of torturing the malevolent dead as a means of cleansing the soul. This has gained them the reputation for being disturbingly malevolent themselves, and this is quite a common description for most of the individuals, particularly among ...

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This is Enough Demons for Now

Upon the subject of demons, I have been putting together some content on the wiki outlining my structure of these monsters.

Starting with the creature itself, there is the Demon page.  This concentrates on what a demon can do, with a quick introduction and then a discussion of their abilities.  Wanting to give them powers closer to those I have read about in many an ancient text, I made their most important power the ability to possess others ~ and not once a day and not by the use of a magic jar spell.  Certainly, very unpleasant, but I insist that monsters should not be weakened just because it will make players uncomfortable.

And this is why I've gotten rid of several things that the books tried to sell as "fun" but are, in fact, imposed handicaps on what should be a terrifying monster.  I just don't understand.  If the beholder does not have a special "amulet" that enables the beholder to be controlled just because the players have gotten a hold of it, why should a particular demon?  If mind flayers and sphinxes don't have to worry about people knowing their names, why should a demon.

I understand that these things are supposed to be clever and adventure making, but it is really crappy, trope-driven adventure making, the sort of awful cliche that we're always seeing in TV supernatural series so bad writers can explain how a bunch of "good ol' boy" humans can get an edge on something that ought to be able to kill them outright.  They're cheap, cheesy off-switches for monsters and they are inexcusably stupid.

I just don't see that characters should be able to kill demons at all; but I don't have an experience system that is based on killing anything, so it works out for me.  At best, I expect a party to fight one off long enough to get it to teleport somewhere else ... which, let's admit it, is good enough.

Oh, and I also made a page on Demonic culture.

I have been playing with this concept that's based on arguments I've made in the past that the Gods are only as powerful as the belief that people have in them.  I'm making up my mind to go one step beyond this ~ that the gods don't exist at all until they are invented by creatures on the prime material plane.  This is what I was getting at with the Gehenna story.

It is always presumed that the gods must be much, much older than we are ~ but why?  We invented the gods, didn't we?  How does that necessarily change the freedom with which the gods act, why does it matter when they came into existence?

We conceive of things all the time that then get way out of our control.  It's easy to imagine that if our thoughts were able to create a real god Zeus, that's going to get out of hand very quickly ~ particularly if we don't know our thoughts created him.  We're just going to assume that he's been there all along and that we've "discovered" him.

There is a story that Zeus created the goddess of wisdom, Athena, directly from his head; "born from the head" will turn up the story if you search it on google.  I've decided to call the process of giving birth to gods (and therefore to places within the outer planes) as "Thoughts Made Manifest." This is, without a doubt, the scariest idea that can be imagined, if we apply it to the actual creation of things simply because we invent them.  But some readers will remember the old Star Trek episode that played havoc with the party on account of that.

I'm not saying that one character's thoughts will suddenly produce a god.  That is not enough belief.  But a thousand characters?  Ten thousand characters?  At some point, there is a tipping point reached and the belief becomes real.  And this is the premise I intend to build my entire god-based universe upon.

Anyway, I hope the demon content is fun.

A Mythology Post

Okay, this was sort of fun.  I thought I'd take a shot at making a few pages for the wiki about "Mythology" ~ get a feel for what those pages would look like or how the content would be designed.  It needs a map, but there aren't any ready at hand that would fit the content I'm designing.  The reader may note, however, that I am trying to keep with the spirit of the actual mythological context, just sprinkled throughout with transitional stuff designed to make it work together and within my D&D game.

This should be somewhat chilling.

Gehenna

A part of the Lower Planes of Existence, a place of punishment, created by the sacrifice of thousands of children in the Valley of Gehinnom outside of Jerusalem, beginning some ten thousand years ago. As the children died upon burning pyres and began to enter the underworld, then no more than a place of dust, a shelf of icy rock was made manifest against the side of a mountain, amidst a great ocean, under an open sky, and there the dead children were left to wait, their feet frozen into a cake of ice that stretched out into the water. But this place had no name, not as yet.

Within the second millenia BC, the mountain above Gehenna began to ...

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A Geography of the Underworld

Let us begin a further discourse on the underworld with two premises, both of which are based on the very believable argument that theologians that are part of our own Earth have no idea what they are talking about, as they have never actually been to any of the places about which they pretend to be expert.

The first premise being, that existence after death is not a stagnant and calcified experience: that, from moment to moment, events occur which provide opportunity for the creation of narratives and change.

