Anathema Sit

I don't know how I got to thinking about this.

Dogs and Firefly and Bishops
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A while back Vincent Baker wrote a bit on indie-rpgs.com about using the Dogs In the Vineyard rules to play a game set in the Firefly universe. To the question of "what happens to the Dogs' function of judging things as sinful?" he answered that the crew of the Firefly have to ultimately make the decision to participate in a (usually criminal) enterprise or not, and whose side to take if they do participate, and that is the same decision that the Dogs make when they make judgements of sin. "I will be a part of this. I countenance this" vs "I refuse to be a part of this. I do not countenance this" or even "I will stop this, at whatever cost."

I was just thinking, while washing dishes, that that equivalence between what seems to be an objective statement about morals or ethics, and an individual decision to take an individual stand with regard to someoene else's actions, shows up in other places.

I have a friend who was ordained a Bishop a year or three ago in an Independent Catholic line of succession, as part of her own personal endeavors to build a faith and perhaps a faith community that reflected religious truth as she understood it. Her own religious community, which was basically her and a few friends who agreed with her religiously to one degree or another, was an interweaving of Buddhist and Anglican rites and beliefs. She tried to make it fully orthodox Buddhist and fully orthodox Christian, in fact, with Mary understood as Kwan Yin. Anyway, the important bit is that some old friends of hers from way back, professors, husband and wife, who had been semi-parental figures to her in days gone by, refused to attend the ordination -- which was as important to my friend, as much a turning point in her life, as a marriage or a conversion and baptism! -- on the grounds that it was syncretistic and therefore *wrong*.

She was musing about this in her blog the other day and brought up just how hurtful and a betrayal that seemed to her, and wondered if she should still consider them friends.

Why? If they were simply informing her of what they saw as the moral and ethical facts of the matter, and behaving in what they saw as a morally correct manner, wasn't that something she should praise, while regretting their difference of opinion on the facts? Why did it hurt her personally, when it was about objective statements?

Because it was also an interpersonal act. It was "I do not countenance this. I will not be a part of this."

I wonder if that sort of thing is *ever* merely a statement of beliefs about impersonal metaphysical facts.

"This is sin."

Anathema Sit and Speech Acts
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My mind moved back to the first centuries of Christianity, and the unfortunate business of condemning heretics and defining and enforcing dogmatic orthodoxy. The usual formula was: "If anyone says ___, let him be anathema." "Anathema sit" is the formula used in Latin, borrowing the Greek word to emphasize the connection with the Greek phrase "anathema esto" as found in Galatians 1:6-9:

"I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel:
Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ.
But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed [anathema esto].
As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed [anathema esto]."

And also 1 Cor 16:22: "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha." (What "Maranatha" is doing there and what it means is a matter about which there has been some interesting misunderstandings over the centuries, which are only relevant here in that it was for a very long time believed that calling someone "Anathema Maranatha" was an especially terrible curse, and it was used as a formula of excommunication.)

Returning from digressions and searches of Greek New Testaments online -- the interesting thing about the Latin formula is that it's in the jussive subjunctive (Latin equivalent to the Greek 3rd person imperative "esto").

The jussive subjunctive is always used in direct "speech acts" or "performative utterances" which were written about by philosopher John L. Austin in his book "How To Do Things With Words." A "speech act" is an utterance which not only says something, but does something. Like agreeing, commanding, cursing, blessing, labeling, greeting, protesting, requesting. Speech acts do not merely state facts; when they do they state facts which come into existence only because of the speech act: "Do you take this man/woman as your lawful wedded wife/husband?" "I do." Performative utterances in English, in traditional, formal contexts, often contain the marker "hereby" -- "I hereby pronounce you man and wife."

That's why it's so interesting that the formula was "anathema *sit*/*esto*" and not "anathema *est*/*esti*". "Est" or "esti" would have been a statement of fact: "he is accursed." It would have had at least the superficial appearance of impersonality, of objective statement of facts in which the speaker has no direct involvement. "Oh, looks like it's going to rain today. Oh, and anyone who denies the Trinity is accursed."

