This is a Forge Birthday (and Special Events) game; if it isn't finished by the time the Birthday Forum closes for the year, I will hold off on it until the next Iron Game Chef or 24-hour games thread is active, and work on it during those.

In the perfect world, this game, when it is complete, will also serve to capture the spirit of the Invisible Cities-styled game that Jonathan asked me to do. This isn't entirely because I am less productive than I'd like - I believe that an intelligent fusion of the ideas will make a stronger game, and I really do want to write that Cities game.

So, tell me about the conception of Heaven that you were referring to, before I go off too far with my own ideas.

The only one I'm going to toss out there is this:

For the beauty to make you cry, you have to care about it first, and then destroy it with your own hand. And you have to want to destroy it.

I just posted some comments in the old thread. I'm reposting them here so we can dissect them:

Jonathan Walton wrote: Ben, Shreyas, and I need to co-write a game that runs from the creation of the angels through the war in Heaven, culminating in the Fall of Satan/Lucifer/Iblis's rebel faction. And yes, there should be lots of crying involved. Lots of crying at the beauty and the harshness of God's Love and Will. Additionally, Heaven should be, if we can manage this, non-anthropomorphic, since human beings haven't been created yet. You know how, traditionally, angels are often depicted as giant amalgamations of eyes, wings, and animal parts? That's the direction to go. Steal from Milton, steal from Dante, steal from L'Engel, steal from the Bible, steal from the Qur'an. Oh, it would be glorious! Imagine millions upon millions (pre-Fall population of Heaven: 399,920,004) of tiny sprite-like balls of faith and feathers swarming towards each other in intricate arcs and patterns, only to be harshly crushed like so many insects! The glorious tragedy! So delicious!

That's precisely what I was starting out with.

I had this slightly too-Nobilisy idea that each angel is the perfect beauty of some thing, and something valuable comes of creating one's own beauty, but only at the cost of destroying another. So you can have large or small-scale conflicts like these:

The angel of Radial Symmetry invents a certain kind of six-petalled flower. The angel of Unlikely Predators invents the archetypal preying mantis - a long-limbed green creature. Then the angel of Parasitic Relations steps in and resculpts the flower and the mantis, destroying the flower's symmetry in order to turn it into an orchid, which becomes an ideal home for its flattened, ornamented orchid mantis, which is clearly the ideal predator for that environment. Later Symbiosis changes the mantis's behavior, making it nomadic between flowers, so that it serves as a pollinator rather than a prevention of pollination. Strangely, this sounded really compelling in my head as I was walking to stat this morning.

The angel of Paradise makes the Garden of Eden on Earth, and Innocence creates Adam and Eve. Knowledge creates the tree of knowledge. Temptation creates the serpent. All is well and good, so far, but nothing has happened, until Temptation starts attacking Eve's innocence and then Adam's by trying to combine them with Knowledge, and this gets them kicked out of Paradise. Ouch!

But I think that's probably a very modern and abstract view of what's going on, and might not be immediately useful here.

See, I think it would be cooler if the angels embodied something far more alien than concrete things or ideals. You're right though: they do need to be the beauty of something or at least a certain kind of beauty. Maybe, since angels were originally created by the breath of God to sing His praises (at least, in some mythologies), they should all reflect (like mirrors or planets) some aspect of the beauty of God. After all, most angelic names end in "-el" or "-iel" which means, roughly, "of God." So you have Gabriel, "God is my strength," Uriel, "the fire of God," Raguel, "the friend of God," Raphael, "God has healed," Michael, "he who is like God," etc. It might make sense then for Heaven to be constructed out of angels , then, and Creation might later be; instead of patron angels, the angels would become different aspects of Creation. So God literally creates the world out of his image (i.e. the angels).

Just a weird thought.

Oh yeah, and that would mean that, when angels fought or destroyed each other, they would be destroying bits of God.

Almost enough to make you cry ;)

If it's OK for me to throw in my two bits:

In the Talmud, it says somewhere that the Angels get less credit in God's eyes than people, because they have no carnal instincts and naturally follow God's laws. This might be a reason for the battles to rage so strongly in Heaven -- angels lack the commonalities of mortal life to distract them from their ideals.

I get a sense from your example that angels don't make much distinction between the political, the metaphysical, and the aesthetic -- I like that, and I liked your example with the mantis and the flower.

DannyK

DannyK, sure! Input is great.

That's an interesting angle, that the angels' very inhumanity makes them capable of these terrifying things. And yes, I intended that they don't make distinctions that seem useful to people, because they're not people. They're something else.

Hmm...angels as the organs of God...that's an interesting concept. This is turning out to be a really fun thread; I don't think I really want to reserve it as a Special Efents game any longer.

Mirrors or planets...somehow, this resonates really strongly with me. I suspect you planned it that way, Jonathan.

So, now, to give this thread some direction: What do the players do in this game? One option is that they play one or more angels, and their job is the stewardship of their own brand of beauty - and, just as importantly, they have an imperialistic need to impose this beauty on everything. They play out the actions of the angels, who reach out and shape creation with the world-maker's hand - as organs of God, they have miraculous awareness, power, and love for their own part of beauty.

