The Subjectivity of Intolerance

In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, philosopher Karl Popper wrote about the Paradox of Tolerance. Here is a quick summation of that concept:

I can see where Popper is coming from, and to a certain extent I agree with him. However, the problem with his position that we must be intolerant of intolerance is that there is no scientific test to determine what is or isn't intolerance. While it is easy to say that someone caught in the act of setting a synagogue on fire while wearing a swastika is committing a hate crime, things get a bit muddy if this person is just a regular, non-swastika-wearing person who maybe just likes setting fires, and things become downright troublesome if the arsonist is himself a Jew. The same applies to jokes, books, clothing, and other forms of expression.

In other words, nearly all “intolerance” is subjective and based upon opinion rather than an objective quality which can be detected through impartial, repeatable tests.

So while the concept of “not tolerating intolerance” is noble, in practice it ends up with whomever is the loudest being able to silence and ostracize those with whom they disagree. This results in mob rule where the strong bully and silence the weak, rather than a republic where individual rights are protected against the tyranny of the majority.

In short, intolerance of intolerance is un-American.

... as much as I'd love to leave it there on that mic-drop moment, it would be intellectually dishonest of me to do so. There is a difference between intolerance of ideas and intolerance of violence, and this is where things get uncomfortably muddy even for me. As a friend of mine pointed out, "An idiot spouting Nazi ideology is just an idiot spouting Nazi ideology, and societies tolerate madmen. An influential person who gains a following that uses violence to advance their political power must be countered before they seize power." I can honestly tell you that I would feel threatened and vulnerable if someone held a rally in front of my home while shouting "Death to Erin!", and the moment the leaders started saying things like "Burn the Queer!" I would be ready to start shooting in self-defense.

This admission makes me intensely uncomfortable, because I can't seem to delineate a point where speech ceases to be speech and becomes incitement. Even our legal system lacks an objective and repeatable system for what is and is not allowed, instead using a form of "I'll know it when I see it" called the Brandenburg Test.

As that same friend of mine said, "We tolerate things until they become intolerable." I can't help but agree that yes, that's the way it is, but the very subjectivity of the whole thing bothers me because I like being able to justify my actions (to myself, if nothing else) in clearer terms than "Because I felt like it."

I don't have a solution here. I wish that I did. I'm just pointing out that everything about this is highly subjective, and maybe it would do us all some good if we acknowledged for a moment that maybe what we "know" is actually just our opinion, formed by our objective mind and shaped by our biases.

As Walt Kelly might have had Pogo say, "Ain't none of us objective here nohow."

An Exegesis of "Tourniquet"

Evanescence's Tourniquet is a crucifixional experience in musical form.

By this I mean "When Jesus Christ was dying on the cross, He was in agony, was probably regretting all of His choices, and called out to God asking why He had been forsaken, and this song captures all of that emotional intensity in an incredibly personal way."

[Intro]
The song starts with roughly 20 seconds of instrumental music that sounds like a wind through a foggy forest, and then suddenly there is a blast of guitar and percussion. I cannot help but feel this represents someone whose mind is drifting off, and then is suddenly, shockingly awake. Given what is said in the first verse, it's a pretty good musical metaphor for blood loss followed by panicked wakefulness.

[Verse 1]
I tried to kill the pain
But only brought more
(So much more)
I lay dying
And I'm pouring crimson regret and betrayal
I'm dying, praying, bleeding and screaming
Am I too lost to be saved?
Am I too lost?

This paints an incredibly evocative picture of a woman who has committed suicide by slashing her wrists and, as she lies dying, has a change of heart. She now wants to live, but is too weak to take action to save herself. Her only option is to pray to God and ask to be saved.


[Chorus]
My God, my tourniquet
Return to me salvation
My God, my tourniquet
Return to me salvation

The phrase "My God, my tourniquet" is what convinces me that this is not a song about someone who has died but rather a song about someone who is dying and now desperately wants to live. "God, please staunch my bleeding" is how I read it. "God, please be my tourniquet. God, please save my life. I'm sorry I tried to kill myself. I no longer want to die. I want to live!"


[Verse 2]
Do you remember me?
Lost for so long
Will you be on the other side
Or will you forget me?
I'm dying, praying, bleeding and screaming
Am I too lost to be saved?
Am I too lost?

I too have struggled with feelings of divine rejection and a desire for death, and so this verse hits very close to home for me. "God, I know you and I haven't been on the best of terms lately. I don't know if I rejected you first or not, but I haven't felt your love in a very long time. Do you even care if I die? If I do, will you damn me to hell for suicide? Or will you know that I've been in a lot of pain and in a very dark place for such a long time, and that this seemed like the only way out for me?"

The phrase "Am I too lost to be saved?" is a plaintive cry for both physical and spiritual salvation.


[Chorus]
My God, my tourniquet
Return to me salvation
My God, my tourniquet
Return to me salvation

{Screams: I WANT TO DIE!!!}

What's odd is that every time I listen to this song, I hear "DON'T WANT TO DIE!" instead, and it's gut-wrenchingly heartfelt. But even if you take it at face value it still doesn't damage my interpretation of the song, because there is always that self-destructive voice at the back of our heads who always wants to ruin things, who wonders what it would be like to destroy something irreplaceable or damage a friendship irrevocably.

Or maybe that's just my head? I sure hope not.


[Chorus]
My God, my tourniquet
Return to me salvation
My God, my tourniquet
Return to me salvation

[Verse 3]
My wounds cry for the grave
My soul cries for deliverance
Will I be denied?
Christ
Tourniquet
My suicide

"I know I'm dying, lord. My body is done for. But I'm still hurting inside. I was taught that you're a God of love. Please love me despite all this. I just want to be loved!"

And there is SO much meaning packed into the last four lines of the verse.

Meaning 1: "Will I be denied salvation? I'm dying, Jesus! Save me please!"
Meaning 2: "Will my pain be ignored once again? Or will Christ finally show me the love I crave by being the tourniquet that halts my suicide?"
Meaning 3: "Will I be denied Christ? Will I be denied a tourniquet? Will I be denied suicide? What will happen to me? I'm scared!"

The fact that it can mean all of these things at once and not distort the message of the song is very powerful to me.


[Outro]
The last minute of the song is a different instrumental piece, this time strings playing a somber passage that reminds me of a funeral mass. Obviously the singer has died.. but what of her soul? The music is not particularly bright nor dark, and so we must draw our own conclusions.

I favor the interpretation that, whatever your feelings are about suicide being a mortal sin, the fact that the singer displayed genuine remorse and repentance is sufficient to earn her forgiveness, salvation, and the peace and love she has been craving.


In short: the entire piece is a powerful musical rendition of "Eloi, Eloi lama sabachthani", made all the more gun-wrenching because I've been where the singer is and I can identify with her pain and loss and need.

Gun Rights are Queer Rights

Erin, why do you believe that gun rights are queer rights?

· I have the right to live.
· There are people who wish to harm me because I am queer.
· Guns allow me to defend my queer life.
∴ Therefore, guns preserve queer lives.

· Guns cannot preserve queer lives if queer people cannot carry them.
· Gun rights means that all non-prohibited people can carry guns.
· By carrying a gun, I can defend my queer life.
∴ Therefore, gun rights are pro-queer.

· Gun rights are natural rights.
· Loving whomever I want is a natural right.
· Living as I wish, so long as it harms none, is also a natural right.
∴ Therefore, gun rights are queer rights and both are natural rights.

On Suicide

If you read gun blogs at all, you've no doubt heard that yesterday (Monday) morning, Bob Owens died, apparently by his own hand. I haven't yet heard it officially confirmed that it was suicide, but the circumstances of Bob's death and his final post to Facebook sure point to it.

