Playing at war in heaven/Ascended Demons and Fallen Angels

[Occluded Sun]

Perhaps the world was and is meant to be a prison for the Fallen - a prison that lets them believe they've escaped and thus cease trying to break out.

[Chamomile]

I don't know if it would help here, but I always liked the idea that God has both his power and nature dictated by mortal faith. Early on, he ate the rest of the Hebrew pantheon and become the sole focus of the Hebrew faith, and this made him much more powerful. So he repeated the process a couple of times and finally struck it big in the dark ages with the whole Christianity thing. But as he started exploding in popularity, the faith directed at him started to expect him to be extremely different things, his psyche began to fracture, and he became insane and ineffectual, a hydra whose heads could each have been a god unto themselves in the ancient world, but who are all fused to the same body and completely unable to direct the whole. Even the mighty Catholic fragment is dragged down because of how many of the Protestant fragments despise and work against it.

[Occluded Sun]

There are likely multiple Catholic fragments, considering how many factions actually exist within Catholicism.

[hyzmarca]

Perhaps the world was and is meant to be a prison for the Fallen - a prison that lets them believe they've escaped and thus cease trying to break out.

There are multiple cases in the Bible where Satan is refered to as the God of this World, or as the Prince of this World, so that sort of makes sense. There is no hell, because Earth is hell.

[Occluded Sun]

So in that case, what are human beings?

[Grek]

Being punished, for the original sin, in hell.

[Occluded Sun]

Ah, but the 'demons' are fallen angels who aren't native to Hell. The natives to Hell are... human beings. Which means they're the actual demons.

It seems to me that this line of thinking permits us to unify the theology with Buddhism.

[Longes]

[Prak]

So, it's been a good four years since I last posted in this thread, and a good six since I started it. In that time... well, holy fuck. There've been some changes on this side of the computer, including antidepressants and dropping the "LaVeyan" part of my self label. Oh, plus some evolution of personal philosophy, politics, specific beliefs... etc.

Anyway. So there's this show called "Lucifer" now. Um. I guess the existence of that and the fact that it was popular enough to get a fan campaign to bring it back when FOX cancelled it kinda... well it has implications towards some of the stuff in this thread.

Apparently, "I have daddy issues because God tossed me out on my ear" is actually pretty damned compelling for a decent number of people.

...and I want to say something about how that's not the part of the show I liked, but... actually, that was the primary story arch I was following it for. It sure as hell wasn't for Police Procedural #32323234, and it mostly wasn't for People Can't Communicate #323424.

But I digress. Because the actual point is not the show. I was listening to a podcast, and it talked about the show, which got me thinking about how I'd do the "Lucifer Comes to Earth" story, because I don't really like Tom Ellis' portrayal-

Spoiler, my Lucifer Comes to Earth would look a lot more like this-

-and it got me wanting to run Demon for my friends. And as I frequently do for games, I ran a search here to see what people have said about it.

So....



So, apparently the DtF corebook is pretty widely regarded as kinda shit, and the followup Houses of the Fallen is considered to add a lot of vital material. I've started reading it, and it does definitely help (altho there's def still some shit I'm just flat tossing out for my game).

But, that also means I have a slightly fresher memory of Demon to talk about here.

So, the Creator wants to make a universe. But to do so would be to touch the Void, and become tainted, so they make angels, and specifically, The Heralds. The Creator give the Heralds The Plan, which is disseminated amongst them because Too Pure, Too Much, blah blah blah. The creator makes six more houses, and the Heralds' job is to carry the plan and direct the other houses, while also not touching the Void themselves.

The Universe is made, it's good, all that, then the angels are told to make humans, and the angels are uniquely invested in humans, more so than any other part of creation.

An angel sees the apocalypse in the long far off, and knows humans won't survive, so angels talk amongst themselves, and a third decide "yeah, no, fuck God's second command, we're gonna intervene."

The War in Heaven happens, Demons lose, they're tossed in the Pit, all of that. At some point in all of that, Lucifer, who previously took a larger part of The Plan into themselves so that other Heralds could manage an even share amongst themselves, took the whole Plan into themself, and... the Plan became lost.

Very notably... the Creator doesn't actually appear in all of this. It's all Angels and Fallen fighting over humans and their fate. There's various moral posturing by PoV characters, but we don't actually know what the Creator wants, other than to create a universe, have humans, and for celestials to not interfere. Like, we can infer a lot about the world because it's about Angels and Demons, there's a sorta generically Christian creation myth, and the core book has its first chapter feature a demon dicking around with a televangelist with some very non-Christian moral failings. And it's White Wolf.

But... honestly, Demon the Fallen isn't about avenging the millions of people killed by God in various biblical stories. It's not about kicking a Westboro Baptist Church Personification in the teeth. It's about a group who took action to protect what they saw as their children fighting a group who were blindly obedient to a "Don't Intervene" order. Like... we can't even say for certain that the Creator is even involved in the punishment of the demons.

As much as I love shit that involves Punching God in the Teeth (Preacher TV show was awesome. Still need to actually read the comic, but... early 90s comic art style is... rough for me), the Creator is seriously absent in Demon, and... I think having an explicitly present Creator God would actually be harmful to the game, for reasons previously discussed. It's better to have a game that is Angels Loyal to The Plan vs Demons Who Say Fuck The Plan, and demons can say, er,



Basically, you have angels as antagonists who want to round up Demons and toss 'em back in the Pit, or into oblivion, or whatever. You have human antagonists who represent pretty much any flavor of religion you want, from Westboro canon fodder who want to kill your PCs because they're ungodly, to Winchester expies who want to kill your PCs (and might actually be able to) because they're Demons and "we're Team Free Will" (and your PCs can say "...um, so are we? Like, where do you get your info from?"), to exorcists who run the gammut from "I'm a Catholic priest and want to get demons out of people because they're ungodly" to 2005 Constantine/Diablero "I'm nominally christian cuz I've seen demons and take that as a sign that God's real and I'mma punch demons in the dick cuz... reasons." And then you've got demon antagonists who are either Killfuck Soulshitter, Enslaver of Adam's Race or The Human Liberation Front, depending on where your PC's sit on that particular divide.

The game doesn't need an explicit philosophy about adultery/abortion/LGBTQIA+ Rights/etc (altho, maybe there's an implicit philosophy, depending on how the game is framed and what kind of political philosophies are coded to what sides. I'm envisioning very Ancom/Black Bloc coding of Lucifer and his court for the actual DtF game I'm thinking about running)