"LET HIM BE ACCURSED!" That is an outright speech act, something the speaker is doing, something the speaker is involving himself with; an utterance which establishes the facts, not merely states the facts.

Those early Christians, following Paul's lead, had no illusions about their personal involvement in matters of judgement of sin.

NVC
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For the past few years I've been interested in a school of thought about communication and personal interaction called "Nonviolent Communication" or "NVC." One of the basic procedures of NVC is reinterpretation of supposedly objective statements, which cause conflict and division, in terms of the personal involvement of the individuals involved.

In NVC, if you heard someone say something like "that is a sin!" you would work towards an acceptable reinterpretation of the statement in terms of the individual person's feelings and needs, hopes, wishes, and fears, and the choices they had made and wished to make with regards to other people. The idea is that these personal factors are always there, and you can choose to use language which exposes them, or language which ignores them, and the language which exposes them, so that they can be understood and respected and addressed, is more conducive to speaking peace in a world of conflict.

And it all comes together...

How do you translate Dogs to Firefly?

You just pay attention to the implicit, which remains the same, though it is implicit in *different things* in the two different settings.

That is all.

300

I haven't seen the film. I've checked out the comic. This is the problem I have with it (I mean, the basic gut problem I have with it, not the intellectual-critical problems I might have with it if I thought about it too hard.)

You know in Men In Black, where Will Smith is sitting next to a bunch of other potential Men In Black, all of them super hardcore military badasses, "THE BEST OF THE BEST OF THE BEST SIR!" and he can't help laughing at them all?

The Spartans, in 300, are those guys. A whole city full of them. And the author thinks they're really really cool.

That's the basic problem I have with 300.

People who have seen the movie tend to love it so much that it's gotta be pretty sweet in a turn-your-brain-off-and-enjoy-the-violence, hey-did-Mel-Gibson-make-this-film kinda way. So I might still enjoy it if I saw it. But that's the impression I got from the comic.

Cluing In on Sorcerer Actions....

Neat stuff here...
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=21236.0 (If that works... I can't bring up indie-rpgs all of a sudden...)

"I'd really like to emphasize that narrations in Sorcerer are not about what it will look like if the character succeeds, but rather what it looks like when he or she goes into action."

Ooh. OK. That means your narration of your action is not going to get shanked by a failure on the dice. Cool.

Christopher K adds:

"We _declare_ what we want to get done, but we get _Bonus Dice_ for what we're actually doing right now."

Beyond that...

In some indie games, you have three or four people who propose different ways the story can go (which may or may not be related to what different characters accomplish). You roll dice to see whose idea about where the story can go goes into effect in the game's reality.

In Sorcerer, that is not the case at all. You get to say what your character does and how he does it. You roll dice to see how that works out.

In "Indie Game X" you might have two people who propose the two possible story directions, "My character grabs the vase successfully," and "your character fails to grab the vase because of the interference of my character," and there's a roll to see whose goes into effect.

In Sorcerer, that's not it at all. Not at all. You are declaring intent for your character and narrating the actions that will be taken to achieve that intent or not. It'd be like, "my character reaches out and takes hold of the vase" and "my character knocks your character down before she gets to the vase."

If that's all there is to it, you could just roll Stam vs Stam to see how it all plays out, but in a complex, combat-type situation, you'd consider each of those actions separately.

Dude A may or may not grab the vase. If Dude B knocks dude A down, it's going to make it a lot harder to grab that vase. Victories = defense dice for the vase. But Dude B knocking dude A down doesn't settle the matter if Dude A still has actions!

The problems in the thread arose from reading a Sorcerer conflict as if it were an Indie Game X conflict, which it isn't.

Jared Wins!

I don't really read rpg.net, but I still found this funny... Jared Sorenson got permabanned. And I'm not laughing at Jared, I'm laughing with Jared.