I have a complicated relationship with suicide. When I was younger, I actively considered killing myself because I was in a lot of emotional turmoil. I'll spare you the details of it, but the gist of the matter is that I felt like a hideous failure because I wasn't comfortable inside my own skin and no one wanted to be around me. (These feelings diminished once I stopped fighting who I was and, for lack for a better phrase, "gave myself permission" to be transgender.) I never actually attempted it, though. Perhaps I had too much survival instinct to give in to the destructive impulse, but let me tell you this: if you are feeling shitty enough to think that killing yourself is the answer to your problems, then not being able to go through with doesn't feel like a victory; it feels like "I'm such a failure I can't even kill myself properly."

What I'm saying is that I get it. I understand the desire to eject from pain and suffering and hopelessness, and even now I feel that every adult on the planet has to right to choose to check out if that's what they truly want. The only thing we really have in this world is our life, and for me to demand that you live in accordance with my wishes seems the height of arrogance and selfishness.

However, having the right to do it doesn't mean that I agree with it. Oh, in certain circumstances I can totally understand the reasoning — like someone in Stage 4 cancer deciding to go out before the agony starts — but in cases like Bob's, I can only fall back on the same belief that I have regarding freedom of speech: I may disagree with what you say (or in this case, do), but I will defend to the death your right to do it. 

Of course, this is all in the philosophical abstract for me, not having known Bob Owens. I fully expect that if a friend of mine should kill himself, I will quite selfishly wish that it didn't happen because I would be grieving.

That's the true cost of suicide right there. I don't remember where I saw or heard it, or when, but I recall vividly the quote "You've just killed yourself. Congratulations, you've just hurt everyone who ever gave a damn about you." It's one thing to kill yourself when you're going to die anyway, because (to me, at least) that's just a matter of rescheduling the grief. It's another thing — arguably, a very selfish thing — to kill yourself when your death could have been prevented by seeking help.

I wasn't privy to Bob's thoughts, so I don't know what agony he was suffering that made him choose suicide. I can't judge him or his actions. What I can do, though — about the only thing that I can do — is to point out that if you choose to kill yourself, you're going to hurt the people you love in a terrible, intimate way. And because you love them, I don't believe, I cannot believe, that you'd want to do that to them.

If you're looking for a reason to live, I'd say that "Not hurting those that I love" is a pretty damn good one.

My Highlander Theory

This came up in a post on someone else's wall, and I figured it belonged here on my blog alongside my equally-cool "Crowlander" post.

I have a theory that Highlander-style immortals are outcast angels. Allow me explain:

http://arazand.deviantart.com/art/Dreus76-Photo-manipulation-104799996

According to the Bible, when Lucifer rebelled a third of the Host came with him -- but 1/3 against 2/3 is not a winnable fight. However, in some tellings of the story (and I wish I could remember where I read this. It might be a Neil Gaiman thing, it sounds like something he'd say), 1/3 of the Host couldn't decide who to support, or were persuaded by Lucifer to stay neutral, and so stayed out of the fight. This made the rebellion an even match for the loyalists, and thus far more winnable.

Well, we know how that story goes: Lucifer lost, and he and his minions were cast into hell. But what about the third who did nothing?

According to my theory, they were punished for not choosing to stand with God, but since they didn't actively rebel against God, their punishment needed to be less than everlasting damnation. Since they did not choose a side -- and since the one of the biggest themes in the Bible is "Free will, even if you choose to do the wrong thing" -- this undecided third would be made to choose good or evil, Heaven or Hell. 

To this end, they were stripped of most of their angelic powers, cast out of Heaven and sent to Earth in mortal bodies (remember, all immortals are foundlings) with no memories of ever being angels. The various ages of immortals, and their appearance throughout the ages,  can be explained by "Time is different in Heaven so it took some of them a while to arrive and in fact are still arriving" and/or "God didn't want to dump a third of the Host onto Earth all at once, so he spread them out."

So now, those angels who once stood by and passively watched are now watched by others (ironically called "The Watchers"),  and are compelled by their natures to fight and kill until There Is Only One.

The Prize, of course, is the entire fate of the outcast third. After winning the Prize, the last living immortal is judged by his character, and thereby redeems or damns the entire lot of them. It is effectively an eons-long Trial By Combat. If a good immortal like Connor or Duncan wins, they are accepted back into heaven. If someone like the Kurgan wins, they're damned to hell for all eternity.

When you think about it, this explains so much about Highlander mythology.

• Why can't they fight on Holy Ground?  Because God said so. 
• Why do 99% of them use swords? Because angels have traditionally been depicted as using swords. 
• Why does the Quickening manifest as lightning and other celestial effects? Because sky = Heaven. 
• Heck, this even explains Dark Quickenings: the entire Game is "Choose good or evil", and a Quickening is the absorption of all the angelic souls into one big over-soul. If you kill a lot of bad immortals, you absorb sin-tainted souls and become tainted yourself. 

The best part about this theory is that if you play supernatural RPGs like In Nomine or Vampire, you have a way to add immortals to the game without breaking the flavor of the setting. 

The Literary Equivalent of Throwing a Bottle at the Wall.

     So this was originally going to be some light-hearted piece about how the new Call of Duty came out, and how I hate playing competitive multiplayer and would much prefer something like a cooperative campaign or horde mode, but then I saw that latest Simon Pegg film, The World's End, and got a little depressed for a few minutes. I'm a bit Gary King, see, and I don't want to explain it for fear of spoiling the film for anyone that wants to see it.

     So instead, I'm going to get a little bit introspective, a little gazing of the navel. I'm going to look into the abyss for a bit, and other such pretentious ways of looking at it. See, I've got this problem with socializing.

     Wait, wait, it's not the usual problem. I'm not claiming Asperger's or saying I'm a wallflower with no social skills. Quite the opposite. I've got a ready smile and charm with a smooth voice and a healthy ego (obviously, right?) and a self-deprecating sense of humor. I just really. Really. Really. Hate socializing. I've taken those Meyers-Briggs test multiple times, and come out INTJ 9 times out of 10. I watched House for 7 years before realizing that House wasn't the character I was supposed to be identifying with.

     For my school years I found myself in a situation where I was forced to socialize. And so I did. Despite the goth kid persona, I spoke to pretty much anyone. Talked my way out of being bullied and learned to stare down the ones too slow to follow my evasive logic.

     After high school, I was a complete social animal. I had at least three different scenes that I frequented, and fell in and out of love with a frightening rapidity. Then I went off to university and discovered high-speed internet.

     In retrospect, that might have been one of the things that caused me to leave school, adding up with mental and social exhaustion, a sleeping disorder rearing its ugly, inconvenient head, and being an intellectual at a 100% football school. So I withdrew for a bit.

     Then I moved to Mobile, following a woman and working a shite job, living a very small life. That job didn't last, and I was nearly broke and unemployed and alone, having observed how unstable things had gotten with the woman I'd followed. So I was forced out into the big, scary world again, and threw myself into it. I was a bouncer at a strip club, got ordained in a church, cleansed people's homes and persons of evil spirits, and was social royalty for a while in the larger beach town of Pensacola. Good times, Bianca. I still think of you now and then.

     Then I snapped back again. Didn't leave my apartment for six months for longer than it would take to visit the nice Bahranian gent who ran the corner store a block away in the dead of night. Then my lease was up, and the call of a woman beckoned me to Texas. I went.

     That, though, is a period of my life that you and I, well, we just don't know each other well enough to talk about just quite yet.

     After that ended, though, I was life of the party again. I drank more than I thought possible, dallied with many a lovely woman, and realized just how broken I was when I disappointed one woman in particular that deserved better than I could give her.

     Some health problems coupled with a change in my job (our site shut down, and a few dozen of us got to work from home) contributed to the longest, if not most intense, period of social withdrawal yet. I haven't regularly gone anywhere and done anything since sometime in 2009.

     Anyone worried about me may be relieved to know that I have actually been regularly leaving my apartment here in Albuquerque, where I relocated to six months ago. My health has, more or less, stabilized and while I may not have any friends in the area, I am at least re-training myself in socializing. I don't put my hood up as often, and will often speak to people while I'm out. The only thing is... I'm not sure if I want to. I kind of like the solitude, and I'm having some very real internal conflict about whether I want to rejoin the real world again or not.

