The way I and an associate have taken to running our games we tend to make human antagonists the main bad guys, with little to no magic in our campaigns. In trying to get away from the typical high fantasy droll and into the land of hard core grittyness we've taken to useing a simple rule to handle monsters and magic in our campaigns...

- monsters to the PC's are like UFO's to us -
We've all heard about them, and if you look hard enough you can even find crazy people who've claimed to see them.
But nobody actually believes that crap.

It's all fairy tales and make believe.

For instance: if the PC's walk into a tavern and openly talk of how they just whacked 14 GOL the other week, they'll be laughed out or have to kill everyone in duels of honor for calling them liars.

For some reason the "real" world i.e - humans, are often seen as "not worthy" as the main opponents for PC's.
For "real adventure" you need monsters and magic - well, that just isn't so.

Plus it does make the rare monster encounter that much more shocking, memorable, and meaningful.

Also Magic:

The PC's in TROS veiw magic the same way we view Ms Cleo and David Copperfield - looks and sounds good, but we all know it's not real.

With the added provision that in the TROS universe such decivers who practice false arts should be summarily lynched and burned alive as heretics.

Try running your next campaign following these simple guidelines and you will never go back.

Humans can also be much more frightening, its the cunning and ferocity of the human mind that can be frightening. A dragon will simply burn the pc's to a crisp or munch them down. a human will lull them into trust, then stab them in the back at the worst moment, then steal the girl etc...

Its all about SA's, you wont have any directed towards monsters as there's no fun in that. they either don't exist or wont care about the measly human PC most likely and are not very dynamic.

Also, if a PC runs into a monster they should be played appropriately, monsters are rare and scary, if you see one the first reaction should be doubt/misgiving, followed by crappinf of ones shorts and a hasty retreat in a most unmanly fashion.
Ex: Bob, as you round the corner you see a big 7 foot tall vaguely human shaped creature with nasty tusks prtruding from under its lower jaw, its heavily muscled and looks rather nasty, especially with the entrails hanging off its chin like that

bob: I hesitate for a moment to see if its not just a man

Gm: It aint bob and now its looking at you like a cat who just heard teh can opener turn on...

Bob: I suddenly wonder where I left my brown pants and decide that now is a good time to scream like a sissy and run like a little girl.

Jaeger, I like the principle under which you're operating in general. OTOH, there's a lot of question as to how you make this all plausible. In the RW, things are as they are because (I believe) there are no monsters or fairies. OTOH, even though there weren't any in previous ages, the people really did believe in them in many cases. So the question becomes, why are these superstitious people so dubious of monsters. Heck, in Salem they were so ready to believe in witches that they burned folks alive.

So, I think that it's a noble idea to make monsters mythic and mysterious, and to keep humans the center of attention. The question is how do you keep it plausible using the UFO idea?

To me, simply making the monsters vanishingly rare is probably solution enough. But I'm sure this is a YMMV thing.

Mike

Also, how do you get your players to play along when the usual response is:

"Bob, as you round the corner you see a big 7 foot tall vaguely human shaped creature with nasty tusks prtruding from under its lower jaw, its heavily muscled and looks rather nasty, especially with the entrails hanging off its chin like that "

Bob: I waste em with my crossbow!

How to make it all possible... Hmmmmm.

You simply make all thier legends real. But rare enough that they still maintain thier legend status!

They may all have "believed" it but thier reaction was just as Ashren of all people stated: doubtful disbelief, followed by realization of thier fears, followed by the desire to runaway or kill it.

But I don't belive we in the modern age are any less superstious than people of medieval times. They had thier way of dealing with the unexplained and we have ours.

We are just superstitious about different things.

JFK Conspiracies, UFO's, and bigfoot have taken the place of the old time dragons,faries and evil legends of yesteryear. You mentioned salem and witches; I give you McCarthyism and russian spies.

And just as you said there were people who really belived all the old legends, I could walk out into the street today and find people who believe in UFO's, bigfoot, etc. etc. etc.

Kenjib...


That reaction is only common because the vast majority of gamers have never quite gotten out of thier D&D mindset. (that most horrible of games)

This is a mindset where magic and monsters are the norm, and non-magic human antagonists the exception to the cheesy high fantasy rule.

It is a mindset where all opponents can be beaten if you can just keep ahead of them in the HP count. Where a man can stand toe to toe exchanging blows with three orcs because he has 100 hp to thier 10 each.

This is a mindset that needs to be cured...

