an Unbalanced Skirmish Game of Deception, Madness and CausalityHorror, set in the Eklipsis/Prescience Wars paracosm. (No, I haven’t actually worked out an entire skirmishgame ruleset. I would be crap at actual rule building anyway, but I did getvery wrapped up in imagining how one might work and especially in consideringdifferent types of Causal Horror and thinking about how they might beincorporated into a game.
Here is a ‘Planning Document’ for ‘Eschat-Jihad, with a biton the core ideas, a section on the various Factions and how they might workand be represented, and finally a very long section on ideas in Causal Horror.
A lot of the art was suggested by people on Discord, sothanks for that.)
| | | Joseph Mugnaini |
Core Ideas Inspired a bit by things like ‘Bone Forest’, ‘TrenchCrusade’ and the 28-Mag, Eschat-Jihad is an asymmetric, low model skirmish gamewith semi-random, hidden goals, surreal terrain and Causal Horror.
Its models and terrain are conceptualised for artists,kitbashers, and the like to be strange and surreal, especially the terrain.
Its meant to be a somewhat hipstery/arty game where you playas much for the pleasure of creating and seeing how the manifold horrors turnout as much as to win. It would have a lot of the card flipping and shifting goalsof Warhammer but instead of producing granular somewhat non-diegetic aims itwould be designed specifically to produce strangeness. So maybe a little likeplaying through a surrealist film as a wargame.
| | | Kjell Daniel Francisco |
Background The battles of Eschat-Jihad take place amongst andbetween the factions of a Dark Future and those of a Dark Past.
In the Past, the Iron Path and Amber Court are are lockedin the ‘Prescience Wars’, and apocalyptic magical conflict which will eventuallycollapse causality into the Red Lands – a Beksynski-style meta hellscape.
In time, (if such a thing can be said to exist in the RedLands), a True Hero emerges and leads a crusade to re-make Causality, bindingup the shattered lands and strands and creating a liveable reality with acoherent chronology.
Then, he goes, or maybe always was, insane, and summonsAzathoth. Now his descendants pray to Azathoth, who hangs I the sky over theirlands, blotting out the sun, in order to delay His annihilation while rebelsand surrounding lands war against them to overthrow their evil rule.
Factions from the past of the Prescience Wars sendwarriors into their future that is the Red Lands in order to assuretheir own victory and prevent the apocalypse the Red Lands represent.
Factions from the future send their own warriorsinto their past in order to ensure the Apocalypse happens, for they areits children.
At the same time, factions within the Past and Future,war against each other. In the Past the Amber Court battles the IronPath, while in the Future the Knights of Eklipsis battle Sulemanof the Black Gates and Villains from within their own kingdom.
And throw in an extra faction; The Hordes of Causality,from the Red Lands themselves, representing the will of that anti-Causal Hell.
Here, in the Nightmare Reality which is the Red Lands, thesewarbands meet and battle, though often for causes and ideas even they do notreally understand, each fighting to preserve their existence and for their ownview or philosophy of Causality itself.
| | | Beksinski |
Rules Concepts · Battle as a form of performance.
· Simple basic rules.
· But highly metatextual rules specific to eachfaction.
Each faction has an entirely different perception ofCausality, different culture and a different understanding of what victorymeans.
Therefore each sides objectives are fundamentallydifferent, hidden and semi-random each game, meaning its possible, in somecircumstances, for both sides to win, or for both to lose, or indeed tolose/win at the last moment as a groups perception of Causality shifts.
Understanding the enemies culture and perception ofCausality is key to intuiting and obstructing their goals for each match,(assuming you even want to do that and are not just focusing on your own, (orare just vibing)).
| | | Piotr Rusjowski |
Factions
| | | Samuel Araya |
The Knights of Eklipsis I already did a whole series on these guys so check theblog.
| | | Stephanie Pui-Mun Law |
They live in a Kingdom in permanent Eclipse because Azathothis hovering in their sky blotting uot the Sun. The ‘Sleeping King’ summonedAzathoth and his Knights betrayed him, stabbing him in the back 13 times withpoisoned daggers, though even this only caused him to fall into a sleep.
These are the descendants of those Knights. They worshipAzathoth and believe their worship delays the final annihilation of all things.They return to the Red Lands to make sure the Apocalypse happens so theSleeping King can emerge from the Red Lands to remake Causality, and so lead totheir current state.
They are the dominant force in the Realm/World they comefrom, and everyone else there hates them because of the whole Azathoth thing,and a bunch of other stuff they do.