But that's enough about me and my problems. Geek culture resumes next week.

Crowlander

Aha, you have fallen for my cunning ploy! Now I shall tell you why I think The Crow is a Highlander movie in disguise.

First things first: it has nothing to do with Eric Draven. He's a revenant, a ghost given flesh in order to extract revenge. No, the real reason for "Crowlander" is Top Dollar. Sure, he's a charismatic psychopath who rules a criminal empire, but I maintain he's also an immortal.

Exhibit 1: A Closet Full of Swords
Knives? Sure, he's a villain. One sword? Why not, he's filthy rich, he can be eccentric. But an entire armory of swords? Easily accessible? That he's clearly practiced with?

There's also the fact that this man, who clearly must have enemies both in the police and organized crime, doesn't carry a sidearm. In fact, he has to borrow one from his bodyguard.

Okay, yes, by itself this isn't convincing. Moving on...

Exhibit 2: Intelligent Anti-Immortal Tactics
All right, so in the previous example Top Dollar hears from a trusted lieutenant and a groveling flunky that there's a guy out there who gets shot/jumps out of windows/etc and keeps on trucking in his quest for vengeance, and this doesn't faze him in the least. He doesn't question the apparent insanity of it all. He just goes "Hmm, that's interesting."

So when he arranges things to have Draven's last person on the "to-kill" list in the room with him, he also arranges to be surrounded by dozens of armed goons. This is good strategy, because as we've learned from the Highlander films and TV show, immortals can be killed conventionally -- they just don't stay dead. So obviously his plan is for his goons to shoot Draven, whereupon Top Dollar can take his rival's head easily.

Except that he's surprised when Draven shows up, because he doesn't get that characteristic "buzz" immortals get when they meet each other. So he thinks that, maybe, this guy is just a loon hopped up on drugs.

And then he is totally gobsmacked when it turns out his opponent is immortal after all.

Also: a katana shows up in this fight scene. Because when I think of "Immortal Scottish warriors," I think of ancient samurai swords. 

Exhibit 3: Running to Holy Ground
Because that's what you do when you're immortal and you don't want to fight another one. Why else would this incredibly rich, incredibly dangerous man hide in an old abandoned cathedral?

Also, kindly note how neither his bodyguard nor his sister are all freaked out by this. "He has power you can take," she says, and T.D. replies with "I like him already." Even as he's running for his life, Top Dollar is planning how best to take Draven's Quickening.

Exhibit 4: Swordfighting in a Lightning Storm
Some of you may be asking, "What about the proscription against fighting on holy ground?"  Well, first, that prohibition is only between immortals.  So when T.D. has his assassin take a shot at Draven's totem bird, that's allowable. And when that results in Draven losing his powers, Top Dollar now knows for certain that he isn't fighting another immortal... and therefore the rules don't apply.

If you're a fan of the series, you know that electricity is a metaphor for the Quickening, so it's no surprise that the final battle of the movie takes place where there is lots and lots of it about. Oh, and look, Top Dollar uses another katana.

Conclusion: Top Dollar is an Immortal
The only question this begs is, "What happened to him afterwards, since his head wasn't taken?" To my mind, there are two possibilities.

One possibility is that his hired goons in the police department -- come on, if you're an immortal crimelord you're going to have some cops in your pocket -- pulled him out of the morgue and falsified the burial data. After this he probably spent the rest of his life hiding from ghost-men before another immortal (probably Duncan) took his head.

Another is that the supernatural vengeance of Draven ("Thirty hours of pain. All at once! All for you!") was able to short-circuit immortal healing, leaving Top Dollar permanently brain-dead, if not dead-dead.

Either way: he was totally an immortal in that movie.

Der Schwarzwaldenwirklichkeit (the truth of Schwarzwald)

I was cruising the various three-digit cable channels when I came across this clip from The Big O late one night. I found it particularly relevant to certain current situations, and I wonder if the rest of you feel likewise or if I'm just crazy (which is a decided possibility).





The text, for those of you distracted by giant robots and loud explosions:

Even without the events of 40 years ago, I think man would still be a creature that fears the dark. He doesn't face that fear; he averts his eyes from it and acts as if he never had any memories of his history. But, 40 years can be both a brief time and yet, a long time. Man's fear has withered. And even time tries to wither the desire to know the truth.

Is it a crime to try and learn the truth? Is it a sin to search for those things which you fear? My purpose in this world is knowledge, and the dissemination of it. And it is I who is to restore the fruits of my labors to the entire world.

Fear... It is something vital to us puny creatures. The instant man stops fearing is the instant the species will reach a dead end, only to sink to pitable lows, only to sit and wait apathetically for extinction.

Wake up! Don't be afraid of knowledge! Humans who lose the capacity to think become creatures whose existence has no value. Think, you humans who are split into two worlds, unless you want the gulf between humans to expand into oblivion, you must think!

Signed, Schwarzwald.

So what think you? Relevant to our current condition, or just the ravings of a fictional madman taken out of context?

Weltanschauung

This snippet of actual conversation with Benjamin Worley happened a few days ago:

Ben: "Magic as an element of friendship? What does that even mean? Twilight, getting A-pluses is not a personality trait!"

Me: "Well, what you need to realize is Twilight Sparkle represents the Friendship Gestalt. It says so right in the series: "When the five elements of harmony are present, the sixth will make itself known." Therefore Twilight is actually the sum of friendship -- which is totally in keeping with her personality of being a good student."

Ben: "Gestalt? What does that mean?"

Me, resisting the urge to tell him to Google it: "A gestalt is something which is greater than the sum of its parts. Voltron is the gestalt of the Lion Force."





Yes, I used Voltron to explain a German psychological term while talking about My Little Pony. I am an uber-nerd.

L5R Cosmology: Shintao

Now we finally arrive at Shintao, and believe me, the wait was necessary.

In my previous post, I detailed the ur-religion of Rokugan as performed by the first humans, also known as the Tribe of Isawa. Now I must once again fast-forward a bit in our creation story by summarizing thusly:

The nine children of the Sun and Moon fell from the heavens. One of them, Fu Leng, fell away from the others, and his impact was such that he punched a hole straight into Jigoku (hell) and became a Villain To Be Named Later. Meanwhile, the others fell together (and more gently) and landed on Rokugan. When this happened, they immediately lost most of their divinity but still retained much power (demigods at the least.) One of these eight, Hantei, became Emperor and the other 7 swore fealty to him, creating the 7 Great Clans of the Emerald Empire.

Two things are worthy of mention here:

• The Emperor and Clan Founders were also considered kami, because of their divine origins. In order to differentiate them from all the other kinds of kami, we are going to call them kami-sama (respected kami).
• Of the kami-sama,  NONE of them were Shugenja. Just file that away for future reference. 

Having read this, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the socio-religious order didn't change one whit.  The Fortunes and O-kami were still worshipped; there were simply new bosses in town who were stronger and smarter than the old bosses. This is the foundation of the "We are samurai, we are better than you, because we are nobles and real people (i.e. descended from gods) and you are only half-people" caste system (also known as the Celestial Order), which is still present in modern Rokugan. More on this in a moment. 

For the average human, life went on pretty much as normal: you farmed, you prayed, and you tried not to die from disease or starvation or angry samurai... for the first 33 years, that is, because that's when Fu Leng invaded Rokugan with an army of demons. Apparently, the youngest kami-sama (who'd spent decades absorbing Jigoku's power, and basically becoming the god of hell) decided he didn't like how his siblings never went looking for him, or he was angry that he hadn't been invited to the tournament where they decided who would be emperor, or whatever. He was hell's champion, it's not like he needed a reason to attack. But the upshot is that that Fu Leng and his minions proceeded to kick the crap out of everyone and everything. He had slave races of ogres and goblins, he commanded demons, and he knew blood magic which was so powerful that it corrupted the traditional blood magic of the Isawa such that anyone who performed it became Tainted (think cancer of the soul) with the corruptive power of Jigoku.