SO: "Bob, as you round the corner you see a big 7 foot tall vaguely human shaped creature with nasty tusks protruding from under its lower jaw, its heavily muscled and looks rather nasty, especially with the entrails hanging off its chin like that "

Bob: I waste em with my crossbow!

"AHH Bob, but you know not what it is and as you ready your crossbow he unleashes a deafening roar as he smashes trees out of the way heading your direction... Please roll willpower to see if you beat his STR / Intimidation roll... good luck Bob."

If you don't think the modern mindset is any different from today to yesterday in terms of superstition and such, I refer you to the show Connections (BBC thing). One of the series was entirely devoted over the course of several shows of demonstrating just how different that mindset was from today's.

I mean, you talk as though you're a skeptic, but then you say that others are not. I think that bigfoot and UFOs serve the same place as myths in the modern day in general terms, but that's not to say that people believe in them. They're informative, entertaining and spiritual - certainly you don't think that anyone believes in Middle Earth? Well, I think that most attention paid to Bigfoot has about the same level of interest. "Wouldn't it be cool," but "Nah, I don't really believe it."

That's where I, and about everybody I know are at. Aliens...get real.

In any case, you've made my point by saying that they were indeed superstitious. That's all I was getting at. And I'm not saying that it wouldn't mean that people wouldn't behave in a shocked fashion when actually encountering such a thing, just that they'd be much more inclined to believe an account, IMO.

Further, as soon as there's a dead Gol lying on the floor of the inn, you suddenly have a room of converts. This is, perhaps the primary difference between there being a real existence of creatures and bigfoot, which is a crock of crap. I'll believe it when I see it in a museum.

In any case, we seem to have the same way to make this all work in any case: just make the damn things rare. One monster per adventure if that is my general rule. :-)

Mike

I know it Weyrth proper the superstition is taken quite seriously. One way to make this hit home is to make the superstition and the reality not match up, and keep things as rare as possible. Alternately, make the beasties rare anyway, but superstion is correct (frex: walk around a toadstool three times to prevent attacks by Loup Garou...and it really works). Thus you get to punish the ever-so-scientific types with your Aliens.

There is an exception in Weyrth, however. The first is any large metropolitan area. Monsters aren't an issue there, really. The second is Stahl. Stahlnish atheism denies the existance of any such thing as monster, magic, or religion. Those are characters that would really have to struggle with what they're looking at.

And, as they say, "there are no atheists on the battlefield."

Jake

One monster per adventure, huh?

Hm. I wonder how I'm doing.. So far, I've got two.. more than that if you count the mysterious NPC sorcerer, and the handful of Cymric druids.

But for all of that, monsters should be either "holy-shit I'm gonna die!" encounters, or plot points in Weyrthian TRoS play. As I've already mentioned, two of my players met up with a Walking Dead. One of them is no longer with us, and hopefully his player learned the lesson. One of those same players has encountered a badly wounded dragon, being tended by the druids. The game is, so far, very human-centric; The players-characters, being in the mystical land of Angharad, know that critters exist. Half the city's population though is Stahlnish, and would try to deny it if it bit off their nose.

Err. Yeah. I guess I'm saying that I agree. Quality, not quantity, yo.

Heck, I'm a Stahlnish halfling sorcerer, and certain parts of me deny they exist with the same ferocity.

I'm somewhat conflicted.

Okay, so far in the adventure I am currently in... magic has been limited to one spectacular instance where a guy was thrown across the room into a wall. Impressive it was, and my Stahlnish mercenary responded by releasing an arrow from the shadows and thus killing her. Having seen such a thing happen not only made my jaw drop from both an OOC and IC mindset... it was no wonder that my character soon fired his arrow. Of course, after picking his jaw up off the floor and rubbing his eyes and doing three double-takes.. if you understand my thinking there.
Magic and magical beings are much much more superb when used on a very limited basis. It's like popcorn and salt. Sure the popcorn is good, but if you put waaaaaay too much salt on it, you don't want to eat it. Or some people won't.. there's occasionally the salt obsessed person out there.
Which makes me realize that TROS is exactly the inverse of D&D in terms of magic and magical beings. It works perfectly and harmoniously. TROS sorcery even comes with discouragement for the magic system.. i.e. it isn't used daily like D&D magic is. It isn't meant to be. It would be putting too much damned salt on the popcorn.
Even for a guy from Stahl, I'll roleplay him in the future as having doubts as to wether there is or is not the existance of magic or a higher-power so to speak. So you could say he's agnostic then. That is, if I DO want to play him after finding out he should have died in the first session... but that's neither here nor there.
So I think that addressed all concerns everyone had.

