The Cardinal Emotions

[dindenver]

TM,
  I have went to post to this and stopped like 3 or 4 times, lol
  I think the setting for this is great. Don't relegate the setting to fluff and make it part of the mechanics/design, please.
  I feel like you are approaching the castes from the wrong angle.
  We are talking about Angelic beings, right? So,it is not clear if they even experience genuine human emotions. And in fact, they are manufactured to fulfill a specific purpose, like the Khokmah were created to server Inspiration or other sparks of creativity that fall under divine providence, no? See how that doesn;t effectively map to human emotion?
  But if you approached it from the angle of these beings were created for a specific purpose, then you can match each caste to a "Duty" or Personality type. Like maybe all Khokmah are mad scientists and are only useful when teaming up with a Binah.
  Maybe something like that might help you with your approach?
Dave M

[TempvsMortis]

[TempvsMortis]

Also, as far as the commandments and things are concerned, I'm skimming over this. It's all fairly detailed, what you actually can do to break or not break a commandment, and what kinds of things happen to you if you do.

[TempvsMortis]

Well, okay, so you *can* kill people, but you can't kill their souls, hence "separate God and Man". You can shoot em dead all you like, just don't rip their souls apart.

[TempvsMortis]

The Tree of Life according to Qabalah:



(This site needs an Edit button. You can't expect people to know everything they'll want to say from now until tomorrow the instant they post.)

[Mickey]

(This site needs an Edit button. You can't expect people to know everything they'll want to say from now until tomorrow the instant they post.)

(I know, that's what I said)

Quote from: TempvsMortis on May 17, 2008, 10:18:03 AM

	Logged

[TempvsMortis]

Jeeze, this is getting a off track. I hadn't been planning to explain the *whole thing*...

Okay, basically, I read this article on rpg.net about the idea of a stack system. Basically, there's a blank list on the character sheet where you write your "retributions". Whenever you gain a new retribution you must roll for all of your stored retributions, and if you succeed then the new one goes on top of the list. Of course, the more retributions on the stack the harder the roll, so really you're just postponing the inevitable. (You can also choose to fail, which is good when there's nothing on your stack so that you can deal with them as they come instead of all at once.) Once you fail a roll, you start a retribution chain reaction. The retribution that triggered the test activates then, and then over time each retribution activates, in an order that makes the most logical sense.

Example:

1) My wife leaves me
2) My wife gives birth to a demon (okay, so basically the Grigori are at war with the souls of their dead children, the nephilim, who haunt them with monstrosities that only they can see... it's complicated. Oh, and the birth will probably kill her.)
3)My flesh lights on fire

Then you break commandment 8 and the retribution is: My career (both human and grigori) will be destroyed. You fail the roll. So now what happens is that the newest one activates, and quickly or slowly (up to the discretion of your Antagonist; oh yeah, should probably mention that: this is a GM-less game) your career will fall apart, as a Grigori intellectual or whatever. This leads to the next one, since your tenuous relationship with your wife now collapses, and she leaves you, even though she's baring your child and never told you (because if you had known you would probably have gotten an abortion for the monstrosity, or option b) gone insane and carved it out of her...). Months later you get a call saying she's giving birth, your worst nightmare. You rush to the hospital to fine the lights flickering and people dropping unconscious, and the thing that sprung from your wife passes through the wall and into the night, to torment you later for the rest of your life. When you get to the emergency room they tell you she died in childbirth, and that the child was still born. (Of course, you know that the still-born fetus was just a vessel.) Then, just to top it all off, good ol' fashioned old testament wrath: right as you hear the news you spontaneously combust, they put you out, and you're confined to the emergency room for a month as that thing goes around destroyed the last shreds of your life.

As you can see, frequent and blatant disregard for the commandments is not encourages. I think your whole idea of self-punishment is really awesome. Maybe that way players can work off pending retributions. I don't want it to be easy though, because you're pretty much supposed to fear retributions.

Now, back to the primary powers please! Am I just going to be stuck with these six and mixing and matching them to the nine castes? At this rate it looks like it. Oh well. At least it was fun for you guys, huh?

[TempvsMortis]

And if you broke all the ones you said, you'd be screwed. No way a whip's gunna blunt that blow, 'cause at that point the universe is just gunna hafta prove a point, make an example of ya'.

And soul forging is like wraith: the oblivion, to a degree. Basically you can attack people's souls, not just their bodies, but you can also remove their souls when you kill them, and capture them. If you take the soul to someone who knows the art, you can make something from their soul that is embodies with their properties and will resurrect with you every incarnation. So, it's not too uncommon for a Watcher to awaken and discover he has a scythe made from his brother of a past life, which causes moral regret in everyone it strikes. The only soul-forging that's free is monstrosities. They're neither people, nor grigori, so you can just do what you like with em, though they're tough to bind.

[Mickey]

it's not too uncommon for a Watcher to awaken and discover he has a scythe made from his brother of a past life, which causes moral regret in everyone it strikes.

That's gold.

Yeah I've basically been milking you for info on the project the whole time -its' been a gas

I don't really have anything more to elaborate on concerning the 6 primary powers/emotions at this time (I think that I'd need to know more about the backstory/setting to really comment on them), but with all that you've shared so far I'm confident that you'll eventually come to some conclusion that satisfies you.

[Mickey]

Also:

the only limitation on what you can do is if it applies to your emotion, and the difficulty the gm determines

I thought you said the game was GM-less?

[TempvsMortis]

yeah, but i wrote that before i decided to tell you guys it was gm-less, so what I really meant was the antagonist, who plays your nephila. Basically, each grigori has a nephila child from the ancient days, whose souls are trapped in Sheol so they cannot resurrect or join god (remember, in Judaism there is no hell, only distance from God), but their festering flesh spawns demonic entities (think like Sin in FFX) that haunt their fathers. Each grigori has a player who represents their nephila, and this player is the one who controls the demons and such, who is the antagonist. Everything else is with the help of spectators and whatnot, but like in most gm-less games there are one or two players who represent most of the gm's power, so in this case it's the antagonist, who plays the player's nephila (literally their own personal demon who's been haunting and torturing them since the beginning of time, and some think it's out of anger because the grigori refuse to love them, other's think that their souls have become symbols of nothingness and they are agents of Armageddon, trying to reduce everything to nothingness [think Nobilis] ).

[Vulpinoid]

I'm intrigued that you used Da'at as one of the 10 sephirot and omitted Keter.

This says a lot.

How intentional was this?

V

[TempvsMortis]

Very intentional. Also, notice that many who espouse Da'at see it as sort of a nega-sephirah, representing emptiness, which fits in well with the whole idea of them being gone. See, the whole idea of the sephirot came around during the renaissance, so the whole implication here is that qabalah actually came from a breach of the commandments by the Grigori and some humans found out. Also, Da'at represents a unification of the lower sephirot, which I thought was appropriate for a de facto leader caste. But the thing is, keter isn't gone. I didn't mention is, but they're there. Basically, there are these beings that the grigori think are the angels who still have gods favor, and like almost every being, they exist on the plains lower than their optimal ones (the grigori only operate on Asiyah and  Yetzirah, and humans only operate on Asiyah). On the lowest plane they are just natural objects, like mountain peaks, but to the grigori who can see the plane of Yetzirah, they look like beings of blinding white light. They call them Keter(Katarim) [Crown], and they frequently make pilgrimages to them to ask them questions, which they rarely answer, and almost always cryptically. I chose them to be the karatim because since keter is the representation of knowledge that is closest to God, I thought it would be more appropriate that they be the true angels, and that da'ot be the tenth caste of the grigori.