And just when it looked like the Empire was about to crumble, a little old man walked up to the Emperor and said, basically, "The solution is right in front of you, but you're too blind to see it. Listen to what I have to say and I can solve all of your problems." 

The Emperor said, essentially, "Oh yeah, old man? Prove it."

And the old man, whose name was Shinsei, did just that. He took seven mortals -- not the kami-sama, but humans -- and the eight of them kicked the crap out of a demon-god, routed his armies, and bound him for over a thousand years.

Of course, Shinsei died while doing this, but his lessons -- many of them spoken to the Emperor himself -- were written down, and they became the Tao (Way) of Shinsei. These written lessons formed the core of Shintao, and they revolutionized EVERYTHING. 

There are really only two major tenets to Shintao, and you've already read both of them. The first is the concept of elemental rings, and how there is a progression of spirits from smallest to largest. This is the lesson learned by all shugenja, and without Shinsei, there would be no shugenja on Rokugan. 

The second tenet is the teaching that All Are One, the concept of universal unity through void.  

Big whoop, I hear you all say. We know this already. Yes, but what you are failing to grasp is the true application of these two principles, which is this:

If the void touches and encompasses and unifies everything, then I am everything and everything is me. I am the soil beneath my feet and the air that I breath. I am the tree under which I shelter and I am the fire that keeps me warm. I am the animals I eat. I am you. I am all of creation. 

You know what else is all of creation? That's right, the O-kami. 

Shintao says, "You are god and you don't even realize it. The only reason you can't access that power is because you aren't enlightened enough to access it. Get out of your own way and realize your own divinity."

Now just think about this for a moment. Shinsei says that this filthy peasant here is you. And you are that filthy peasant. And both of you are gods.

Shintao was not the great equalizer, it was the great humbler. It took the notion that the gods were somehow set apart and unattainable to all but a select few, and it threw that notion to the ground and stomped the pieces into dust. This is amazingly heretical stuff, because there is nothing an entrenched caste system hates worse than being told its repressed underclass is equal to them. 

But Shinsei got away with it, precisely because Rokugan needed to topple a god from his pedestal. Because of that, and his success, and the heroic sacrifice of himself and the Seven Thunders, Shinseism became revered and codified into Shintao. 

This heralded the emergence of the first truly ethical belief system in all of Rokugan. It works because it is very simple: "If all are one, then any wrong done to another is wrong done to yourself, and kindness shown to another is kindness towards oneself."

Or, put more succinctly, "Don't be a douche to yourself, dude."

In addition to a moral system, it also unified the Rokugani system of spirituality. Why are the kami amoral? Because man is inherently amoral, because you are them and they are you. Want them to act ethically? Then act ethically yourself. Karma, right action, social order, all of these things came about because a little old man said "I have empathy for you as if you were me."

This puts monks in a very interesting social position. Technically, they are peasants, but they are also highly esteemed due to their religious devotion. Only samurai can become shugenja, because shugenja training requires time and education and resources which non-nobles simply don't have, but anyone, even the filthiest untouchable, can shave his head, join a monastery, and seek enlightenment. At the same time, when samurai reach old age and retire, they often become monks in order to prepare their souls for the afterlife.

Monks are a social aberration because they allow anyone to join their ranks. They are an escape from, and an exception to, the caste system. Yesterday's gravedigger can become tomorrow's abbot who gets to order a freshly retired samurai to clean out the toilets because he's the newest novice.

Of course, despite being (by Imperial Decree) one of the core religions of the Empire, not everyone reveres Shintao equally. Peasants love monks (who are far more approachable than shugenja) but are typically too busy trying to feed their families to tend to spiritual correctness and Right Action. Samurai should be mindful of Shintao at all times, but compassion for others gets a bit... muddied... when bushido states you have to serve your lord faithfully, and he's just commanded you to kill those other people.

Also, frankly, most samurai are douches. There's a Rokugani saying which goes "Samurai are cursed to be reborn as samurai," which basically means that your karmic punishment for killing people in the name of honor is to be reborn as an ass who kills people in the name of honor. It's far, far easier for peasants to achieve enlightenment, or at least escape the karmic cycle of reincarnation, than it is for samurai.

The upshot of all of this is that most samurai pay only lip service to Shintao, because Fortunism is what get things done. This really only changes at the end of their lives, when they realize they may have to answer for all the bad things they've done in service to their lord.


This concludes the Basic Course of Coherent Rokugani Cosmology, and is all you need to know in order to play. More sophisticated topics will be addressed in the Advanced Course. 


If you have any questions, now is the time to ask them. 

L5R Cosmology: Religion in Prehistoric Rokugan

So having gone up the ladder from mikokami to o-kami, some of you are no doubt wondering, "How do humans fit into all this mess?"  I'm glad you asked.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to skip large chunks of the creation myth for now. Suffice it to say that humans were created when the bodily fluids of Lady Sun and Lord Moon fell to the surface of Rokugan and mixed. Therefore, humans are a perfect mixture of yin and yang, or courage and cowardice, or however else you care to explain a union of opposites. What's important is that humans were created and formed a society before the children of the Sun and Moon fell from the heavens and founded an empire, and even before people knew of the kami, they had an atavistic religion.

These humans worshiped the Sun and Moon, of course, because these things are primal. Heat and cold, life-bringer and life-taker; we've seen it time and again in our world. What is unusual is that these people also worshiped their dead ancestors, believing that their progenitors were somehow sticking around as spirits, watching their descendants, and looking after them.

At the same time, these people also worshiped the Seven Fortunes that were mentioned earlier who, unlike all the other kami, represent human agency. Put these two facts together, and we may logically derive the conclusion that the Seven Fortunes are in fact super-powerful ancestors who lived so long ago that practically all humans on Rokugan are considered to be their descendants.*

If you'd like to be a bit silly, just consider the Seven Fortunes to be the first Player Characters on Rokugan and who, for all their exploits, are now recognized as gods. Blows your mind a bit, eh?

Another interesting tidbit about Rokugani pre-history is that they had a form of magic that did not pay homage to the elements. In fact, all of their magic was blood-related. Again, this goes back to the roots of "Religion as a way of brokering a deal with the supernatural to get things done without any trappings of morality to get in the way."

Let's say you wanted someone to fall in love with you. For that, you go see Benten, the fortune of love. But, at least in the early days, Benten is just a powerful ancestor. Sure, she brings romantic success to her descendants, but you aren't related to her. You have to find some way to get her favor, because all of your prayers to your grandparents aren't doing jack.

The simple answer is to use the sympathetic magic. Benten cares about her family because of blood relation. In order to get Benten to care about you, there has to be a blood link between her and you. So, obviously, you ritualistically cut yourself and offer that blood to her. Now you are symbolically related, and clearly you care enough about her to suffer and bleed. The sympathetic principle (like produces like), with a sacrifice to sweeten the deal, ensures that Benten will now accept you as part of her family -- one of her bloodline. After a while, the shedding of blood was no longer needed, but it became institutionalized.

This is how it was for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years: an ur-religion based on bloodshed, power exchange, and material gain, without any of that messy ethical nonsense.

And then Hantei, Fu Leng, and all the rest fell to earth, and screwed everything up.

Next: Shintao, I promise.


* Before you get all up in arms about ancestors becoming fortunes, I have one word for you: Osano-wo. This man was so badass that he became the Fortune of Fire and Thunder in the span of time between his death and when his son, Kaimetsu-uo, assaulted the lands of the Phoenix. This rate of ascension makes the Seven Fortunes look like snails.

L5R Cosmology: the O-kami

Fresh on the heels of yesterday's post, I imagine that many of you are saying something to the effect of, Wait a minute. One giant universal godhead? That sounds far too much like western monotheism and not enough like multi-layered eastern spirituality.

To you, I say this.