-Ingenious

Jake Norwood wrote:
There is an exception in Weyrth, however. The first is any large metropolitan area. Monsters aren't an issue there, really. The second is Stahl. Stahlnish atheism denies the existance of any such thing as monster, magic, or religion. Those are characters that would really have to struggle with what they're looking at.

And, as they say, "there are no atheists on the battlefield."

...and here I was thinking that I'd never be able to agree with contracycle on *anything*.

Well, I don't actually buy into the "there are no atheists in the foxholes" bit myself, but there is something to seeing atheists pray "just in case."

why do they fear a death that takes them on to immortality? The sample character annoys the hell out of me every time I see it.

The atheist praying in a foxhole is a form of Pascals Wager, I guess, the argument that you might as well pray as you have little to lose. The only problem is, which god do you pray to? All of them? Then there may be said to be Buddhists in foxholes. Several gods are exclusive clubs which take a dim view on the veneration of other gods, however, so the wager can still be very risky.

In the TROS context, in which the objective truth of the major religion and its schisms is admirably vague, atheism would probably be restricted to the non-belief in a life after death. So doing something now for a reward in the hereafter would not make sense; there being no post mortem rewards or punishments, in their view, the only things that matter are the ones that change the real, material world for better or worse.

But this fits quite well with stahl as written; "Trust in steel, not the gods" you could imagine them saying, which is perhaps why they wear so much. I should also moderate my criticism, as the charsheet does allow this atheism to be a creed, my reaction is much more toward the depiction of atheism as a faith, which gets up my nose.

Yes, depicting atheism as a faith irks me as well. Atheism is the complete opposite of faith. It is the non-belief in a God or Gods, a 'higher power' etc. And don't to get me started on the theories of non-existance after death. Atheism does not necessarily mean that there is the non-belielf of an after-life. I have known many athesits that beleive in some form of life after death. Whether there is a consciousness in this after-life is another question to ask. Now, let's take a look at agnosticism. This being defined as 'the belief that there can be no proof either that god exists or that god does not exist'. So an atheist actively denies the existance of a God, where-as an agnostic doesn't care because they beleive there is no certainty about the whole thing. So you could honestly have an agnostic in a foxhole that happens to be praying in order to cover his ass if there IS a god AND an after-life...
*shrug*

-Ingenious
Oh, contra.. for an atheist to pray in a foxhole because he has little to lose would not make a difference as to which God he prayed to... because he doesn't beleive in any.. so if an atheist in a foxhole were to pray... I'm sure he'd just pray to all of them... to further cover his ass.

So an atheist actively denies the existance of a God

Ian brings up an interesting point. While differences in understanding over the term "Faith" could lead some to misunderstand what I'm about to say, bear with me.

Atheism is not a religion per-se. There is no established doctrine (and in some cases, not even rejection of doctrine). However, it does take an element of faith (much for the reasons that Ian stated). It is also much like a religion in that many an atheist has an opinion about the afterlife, often "nothing." Others say "I don't know," which is less likely to be interpreted as a statment of faith.

It is my experience also, as a person who acted as full-time clergy for two years, that so-called "devout" atheists are the more inclined to push their non-faith upon others (or do "missionary work") than do the most devout Mormons, Jehovah's witnesses, 7th Day Adventists, or Southern Baptists. Some atheists will say this comes from a desire to clear away the lies/idiocy/whatever of those that foolishly buy into the idea of God or of organized religion, etc. In other words, their reasons end up sounding remarkably like the reasons that motivate any pro-theist missionary, pious crusader, or --gasp-- preacher.

Atheism is, by definition, a belief structure. There are many interpretations of what Atheism is "to you," but the same is true not only among Christian sects, but among individual catholics who technically subscribe to the same catechism.

My feeling on the Faith SA is that an Atheist qualifies for it if they're willing to try and proselytize, convert, or "pass the truth on" despite personal discomfort (arguments classify as personal discomfort to me). That they stand up for their disbelief in an environment that doesn't appreciate their opinion. This may be driven by some believe in "Truth" (I find that many of the atheists I know, if they aren't too bitter, are very interested in the idea of "truth," and although I didn't usually agree with them on the source of truth, I did agree that I was searching for the same thing as a religious man). Is not the search for truth what leads to some kind of faith? The SA sets in when you think you've found truth, or at least the path to it. To a lesser degree, it also sets in when you're sure that it isn't one of the aforementioned roads.