Alternatively, that conflict could all be played out in the abstract, and play could focus on the effects of angelic conflict at the level of instantiation. (This is the Invisible Cities angle, I think.)

If angels are parts of God, and they inherently conflict with each other, then what does this say about the state of God and Creation? Can angelic conflict affect God in an important manner, and bring about events like the Fall, the end of the world, etc., or is it a more or less cosmetic state of affairs, with larger events being out of the players' hands? If angels are part of God, then what is the Fall?

Shreyas Sampat wrote: If angels are part of God, then what is the Fall?

To clarify in my mind, I seem to recall some doctrinal conflict that led the Fallen to separate from Heaven.

What was the conflict that precipitated the Fall? (I think you're right; pinning this down for the purposes of the game can bring it great direction.)

There are several reasons given for the Fall, in different sources.

In Paradise Lost, Satan starts the rebellion because God elevates the Son (the pre-existent Jesus, in an "In the Beginning was the Word" type of way) to be the superior of all the angels, a place that was formerly his own. Personally, I don't like this version, but I don't really like the idea of a pre-existent Christ, either.

In the Qur'an, Iblis starts the rebellion because God elevates man and commands the angels to serve and look after mankind, when it's obvious that humans are inferior to angels. I like this version much better, but it means the Fall happens after the creation of man (which isn't my preference, but sounds more like what you have in mind).

In some Christian traditions, Satan/Lucifer justs sees himself as God's superior, or thinks that he can do a better job than God. Then the Fall happens and God creates man to be His new servants, replacing the fallen angels. I don't know how this would be possible, if angels reflect God's beauty, unless Satan was "the pride of God" (God's narcissism and self-esteem).

Sometimes, angels fall (though this may be after the civil war and big Fall) through the pleasures of the flesh and senses, seducing (or being seduced by) mortals and having carnal relations with them. This, in turn, creates the nephalim, the half-angels, who were monstrous and caused God to flood the world, according to some accounts. Some angels are also rumored to have fallen because of greed or wrath or gluttony or one of the other Seven Deady Sins.

More points for thought:

On the back cover of 'To Reign in Hell,' Steven Brust wrote: God is omnipotent, but Satan is not a fool. There seems to be a contradiction here.

In, 'The Hypostasis of the Archons,' someone wrote: I have sent you to inquire about the hypostasis (reality) of the Archons (rulers, authorities, angels). Their chief is blind; because of his Power and ignorance and his arrogance he said, with his Power, "It is I who am God; there is none apart from me." When he said this, he sinned against the Entirety.

...

Then the Female Spiritual Principle (Sophia, the Wisdom of the True God) came in the form of the Snake, the Instructor; and it taught them, saying, "What did he say to you? Was it 'From every tree in the Garden shall you eat; yet, from the tree of evil and good do not eat'?"

The carnal Woman said, "Not only did he say "Do not eat,' but even 'Do not touch it; for the day you eat from it, from death you are going to die.'"

And the Snake, the Instructor, said, "With death you will not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather, your eyes shall open and you shall become like the gods, recognizing evil and good." And the Female Instructing Principle was taken away from the Snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth.

I suggest not feeling constrained by religious doctrine. Instead, make this game to adress an issue. Do you want this game to be about having faith no matter the cost? Or maybe you want it to be about doing what seems good but is actually wrong. Find an issue and then construct the game around it.

I wasn't suggesting being limited by existing mythology. That's why I was giving so many different choices to see which ones clicked. But when you stray too far from the themes that human beings have focused on for millions of years, you end up creating a superficial mythology with no substance (like the one in most "mythic fantasy" games). If you base it on existing mythology, but tweak it or reinterpret it for your purposes, it gives you a huge foundation to draw from.

That's why Ben Lehman wrote: You are not cooler than thousands of years of human storytelling culture.

Wow.
Just wow.
You guys are the *best*

Okay, now I'm going to get into some serious setting design meat. I'm going to tossing out ideas around left and right here. Don't let me step on your toes, or derail things, or take this as any sort of "guideline" other than "more cool stuff."

1) I don't like the idea of limiting this game to the "pre-fall" times. Why? Because Heaven is described out outside of space and time -- literally, the entire history of Heaven is happening constantly, eternally. The war is going on *right now*, and it was settled yesterday, and it will be settled tomorrow.

1b) Because of this, Heaven is simultaneous Before Creation, Before Man, During Man before Salvation, During Man After Salvation, and After the Last Day.

2) The description of angels as not having any free will seems, to me, to not make them strong candidates for player characters (yes, I have somewhere I'm going with this.) I think that angels, literally as described in the mythology, function as game mechanics. In other words, "roll your Razael dice" seems like a really cool idea to me.

3) I have read a description that, upon entering Paradise, the salvaged souls lose their entire memory of those that did not enter paradise. Otherwise, they would feel survivor's guilt, and paradise would be unpleasant.

My reference: Hymns of Paradise (I hope I'm getting the name right here) is my main source material here -- early Christian poems about the nature of the world to come.

4) What if you are playing saved souls who, after the last day, are called upon to recollect the world and, through and together with the angels, create it? (remember the trans-time thing.)