All right then. First, the creation story of Rokugan:

In the beginning, before the universe was created, there was only Nothing. The Nothing that existed before the birth of all things was aware, and at some point during its timeless existence, it realized it was alone -- and thus experienced Fear. This unprecedented emotion was the first Sin, and created one third of the world. The realization of Fear also created in the Nothing a sense of loneliness and a desire for a companion. These sensations were the second Sin, Desire, and created a second third of the world. And when the Nothing realized what it had done, it experienced regret and a wish to unmake what it had mistakenly created. This was the third Sin, Regret, and it created the final portion of the world, completing it and ending the Nothing’s existence.

The newly-made universe was chaotic and formless at first, like an egg whose white and yolk had been intermixed. Slowly, the primal elements of creation seeped through the empty universe, and the energies pooled, with the heaviest sinking to the bottom and creating different layers of reality. Above was the Celestial Heavens, while below the mortal realm was born, as were the various other spirit realms and, finally, Jigoku, the Realm of Evil.

In the wake of the Nothing came three entities whose names have never been known by any living creature, mortal or divine, since that time. When they are spoken of at all, they are simply known as the Three Gods Whose Names Cannot Be Spoken.^[1] These three gods looked upon the new realms, particularly the mortal world, and recognized that it must be given form and purpose, an act beyond their means. In order to give shape to the universe, the three gods sacrificed themselves to give birth to a single man and woman, two divine beings who could do what the three before could not, and bring order to existence. Thus were born the Sun Goddess and the Moon God.

Lady Sun and Lord Moon looked down upon the mortal world and were perplexed by its formlessness. Ultimately, they realized they could only give form to what existed there by giving names to all the things that could be found in the mortal realm. They entered the mortal realm and named it, and doing so, they created names for themselves; Lady Sun became Amaterasu, and Lord Moon became Onnotangu. They began to name all they found there, such as stones, trees, deer, and all other things imaginable.

With the mortal realm fully formed, Amaterasu and Onnotangu returned to the Celestial Heavens, and Lord Moon’s ardor for Lady Sun grew more powerful with each passing moment until, driven by his obsessive love, he pursued the Sun across the sky, creating the cycle of day and night. Onnotangu eventually caught up with Amaterasu, and the sky was blackened during the middle of the day. It was at this time, the first eclipse, that the ten children of the Sun and Moon were conceived.

All right, pretty basic stuff here. I included this mainly for the sake of completeness, since there are some folks reading this who haven't played the game and aren't conversant with Rokugani mythology. The only thing that you truly need to take away from that story is this: Lord Moon and Lady Sun represent yin and yang.

Side Note: it bears repeating that kami are not moral creatures. Therefore, it is incorrect to say that Lord Moon is evil and Lady Sun is good. It is far more correct to say that Lady Sun embodies propriety (and therefore honor) and Lord Moon embodies impropriety and lack of honor. Again, divest your mind of the notion that honor = good. Other words for propriety are bureaucracy and stubborn pride, and impropriety is often another term for expedience and candor. 

Yin is characterized as slow, soft, yielding, diffuse, cold, wet, and passive; and is associated with water, earth, the moon, femininity and nighttime. Yang, by contrast, is fast, hard, solid, focused, hot, dry, and aggressive; and is associated with fire, sky, the sun, masculinity and daytime. 

-- from Wikipedia

Admittedly, many of the attributions aren't perfect, and the genders are switched; we can handwave that by saying "Rokugan is not Asia." That said, the comparison itself is apt: Sun and Moon are polar opposites who nonetheless complement each other, and when they come together they form a perfect whole. Elaborating upon yesterday's conclusion that the Void Dragon is Lady Sun and Lord Moon (and yet, at the same time, not), consider this:

Lady Sun is the white element (Yang)
Lord Moon is the black element (Yin)
The circle that they form is the Void Dragon.

The Void Dragon is the totality of the Four Elemental Dragons.

The Elemental Dragons are the gestalt intelligences of their respective mikokami. 

The mikokami are the building blocks of the universe.
Therefore, Lady Sun and Lord Moon are everything.
As it is written in the Tao of Shinsei, All Are One.

The tremendous implications of this philosophy will be addressed, I promise, when we reach the Shintao portion of this series.


^[1] I believe this to be an obscure in-joke regarding the original creators of the game: John Wick, David Williams, and D.J. Trindle.

L5R Cosmology: Of Void and Dragons

In this installment, we briefly step away from discussions about the kami (sort of) in order to blow your freaking minds. Helmets may be necessary.

Rokugani theology holds that there are five elements which comprise the world and affect the lives of mortals. You have already met four of them, and in addition to their expected physical qualities they also embody certain mental qualities. They are:

• Air is enigmatic and mercurial in all things, and represents an individual’s capacity for empathy and intuition. Those who are aligned with the element of Air possess superior instincts and speed of reaction. Those who are at odds with Air are physically sluggish and oblivious to the nuanced behavior of those around them.
• Earth is eternal, unchanging, and unmoving. It is the element of endurance and resistance, and represents an individual’s ability to withstand whatever trials arise. Those who are aligned with Earth have tremendous fortitude and resolve, while those who are at odds with Earth are frail and weak-minded.
• Fire is the element of dynamic change, energy, and destruction. It is the element of motion and illumination. Those who are strong in the element of Fire are great warriors, brilliant scholars, or possibly both. Those weak in Fire are physically uncoordinated and sluggish of thought.
• Water is the element of rapid change and alteration. It is the inexorable force that can carve mountains over thousands of years and the capricious storm that batters a ship one instant and gently carries it to its destination the next. Those who are strong in the element of Water possess incredible strength and perception. Those who are weak in Water are slow to move and possess dulled senses.

(Copied from the Legend of the Fire Rings RPG, 4th Edition)

All of this is quite understandable and familiar to our western minds. The fifth element, however -- the element of Void -- is anything but simple. There are many ways to explain the concept of Void, but the simplest I have found is just to look at a cup.

As you look at the cup, ask yourself this: What makes it useful for holding water? Is it the cup itself, or is it the empty space in the middle where the cup is not? Without that space, the cup is just a piece of ceramic, incapable of holding anything. The places where it isn't a cup are what make it useful. The nothing makes it something.

Now look again. Is the cup truly empty? Or is it filled with a limitless ocean of invisible air kami? You could have the Dragon of Air curled inside of your teapot and you'd never know. But just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there.

So the cup is simultaneously empty and not empty. The nothing which makes the cup a cup is actually filled with other somethings. This concept that nothing is something, and something is nothing, is what we call the Void. It's all very quantum, being and not being at the same time, except that unlike in Schroedinger's experiment, looking at it doesn't collapse the waveform.

Void is a bit like the Force, in that it's everywhere and surrounds everything. It's where all the other elements meet, and therefore it touches and encompasses all of them. In a very real way, Void is the incarnation of all of the other four elements simultaneously, because Void exists where they blend into each other: a cliff (air and earth), a beach (earth and water), and a volcano (fire and earth) are perfect examples of Void.

But as I have said earlier, every element is comprised of an infinite number of spirits, and their gestalt is what we call an Elemental Dragon. So if Void is the perfect unity of all four elements, and is itself an element...

... then yes, that means there is a Void Dragon, and it is not only a separate entity in its own right, but also and simultaneously the gestalt consciousness of the Air, Earth, Fire, and Water Dragons. One might do well to call that truly immense and alien intelligence god.

And you'd be right, because the Dragon of Void is also (actually, simultaneously, and yet somehow wholly separate from) the O-kami, Lady Sun and Lord Moon, the divine incarnations of yin and yang.

Whom I shall explain in my next post.

L5R Cosmology: the Fortunes

Continuing from this post....

Next up from the mikokami (divine nature spirits which inhabit every object) are the Greater and Lesser Fortunes. These are still kami in that they are spirits, but unlike the others they are neither tied to tangible things, nor can they be controlled. If we were use a western paradigm, these kami are gods.