This is the reason that faith and truth are ambiguous in TROS. This is the stuff that drives men and nations, and any setting where the "truth" is pre-settled because the gods walk among us is missing out on the greatest source of human conflict EVAR.

Jake

Ian Charvill wrote:
The character comments that in times of crisis he reverts to Christian prayers, and I would suspect similar things about athiests in foxholes (if that particular hoary old cliche has some truth behind it) - that they would revert to the religion of their childhood or culture.

As an aside, not if your a Gurkha, they take bets on whether their fellow gurkhas on the Machine Gun Crew will survive the sniper shooting at them...

Having spent many a wasteful time in the Atheist vs Christian debate room(around 2 years worth, off and on).. Jake's point of 'truth' is exactly what I forgot to mention. Oh the times to be had listening to the banter in there... many offers of evidence from one side to the other. One saying their 'holy book' WAS the proof, etc... and the atheists just dismissing this with a grin and a pointing and laughing session, and then pointing out that too many sects of Christianity have twisted the Bible to say whatever they wanted it to say, thus using it as a control measure(which is all I think of it as). Most of the christians tried to convert the atheists chatters.. but to no avail. However, the entire thing was about proving one side over the other(thus trying to convert)... so this is a very valid point in terms of atheism being a 'faith' SA.. also read the definition of what faith is:

faith:
noun
1. confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing. 2. belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence. c synonyms at belief, trust. 3. loyalty to a person or thing; allegiance: keeping faith with one's supporters. 4. often faith(christianity) the theological virtue defined as secure belief in god and a trusting acceptance of god's will. 5. the body of dogma of a religion: the muslim faith. 6. a set of principles or beliefs.
idioms
in faith indeed; truly.
etymology
middle english, from anglo-norman fed, from latin fid*s; c bheidh- in indo-european roots.
And so forth.
So by the first definition the faith of an atheist is possible, regardless of trying to 'convert the idiots'.

-Ingenious
To bring the Matrix into this, the matrix was a means to control everyone's minds right? And wouldnt religion therefore be the first matrix?

Hmm, well, I agree that the big issue here is Truth but take a slightly different approach. Yes, it is normal for people to seek some sort of worldview - I would go so far as to say, something rather like a Lumpley principle of consensus on how the world is and works. But I strongly dislike the painting of the skeptical position re the claims of divinity as equivalent in terms of the nature of those "beliefs". What bugged me about religion was the emphasis on faith *rather* than evidence, even the claim that if there were evidence, faith would be worthless. This is making a virtue of ignorance, the very antithesis of a serach for truth.

Some like to distinguish between weak atheism and strong atheism; I'm an advocate of strong atheism and am willing to claim that there is no god. I do so not by trying to disprove the existance of god - which cannot be done as you cannot prove a negative - but by providing an alternate thesis for the origin of *claims* of god. One thing that is often forgotten in this debate is that we are not discussing an observation external and common to us, but only discussing the claims made by a particular group. If I say the claims originate from some other cause - such as the stucturing of social heirarchy - which satisfactorily explains the church and its claims to have knowledge of god, then I have pretty much disposed of god too. I don't need to get bogged down in trying to eff the ineffable.

From this perspective as well, I can resolve the problem of proselytising atheists. If I have an *opinion* on some matter, I can be just as pushy and as much of an advocate. If I like a book and recommend it to someone, I am likely to do so strongly, enthusiastically. Similarly, if I have a view of truth I find compelling, I'm likely to advocate that too. My criticism of religion is not based on proselitism, it is based on supernaturalism; that is, it seems to me, supernaturalism is not as fruitful a line of enquiry as materialism. And obviously, as Jake points out, it is the search for truth, and methodologies of truth, which is important becuase those views and tools determine action. Atheists are just as enthusiastic about their vioew of reality as theists, and may also feel a sense of urgency in disseminating that view. But these similarities do not, to me, make supernaturalism and materialism equivalent per se.

yeah, this didn't go off topic at all....

Ashren Va'Hale wrote: yeah, this didn't go off topic at all....

probably ought to split it right when it went into the faith debate....

The burden of proof lies on the person making the assertion, not the person denying it given the lack of any demonstrable and decisive evidence. That's the problem with trying to say that atheism is faith. It implies a parallelism where it does not at all exist.

It's a very similar logical fallacy to straw man, or when people try to prove something by proving some only vaguely related analogy instead.