4a) What if you're playing yourself?

yrs--
--Ben

Okay, so I really, really dig trans-spacetime heaven and trans-spacetime angels.

Satan is always present in Heaven, there at the right hand of God, but everyone knows that he also sits on the throne of Hell, simultaneously. As such, he has a terrible beauty that is hard to stomach. Of course, talking of "sitting" and "at the right hand" don't really matter in a "place" where spacetime occurs all at once. Heaven is not a place, or a time. Heaven is an explosion of beauty, a flicker in the night, it is forever and a day. I can already tell that getting all poetic about Heaven is going to rock...

(Side thought, potential titles: The Ancient of Days, Forever and Ever Amen, The Sweet Hereafter, Alpha and Omega, etc.)

So, Ben wants human souls as PCs. Possibly strict avatars of the players. I like the idea of having someone's mortal imperfections burned away by the glory of God and Heaven, similar to the way people believed you could burn someone's mortality away (like Loki does to Daniel in Sandman: The Kindly Ones). So the question would be: what remains of a person after their mortal failings have been burned away? What does the soul preserve after death?

So, if the war in Heaven is constantly going on, it makes it easy for it to be about humans. Maybe Satan and the fallen, at the moment he and Heaven come into being, sees humans there and "decides" (in a non-causal sort of way) that they don't belong in Heaven, so he wars against God. Hmm, how to narrate all this simultaneously happening stuff? It should probably just be a matter of perspective.

Okay, thought: What if we collapse the dimensions to help model this better?

Time and Space are both a single point in Heaven, so players have to choose what they want to focus on and that's what they experience. If they want to talk to Michael, he's right there and he has plenty of time to answer your questions. If you want to watch the Fall, you can do that too. So maybe very player-specific scene framing, where they specifically request what they want to experience and then it happens.

Do we even need a GM for this? Maybe not. Maybe we just create a general "map" of Heaven's spacetime, where you list major "events" and occurances and then the players "wander around" by focusing on specific things that are going on.

Some more thoughts. Bedtime now. More tomorrow. Shreyas, you're going to have a fun time sorting through all this.

I really ought to be doing work right now, but I just had some thoughts on "systematizing" Shreyas's ideas on creation and also the relationship between the players, the "gm" (if any), and the system, and they need to get written down before I forget them.

On Creation: I don't know if this is *necessarily* all you do in the game, but it should be a part of the whole affair (perhaps the lowest node of the tree of life, each node of which is a subsystem?) and here are some ideas on systematizing it. If this looks a lot like Universalis, that's not an accident.

1) Creation is systematized in a series of concepts, called "Logos" and written down on 3x5 cards with a series of traits. So you get things looking like:
Orchid:
Flower
Six Petalled

Perhaps there is some limit or requirement for number of traits. I haven't thought about this yet.

1a) The initial card is, by tradition, "Light"

2) When you want to add a card, you describe the sort of thing that you are creating and, utilizing effective speech, add it into creation with the aid of the angels. When you describe the object, you take 1-3 dice (your choice) and roll them, depending on the strength of your concept -- if it is muddled, take less dice, if it is clear, take more. Also, any other member of the Metatron (see below) can give you an extra dice. If you roll high, your creation is so strong that the other bits of creation wrap themselves around it. If you roll low, your creation is weakly formed and the rest of creation takes bits of it and changes them. This manifests as adding and taking away of traits.

3) There are ways around these rules -- ways of directly effecting the board. These are handled by Lucifer, through the Scar of the War. The question is "is shaping creation as you want it to be shaped worth the cost of exerting your will on it?" Wham. Narrativism.

So about the players -- this is pretty far out there:

I would like to note to Jonathan (and Shreyas) that I don't need the players to be humans. It was just an idea.

I suggest that the majority of the players are, collectively, the Metatron -- the voice of God. It is through them that creation is order, and through them that the angels are directed, and through them that paradise is both created and experienced.

(Traditionally, for the curious, the Metatron is a transcended human. So that's one option.)

I suggest that the system, and possibly a "GM-player" represent "the Host." This player has no real "free will" as it were -- they merely enact the rules and assist the other players, as well as role-playing all the angelic (and demonic) host. The particular caveat here is that "the Host" has one role that gets to make its own decisions -- Lucifer. But perhaps only when the Metatron invokes him.

Other thoughts -- Christ and the Holy Ghost -- how do they fit into the system? Memories? Mary?

I also think that the approach to important religious figures -- Satan, Christ, Mary, etc. -- should give multiple approachs drawn from various Christian sects that can be combined into your unique "metaplot," as it were. Or can be tailored by members of a particular Christian viewpoint, if using the game as a religious tool.

yrs--
--Ben

Wow, after reading this thread, I've realised that there are way too many differing notions of angels out there, even within the christian tradition. Throw in a few other religious sources, and it's a right bloody mess.

Metatron is a singular, not a collective. Metatron is The Voice of God. In life, he was Enoch. In life, God charged Enoch with the scribing of His history and intentions, so that mortal men may know the true God. Enoch and Soloman are the only two humans who have never died. Soloman was taken up into heaven, but Enoch, rightous above all others, became the official Voice of God: Metatron.