Spione

I didn't realize Spione was even out, but Emily's review of it here makes me realize I will want to buy it. I was not much of a spy geek but the first edition of Top Secret fascinated my twelve-year-old self, with its glossary of espionage terms and agencies and stuff. It sounds like Spione has that kind of loving attention to historical and realistic detail, in a new generation of game. The cold war is generally remembered by kids today only in partisan and caricatured terms, but it was important. I might well enjoy a game about it.

When I think about the Cold War I always think about the musical "Chess."

Devils Rising From The Dust

Go Matt Snyder!

The new edition of Dust Devils includes 70 pages with new artwork, completely revised and re-written rules, and much additional content. (File size is 8.5 MB)

Dust Devils Revenged also includes three alternate setting supplements. Deathwish is espionage and covert action. RONIN (by Jason Blair) captures the samurai drama of feudal Japan. And, Concrete Angels (by Jared Sorensen) is a grim and gritty neo-noir crime romp.

Apparently John Harper Is Diversifying Into Restaurants

Thinkin' Sorcerer (Mystic Blood II: Demon Blood of the Sorcerer!)

I feel kinda silly being into hippie games and never playing the grandaddy, Sorcerer. I've wanted to run it for a while but to run it you have to make it your own first, and I haven't every done that in a way I like.

I really want to run or play Sorcerer and Sword -- but it feels wrong to me to try and run the heavily modded supplement without having run or played the pristine item. Joe thinks this is silly and I should just run Sword, but there you go.

So I've come up with something that's kind of hooked me into it a bit. I was thinking of trying to do something kinda like NightLife, Vampire, or NightSpawnBane, some "contemporary horror but the players are the monsters" game, but with Sorcerer.

In such a game, you do not become a vampire by getting bitten and just waking up vampy. You become a vampire by allowing the vampire blood -- a parasite demon -- into your body and bonding with it, agreeing to feed its need (for you to drink human blood). Likewise, with a werewolf -- but with wolf blood. I can also see there being "vampire rings" or whatever, an object demon which gives you the powers of dark blood, if a player preferred that. A "monster" is a character who is possessed, or in the case of player characters, voluntarily inhabited, by a particular kind of demon.

I don't think you even need to tweak the base rules to do that. Vampires would have (conferred by their blood demon) Special Damage (fangs), Boost Stamina, Cloak, probably Vitality... Add-ons could be Travel (flight) perhaps conditioned on a Shapeshift to bat form, Perception (night vision), Boost Will, Armor, Command (bats, rats?), Daze or Confuse, Fast... All of the above would be a bad-ass, Drac-level vamp, and the demon would be a force to be reckoned with on a global scale. Maybe if you wanted to go really nuts you could add in some kind of Spawn/Possessor deal which spawns possessors, to reflect the ability to create slave vampires, who knows. A "starter" vamp could just have the first few powers from the list.

A werewolf demon would have Boost (stamina), Special Damage (lethal -- fangs and claws), Perception (animal senses), Vitality, and Fast, some or all of which would be conditional on a Shapeshift to wolf form. Need would be to kill a living thing while in animal form.

I'm thinking maybe an Immortal demon -- something which made its user ageless, like the Highlander or the Comte de Saint-Germain. Such characters were part of a game Joe and I worked on on and off for years, called Mystic Blood, which was kind of a spinoff from the old Magus game that Jim Z began back in, what, the summer of 1988 I think.

For the base immortality you'd have Vitality, then... I don't know. If the demon itself carried ancient wisdom, maybe an abstruse Cover or three and a Boost Lore? I guess such a demon's powers could be tailored according to the players' whim. I don't know what its Need would be. Perhaps competition (if you make it martial competition you're starting to move into Highlander territory) or domination (Illuminati-type scheming)? The trouble with this kind of character though is if I remember correctly (I'll have to check), you're supposed to start off having newly bound your first demon, and that doesn't work well with centuries-old characters. Dunno. We'll see about that one.

