Just to give y'all some background... a rush of ideas came to me this evening for a Sorceror supplement. Without giving too much away, a song by Bjork inspired a lot:

All the modern things
Like cars and such
Have always existed

They've just been waiting in a mountain
For the right moment

The setting deals with Technology and Flesh as massive opposed drives in humanity (mega-demons, really), aluminium foil hats, losing your car keys, the behaviour a schizophrenic friend of mine exhibited, when I was homeless, religious experiences, and a lot of other things that scare me. So far, so scary.

I read and reread Sorceror to make sure I was paying enough attention to the crucial bits of the game. So, Sorceror is about transgression. Breaking the law(s). Calling up evil to possibly do good.

I realised that there was a possible danger in my supplement, in that the sorcerors might end up using magical forces relatively safely. They'd use malevolent forces to destroy the malevolent enemy, and never be accountable to a higher moral code. It felt like some ourobouran White Wolf RPGs, where Werewolves can rationalise every action they take as being for the greater good. Rather than have complex moral codes, they can just act like assholes with claws.

My question is, how do the mini-supplements tackle the question of accountability? What laws (eternal or otherwise) are broken in the supps? What is transgressed?

Joe.

Joe Murphy (Broin) wrote:
My question is, how do the mini-supplements tackle the question of accountability? What laws (eternal or otherwise) are broken in the supps? What is transgressed?

Hey Joe, I'd like to hear more about your idea... what's the deal with Modern Things?

I did get some design notes up onto my LiveJournal last night. They're pretty rough, but there's definitely something to them...

Plus, the ideas kept me up till 4am writing, and till 6am thinking. Yeesh.

I'll be adding more design notes today, so check my main LJ page aswell as the individual post.

Best,

Joe.

I work with computers.

And I have this theory.

I believe that despite all the propaganda, computers don't run on electricity. It isn't streams of charged subatomic particles which zip about in circutry and trip logic gates.

It's pure hate.

Computers run on malice, on curses, on the frustration of their users.

They NEED to be hated to function.

Don't believe me?

How often has your machine been humming along quite nicely, when suddenly it starts to freak out, shut down, crash, or corrupt files.

But when you get seriously piss-crazy mad, when you're just about to crush the satanitc beige box with your chair... it starts working again just fine.

It's trying to piss you off.

It NEEDS you to be pissed off at it.

It NEEDS your hatred.

Computers don't fail bacuase something breaks, they fail because they are running low on juice.

But some of us have a measure of power over the creatures.

We TECHS have developed a certain presence, and when the machines sense us, they straighten up, fly right. I can't tell you the number of times I've walked into someone's office who swore (swore to God in Heaven) that the machine was broken beyond repair, and with just a vague gesture to the keyboard, it starts working fine again under my hands.

The most importiant factor in being a tech, is to make the machines fear you. And once they know they can't intimidate you, thet you don't get angry anymore, that they can't make you fret over hostage data on failing disks, they roll over and show you their bellies, and hunt for more vulnerable psychies to feed upon.


You see...


Copmuters feed on us.


I use em, but I don't really trust em.











So......







What if Machine is a parasite, a predator. Technology feeds on humanity- draining vital energy, motivation, free will. Flesh is the oposite extreme- sudden death with claws in your neck; a savage kingdom of predation.

Becoming a sorcerer involves three distinct steps:

Awareness- the world is not as it seems. Machines glare at me with fanged maws, cars lick their grill-fangs with carbide tongues. Either I go mad, get killed, or accept it.

Authority- The artifice hates me... abuses me... trys to feed from me. The only difference between me and anyone else, I know what is happening. Then one day, pressed past the point caring, hitting bottom, I bark and order to that looming SUV about to crush me... and it backs off, whimpers. So long as I can maintain my Authority, the machines obey.

Mastery- Now beyond simple compusion, machines can be bound (as you suggest summoned), made to perform their native function (a computer coud be made to type, print, surf porn), a car can drive about, a gun can fire. You just have to know how to handle them.