The reference to any angel as a "Fallen" angel is reserved for those 200 odd (most of whom were Watchers) who were seduced by the beauty of mortal women (all angels are male, imagine the angst!), and their fall came from two reasons: One, god forbade any angel to sleep with any mortal, and they did, giving birth to the nephillim (sometimes known as the grigori, though this term actually means the Watchers), which were huge giants of great power who had no souls, but had an "eternal and insatiable hunger" which they could never satisfy, and thus they all waged war on earth, corrupting everyone and causing great amounts of mischief and carnage (as has been mentioned, the nephillim were the reason God created the flood, and FYI, Goliath was a nephillim). The second reason was that the fallen watchers taught mankind things that God deemed suitable only for heaven, and commanded the angels to never teach to humans. These things included metallurgy, sexual positions, make-up, written language, magic, medicine, and knowledge of plants and herbs.

God punished the fallen by devising an individual punishment for each of the 200 odd. One of them is said to be buried deep within the earth for all time, another was sent far away among the stars, others were sent to live in eternal burning torment within the sun, but yeah, 200 different punishments.

No other angels should be called "Fallen".

"A Dictionary of Angels" by Gustav Davidson is a worthy, well-researched, and extensive resource that I would recommend to any person interested in the goings on of angels and the inner workings of the 7-10 (pick one!)heavens.

If you want to make a game that is not "a superficial mythology with no substance" then I reckon you may have your work cut out for you. Mainly because agreement on any particular mythos is rare, even among advocates of a superficially similar view. I reckon your best bet would be to pick one particular perspective that you really like, and run with that, rather than mix and match and piss everybody off for doing so (kinda like if someone mixed babylon 5 with star trek to make a cool sci fi game).

Alternatively, and this is what I would recommend most strongly, you could find aspects that you like from various views, but then create a new one, that might bear similarities with other sources, but which stands clearly apart as a distinct and inventive perspective.

So yeah, my 2 cents = pick a single attractive existing perspective or make up a new one, but don't blend or you'll end up with soup that doesn't taste really nice.

Probably too much Gaiman, but I actually would prefer no focus on creation, and players as angels. It seems to me that the Fall is the interesting thing, and any metarules for general creation of the world would only efficiently sidetrack the game from the human (angel) issues. The point isn't what colour of daffondils this or that player would prefer for the Earth, is it?

It'd be very easy to walk the road already travelled and make this metaplot-heavy character simulation like WoD, Nobilis or In Nomine. All one needs to do is to make Satan a NPC and there it is, players going on assignments for bigger angels with their low-on-the-totem-pole human souls or angels of lowest rank.

What I'd want to see instead is probably a game affected by the aesthetic idea of morality play: Let the game be about the eternal questions of religion, as evidenced in simple form in medieval moralities. This is how I envision it:

First of all, the structure of the story is already known. The God creates, angels fall, humans live and die and the world ends. All will be so. All is so, because God and angels both are outside time as earlier suggested, and do indeed already know how it will end.

The reason for Lucifer's fall in this scheme is that he does it despite knowing how it will turn out. This most pure creation will not abide by a world in shackles, and therefore he has no other course but to make his terrible mistake. He's too much like his creator to not Fall. What matters it if he will fail, if it's still the right thing to do?

What players do: they tell moral stories within the confines of the big story. "Characters" are angels, that each and every one are represented by individual scores in various attributes (similar to Pendragon virtues). There isn't two angels with the same stats, and stats do not degree game efficiency. Statistics are derived from the player's moral choices (or choices he chooses to defend in-game). Satan, or Michael, or whoever isn't any stronger than other angels, they just happen to be the right ones for their roles.

Now, players are effectively playing philosophical paradigms at this stage. They have chosen who they play, even Satan, if a player can support those kinds of choices. How the conflict is realized through play?

The players can stage short scenarios in Heaven or Earth or where-ever, at any point of history. Usually the angels cannot affect Earthly stories, but they can choose representatives for themselves from among humans. The scenarios played can concern anything from petty theft to the Fall itself, as preferred. The style is similar to thought games of philosophers or medieval morality plays, as preferred. What if you had to do this and this? Or this and this? What if then happened so? Short and hard, and refereed by the statistics of the angels in question. The GM is called GOD, of course.

The idea is to deconstruct or reconstruct the concepts of God, Heaven, Fall, Creation and Judgement. Are these possible bases for cosmology, ethics or aesthetics? What they have to be like, to work at all, or are they after all not possible, is Satan right? The players can reveal during play if their angels were among the fallen, and one way for the game to end is for all the players to come to shove their angels off the ledge.

This'd probably need some heavy support structures, like "life-plays", where the players go through lives of mortal characters who make different decisions, just to illustrate their side of the great argument. Some support for how to begin to hash the differences between the players.

Just some rough first impressions. Carry on!

Another quick comment: in some parts of the Old Testament (the book of Job is a good example), Satan is portrayed not so much as the personification of evil, but rather simply as an angel who is inimical to humanity. That's his job. He is rather like the prosecuting attorney in a case, whose role is to make the best possible case against the person on trial, regardless of their personal feelings in the matter.