Oh yeah... and Mystic Blood also followed Monsters! Monsters! by Ken St Andre in ripping off Roger Zelazny's Jack of Shadows to create the "Shadowjack" as a race. A Shadowjack demon might have Perception (hear anything said in a shadow while you're in a connecting shadow), Cloak (disappear into the shadows), Vitality, and such stuff. It'd be fun to include those as an option as well, in this "Mystic Blood II: Demon Blood of Sorcerer" idea.

Anyway, I'm writing this stuff down mostly to throw it open to the folks who are kind enough to read my blog and who might have played or run sorcerer, for advice on what else I need to figure out before I'm ready to run with this, and how workable the stuff I've got so far sounds.

Junonian Endgame -- Part 1

Junonian Endgame

I took notes, but this game sticks in my mind.

For reference:

• The last game, which I missed
• The Venerean Gambit, previous Max game (Jim/Cyrus's writeup )
• The Jovian Candidate -- original Max game

We left Maxwell having lost his would-be captor Ivy in a hospital on Venus. As the story begins, he has given up on her and decided to track down the origin of the Aegis agents he slew in the previous game. (Remarkably, Maxwell does not murder anyone in this game.) He goes to the beach where they fought and manages to find a tooth from one of them. Perhaps it has a little Jupiter symbol etched on it...

Anyway, he turns into his signature dark eagle form, grabs the tooth, and uses it as a psychometric homing device to find his way back to the Aegis unit's ship -- a big nautiloid (Randy had brought a sheaf of Spelljammer ship illustrations, including the nautiloid ), for visual reference.

He approaches the ship -- one light is on in one window. He flies up and alights on the window, and looks inside.

It's Ivy. She's going through the ship's papers, apparently trying to find out the same sorts of things Max wants to find out about.

He watches through the window as she appears to find nothing and heads out of the ship. As she walks back out on the beach, Max the eagle lands on her shoulder. She starts and he flaps to the ground and becomes himself. He hits her with a barrage of questions about what she knows about him and the people who brainwashed him. She says, "that's a lot of questions." He replies, "that's all I've got."

(Game system note: he was down to one single four point muse: "find the people who brainwashed him" or words to that effect. So this conversation was inspired by game system considerations.)

She takes him to a Turkish-ish coffeehouse. Sit on the floor on rugs, eat turkish delight with your coffee, hookah available on request. They talk, and he finds a lot out.

Her name, Ivy, is not a coincidence apparently; she's a Bacchante, a member of the secret society led by Dionysus. Specifically a Maenad, one of their leaders -- the Maenads are largely Archons. (Ivy adorned the Thyrsus, of course.)

Dionysus, as a son of Zeus, lived on Jupiter for some time. But with the ascendancy of Hera, he was driven out. (Hera has no use for her husband's bastards.) He now moves from place to place, spending a lot of time on Earth. The Bacchantes are minor but powerful players in the espionage and war games of the gods, holding special emnity for Hera and her Junonians.

Her Junonians? Hera drove Dionysus from Jupiter? None of this was familiar to Max, despite having the memories of an ordinary Jovian citizen. I guess Max never read the Jovian equivalent of Noam Chomsky. Pretty much watched the Jovian Fox News, if you will. Party line.

Anyway, they're interested in him as a probable pawn of, you guessed it, Hera. An angry pawn, and therefore a possible ally.

But why would Hera scheme to have him kill a major Aegis official, an act so offensive to her husband it required a brainwashed Archon as a sleeper agent assassin?

Well... She does hate her husband's bastards. Among them, Heracles. Who's still on Jupiter, enjoying great rank, power, and privilege as the head of the Aegis. She can't kill him (Jove knows she's tried..), but maybe she could assassinate a favorite?

If that were the case, these Aegis agents would have been straightforwardly pursuing him as a murderer, perhaps suspecting some intrigue but surely knowing nothing of its extent or origin.

And the Junonians would be off in the wings, smiling quietly to themselves.

That was the end of my first play segment -- no conflicts yet! But it's enough to post in one bite.