And the second premise being that the motivations of demons and devils are not, in fact, known or understood, except by those who have had the opportunity to die and experience these beings as they function.

From this starting point, we can see the opportunity to create a campaign that begins with the death of the characters, moves through a set, planned adventure that is based around the culture of demons and devils, that in turn allows the characters to have ambitions of some kind that can be pursued.  We do not need to be bogged down by limitations such as, the only reason for the existence of a devil is to torture dead beings.  Nor that a demon's conversation is all pain pain pain all the time.  We can surmise that these creatures, too, have aspirations, goals, ideals, dreams ... and in turn, let downs, disappointments, failures, despair and so on.

After all, Earth's theology was designed to scare the shit out of people to ensure obedience; it was not based on observation and experimentation.

What matters, however, is that we want to retain most of the scenes as proposed by Dante and other writers ~ hordes of the dead pushing down to the river, where they wait to be taken, across, the dead floating in pools of acid or fiery oil, the horrific lines of the dead being whipped down winding paths over precipices by laughing, gleeful devils ... all that has to stay because all that is compelling and distinctive of a world that is definitely not the prime material plane.  All I am saying is that while being boiled alive, there should be some sequence of options available that makes it possible to be bumped out of the pit and into some other kind of frying pan, which in turn provides an opportunity to get into the line where the next punishment provides some opportunity for redemption ... of a kind.  Let's say, an opportunity for moving up in the world.

Now, getting down to the structural framework of the underworld.  Let me say up front ~ if you haven't taken the time to read Dante, this might be hard to follow.  I'll try to give a brief synopsis of the bits that I need explained.

In the Canto III of the Inferno, Dante borrows heavily from the imagery of the Greek Hades.  The river that Charon, a Greek figure, takes you the sinner across is the Acheron, again from the Greek.  The dead wait on the shore, as they do in Hades.  There's no Cerberus on the other side, or Greek monsters, but within the 1st Hell (canto IV), that Dante names Limbo, there are many intellectuals, mostly Greeks and Romans, who were good men who never wished malevolence on anyone, but because they could not know of God or believe in him, they're doomed to this plane.  Mostly, they sit about and wait.  For what is not made clear.

Taking up the problem I mentioned two posts ago, the "all myths are true" issue as Tim calls it, part of the practical solution is to recognize that we as a people tend to call the same thing by more than one name.  I think it is reasonable, then, to establish that Limbo and Hades are fundamentally the same place.  Since we have no alignment straightjacket to adhere to, we don't need an arbitrary plane to exist between Pandemonium and Gladsheim.  We have a geographical placement for Limbo in Hell, and therefore Hades is folded into Hell as well.  Hades is simply the Greek name for the planes that they knew about.

We could argue that "Hell" was an extension of Hades that was conjured into existence by the gained beliefs of millions of Christians as their numbers swelled in the 4th century.  I have, in the past, argued that "belief" fuels the powers of Gods; perhaps that, in turn, fuels the creation of physical spaces.  As the Gods grow more powerful, they naturally start creating homes: and as Christianity expanded to be much bigger than the comparatively small number of Greek believers in their gods, the former plane became crowded and needful of renovation.  Hell could have begun as an add-on of a level or two, then the expansion of eight new levels to comprehend the sudden complexity of what places needed to be made for which dead.  Just a thought.

As an aside, I had considered making a map to add to this post ~ but I must confess, I haven't the energy or the wherewithal, at least not now.  Perhaps another day, when I will add it to the wiki.  Right now I just want this straightened out in my mind so I can get back to describing demons and devils.

Gehenna, then, is the Jewish destination of the wicked ~ and apart from many arguments about Gehenna referring to real places attached to the Holy Land, the part that matters to me is the rabbinical tradition that those condemned to Gehenna are made to spend no more time there than the period of one year (the Jews clearly being more merciful to bad people than the Christians).  This, to me, sounds more like Purgatory ~ and that works for me, because the original map of the outer planes never did include a Purgatory in their conjurings.

Unfortunately, Gehenna cannot be reconciled with Dante's Purgatory as easily ~ and I like the Purgatorio.  When Dante arrives in Purgatory, he and Virgil find themselves on a beach next to a big ocean, where occasionally boats come along and drop off the dead.  These dead step off the boats singing about the escape from Egypt-land, so that at least gives us a strong relationship to Jewish mythology. We can, from there, relieve Gehenna of its flames and equate it to this initial part of Purgatory.