In other words, Satan is the devil's advocate.

Since it's awfully easy to get emotionally involved in your job, and since we've already said that angels are pretty passionate, perhaps the whole War in Heaven and Fall is sort of a political/legal argument which got out of hand, leading to the parties to the argument coming to blows.

It makes you wonder who or what was on trial before humanity, that the angels were able to come to terms on.

Ravien wrote: Wow, after reading this thread, I've realised that there are way too many differing notions of angels out there, even within the christian tradition.

Metatron is a singular, not a collective. Metatron is The Voice of God.

Enoch and Soloman are the only two humans who have never died.

I agree that it's important to create or adopt, for the purposes of the game, a mythology that's stable and consistent, rather than cobbled of spare parts. Preferably, to stay with the original idea, a literal interpretation out of the basis mythology should be the source of everything else. I will note that we're messing with powerful themes here, and I'm not really worried about creating a superficial mythology.

Now on to other points -

Heaven as the Zen motionless point! Yes!

I'm still interested in this two-level play idea, so I would like to have a way to "roll your Razael dice" as well as play out celestial struggle. Free will is a weird concept since Time doesn't exist in Heaven - so then is it even possible (comprehensible?) for timeless entities to make choices? Somehow it has to be. I think that interfacing between Heaven and Earth forces angels to choose how much of their power to exert at any one point in Earthly timespace - to an angel Creation is an instant, but it is a very complex instant that it cannot influence completely or perfectly (though the summation of angels completely and perfectly executes the Almighty's plan.)

Perfected human souls as PCs - Interesting, interesting. This folds back into the "two levels" thing, and I think I'm getting some idea of how it'll work. More soon!

On prophets: On one level, I don't want to tuch this because I don't know a lot about it. On another, I know that even if I did know a lot about it, I would colour my presentation of it with my fairly strong biases. I think the most respectful thing I am able to say is that, occasionally, certain people come into contact with the Divine personally, rather than through angelic mediation, and they are inspired by holiness. I will leave it there.

So, my idea:

Angels, when you want to simulate angelic agency, have a job and a pool of points that represent their attention. To angels, existence is an instant, and so once they've spent all their attention, that is all the influence they can exert on the universe, ever. Angels who're out of attention can always try to persuade other angels to spend their own attention toward a mutually beneficial goal.

Resolving human actions means resolving the conflict between passive angelic will and human free will. The effect of passive angelic will is a function of the angel's absolute power and how much attention the angel has chosen to reserve.

This means that play proceeds in two phases for any given game; the first, where angels act consciously on Creation, and a second where mortals act out their free will, influenced by the dregs on angelic power.

This thread is hard to keep up with.

Anyway, more agreement that creation isn't interesting. I'd rather deal with the reasons that the angels have for doing the things they do to Creation, once it has come into existence and they are acting in their capacity as components of the divine plan.

The best part, of course, is that there are some angels whose job it is to oppose and to suffer, and to cause mortals to do the same. God is in an eternal state of suffesring, because he has decided to be so.

I think somebody once said that at the moment of an angel's creation, the choice is set before them: support or oppose God? But then, after that, they get no more choices. Honestly, I think that might just have been an attempt to let God off the hook for punishing angels that couldn't choose to be obediant. Perhaps angels make ALL their choices at the moment of their Creation (their identity is self-determined basically, "I choose to reflect the strength of God"), and then spent the rest of their existence being true to that original set of choices.

I do like the concept of angelic Passive Will vs. human Free Will. That's a powerful theme. The question remains, though, can humans convince angels to do things that they might not have done on their own? This would seem to imply so, that human (and maybe animal) will is the only real variable in the deterministic universe. If that's the case, perhaps a human convinced Lucifer to rebel in the first place. That could be cool.

On prophets: Shreyas you'd absolutely love the prophetic tradition, especially in Islam where it's heavily aestheticized. Prophets are both conduits for the Word of God and models for how human beings should live their lives. This is why there are so many records kept of what the Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) did, because his actions are just as important as his words. They reflect God's plan for human beings. The Qur'an implies that the Prophet was given the Qur'an (which started out just as an oral tradition that was memorized and recited) by the angel Gabriel (Jabril), and that the Qur'an and other holy books are simply imperfect copies of Mu al-Kitab, the Mother of the Book, which is in Heaven and contains the perfect rendition of God's Word. There are parallels in the Mormon tradition, in which the prophet Joseph Smith translates the Book of Mormon from gold plates with the help of the angel Moroni. In Taiping thought, prophets were often actually possessed by God or Jesus (based on traditional Chinese shamanism) and literally spoke the words of the divine, in the form of classical poetry. In Judaism, there's a strong tradition of the prophet denouncing his own people, who have turned away from God, but also speaking with God's voice and authority ("Oh rebellious children, says the Lord, who carry out a plan but not mine..." -- Isaiah 30:1). Isaiah is a really great example of this, as is Elijah. Christianity doesn't really have a strong prophetic tradition. We have Saints and Martyrs, which are pretty different. Islam considers Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) to be the "Seal of the Prophets," i.e. the last real prophet, but they do consider people before him, such as Jesus, to be prophets.