Pointer to the 20x20 room

If for some weird reason you're reading this blog and not the 20x20 room, check this out. Good entry with lots of interesting comments about race in RPGs -- in Shadowrun, to start with.

Road Movie to Hades

Another Nine Worlds game last night. Sadly, Ed was unable to make it. Here are some of the things that happened:

- Scopas (James) needed to find a way into Hades proper. He ran into Kester, the Thanatoi that had been on the Eclipse, and the two went to a pub in the Ninth Gate. He wanted Kester to help him get into Hades and find out what happened to the souls of his friends and decided to be upfront about it. Kester is moved by his story (and a few bottles of liquor) and agreed to take Scopas into the Underworld.

- Cohen (Randy) got to thinking while waiting for Scopas to return to the ship. The cyclopes, who created the original telluric weapons, were killed by Apollo's Archer agents. When things die, their souls go to Hades. He was sitting just outside the gates of Hades. Math was done, and he headed towards the Gate. He made his way past the guards and their cerberus dogs and found himself in Hades.

- Cyrus (Jim) under the guise of being an Aegis agent, infiltrated the Daedalian base with the intention of smuggling Milo Icarius out. Things were going good until the base commander got suspicious and wired back to Aegis HQ and found out Cyrus was not who he claimed to be. Cyrus kicked into "Matrix" mode, pulled out a few sub-machine guns and blasted his way out, Milo in tow. Something tells me that Max, Ed's character, is no longer number one on the "Aegis Most Wanted" list.

- Kester took Scopas to the Hall of Records in Hades, where he found out what had happened to the shades of his friends. Sahak had been sent to the Elysium Fields, but his wife, Anastasia, who had committed suicide after the death of Sahak, was slated to go to Tartarus. Scopas asked Kester to help him again, to find Anastasia, but Kester would only do it if Scopas agreed to help him get Cohen... Kester held Cohen responsible for his being beaten and interrogated by the Atlanteans, and nearly losing the soul he had been transporting. Scopas swore to help him. They found Anastasia just as guards were coming to take her away to the Black Pit. Scopas told her that he had destroyed the Kraken that had killed Sahak, and that she need to have hope, and tried to instill her with that hope. She glowed with a light never before seen in Hades. The guards told Scopos that it had been foreseen that he would come, and that he had tipped the scales for Anastasia. She would be reunited with her husband. They led her away to go to Paradise.

- Cohen made his way into the Hall of Records, into a secure area, and found out the fates of the cyclopes. Arges and Brontes were locked away in Tartarus, but Steropes was NOT in Hades. Cohen dug more and found that the cyclopes had been sent out of the Underworld by Hades himself, escorted by Briareus the hecatonchire. They had been sent to Earth. Curious. Cohen left the Hall, wondering how he was going to get out of Hades, when he ran into Kester and Scopas, who tried to capture him. Scopas, though, did not really try to the best of his ability. In fact he wanted to make it look like he was doing his best to incapacitate Cohen, while letting him escape. Kester saw through this ruse and tried to take both Archons into custody, angered by Scopas' betrayal. During the conflict, he used Chaos points to damage both of their primary virtues, then later, Stasis to lock them down. Things were looking grim until Scopas trumped in on the conflict and won, allowing both he and Cohen to escape.

- Cyrus and Milo made it back the the Benjamin Franklin and took to the air, just as a group of Aegis aetherships closed in on them. With some fancy flying and simple outclassing, Cyrus blasted out of Jupiter's atmosphere and into the aether, leaving the Aegis ships in the dust. He and Milo discussed what to do next, and Cyrus suggested that Milo go into hiding on Earth. Milo thought it was a good idea.

So, we have a convergence on Earth. What the hell is Steropes doing there for Hades? You can be sure that Kester is going to be gunning for Cohen and Scopas. Now Aegis is after half the players. Could it get any better?

SFWA has had it with WotC

Check this out: SFWA creates grievance committee "WOTC Desk">

Via Uncle Bear with a few words of his own.

Yikes.