Bloodthorn's Journal

Some Musings On Sorcerer and The "Nature" of Demons
Over on The Forge, a series of discussions lead to a bit of revelation concerning the game Sorcerer. I'm recording them here so that I won't forget them.

Someone Asked:
'A question arises: What defines Not-Here[...]?'

Ron Answered:
'"Not-Here" is a concept that many role-players and modern SF/fantasy fans are going to have a hard time with. At least as I see it, if you can define it in any sense that carries explanation, you're still talking about "Here." "Here" is the explainable, or even conjecturable, in metaphysical as well as physical terms.

'Hell? Here.

'Some other dimension? Here.

'The seething Collective Unconscious? Here.

'In other words, as soon as you give demons' origins/nature a context in the human scheme of things, you've missed the point. Not-Here cannot, by definition, be accounted-for.

'Now, if one wants to use terms like "Hell," "other dimension," or "Collective Unconscious" for that concept, then that's cool. That works. But in gamer-terms, that's not what's happening. For most gamers, using terms like that tames demons; it makes them "belong" in a set of boxed-universes or boxed-concepts, such that they skip from one part of Here to this part of Here. And that is boring. They might as well be trolls in caverns, for all of that.

'Think of Not-Here as something that not even the Creator, if any, would acknowledge or include in reality of any kind. Then you see that even using the word "something" is not appropriate in that sentence. Yeah. It's that freaky.'

Someone Else Replied:
'I always thought that demons don't exist until summoned...?'

Ron Replied:
'Yeah, that's how I see it too. But when something that "doesn't exist" then does, and it seems to have an identity, then funky music starts up. Either it's being formed from some whacked process (manifesting childhood terrors, e.g.), which is bad enough, or that is one messed-up metaphysical badness. The former is very good for highly focused play (e.g. Schism) but the latter provides maximum philosophical crawlies for more generalized play.'

Someone else wrote:

'One thing I actually did during a game was to screw with the player's idea of what "not-here" was. They started off thinking literally- demons are "demons" from "Hell". They were convinced by one they summoned that "Hell" was just a Human name for this dimension where some demons come from- but only one out of many. Then an NPC sorcerer & shrink explained how concepts like "hell" and "demon" and even in more recent times "alternate dimensions" are only reflections of universal archetypes. By this time, they didn't believe a damn thing. I made it a point to hit them with a different "not here" every chance I got. The demons lie about it, other sorcerers are confused or deluded about it, and no one really has any useful answers. At some point, they figured it just didn't matter.'

In response to some character ideas Ron wrote:
'These are "Oh man! Demons! I'm a sorcerer!" origin stories, and nothing more. They are ... well, I'll put it this way. The whole experience of playing the first versions of Mage and Vampire was predicated on "Sweeping aside the veil of mundane reality, as you enter the mystic world that lies beneath and take your place in it." Nightbreed stuff.

'Sorcerer doesn't do this at all. The default setting is here and now. Not a fantasy version of here-and-now. Not a here-and-now plus demons.

'That's right, so I'll say it again. Sorcerer is not here-and-now plus demons. All the discussion about the stage magician guy discovering that "some of the magic is real" is totally off the mark for the default version of Sorcerer. None of it is real. Demons aren't magic. Occultism, mysticism, and magic is all crap.

'And this is a demon, and you've Bound it. Not, "Oh, no, I'm Bound to it!" but ... you Bound it.

'Why? That's the question that begins Sorcerer character creation at its most productive.'

Finally I wrote:

'First Ron talks about some funky place called Not-Here which is pretty much defined as The Place You Can't Define. And now [...] he's talking about how Sorcerer's default setting isn't Here-And-Now-Plus Demons.

'This is really subtle shit.

'It's like contemplating NaN. NaN is a concept I first ran into when learning the Java programming language. NaN stands for Not a Number. It was primarily Java's clean trick for getting around divide by zero errors. If you devide something by zero the result is NaN, Not a Number. Simple.

'This is the weird part. Like all mathematical concepts NaN has a formal definition. NaN is defined as: A value that is equal to nothing, not even itself. So we know the question "Does X equal NaN" is ALWAYS "No" even if X is NaN. The weirdness comes in because Java includes a function called IsNaN. IsNaN returns TRUE if its input parameter is NaN. But we've just said that you can't test for equality on NaN... So how the HELL does IsNaN function?

'That's what I feel like Ron is trying to say. Demons don't exist and you've just bound one. Blink.

'Demons are NaN. They are Not-an-Entity who come from Not-a-Place.

'However, the function IsNaN is only really bizarre when you think about it litterally. How can I determine if X is equal to NaN when by definition if X is NaN I still get false as the output. But there IS a way we can determine if X is NaN. X is NaN if X is, well, Not a Number. We can determine if X is a Number if X IS equal to itself because all numbers are equal to themselves.

'So IsNaN looks like this.

'if(X == X) then FALSE, otherwise TRUE

'What this means, is that I can't consider NaN in isolation. NaN is DEFINED only by the existance of numbers. We can't look at NaN all by itself, we have to consider real numbers in a sideways effort to see NaN.

'Going back to the Sorcerer analogy. We can NOT examine demons by themselves. We can't perform social tests and opperators on them because they are, Not-a-Human. Alone there is no standard of conceptualization for demons. The ONLY way we can conceptually understand Demons is by understanding Human Beings. We can understand NaN ONLY by understanding the equality property of real NUMBERS. We can only understand demons by understanding the Humanity property of real HUMAN BEINGS.

'How do you recognize a demon? It's Not-A-Human. What's a Human? That which has Humanity? What's Humanity? That's why we're playing the game.'

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