Hope that helps some.

One more thing:

Prophets are often poets, which is really cool. Everyone from Isaiah to Hong Xiuquan to Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) to Joseph Smith was known for writing beautiful verse/prose. In Islam, the indescribable beauty of the Qur'an is taken to be a sign of its divinity and its status as the words of God and not man.

I see a nice congruence between two themes that have emerged:
--the conflict between the loyalists and the fallen
--the aesthetic politics of the angels.

It reminds me of something Mephistopheles says in Faust (also a must-read, I'd think):
"Alles, was besteht, ist wert dass es zu Grunde geht."
In English, my lousy translation: "everything which exists, is worthy of ceasing to exist."

It's an attitude a little bit like the Excrucians in Nobilis, but I think we could interpret it in this light as aesthetic agreement. Perhaps Satan had been unhappy with Creation for quite a while, but when humanity came along, and he raised his objections, and the human race was not exterminated, he lost his patience and decided to take a more direct, violent hand in the development of things.

So perhaps a central dialectic of this game could be... conformity versus perfection? The loyal hosts of Heaven are working to continue and develop creation, while the rebel angels feel that much of reality should be wiped out and God should start again, maybe at the fifth day or so.

Hmm... conformity vs. perfection... sounds kind of like Ayn Rand, doesn't it? Maybe you should call it Satan Shrugged.

This does indeed need some design decisions, and fast. I'm seeing so many different foci here that I at least have difficulty finding the game for the ideas. I love the background many have provided here (much of it familiar), but won't join in with the alternative interpretations because that really doesn't further any narrowing down of ideas. It'd be great to construe heaven by some Indian tradition, for example, but that doesn't answer the very human thematic questions here. So lay off with the esoterica, and focus on what the players will be doing, ne? It's likely that the result will support many different intertextual interpretations anyway.

I'm not actually too hot about the idea of contrapositioning human and angel free will; it is necessary when the focus is on humanity, but it's unnecessary if the game will concentrate on the Heaven. Admittedly you'd get some wicked cool games out of humans, flipping in to the world for a fleeting moment and coming back in the Judgement, but that would necessitate the kind of life stories I proposed earlier. If the focus should remain in Heaven, there's no consistent way of getting humans in important roles: what a human is is necessarily defined by his or her life on Earth, so play would one way or another come back to the temporal world.

As far as the game goes, for most approaches it's sufficient to keep in mind that the angels indeed don't need to have free will for successful play. One can always assume that although the angel knows his destiny, the players, as audience, don't. The angel does what he does because he is predestined to, despite there being a player making the decision.

I find the subject matter here extremely problematic, because one has to either allow for perfection in the background of the game, making actual play unnecessary, or focus on the moral questions inherent in the setup, somehow building a very general and ritualized approach to moral disputation. To say it in another way, you can either assume that heaven is perfect (losing all incentive for play) or roleplay Lucifer and Raphael arguing about meaning of free will (hard, but not impossible to play). A tough one to crack. My first approach was to let the angelic conflict shine through into the human world, so that the moral questions get a little bit of background from actual situations of humans. A mor(t)ality play approach, if you will. Is there better options?

That said, let's try:

How about a Setting focus? Split play into four phases, the Light, Fall, History and the End. In the Light phase of play the focus is on detailing the plans of Heaven for humanity and the world in general. Construct elaborate heavenly imagery, plot the rough outline of human history, that kind of thing. Make something to weep over. This is all formalised by the creation of the great Plan for the Creation. The Plan is made by the players, but the mechanics are such that players get different amounts of say in the matter.

In the Fall phase the players have all the information about the Plan, which was made to ensure that some player's notions were intentionally (largely) disregarded. Now such a player may take on the mantle of Satan, and the players get to play the Fall, which happens over whatever issue of Creation the Satan player objected to. Satan loses, of course, so the objection is indeed that, something for the record. Main focus would here be on the damage Satan succeeds in inflicting on the structure of Heaven and human history detailed in the first phase. Presumably very sad, if both the Plan and it's destruction are done with gusto.

In the History phase the Satan player and his adherents get to structure their own version of the Plan and execute it over the ruins of the Heavenly Plan. Instead of Heaven they plan Hell, and what was left of the last plan after the Fall phase will resist their plans for the rest of the creation.

In the last phase, the End phase, there is a miraculous comeback by the Heavenly host, when all the satanic plans fail to come to fruition in some manner, and it's revealed all to have been a part of even greater plan by God, who is played by the game designer.

Hmm... this could be done, but I don't know if it's what we're trying to find here. At least the structure is interesting and leaves enough room for the players to choose their issues. The dual structure, where first all players plan, then split and destroy, and then one party plans and other resists, and then everyone cooperates on a final destruction, is interesting too. I'll at least keep this in mind, in case it doesn't catch anyone's imagination.

It's hard to do any setting heavy game, obviously. I'm of the mind that although the game should include heavy background on traditional heaven imagery, the rules should leave the poetic visions untouched and up to taste. Maybe some reward mechanic for focusing on visuals. Although I totally get winged amalgams as angels, they might not speak about beauty for all.