And the awakening to the possibilities of flesh:

Awareness: Free will is rare- perhaps even impossible. People are driven by mindless squalling urges, utterly selfish drives which compete for energy and outlet; every stimulus fires off a dozen drives which battle it out along twitching nerves and fat ganglia to see what becomes manifest. I am nothing but a puppet to flesh; nothing at all but flesh itself. No spirit, no soul, no mind. Just flesh argueing with itself.

Authority: i am not the only one. Everyone is just like me, and by reaching out in that subtle way- by laying on hands just so- particular urges can beplayed out as desired. You need obedience- summon forth The Coward, you need murder done, call up The Killer. You want companionship, summon The Lover. A tarrot of blood and sweat, bone and tears. Nothing is more real than flesh, nothing more profound.

Mastery: Bind certain Urges, make them your slaves. Cause them to manifest at will in those around you. You bring forth The Guardian when you need protection, The Pervert when you need horrors done. Each drive (or combination of drives) is another creature you comand- the only thing that changes is the flesh it wears.













Joe my friend. This is some sick stuff.

I love it.



Mastery-

Artafice vs Organ

Bailywolf wrote:
I work with computers.

And I have this theory.

My friend and former minion Michelle said to me, "Vincent, I think I'm finally getting the computers here to like me."

I said, "great god in heaven, Michelle, are you mad? No wonder you have to call me in. Every day, I want you to stab your finger at the computer like this, and say 'work, or I will hit you with a brick and put you in the dumpster out back.'"

She hasn't called me for geek support since.

A pointless but short story.

-Vincent

Joe,

Sorry I ran away with things. I tend to riff when I like something. Just ignore the man behind the curtain.

I have a fairly fundamental question- and this comes from the purly mean, practacle side of may nature that milks the Hero system to get all the possible juice from the fewiest possible points:

Why would I want to play one of these guys?

Their 'powers' are defined esentialy by a terrible failing in their nature- and inability to get along with tools. Unless there is some big pay-off for the monumental pain in the ass... I can't see wanting to take on the roll of one. I'm a bit of a throw-back here on the Forge. I think 'kewlness' is a definite requirement for a game. Otherwise, what's the point? You have reality (and who wants that).

What is the payoff for being a... ah... sidelong sorcerer of machines?

Bailywolf wrote:

Their 'powers' are defined esentialy by a terrible failing in their nature- and inability to get along with tools. Unless there is some big pay-off for the monumental pain in the ass... I can't see wanting to take on the roll of one. I'm a bit of a throw-back here on the Forge. I think 'kewlness' is a definity requirement for a game. Otherwise, what's the point? You have reality (and who wants that).

What is the payoff for being a... ah... sidelong sorcerer of machines?

Gotcha! They can make use of a road's inherent nature to provide transport (ie: in Demon terms, the travel and transport abilities)... but can expect no 'free ride' of they want to just go up to the corner store and get a pack of smokes...

Very cool (even if it does raise questions of playability... how does the character just get by and live without constantly rolling to compell and bind?).

I can see two primary modes of binding based on which trait is used. For stamina, it involves kicking, spitting, and shaking machines. For Will, cursing, cojoiling, and intimidating. The juy that attacks parcking meters with a baseball bat vs the guy who screams at cars.




What you need is a third element; something which penetrates all aspects of your setting, something that equalizes, breaks down, destroys machines as easily as flesh. Entropy.

Sorcerers live in the worst part of town, because among the decay, the machines are listless, responsive, lazy. They don't attack as often because their essential functions are disintigrating. By the oposite token, humans who dwell in highly entropic environments are energized with the forces of self destruction. The urges feed off the entropy, getting stronger, getting louder, getting out of wack. Madness, depravity, violence, hatred, dispair... all these things manifest much more strongly in the bad part of town; the part of town sodden with entropy.

So you have Flesh, Machine which consumes Flesh, and Entropy which destroys Machine and drives Flesh mad.

Oil was once flesh. Machines burn oil. In the burning, both are destroyed.