Military Forces Knights! Dak gothic somewhat elfin knights from a wholerange of groups and orders. (I already have loads of these). Also I guesspeasants (blue) and Sorcerer/priests of the Black Church.
Force is arranged around its highly individual and veryodd elite heavy cavalry, with some backup from shitty foot troops, Priests, squires,footmen and animals. Only the knights really matter (everyone else isreplaceable) and the behaviours and win conditions all spring from and relateto the Knights.
Their goals are influenced by Eklispsis Dark Religion andKnightly codes of honour.
Super-evil Brettonians plus Undead plus Dark Elfaesthetic is the closest thing with already existing miniatures. Ian MillerKnights would also work. Slender Chaos Knights also.
Concepts of Time · Religious and apocalyptic
· Tied to the living presence of a singular God(who is Azathoth)
· A bit similar to mediaeval millenarianChristianity if they worshipped the Nuclear Chaos.
· A sacred trust inherited from the Sleeping Kingand sustained by him and by Azathoth.
· A universally held textual description ofCausality describing the entire arc of all time from beginning to end – thoughquite metaphorical, short on details or exact times and seeminglyintra-contradictory.
· Still, they have Faith!
| | | Remedios Varo |
Suleman of the Black Gates The main remaining opposition to the Knights of Eklipsisin the Dark Future of Azathoth. A faction influenced by a general grab-bag ofOttoman, North African and Arabic culture but somewhat realised and Oprey-ifiedby putting through a neo-Ottoman blender. Though honestly throw in a Lammasu orsomething if you like.
“The Emperor Sueman has the body of a Bull, the wingsof an Eagle and the bearded face of a man. He was famed for thousands of yearsas a just and wise ruler, a mighty warrior and a master of many magics. Hespoke the language of Birds, Djinn, Devils and Ants. He commanded theArch-Devil Asmodeus who, bound to his will, served him for many years asVizier, before his ultimate betrayal and escape at the height of the fourthCold Crusade.
Suleiman can read minds, scry his enemies, see thefuture in a limited way, turn invisible, teleport at will and no doubt performother miraculous actions. His seal is unbreakable once set and can be used tobind creatures like Devils or Djinn if they are subdued first. At the height ofhis power he commanded the direct loyalty of men, centaurs, birds, djinn,devils and ants as his subjects.”
The Kingdom of Suleman has access to its own form of TimeTravel, ripped straight off from Ted Chaing’s story ‘The Merchant and theAlchemists Gate’ and using exactly the same mechanics, but systematised andspread over an entire Kingdom.
The Sulemites are fatalistic and so don’t believe thepast can be changed, (from their perspective it never is), but one canunderstand it and perhaps plant things there that are yet to be revealed abouttheir own future
They hate Azathoth and Eklipsis and are sympathetic tothe forces of the Past but believe their cause it doomed so won’t aid them.
Military Forces High morale, fatalistic, professionally trained and thosesent to the Red Lands are all veterans of various wars. Largely Turkishinfluenced, with north African and Saharan elements.
Ottaman-style cavalry, Zuavre-style infantry, limited useof gunpowder. Their leaders can be sentient, intelligent Arabic and Persianmonsters like Sphinx and Lamia but other than that no magical or post-humantechnology or powers (they don’t really believe in it).
The leaders or officers can be travellers of the BlackGate, meaning they have used a Gate to travel a set distance into their ownpast. The forces of Suleman don’t think the past can be changed, so they don’tseek to change what they already believe has taken place, but they do work tofind gaps in what is known or understood, to change the meaning or inflectionof what has been and to gain wisdom for when or if they loop back into theirexpected timeline
Concepts of Time · Rationalist, scientific, fate-bound, fatalistic.
· All travellers are partial-looping.
· People are allowed into the gate in the pastbecause the operators recognise them as having come out of it previously.
· Gates only work in-situ and only for the personsfuture or past, which they are in so their culture is based around maintainingwell-preserved sacred sites for as long as possible.
· Their culture can only communicate “with itself”over the course of its own existence.
· All of its messages are true (notwithstandinghuman error)
· All ‘future events have already happened (butthere may be things we do not understand about them).
· All of this might be thrown into disorder in theAnti-Causal Red Lands.
| | | Kjell Daniel-Francisco |
Villains of Eklipsis (Literal ‘villains’ in the early-modern Shaksperiansense).
A mix of rebels, criminals and Heretics of Eklipsis,those opposed to the Black Church, Azathoth and that whole culture.