There are seven Greater Fortunes, copied more-or-less from the Seven Lucky Gods of Japanese folklore:

• Benten, Fortune of Romantic Love
• Bishamon, Fortune of Strength
• Daikoku, Fortune of Wealth
• Ebisu, Fortune of Hard Work
• Fukurokujin, Fortune of Wisdom and Mercy
• Hotei, Fortune of Contentment
• Jurojin, Fortune of Longevity

They are attended and served by an array of Lesser Fortunes too numerous (more than a dozen and perhaps less than a hundred) to be listed here. By way of example, Inari, the Fortune of Rice, is subservient to both Daikoku (as wealth in Rokugan is measured in bushels of rice) and Ebisu (because farmers harvest rice). These Lesser Fortunes are somewhere between demigods and lesser gods in terms of power, and because of that, they are often more approachable (more human) than their greater counterparts. In this regard, the Lesser Fortunes are more like the Roman Catholic conception of saints: people you pray to in order to get things done, because they have the ears of the higher-ups.

Although the Fortunes are kami, the differences are evident. These kami have names; the mikokami do not. The Greater Fortunes represent abstract concepts, not concrete objects like "a campfire" or "the river." (Interestingly enough, many of the Lesser Fortunes do embody more specific concepts, like "rice" or "the seashore," further cementing the notion that they act as intermediaries between the concrete spirituality of Ningen-do and the abstract divinity of Tengoku.)

Perhaps most importantly, the Seven Great Fortunes represent human agency* in that -- unlike the O-kami of Lady Sun and Lord Moon, or the mikokami of the material world -- the Fortunes would not exist in a world without people, because there would be no reason for them so to do. In other words, the world works perfectly fine without the existence of a god of strength, or wealth, or compassion. It's only through the intervention of human desire -- hope, fear, love, jealousy, ambition, etc -- that these gods exist. In fact, it could be argued these gods are the creation of human emotion. 

What's fascinating about the Seven Fortunes is that, much like humanity, they are neither inherently good nor inherently evil, and do not require moral conduct from their worshipers: Bishamon smiles favorably upon both an honorable Lion bushi and an honorless, tainted Crab, because both embody strength.

In fact, all kami are like this: just as Lady Sun's light nurtures the crops, her heat also ruins them.Too much water causes flooding, but not enough results in a drought. This amorality of both kami and their worshipers is important to understand, because it informs so much of Rokugani lifestyle. Specifically:

One can be a completely immoral, dishonorable ass, and the kami will still answer you as long as you pay them homage and say your prayers in the proper manner.

It is this lack of morality which resulted in the necessary creation of Shintao, which provided a much-needed ethical basis for Rokugani society, and which is in fact the bedrock of their civilization. However, the complex interplay of Shintao, honor, and ancestor worship will have to wait for my next post.

*Perhaps "human" is too limiting, what with the existence of self-aware races before the arrival of humans upon the face of Rokugan. Let's say "sapient" or "intelligent enough to have a culture."

L5R Cosmology: The Kami

Let's start small -- very, very small.

In Rokugan, samurai priestesses known as Shugenja commune and interact with spirits known as kami. This very simple word has a very complex definition, because it can mean both "god" and "spirit" and has no sense of scale whatsoever; pebbles contain kami, as do rocks, boulders, and mountain ranges. The clan founders are also kami, as well as the sun goddess Amaterasu, the moon god Onnotangu, the Seven Greater Fortunes, and the many Lesser Fortunes.

 The easiest way to explain a kami is also the most vague:

[A kami is] any thing or phenomenon that produces the emotions of fear and awe, with no distinction between good and evil.

For purposes of simplicity,  the kami we are discussing today are the mikokami, a.k.a. beautiful tiny gods. These are the "eight million gods" of folklore. We'll discuss the other kinds of kami later, but right now, when I say kami, be aware that I mean "elemental spirit" or "divine force of nature".

Kami live inside all material things, and at the same time are those things. If you can't conceive of something being a thing, and yet not being that thing because it is really the force which lives inside the shell of the thing, then you're going to have severe trouble from here on out. If it helps, think of your mind/soul/sense of self as a kami; without that, your body is just a shell, but at the same time your body is such an extension of yourself that it is you.

Now here is where things get complicated. If we assume that every river is Rokugan has a kami -- which every shugenja will tell you is true -- what happens if you draw a cup of water from that river? Is the river spiritually diminished? Does a new "cup of water" kami spring into existence? What happens when you drink it? Or when the river runs into the sea?

This is a riddle which baffled the Rokugani for centuries, and there are essentially two answers to it, one philosophical and one practical. The philosophical answer, which came about in the early days of the Empire, is that all are one: You are the cup, which is also the water, which is also the riverbank. Everything, everything, is linked and interconnected to the point where it doesn't matter, all of us are also all of creation, one giant god-soul, and once you realize this, you are able to live in harmony with the world because the world is you and you are the world, and the soul always lives in harmony with itself. This is known as enlightenment, and it's also very, very hard to achieve, because humans have all these senses telling them that no, I am completely different from that tree over there. A good chunk of enlightenment is un-learning concepts such as "I am an individual" and "I can trust what my senses tell me." [1]

The practical answer is that kami are infinitely divisible. Take two ladles of water, each containing two water kami, and pour them into a teapot. How many water kami do you have? Just one. Boil some tea, and pour that tea into four cups. You now have four water kami (possibly five if there's still some left over in the pot). Dump it all back into the river, and boom, it's all one kami again. They are aggregate spirits who seek concentration, yet lose none of their power if you divide them up. The smallest drop of water contains the same amount of power as the entire ocean. [2]

Now if you combine these two answers into one thought -- "all is one" and "potency is not lost through division" -- you arrive at a frighteningly powerful conclusion: every single droplet of water in Rokugan is linked to every other droplet of water, meaning that all water everywhere is a single, massive kami. This monstrously powerful kami is what is known as the Water Dragon, and there are other Dragons for the other elements. (Please don't ask about the Void Dragon right now, it'll just break your brain.)

While all kami may technically be called "gods", these Dragons are what humans think of when they hear the word god: powerful, alien, and distant. The Dragons are as far removed from humanity as humans are from bacteria, and understand them about as well. Therefore, every Dragon has an Oracle: a human whose soul is linked to that Dragon, and therefore shares a fraction of its power (and a fraction of nigh-infinite power is still a lot). These Oracles serve as eyes and ears for the Dragons, enabling them to understand from a human perspective all that happens on Rokugan and subtly influence events. [3]

What is interesting about Dragons is that they are dichotomous and somewhat contradictory. On one hand, what separates the Dragons from the Fortunes (other gods which will be explained later) is that they embody concepts that don't require human agency to exist. Objectively speaking, air always has been air and always will be air, and no amount of worship (or lack thereof) is going to change that. But on the other hand, air is more than just literal gas; it also represents connection and empathy. Fire is flame but is also burning passion; earth is determination and resistance in addition to being rock and soil; water is liquid as well as the strength that erodes rocks. It is entirely possible that this embodiment of abstract concepts is the result of the Dragons seeing themselves through human eyes.

Therefore: in Rokugan, there are lots of tiny spirits which are actually big spirits which are actually Dragons who then take human avatars who try to understand the humans who are trying to understand the tiny elemental kami spirits, and in so doing, influence the Dragons which influences the elements which influences the people.

All are one.



Footnotes:
[1] This will be discussed in greater detail under the "Shintao" entry.

[2]  The only difference is how well they apply that power, which is a combination of perception (smaller spirits don't notice as much) and leverage (smaller spirits don't know where best to focus that power). This is typically how shugenja achieve spell effects, by telling the spirits "You can achieve an awful lot if you do X thing at Y time and Z place for me."

[3] As a brief aside for fans of the card game: this "Dark Oracle" business is nonsense. Just because something resides in Tengoku doesn't make it virtuous, as Lord Moon aptly demonstrates. The Elemental Dragons find morality to be a strange, alien concept. Fire is neither good nor evil: it simply is. The waters that flood also irrigate. Air gives breath but also creates storms. Earth shelters, but also quakes.

Also, I pretty much ignore everything that happens after the Clan Wars anyway.

Cogs & Complexity

(An idea borne from an off-the-cuff discussion with Barking Alien earlier this evening.)