To escape the hateful Machines, a sorcerer flees into the entropy ridden inner city... but there, he is confronted with entropy-bloated Flesh and it's demonic urges. So he rides the perpherie, lurking outside Starbucks less the espresso machines try and steam him, while skirting housing projects to avoid the maddened urge-demons who recognize him as victim-confidant.

What you have is a game a razor-walking, of maintaining ballance between inner and outer entropy, between flesh and machine, between decaying urban mad houses and sterile, lethal industrial parks. Wandering, wary, watchful... for someone who understands what it's like.


This isn't about alienation... it's about mobility, about constant furitive movement, about alwaysing moving. About leaving things behind. About loosing things. About being lost. Alienation is a sense, a feeling. Here, you can never trust your feelings. Your own myrid drives will hapily swarm up into your mind and devour you, just as surely as they do those you infect with entropy, and just as surely as an unbound, unbroken machine will chew off your leg.

Entropy becomes both savior and damnation; too much and everyone around you goes mad, too little and the machines try and kill you. Not too much, not too little. Sorcerers must ballance their environments between chaos and order, between death by Flesh or death by Machine.

Sorcerers must work with entropy, but be careful not to become too stained with it. It molifies the machine, but maddens the flesh. A Judas Christ, savior and betrayer all in one.





Jeepers... I ramble on

Maybe, but you sold me at least.

Problem: I'm lookin' at all this and I see it all in Unknown Armies.

Solutions are welcome.

Best,
Ron

Ron Edwards wrote:
Problem: I'm lookin' at all this and I see it all in Unknown Armies.

Solutions are welcome.

Looking pretty good, Joe. I suggest checking out Raven's mini-supplement, Electric Ghosts, which provides a fairly extensive treatment of technology-as-demonic, although I think the "world" of Electric Ghosts and that of your notion (I really like the title, Modern Things) are pretty different.

Best,
Ron

Yep, the EG "world" (such as it is) is definitely different from MT; but that certainly stems from the definitions of sorcery and what it takes.

Sure, both are about demonic technology, and both posit that technology isn't what we believe it to be, but it seems that the sorcerers of each setting are different in their abilities and understandings.

From what I'm seeing, MT definitely sounds cool. I look forward to more on it.

Heck, I don't wonder if I might do some updating to EG to make MT its flipside (with your permission, of course)...when you've lost all your humanity, you can't connect with the machines anymore, not normally, because you KNOW what they ARE.

Course, I'd have to figure out how to make that work with the current end result of 0 Humanity -- where you become a machine, you become a tool, you're not the user anymore, but you who is being used.

I was reading Ghost in the Machine, a book on evolution of biology, machines, and even ideas(not to be mistaken with the anime Ghost in the Shell, although many of the themes seem to be derived from the book), which had put me in a similar wandering of what is technology?

Instead of seeing technology as a set of tools, but instead as a symbiont that went far out of control, I was musing about the evolution of mankind now being based on the evolution of technology. We wear shoes to protect our feet from the ground we've made so that machines can travel easier. A city is simply the most effective way to support factories. We are trained in reading, writing, math, whatever makes it easiest to work with the machines. Videogames train us to work most efficiently with the computer, the human brain making the higher end "fuzzy" judgements, while the computer carries out the tasks, a marriage of the highest end parallel processing and serial computation.

So, has mankind as a whole already submitted to a demon?

Reading the 4 Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Manders brings up the excellent point that we adapt to our environments, and the environments of the last century have drastically changed compared to what we have been used to as a species. What is result of placing humans in new environs?

Of course, I myself deal with a lot of folks where I work at, and I find that most who cannot deal with machines, are also the same people who are generally lost in life, so the argument that avoiding technology preserves Humanity(as grounding, sanity, whathaveyou) isn't quite true either. I'd say the closest thing of real life loss of humanity comes with the adaptation of mankind to a technology dominated environment, a place made more convient for the machines exist than for mankind, which would be most cities. We learn to serve the machine, we learn to treat each other as machines.