A crazy grab-bag of semi-fairytale-like Rebel Alliancewho use radical time travel spells or steal the ability from Eklipsis itselfand go back into the past, but with what aim? This could depend a lot on the mixtureof their party and who or what is leading it.
Their aim is a fundamental opposition to Eklipsis andthat entire situation. They would be fine with the ‘Red Lands’ apocalypse neverhappening/never having happened. Like many of the ‘Past’ factions they aretrying to avert the Red Lands, but unlike them they don’t care about who wins,or about humanity at all. They would have probably been happy in thePre-Prescience Wars Era.
| | | Stephanie Law In Green Shadows |
Military Forces Very wild and whacky, with lots of conditional or strangespecial powers.
Vere Agentia – the children of imprisoned Summer,with a cyclic understanding of time. Cypto ents, deep cover dryads, seeddryads, woodwose and summer elementals
Haereticorum Ineptias – literal absurdistanti-causalists. Baku, Hollyphants, Foo Creatures, Blue Dogs and Yellow Bears,the Roly-Poly Bird and Jub-Jub Bird, the Opinicus
Backup comes from the Avis Invefernalis – Birdslike Simurgh, Phoenix, Roc, etc. From minoris heretics like Moon Dogs, MonkeyMen, Blink Dogs, Grims, Thaw Mephits etc
| | | Rob Gonsalves |
A ‘playful chaos’ faction, (as opposed to the Scary-Chaosof the Hordes of Causality. They would focus on deception, disruption, cyclesand frame shifts. These would probably work well against the more ‘Orderly’forces whom they can ‘bawd’ nicely, but not against the Hordes of Causality, towhom Order and Reason are no more than Dreams anyway, and who the ‘Villains’would have to battle in a more prosaic fashion.
Concepts of Time If dominated by the Vere Agentia then a cyclicimpression of Time predominates and the aim is to restore the cycle.
If dominated by Haereticorum Ineptas then anabsurdist or anti-causal or playful impression of time dominates in which theaim is to disrupt, subvert or make ridiculous whatever others desire.
| | | Remedios Varo |
The Amber Court A chief faction of the ‘Prescience Wars’ – led by the‘Twice Redacted King’ whose name cannot be comprehended, often commanded by oneof the ‘Orouboros Kin’ - Childrenraised in the Amber Court in full knowledge of their own futures. This is aworld-spanning Empire (in its later form), dedicated to the full exploitationof all forms of Prescience, (under centralised control). Theysend out their forces commanded by the various Haptic Ranks and Ocular Ranks ofthe Court. They are meant to have a near-perfect knowledge of the future, butthe Red Lands of course often confuse and invalidate this. Their war againstthe Iron Path, and the ever more extreme use of magical ‘workings’ lead to the ‘RedShift’ and the Red Lands Apocalypse.
Obviously they completely blame the Iron Path for all ofthis. They go into the future of the Red Lands to make sure it doesn’t happenand to ensure the rapid defeat of the Iron Path to make certain of this.
They are opposed to all Post-Apocalyptic forces becausethey are invalid spawn of a nightmare that should never take place.
Military Forces Combination of 17th/18th CenturyFrance under the Sun King, Renaissance Germany and T’ang/medieval DynastyChina. Think massed armies full of braggadocio and glorious peacocking.
Largely conventional, albeit large forces, disciplined onthe surface but inwardly often riven with hysterics and secret tensions. Lotsof low quality infantry with high but fragile morale, (i.e. hard to break oncebut crushingly easy after that).
T’ang versions of Currassiers as bodyguards for theEmissarys of the Amber Court. High status bodyguard units like T’ang versionsof Landsknechts and Doppelsoldiers.
Tend to fight in a manner reminiscent of the Romance ofthe Three Kingdoms – big on tricks, deception and strategy dictated by acentral commander who has already predicted and planned for everything. (Untilthis goes horribly wrong.)
Concepts of Time · Believe very deeply that the future can be bothpredicted and changed.
· They adventure in their own Apocalypse - the Red Lands, in the belief that they candiscover enough to prevent it occurring.
· Opposed to all future factions as theyare ‘post apocalyptic’ insane barbarians. They specifically want the futureindicated by the Knights of Eklipsis to not happen. They are also totallyopposed to the only other faction from their own time; the Iron Path, who theyblame for everything.
· They play the most like a normal warband butwith extra ‘tricks’ from Prescience and lots of ‘yes, but’ powers.
· All according to Keikaku.
