Demon's don't exist.

[Judd]

I've heard you say this a few times, something like, "Demons don't exist, yet the sorcerers can summon them," and I don't really understand what that means. Does that mean that the demons are a shared hallucination, a manifestation of the sorcerer's will that doesn't really exist at all?

What does it mean when NPC's see them?

I know you are knee-deep in kickstarter-ville, so no rush on a reply.

[Ron Edwards]

I'll get to this when I can. In the meantime, I'd prefer that others not chime in until after that; it's definitely a one-on-one topic.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Judd,

Let me know if this helps.

When I use that phrase - which I've been doing frequently during pitches, lately - there are two responses I get. In personal face-to-face contact, typically I get the one I want more often, which is why I have been trying different routes in print or in voice interview. Your response is picture-perfect for the response that I ... well, I can't say "that I don't want," more like, "indicating that this concept is not useful for this person."

Your proposed interpretations, which I understand are inquisitive, are like a horse that gets out of the barn and bolts down the road. It ain't going anywhere good. The work is back in the corral, and before we can do anything even beginning to be the work, the horse's entire route from barn to its present location has to be recovered and sternly identified as Not That Way.

What's wrong with those interpretations is that they re-establish, or never challenge in the first place, the integrity of the setting's own metaphysics. If I say "demons don't exist," and then I say "you have one," then they can't be demons, can they? The first sentence is given privilege over the second. The first one is deemed right, like the Series Bible in a setting-centered science fiction TV franchise. Anything after that can only be nuance or self-delusion, justified in some way in in-setting terms. "You have one." Oh, no you don't, it just looks like you do. Because the first sentence wins. Privileging the first sentence is the core error; that's why the horse is 'way down the road in the wrong place. Playing with this construction in mind would be absolute poison to the point of the game.

So, let's not go That Way. Let's say the horse didn't bolt and now we're back at the corral, gazing uneasily at the work. First question: so, do we privilege the second sentence, then? Meaning, the first sentence is simply wrong? By this interpretation, "Demons don't exist" is simply a social delusion and sorcerers are the ones who know the truth about the setting. This is the classic Masquerade in all its glory ... and it's wrong too. Not as off-the-ranch wrong as the first interpretation, but still wrong. I wouldn't say it's as poisonous a misinterpretation as the first, but it's definitely kindergarten compared to what I'm after.

With that initial learning-step in the corral accomplished - which is to say, really grasping that this is not about simply rejecting one of the sentences in favor of the other - we can get to the real work. The two sentences together prompt cognitive dissonance. They are supposed to. Don't dodge out of it, stay in there, distress and all.

If both sentences are fully true, then in-fiction, the character has already broken the laws of reality in order to be a sorcerer at all. Not perceived laws - the real ones.

You can apply this concept in many ways. One useful consequential detail is that the Will descriptor Belief System becomes very important - it means the character thinks that he or she has successfully explained the demons' existence in some cosmological way. Emphasis on "thinks." One might also point to the Lore descriptor Mad as potentially closely related, such that in combination, those descriptors make a potent brew.

More specifically, I remember an old thread in which someone was all puzzled because the AI ships in some anime series (Gundam Wing?) were "real," right, so how could demons not be real? My answer was that the ships were demonstrably not merely AIs, which would mean they'd behave precisely as their design specs had predicted - still servile machines, intelligent yes, but intelligent tools. Whereas the ships in the series were disturbingly, alarmingly something beyond that, with all the perversity, neediness, and caricatured-human qualities that match the concepts in the game. And only the pilots really knew this, and acted upon it.

Fostering this particular unit of cognitive dissonance is also important for the player. People say "my character scares me," but that shouldn't be about how foul or immoral the rituals or Need may be. Such things are faux-scary Ozzy Osbourne dross. You could have the squeakiest-nicest sorcerer in the world who does rituals by posing Barbie dolls tastefully and whose demons have needs like "accessorizing," and that character should still scare the shit out of you because of what they have already done: broken the rules which every single science, philosophy, religion, or moral-metaphysical concept in the setting justifiably take as given. What remains is chaos, and I don't mean a nice safe cosmologically-defined realm in Planescape. I mean the end of rationality, the end of modeling the universe, the end of a sense of "place" for oneself, and the end of an objective understanding of existence - anything's existence.

That's Lore.

Best, Ron

[bankuei]

What clicked for me in understanding that idea was considering many horror movie villains.   It's not like there's a set of metaphysical rules for how you get "Chucky" or "Jason" - no one stops and goes, "Oh, when this and this happens, now you have an animated doll of murder" - it's something that isn't a 1 in a million chance, it's a 0 chance, an impossibility.

And yet here it is.  And you fucking made it (summoned it, whatever).

Chris

[Ron Edwards]

Found Jesse's statement of the idea, in Not-Here, Not Here-And-Now Plus Demons, and NaN.

I stress, however, that the exercise lies in saying it for yourself, in your words.

Best, Ron

[Judd]

Ron, is it this or this?

Judd, it is both.

But squinting at them until they bleed together makes me uncomfortable.

Yes.

Demons don't exist but despite or to spite all of the rules and regulations of reality these motherfuckers summon and bind them anyway.

I think I gotcha.