Ignor the bum, he's not real, dehumanize him so you don't feel bad. Lose a relationship? There's other fish in the sea, all people are ultimately disposable. Don't like your religion? Get another, even god, tradition, history, disposable. This is really a cyberpunk point of losing humanity.

So, ultimately, is it a battle of machinists vs. the fleshbound, or is it sorcerers against the forces of society? We could live without cars, without nuclear power, without computers. Other folks do it everyday. But ultimately for mankind, there will be technology, there's no going back. So the Price is pollution, loss of humanity, and what? What place do the sorcerers have? Are they those who are aware of the cost, or are they those who actively work against it?

Just some musings to add to the stew. I do recommend the two books above as great sources of ideas regarding the issue.

Chris

Fantastic, Chris, thanks for the recommendations. That's just the sort of stuff I need. I'll be posting some responses over the next couple of days.

I read a story a while ago... a scientific musing, really. If aliens visited Earth, they could well assume that the primary lifeform was wheat. Wheat covers a very large portion of the Earth, and is tended to by a variety of symbiotic lifeforms such as humans. Where we get more humans, we get more wheat too. Wheat uses us to propagate.

Joe.

Look at dogs. They steal sandwishes off our tables. Bite our children. Loose us our pet deposites when they crap on the floor too often. Cost a fortune in vet bills. Shed on the bed. Inflict punishing allergies. And die before we do.

What do we get in return for all this agravation?

Something as undefinable as "love"


Now, what is that definition for "parasite" again?





Seriously, I love dogs. I've had many, but it raises the question. What DOESN'T feed from us? Any kind of human activity/association/endevor eats us alive.

Work. yup.

School. yup.

War. Oh certainly.

Religion. don't get me started.

Technology. already got this one.


*************************

Another aside



Reverse it.



We have been slave to Flesh for our entire existance. Flesh owns us. With Flesh, there is no soul, no mind, no dreams. Just Flesh moving.

It's time to escape.

Jared will probably chime in with a Chronenberg reference here (think Videodrome).

What if Technology isn't a parasite, isn't destroying some esential humanity (because let's be honest. Humanity is disgusting. I've been sick for the past week. Much vomiting.)

What if Technology is the Angel to the Devel in the Flesh? What if it is our release?

Mix Sorcerer with Transhumanism... don't make it a game of transgression and degeneration but of glorious (if disturbing) transformation and transcendence.

On that note, other cool books to check out: Battle Angel Alita, cyberpunk manga with the theme being,"Can man escape destiny(karma) by altering himself?" or check out TORG's Cyberpapacy...

Chris

Oh, you just become a member of my personal pantheon.

I LOVE Gunum (IE Battle Angel) but haden't considered it in terms of narritve gaming (I have a fairly good BESM adaptation in the works).

Damn, but there are some great stories to be explored in the BA universe. Thanks for bringing it to light.

Also look at Seriel Experiments Lain. Wierd but OH SO GOOD. One of my favorite anime to watch alone.

This thread's peachy. =)

I thought, rather than going for a rather typical definition of humanity - the dehumanizing effect of technology etc - that I'd go for a stat that tied the sorcerors to their world. This is partially because I want a relatively minor moral component in the game. Often, characters in MT will barely be able to relate to their fellow humans, who might not even perceive them, so moral decisions will more often be made about fellow sorcerors than ordinary people. I think.

It's a little bit like Arcane in Mage, or Frag in Continuum. it's also based on a great story by Alan Moore called 'What Ever Happened to What's His Name'. 'Humanity' will become 'Alienation'.

When you have a lot of it, you can relate to the world, people make sense, and cause and effect are perfectly ordinary. Start to lose a few points, and a sense of unreality creeps in. The crowds march in step for a moment (or dance, cf The Fisher King), you lose your change regularly, and you're more likely to miss trains. When you're down to just a few points, the world stops making sense to you, advertising terrifies you, and you're desperately paranoid about technology and society. Think 'They Live'.

Yeah. It's a scale from Ally McBeal to The Fisher King to They Live. I have created a monster.