Dante calls it ante-Purgatory, the three levels before Purgatory, where the excommunicated who waited until the very last moment of their lives to repent are waiting on the arrivals beach.  We can always argue that the sun is hot, sort of like burning, but that's not confirmed by Dante.  Oh well. It gives us a place for Gehenna, and we can always say that Dante was misinformed.  The main thing is that the repentant bad people have a zone between Hell/Hades and Purgatory where they can go and spend a year (or longer), giving us a bit more structure.

The Abyss is easier.  It, too, is a Jewish legend, perceived as a part of Gehenna, beneath the ocean and sealed.  It is the seat of the evil spirits, that being demons.  It is equated with Sheol, also a very deep pit, repeatedly mentioned in the Bible and likely derived from an Assyro-Babylonian word, "Shu'alu", where in that culture is the place where the dead are cited or bidden. We can assume, then, that there are a lot of different names for this same place.  We can imagine that the ocean that this Abyss is under is the same that the beach in ante-Purgatory/Gehenna looks out over, that the boats cross.

Perhaps souls that do not properly get off the beach feel compelled to dive into the sea and thus disappear forever, into the Abyss.  Perhaps the arrival at Purgatory isn't a guarantee of eventual redemption.  The boundary might be fuzzier than we imagine, and that actions that are taken after death have influence on where we go, as well.

Now, Tartarus is also an abyss.  It is where the monsters go, where the bad gods go (the Titans and such), it is the primordial place where the Greek mythology of the present imprisoned the mythological ideas of the past.  Tartarus is, therefore, old, much older than any of the other places in the underworld ~ old enough for Cthulhu, perhaps, and gods older than Kronos and Uranos before him.

Geographically, Tartarus is viewed as "below Hades" ... which makes a connection between it and the rest of our model, as Hades is the top of Hell.  I'll go one further and argue that Tartarus is the Abyss ~ one and the same, just as the Abyss is Sheol and Shu'alu. This gives us a passage from Hades/Hell into Tartarus/the Abyss and a passage from Gehenna to same.  This might be a passage out or a passage in.

We might imagine our dead party, arriving at the Acheron, told to find their way into Hades, to avoid the deeper Hell, find the terrifying passage into the Abyss, avoid the much older passages into Tartarus under the Abyss, in order to find their way out of the Abyss and onto the beach of Gehenna, where my some means the might climb up the mountain of Purgatory and, perhaps, find a way into life? Perhaps there is a passage from the top of Purgatory across Eden into the Prime Material, before moving onto Paradise.  Only the DM would know.

This, then, is enough for now.  I'll just add that I feel that demons and devils are, in fact, divine beings.  That some may be twisted, as Ozymandias suggests ~ but then again, some may not. Some might be disposed to help a party trying to find the passageway out of Hades or out of the Abyss. Though telling them apart from the "helpful" demons who are directing the party down the wrong passageway ... that might be difficult.

Oops, forgot Pandemonium.  Well, another time.

Proposing the Underworld

As I have rolled forward working on monsters, I have tried to make their interrelations with the world, and frankly the party trying to kill them, a little more practical.  This has included things like patterns of attack, such as whether or not the monster focuses its weapons on one target or on many, or how long the monster can be expected to remain in the fight.

I have also, now and then, put a few other features in, such as adding a generator for hit points and stats, or detailing the exact way that a monster's poison works, updating the poison list for those poisons that might be salvaged after the kill.  Steadily, I have made my way through strictly the original monster manual to the end of the C's (I'll go back and add other monsters from other books later) ~ and this has brought me to the letter D:  demons.

Looking over the general description that Gygax wrote 40 years ago, that was meant to apply to all demons, I recognized at once that there's very little in the description that defines what a demon is. As part of the description of the manes demon, it reads, "Those dead which go to the 666 layers of the demonic abyss become manes."  Which dead?  What is it about these dead that separate them from dead that go elsewhere?  And what of the other, more powerful demons (and the devils also). What makes a demon?

We can return to John Milton and apply the mythology that devils, and perhaps demons as well, are angels that have been cast out of heaven.  This, however, only postpones the question, what makes an angel?  Milton did not have to worry about this; he didn't have to deal with players who might want to actually make a demon or a devil, or be put in a situation where they have to stop such an event.  Milton had it easy.