I'd try to come up with something definite, but it's late and I have to get going if I'm to get to start my Easter holiday. Long live Jesu!

I'd again like the emphasize that time and place are continuous here -- I envision "phases" like creation, the fall, whatever as *places you can go* or perhaps even *actions that you can take* So I don't think we need to worry about a timeline, and I think that a group can focus on on what "areas" they find, personally, interesting. If you're into creation -- create! If you're into the Fall -- Fall! If you're into Jesus -- Jese! If you're into the Last Day -- Rapture!

I would also note that human souls are very important to the conception of Heaven as I have seen it presented in the materials I'm talking about (Hymns on Paradise) in particular. Remember, the Last Day has already happened, and is happening simultaneously with the rest of this stuff. Heaven is packed with the souls of the righteous, and they're doing more than just sitting there. No matter whether or not they are PCs, they are important to the Scheme of things.

I also get the feeling that I should duck out and let Shreyas do his work on the game. I feel like a too-picky customer.

Mostly, I wanted to post that I have some comments from a priest-in-training and gamer friend of mine on the game. Ethan knows his stuff on this topic Notes: Babel is Ethan's theological game, and it's actually pretty different from this. Also, I think he means "insane" in a good way. I think.

Ethan Gafford wrote:
Look, they're writing Babel. Or at least, you're telling them to write Babel. Neat. I should get on this when I feel I have the head and time to respond in a concerted fashion. Mayhap tomorrow. Yay!

On your comments: the comment you made about time periods is absolutely vital. Any game and gameworld that purports to be about the Christian timeline must be applicable to any time period: otherwise you get into an "in the Beginning, there was the Word, and in the End, there'll probably be the Word again, but you know, right now, you're probably out of luck." Dealing with Heaven in a game is inevitably going to drag you into the pulsing, bleeding heart of time itself, and if you haven't thought that out better than it takes to say "eh, set it 6000 years ago," you're not going to have a game that paints the required picture.

I also agree that angels make bad player characters, because they're just really hard to get your head around. I would caution, though, that they DO have free will. They just exist in a flow of time external to our own (it seems to me analogous to the relationship of eternity to angelic time, but that's bonehead speculation; still, useable in a game.) Their choice has already being made, or rather is made and was and will be as far as our perspective is concerned, as the basic data structure of our time appears to be composed of their choices, but it is theirs. Still, making the angelic accessible is key, and the world of angels is an appealing mystery to explore in a "real-world magical"esque gameworld. The most important thing in dealing with them, I think, is not what to make them abstract representations of (as your colleagues seem to be debating) but to make them people. That's the most amazing part of angels as Christianity treats them: these perfect cosmic entities are in fact people, with souls and choices and personalities and loves and needs and all the rest. Losing that under a clever cosmology is disastrous for the impact of the game. The understanding that the fundamental disposition of the world created by conscious choices, made by persons and not inevitable mechanism, is key to Christianity, and necessary to any game that tries to deal with it.

Shifting up an infinite number of gears: dealing with God the I AM too directly can be really difficult, for obvious reasons. Any GM who starts playing the part of God the Father really needs to start evaluating whether he/she/it is in way over his/her/its head. I think a Nephilim-esque setup, in which angels reveal themselves to humans as influences, and begin drawing the players out of time in stages, first through simply synchronicity, identification with historical and mythical figures, until time-periods begin to become interchangeable in the narrative, would be good to deal with the worldly part.

The Heavenly directly is just insane to attempt. This is not to say it shouldn't be attempted. But it is insane. Words fail by definition. To describe Heaven, though words fail twice in sequence, and the failures compound exponentially.

Emily Bond wrote:
I'd suggest looking at the works of Rilke for inspiration, particularly the Second Duino Elegy, but a lot of his stuff touches on these themes. (I like the Stephen Mitchell translation, unless you or your collaborators happen to be able to read German.) Rilke's got this idea that the reason humans exist is to bring the world into eternity through their connection to or observation of it, in some sense, and that angels aren't so much things that have emotions or do things, but rather are emotions, self-contained and complete in a way humans aren't. This seems related to the whole idea of human souls remembering Creation into being that someone in the thread brought up.

Yeah. Which is why you're statement that only the Watchers should be called "the Fallen" is silly.

Heaven as the Zen motionless point! Yes!

I would like to note that Heaven having a timeline in which all things have already occurred, at least according the Xtian philosophy, does not in any way invalidate free will.

Plus, I think its cool.

I think that, for instance, one could say the there are Decisions which cannot be invalidated. One can go and talk to Lucifer at the right hand of God or in the pits of Hell, but it does not chance the fact that it will happen.

Once a player has made a Decision, it is done.

yrs--
--Ben

When you think of Time as a motionless point, it constrains you in two ways.

1) Each game has to be a unique Creation; a different mortal timeline unfolds each time, because different things happen in the instant of heaven. It isn't the case that each game is predestined just because time in the gameworld is predestined. If it were, the game would be entirely worthless.

2) Angels cannot directly interact in the way you describe; there is no such thing as "before" in angelic perception. This means that you can say, "I come to the portion of Azazel that is being persuaded by Samael and try to convince him to be loyal", but you must keep in mind that all angelic action is, from their point of view, simultaneous.