The problem with revised editions of games is that they frequently revise too much. Most RPG engines -- the crunchy bits of core mechanics which make the game run, hence the term -- start off with a very simple idea:

• "Roll a d20 and beat a number."
• "Add up your stat + skill and roll that many dice."
• "Pick a card."

Of course, an engine by itself is useless. You need wheels to make the car move. You need axles to attach the wheels. You need a transmission to get power to the wheels. You need a frame to hold everything together.

What inevitably happens, though, is that what is needed to make an RPG work is often inundated with optional rules and fiddly bits. Now don't get me wrong, I like fiddly bits in my games, because they usually give me a finer degree of control over my character, either in generation or in play. But they aren't necessary. The fact that Holmes-level D&D is thriving in the OSR while the far more complex Pathfinder and 4e D&D are on shelves is a testament to that fact.

As this complex game grows, it accumulates levels of complexity, much like Katamari Damacy. Whether this is good or bad depends on your philosophy, but it's a fact of life (and marketing) that games which are actively being sold and played experience regular growth of rules. Eventually, the system reaches a point where the core game is lost under the sheer weight of all the expansion and supplements. I call this "splat bloat," but there are other names associated with it.

Once a system reaches splat bloat, the clock starts ticking for a new edition of the game. Sometimes this is because the customer base decides that enough is enough and stops buying the books; sometimes this is because the system is so massive that the writers and editors can't keep track of everything and either put out products which contradict each other, or else spend so much time referring to old material to make sure contradictions don't happen that most of their energy is spent in research instead of writing.

The problem with revisions is that they often revise too much. Sometimes, in the name of simplicity and accessibility for new readers, they revise the soul right out of the game. (Insert snark about your edition wars in your system of choice here. My personal selection is Mutants & Masterminds 2e. )

But instead of endless revisionism, why don't we attack the root of the problem instead of sawing at its branches? To whit: The game is only as complex as you allow it to be.

As BA so succinctly put it, "The first time you read a RPG rulebook, you assume it's full of rules." It is holy writ for you, and you follow it to the letter. It is only much, much later, after years of experience, that you allow yourself the heretical notion that you can "simply look at all the text and sections and subsections and decide right then and there how crunchy you think the game should be."

My proposal is that we help novice GMs and players realize this by using a form of symbolic notation to let them know which parts of the game engine are crucial and which parts are not. Continuing with the car analogy, it would be a bit like having the following notations in the rulebook:

• "This is the carburetor. It won't work without it."
• "This is the automatic transmission. It's nice but not strictly necessary."
• "This is nitrous oxide. Use this only if you know what you're doing."

I envision a simple system, like a symbol of a gear in the margins. The more complex the rule or idea, the more cogs are in the gear. The heart of the engine ("Roll a d20") would have one cog. Character generation bits, such as skills or classes, would have two cogs. Tactical combat options would probably have many cogs.

This would, ideally, result in players and Game Masters realizing that not everything in a game book needs to be used all at once, and that the vast majority of RPG rules are optional.

A brief meditation on fantasy economics

Note: I am SO not an economist. I don't even claim to be good at math. Therefore, this is not a serious discussion of fantasy economic viability vis-à-vis reality.

If you've played fantasy RPGs for any length of time, you have certainly collected a fair amount of gold coins. Gold is the coin of the adventurer's realm, as it were, with silver relegated to being pocket change and copper worthy only of a sniff of condescension. I want to a little bit of mental re-alignment here to show how skewed that mindset it.

Peruse the equipment lists of your preferred fantasy RPG. Ignoring specific numbers and certain oddball outliers (flint & steel, I'm looking at you), we begin to notice certain trends:

• Subsistence-level items, like a loaf of bread or a mug of ale, cost copper pieces. 
• Sustainment-level items, like tools, basic clothing, and nightly shelter cost silver pieces. 
• Things which cost gold pieces are either truly expensive tools or luxury items (and if you're a peasant, a sword or a suit of armor is a luxury)

So let's do a bit of role-playing and put ourselves into a magical medieval society.  Since we are all reading this essay on a computer, it's reasonable to assume you have a regular supply of food, shelter, education, and entertainment. That immediately puts you well ahead of 90% of the fantasy populace, who eke out a living in what we would consider to be third-world conditions. They aren't illiterate because they're stupid; they're illiterate because they are too busy herding or farming or otherwise keeping their family fed to have time to study books, and when they get home in the evening they are too exhausted to do much of anything except eat their dinner and go to bed. They aren't dirty because they're slobs, they're dirty because they toil at jobs which make them filthy on a regular basis, and water is too precious to be wasted on daily bathing when they're just going to get dirty tomorrow.

For these people, copper is the only kind of money they use on a daily basis. They may occasionally see a silver if they have a particularly lucrative business (like a smithy) or if they sell livestock. They have never even seen a gold piece, much less touched one, and if you gave them one it would likely be more money than their family has ever had before. You, however, would be closer to a well-off merchant: you see silver all the time, occasionally some gold, and maybe once in your life you've seen a platinum piece.

Now let's apply this to the real world. A copper piece is worth roughly a dollar. We buy (cheap) meals for $5 - $10 all the time, and think nothing of it. It's disposable money to us, but to the lower classes -- those below the poverty line, on welfare and food stamps -- a dollar can make the difference between eating and going hungry.

Silver pieces aren't quite worth twenty dollars, but the $20 is so ubiquitous (as a result of ATMs) that it suits our purposes. This is where we, the middle class, spend most of our wealth: clothes, entertainment, quality food, entertainment, and either fuel for our cars or bus/train/cab fare. These things cost tens, but not hundreds, and while we may buy a lot of them we typically don't spend this money frivolously. A twenty, to us, is like a one or a five to a panhandler -- a basic unit of currency worth getting out of bed for.

Gold is for things which cost hundreds. Now it's important to note that in fantasy games, society does not yet have advanced metallurgical techniques and super-efficient assembly lines, so prices are often what we could consider exorbitant for consumer goods because of the cost of the raw materials and the time spent crafting them. But skip the Goods & Services table and look at the prices for armor and weapons. My father bought a handgun last week, and I came along because I think guns are neat. I did a lot of looking and window shopping while he picked out his gun, and I came to this conclusion:

Expect to pay $300 - $500, baseline, for a gun. It doesn't matter if it's a rifle, a shotgun, or a pistol, they simply don't go lower than $300 unless you buy used -- at which point you have to wonder if you're getting a discount because of a downward quality adjustment. The really, really good items, like a Desert Eagle .50 or a tricked-out AR-15 with a scope and a laser and a forward grip and all the other bells & whistles, can run over $1000. These would be roughly equivalent to a masterwork weapon.

And then there's this beast, which might be considered a +1 BFG of Ass-Whupping. Puts the price of a magic sword into perspective, doesn't it?

So in conclusion: fantasy games should run on the silver standard, not gold. The fact that adventures don't get out of bed for anything less than gold should serve as yet another indication that they are not, in fact, normal people, and their attitudes and goals are extraordinary rather than baseline. 

Nine While Nine

Everyone has heard of the Rule of Threes, and although which rule is open to debate, most peoples' thoughts will turn to the belief that disasters and/or celebrity deaths happen in triplicate. Regardless, three is a very powerful number, mathematically, scientifically, and mystically.

See what I did there? I used the Writing Rule of Three to enforce my point. Orators and rhetoricians have used threes to great effect:

• "Never, never, never give up." -- Winston Churchill
• "Read my lips: No New Taxes" -- George H.W. Bush (special double emphasis version)
• "If today I stand here as a revolutionary, it is as a revolutionary against the Revolution." -- Adolph Hitler

(Note to contextualists: I'm not suggesting anything political by listing Churchill, Bush, and Hitler in the same paragraph. These were simply the first that came to my mind.)