I've yet to work out how all the rules tie together, though, so I've been rereading some of Indie Game Design for inspiration and focus.

Joe.

Joe Murphy (Broin) wrote:
When you have a lot of it, you can relate to the world, people make sense, and cause and effect are perfectly ordinary. Start to lose a few points, and a sense of unreality creeps in. The crowds march in step for a moment (or dance, cf The Fisher King), you lose your change regularly, and you're more likely to miss trains. When you're down to just a few points, the world stops making sense to you, advertising terrifies you, and you're desperately paranoid about technology and society. Think 'They Live'.

Personally, I'd go with the term,"Grounding", or something to that effect. It's a point of being able to comprehend, and work with the world in cognition. Look at Einstein, great theoritician, terrible with everyday things. As one distances oneself from the immediate reality, either going more and more into their own head(see Aronofsky's Pi, or Requiem for a Dream), one loses the basic interface between the objective and subjective.

Chris

I advise to check out the just released GURPS book "Transhuman Space", which deals with a near future where nanotechnology and biotechnology (i.e. cutting edge tech) have changed what it means to be human, and certainly defies our current definition - Humanity has effectively split in different groups; are variant DNA types human? biolgical androids (used as property in some countries)? sapient Artificial Intelligences ? what about a child growing up with the permanent presence of a pet A.I. living in the web, via a skull implant? what kind of human will he become?

I participated in the playtest of that book, and let me tell you it's quite something; I see it as a prerequisite for any work involving humanity/technology parallels; an upcoming supplement "Broken Dreams " should prove very interesting as it deals with the interface between fifth wave countries (advanced nanotech) and fourth/third wave (information age). It is written by a specialist in future trends prediction. (Anyway, all GURPS books are written by specialists, but this is even more true here)

And no, I'm not getting any money for this plug, I just love the setting ! =)


Manu

Cheers, Manu. =)

I'm going for more of an urban fantasy feel than sci-fi, though. I'm looking forward to Transhuman Space too, mind you, but source material for Modern Things are movies like Vamp, the Highlander series and some things like Red Rock West. You know the movies where chracters get lost in the urban sprawl? That sort of thing. A lot of surreal tv (Malcolm in the Middle, Eerie Indiana, Northern Exposure, Ally McBeal) might work too.

Technology will be much more a metaphorical parasite than something composed of nuts and bolts. I think the baseline world of MT is going to be more surreal than I have yet to convey.

Cheers, though. =)

Best,

Joe, updating on his LJ.

Ever see the TV show Strange Luck?

Might be worth a look.

For anyone still interested in this subject, I've picked up Jerry Manders' In the Absence of the Sacred. Some interesting Quotes:

...Rather than a biosphere, we have a technosphere. Call it megatechnology.

....Human beings did not set out to create such a worldwide, interlocked technological entity. But at each stage human beings followed the logic of technical evolution, whcih seeks to expand it's power over nature, and to employ other technologies to be reborn into ever newer, larger, more impactful forms;to strengthen the web of connection.

It is true that there are human beings who sit near the hub of the process...and who benefit financially if they can steer the process a certain way. But they are not really in charge. Technological evolution leads inevitably to its own next stages, which can be altered only slightly.

Exactly. :) Great quotes, thanks for lining them up. Much appreciated.

At the moment, I'm breaking down 'technology' into various levels of demon. In general, the bigger something is, the more Power it has. 'Technology' itself is the biggest demon. Cities are huge, but can potentially be influenced by Sorcery. However, some items have such mythic significance that they're disproportionately powerful. Guns and cars are the best example, and are a point or two more Powerful than one would expect. Power has nothing to do with the 'tech level' of an item.

The happy side effect of this is that most characters will be restricted to fisticuffs and melee weapons, and will take a lot of trains, or walk. As Highlander is soure material, this works out fine.

Particularly passive objects have a Power of 0, most of the time, and can be used quite freely. Processed food, most clothing. I generally don't want charaters to have problems getting dressed in the morning.

I took a bit of a break from the Net this week, so I've a lot of things to write up, and eventually post.

Joe.