Importantly, the players are playing out, through time, an instant, because humans cannot take in so much salient information at once. Angels still make decisions, and they're still capable of changing their minds about things - in a strange way - because until the whole instant of heaven is played out and all angelic decisions are locked in, time in the game's Creation has not begun.

I suggest that timelessness is not the bug-eyed monster you make it out to be, and abandoning it makes the game lesser.

Ben, please thank Ethan for his comments; they were really great.

I started off really excited about this game, but I have to say...this whole time thing seems like a complete distraction. I'm not sure what you gain from a game perspective by having a bizarre definition of time. How does this "all things happen simultaneously" notion make game play better. It seems to me to be one of those higher order philosophical issues that makes for an obstacle in play.

How would you portray this

there is no such thing as "before" in angelic perception. This means that you can say, "I come to the portion of Azazel that is being persuaded by Samael and try to convince him to be loyal", but you must keep in mind that all angelic action is, from their point of view, simultaneous.

You make a good point.

And I'm just contrary enough to want to go against it just because it is good, and I want to be able to say, "I surmounted that challenge and made a playable game out of it anyway!" But I'm aware that it's a problem.

Unfortunately, it's really important to me to make angelic Decision (with a capital D) irreversible. And the only way I see to accomplish that is to have celestial time be incomprehensible from the point of view of terrestrial time. Does that make sense? I don't like having unexplained holes in my cosmology.

Edit: That is to say, I am open to alternatives, but I'm really fond of this one and would rather try and make it work than abandon it.

Ok, angelic decisions are irreversible...

Question. Is a decision by an angel to "walk across the street" irreversible because every action an angel makes becomes immutable. Or is there some special Angelic Pronouncement that is immutable...like an oath or vow that cannot be changed but has become cosmic law.


Forgive my terrestrial bound mind here, but I'm not seeing the connection between this goal and incomprehensible time.

It seems to me that if all things happen simultaneously...then all decisions happen simultaneously...then every angelic event in the universe is both simultaneously not started and already finished. Then there's nothing else to do...

On the other hand if dealing with immutable Angelic Pronouncements then knowing which Pronouncements have been made and which haven't seems a useful thing...which would suggest a normal time flow.


But maybe I'm not actually grasping yet what the players are supposed to be doing in the game...

What about sort of a "Herman's Head" meets "Paradise Lost?"

Perhaps each player would play a... personality in God's Mind. Each one has certain powers to make the Creation->Fall->Judgement sequence to play out in a certain way.
The short term goal of the game is to get the Universe to happen how you want it to occur, not how your fellow personalities wants it to occur.

Each player has opportunities to introduce / change something in the universe as we move around the table. Once we go all the way around, we look at the Universe that has been been created, and the Story of the World (Creation->Judgement Day) is narrated based on the elements in play.
(note: This would let you have a "Roll your Raphael Dice vs. My Uriel dice, and I need 10 success for all 10 plagues! or some other mechanic that involves manipulation of Angels, Free Will, Nature, etc)

There are some key events that happen : The Garden, the Flood, the Exodus, the Redemption, the Seal of the Prophets, the Rapture, Judgement Day, etc. HOW they happen is determined by the choices of the players via play. Maybe the Flood is actually just confined to a few countries, because there were more Righteous People in play than just Noah, this time, and Unicorns remain in play.

Now for the big twist, where this game becomes a RP Game instead of just a Game.
Then the whole Creation->Judgement begins again. We get intercharacter conflict, because each player has already seen something of how the other players want the Universe to be created.
The next time around, does each player make the same choices?
Can they influence the other players to change their allegiences, and maybe even their vision of how the Universe should be? How will they use their powers, and shape the Universe?

I imagine, as a moment of play, we have The Metatron griping with The Shekhina about the fact that The Lucifer keeps using his level 99 Tempt power in the Garden of Eden, causing a Fall from Grace, and the Christ isn't stopping him, so that he can put Crucifixion into play and cause the Redemption.

There are strangths and weaknesses to forum discourse. I think we've run into a weakness here - this conversation has moved very rapidly and along several different foci, and along the way it's lost its immediate usefulness for game design in favor of brainstorming. And it makes my head hurt.

So here are some conclusions and clarifications:

Angels are instantaneous entities. They only ever make one choice. There is no strong need to play out the angels as characters, really, but the players should decide the pattern of their influence as a part of setup, the Creation (or something) phase.

Before apportioning influence, each angel may Fall.

Influence may be used in two ways:
One, it may be spent to affect certain junctures in human history, to guarantee that they end in that angel's favor.
Two, it may be reserved; reserved influence acts passively, skewing all events in its favor.

For a real-world example: I interpret Holiness (as contact with the divine) as a force that was primarily spent on critical points, while Compassion was more evenly distributed, and Bounty (who Fell and became Greed) is more or less all passive.

Once this work of Creation is complete, play goes on with humans.

Every point that an angel spent influence on should be played out, briefly, to show how it ended in accord with that angel's will.

After each of these scenes, a related scene should be played out where only passive influence is a factor.

That, above, is the skeleton I'll be working from... expect mechanics shortly.