So I am thinking about that, about what makes a demon, and what separates demons from devils, from a zoologist's perspective, when I realized that before I can even try to answer that question, I have to first define what distinguishes the Abyss from Hell, Gehenna, Tartarus and Hades ... not to mention other lower planes of existence not highlighted by the original alignment chart.

Now, let's be clear.  I don't use alignment.  For my game, "evil" is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, term.  To some degree, everything and everyone of rational intelligence is in some part evil, just as all rational things are in some part good.  Evil is a choice, not a character trait ~ and to be specific, the choice is to be malevolent, which derives from the Latin meaning to "wish badness," most likely upon others and upon the world.

This is why deadly spiders are not evil or malevolent; they do not actively wish anything; they merely need to eat or lay their eggs and the poison they carry is an unknowing means to that end.  The spider does not wish you harm; it does not know there is a "you" at all.

If I'm going to craft the lower planes, then, it follows that their geographic relationship has nothing to do with having law or chaos as a framework.  "Law" is just as much a choice as malevolence.  All things that have authority have law; and all attempts at law fail to root out the last vestiges of chaos. Unless Hell features a perfectly ordered society in which all persons in it move in lockstep, without randomness or uncertainty in a completely known universe, there will be chaos there ~ and if you as DM perceive that this might just be exactly what Hell ought to be, to fit your prescriptive framework, well, how boring.  I wouldn't want to adventure in your Hell.  Where's the wiggle room?

To remain consistent with that rigid, playable framework that is required for a good game, the lower planes must be made flesh from some other sourcework than those applying to D&D alignment ... and thankfully, we have only 2,800 years of general theological supposition to consider.

Let us not forget that Hell, the Abyss, Gehenna, Tartarus and Hades all exist in an academic sense well outside the realm of role-playing games, engendering discussion that is regularly pursued by people other than role-gamers.  When I think to figure out what these things truly are ~ and I must admit, I've never really sat down and given it much thought before today ~ I want to go to the source.  To the "real" work that has been done.

There is an obvious problem.  These things come from different cultures, who all created various destinations to which the dead to travel.  Basically, the same dead.  There was no distinction made within these cultures that only a certain kind of dead would go to such-and-such a place ... so we must either pick a specific place for all the dead to go (perhaps to be redistributed later, for some reason) or create some factor that defines which dead go to which place, and why.  An easy, obvious solution would be to argue that all the Greek dead go here, and all the Christian dead go there, the Elvish dead and the Orcish dead go elsewhere, but to my mind if there really were these planes, why would they care what belief system these beings on Earth had?  Is a demon prejudiced?  Does a demon send you back if you're not the victim expected?

Not to my mind.  And in fact, I have little interest in any distinction that would regulate which dead go to which lower plane based upon what backgrounds they had or how awful they were.  We already have such a system established for Hell and Hell alone, written by Dante, and I'm not going to denude certain levels of Hell so that I can outsource murderers or blasphemers to another plane of existence just to be sure the caves there don't go empty.  No, I just don't see it that way.

To my mind, it makes no nevermind what carcass you possessed in the prime material ~ you're dead now and it is your essence, not your body, that is burning in the eternal pit of flame; so expect to be sitting in that pit next to an orc, a halfling and a lizard man, because that is just how it goes.

Perhaps I'm ruined by Dante.  Hell must be, for me, the arrival gate.  Abandon all Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.  If there is some reason why the other planes are populated by the dead, it is because of what happened after those dead arrived in Hell.  Basically, to my mind, the other planes are parts of Hell, where the dead are selectively routed after it is discovered that they have ... something.  Skills?  The right attitude?  They've been here this long so they're ready to be moved down?  Perhaps, in the true Mengelenian sense, there are devils and demons moving through the suffering hordes, selecting this one for experimentation, to create a better beast, to divide and multiply into a more horrific atrocity, and there are specific places where that happens.

If I can establish a movement of the dead, a steady migration out of the planes of Hell and into other planes, where lines of misery can be identified as the swirl of dead are marched into deeper and deeper misery, then I can perhaps figure out the jobs that these demons and devils do ... and ultimately, how they were designed by higher powers in order to do those jobs.  From there, it follows that this provides a personality for individual demons and devils that really, really, really doesn't exist in the books, a motivation, that can in turn explain just why these three demons are found standing on this dark streetcorner in the middle of the night when a player character walks by.

I'll be working on this for a while, playing with it, writing a draft on the blog and eventually a final layout on the wiki.