Threes are very popular, and very powerful. So much so that a 2nd Edition AD&D game setting called Planescape created a world where the rule became the law, and then expanded upon this by making two other laws, thus forming a perfect triad of cosmological law:

The first principle, the Rule-of-Three, says simply that things tend to happen in threes. The principles which govern the planes are themselves subject to this rule.

The second principle is the Unity of Rings, and notes that many things on the planes are circular, coming back around to where they started. This is true geographically as well as philosophically

The third principle is the Center of All, and states that there is a center of everything — or, rather, wherever a person happens to be is the center of the multiverse... from their own perspective, at least. As most planes are functionally infinite, disproving anyone's centricity would be impossible. In Planescape, this is meant philosophically just as much as it is meant in terms of multiversal geography.

A great deal of this philosophy carried over into, as you might expect, Third Edition D&D.

1. Saving Throws: Fortitude, Reflex, and Will.
   
2. Base Attack Bonus: Good, Average, Poor.
   
3. Core Books: Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Monster Manual.
   

But when I created my "The Light, the Dark, and the Gray" post (again, note the three), I realized how the two axes of Ethics (law vs chaos) and morality (good vs evil) created nine possible alignments, When I started looking, I found nines everywhere! Which makes sense when you think about it, because nine is really just three in triplicate.

• As previously stated, nine alignments: Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil; Chaotic Good, Chaotic Neutral, Chaotic Evil; Neutral Good, True Neutral, and Neutral Evil.
  
• Nine size categories: Fine, Diminutive, Tiny, Small, Medium, Large, Huge, Gargantuan, Colossal.
  
• There are actually nine forms of unique dice used in D&D. In addition to the standard d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20, there is the d3 (half a d6 and used for unarmed strikes), the d2 (half a d4 and used for several small-size weapons) and the d1, aka the single point of damage that sneaks in through a variety of different means, usually through wording like "damage may not be reduced below 1 hit point."
• Important weapon data: Simple, Martial, or Exotic? Smashing, Bludgeoning, or Piercing? Damage, Critical multiplier, and Range.
  
• Before Third edition introduced zero-level cantrips and orisons, spells went from level (power) one to level nine. Everyone knows that all the best spells are ninth level.
  
• And I know this last one will be met with suspicion, when you look at my Compass Rose of Character Classes, there are nine distinct positions.

No doubt some of you are thinking, "This is all very well and good, Palette, but where are you going with this?" Which is a fair question, because I'm wondering that myself. I honestly don't know what my thesis is, other than "there sure are a lot of nines around here." Sometimes the answer comes to me as I write, but sadly not in this case.

Since I have to force a conclusion here, I will end with this: D&D has, from the beginning, been about numbers and symbolism. I think it would be neat to create a campaign world -- even an entire cosmology -- where the Law of Nine was apparent and important. However, I don't know how I'd do that without making it just a multiple of the Law of Three.

But this isn't just an excuse to pad my postcount with blogfodder. I actually am working on a campaign world, more for fun than anything else, and I'll try to work Nines into it somehow. If you have any ideas on how to implement this, please leave a comment below... I'd love to see what similarly deranged minds can come up with.

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Now playing: Sisters of Mercy - Nine While Nine
via FoxyTunes

Atlas LOLed

Sometimes an idea leaps unbidden into my mind. Sometimes it is perfect and fully-formed, like Aphrodite rising from the sea.

Sometimes it is utterly batshit crazy.

Today is one of those days, because just now, I had this startling revelation:

LOLcats are the new Objectivists.

The evidence for my case is staggeringly simple. First I will list the Objectivist Axioms, and their classical examples, and then I will list the modern LOLcat example thereof.

1. Axiom of Existence: To be aware is to be aware of something. I can haz cheezburger?
   
2. Axiom of Identity: A is A. Longcat is long.
   
3. Axiom of Consciousness: Consciousness... is not a passive state, but an active process that consists of... differentiation and integration. I'm in your X, Y'ing your Z.
   

I could go on, but I think the evidence speaks for itself. Feel free to argue amongst yourselves. It could even be said that LOLcats are a truer, purer form of Objectivism than even Objectivists can attain.

Oh, and before anyone thinks to argue about the Invisible Sandwich et al., let me point out the Primacy of Existence,i.e. "Real is better than imaginary," and the indisputable LOLcat belief that a visible and therefore real cheeseburger is better than an invisible and therefore imaginary one, because if imaginary cheeseburgers were just as good then LOLcats everywhere would not be asking "I can haz cheezburger?"; they would instead be NOM'ing on their invisible ones.

As you can see, my mind travels in dark and fearsome places. One day it might be eaten by a grue.


PS: IM IN UR BRAIN BREAKIN UR PAIR A DIMES

Self-Improvement Through Self-Immolation

So, I seem to be stuck in a Fight Club kind of mood today. Which is cool, because I really like that movie. It's been a while since I saw it, but for a while there I made a point to watch it every six months or so.

That movie still speaks to me, and it's not because of its existentialist philosophy (to which I partially subscribe) or the fantastic acting of Ed Norton. It's because it helped me through a very rough time in my life, back when I had been dumped by my fiancee (3/21/03, R.M.E., I still haven't forgotten) and it felt like I had lost everything of value in my life. In fact, I felt like I had nothing worth living for, and I would have killed myself were it not for the fact that I knew that doing so would have hurt, in the most terrible and personal way possible, those few people left who still cared about me.

And then I watched Fight Club, and realized something:

• Evolve or Die.
• The Universe doesn't care which path I choose.
  
• Entropy, however, wants to keep me from evolving, because that's the path of least resistance.
  
• Therefore, anything that prevents me from improving myself is my mortal enemy, and I must kill it with fire.
  

Which is pretty heady philosophy, you must admit, but it's a bit shoddy in practice. I can rage all day long at things which I perceive as obstacles to self-improvement, but it's not at all productive, and if I take that last line a bit too literally it would result in criminal charges.

Prison, I felt, would be a definite hindrance to my own journey of evolution.

It wasn't until later -- years later, sadly -- that I realized the second, crucial, element of this binary philosophy. It began at my Goth club, where I was quite happily depressed, when I noticed that some woman was giving readings of Tarot cards. I decided to get a piece of this action, because there's little I enjoy more than saying "Nope, you're wrong" when someone tries to analyze me.

I went into it blind, with all the arrogance of "If you're a psychic, you already know who I am and what I want." The woman obligingly cast my future, and one of the cards -- I don't recall which one, and I know she wasn't using a standard deck like a Rider-Waite -- had a dragon on it. I do recall that this card was in the "present" position, and she started to do a fairly typical spiel along the lines of the "Striking the Dragon's Tail" scenario.

"That's me," I interrupted her, stabbing the dragon with my finger. "I'm not that stupid farmer. I'm the dragon." I said this mostly because I was getting irritated with the predictability of the reading and wanted to throw her for a loop, but also because I dislike being categorized so neatly.

I was hoping she'd sputter in an amusing manner. Instead, she quietly murmured, "Friend, get out of your own way." I didn't really know what she meant by that, but I knew that whatever it was, it was important. Not because it was Tarot, but because she had hit a very sensitive and vulnerable spot I didn't know I had. I chewed on this for a long time, trying to puzzle it out.

I finally figured it out last year when I realized that I am the source of all my problems.

Of course, I'm not about to set myself on fire. That would be foolishly self-destructive. What I aspire to do, what I have been trying to accomplish for nearly a year now, is to systematically destroy those obstacles in my life which I have placed in my path. And believe me, it's hard going, because while it's very easy to say "I would sure be motivated to make more of myself if I was starving and freezing in a ditch," the human desire for comfort is a very hard thing to short-circuit. I suspect this is because our minds equate comfort with survival.

I guess, then, the entire point of my post is this: 2009 is my Year of the Phoenix. Either I burn away all my dross and am reborn, resplendent, and rise to the heights to which I know I can climb... or I burn out forever, and accept a life of mediocrity.

Evolve or die.

Self-improvement through self-immolation.

Come watch me, my friends. This is the year I burn brightly, and even if I fail, I'll go out like a viking.

It'll be a hell of a show.