The Iron Path
| | | from 'Cromwell' |
A faction, originally radical, eventually coming toencompass all non-Amber Court aligned entities.
The prime enemy of the Amber Court in the “Past”, theyfight specifically against the concept and use of Prescience itself. Like theCourt they believe that the future can be grasped and shaped by human will, butcrucially, only in the absence of Prescience itself, which makes slaves ofhumanity.
Like the Amber Court they battle all future factions as‘warnings’ of an ‘apocalypse’ to come, for which they blame the Amber Courtentirely.
Early Pathists oppose the Red Lands, fighting to preventthe Apocalypse. Later more radical and insane pathist factions may havepro-Apocalypse leanings, since the annihilation of Causality is a sure defeatof Prescience.
Military Forces English Civil War Puritan or Cromwellian. RadicalProtestant. Muted, armoured uniformity.
Very high morale, quite high quality infantry and mutedvisible power differentials. Lots of iron and steel. Think Pikemen and Shotte.Hard to break infantry means they stick around a long time. Extreme fanaticismmay make them hard to control and can be a double-edged sword when confrontingthe horrors of the Red Lands
Extreme radicalism later giving way to Taliban-esquemurder squads. Late versions likely to make use of memetic terror weapons,unthinkable anti-causal weapons, mnemovores, or simply fire. Later instantiationhave the most radical uses of magic/technology.
Concepts of Time Originally a semi-humanist view in which concertedreasoned effort can shape human futures in positive ways, long years of warfaretransformed the Iron Path (or perhaps these tendencies were always there), intoan extremely radical, Nietzschean cult of pure human freedom and selfdetermination guaranteed by absolute resolution, willpower and the willingnessto make any sacrifice in blood, treasure or morality in order to defeatPrescience, and finally into one that believes that such sacrifices are goodand noble in themselves.
“Better Time die than Men be Slaves.”
The Hordes of Causality
| | | Geiger |
Born of, or perhaps only existing with, the ‘Red Lands,these are people, creatures and entities that either come from outsideCausality, or are products of its ruination.
Relentlessly time-looped individuals or groups, Paradoxfactions, Mnemovore or Mnemovore-aligned. The Yellow King or other Memeticforces. ‘Bodieless’ or ‘unborn’ minds, personalities or philosophies which may instantiatethemselves by varied methods, or perhaps spreading like a disease. Sometimes lostor abandoned forces from other groups which have taken to the Red Lands.
They fight from madness, from glee, from despair, orsimply by chance. All of reality is like a Nightmare to them and they wouldmake it so for all. More a spreading wave front of anti-causal insanity andtotal chaos than a ‘faction’.
Military Forces A seeming rabble of impossible grieving things.
Are they even arranged together in anything like ahierarchy? Are they organised or is this simply a group of entities thathappen to be alongside each other at this particular moment?
No plan or discipline, no morale to disrupt or plan tounfurl. Call them ‘Zombies’ or ‘Mutants’ if you like, or forms of theCybernetic undead, or broken golems, or mind-viruses, or devils or demons orthe half-unreal.
Extensive random interrupts and random actions. Highlydestructive if they ever cohere but utterly unpredictable even to their ownplayer.
Concepts of Time In a sense these are anti-colonial forces. The Red Shiftor Red Lands are their home and inexorably attached to their nature. They arethe living breath of the Causal apocalypse. They are the final product of aCausal war and the ultimate and last fate of all that lives. They are borderedto the future and the past by those who would eliminate or destroy them,removing the Apocalypse and reasserting Causal Time. Though they have littleplan, their actions tend towards the growth and extension of the Red Lands tillthey cover the whole of the future and the whole of the past, till there arenothing but Red Lands anywhen. They are against All Things, Forever, evenAzathoth, which is a kind of formal end to reality. For the Red Shift Hordesthere is no end and no beginning, there is nothing, and everything, forever andnever.
| | | concept art from Disneys 'Back Hole' |
To Make the Red Lands But, of what are the ‘Red Lands’ composed?
Artistically, key influences are Miller, Geiger,Beksynski. So I started there and asked for recommendations. The images in thisarticle are the result.
Conceptually I tried delving into concepts I had peggedin my head as ‘Causality Horror’ or ‘Reality Horror’, made up of bits andpieces I had gathered from various places.
From that I expanded outwards through ideas or conceptsthat seemed linked either emotionally or intellectually. I ended up with acurates egg of an essay that doesn’t work fully as a system of classificationor a means of exploration but is torn between the two, more of a ‘TV Tropes’article, but less capacious than those.
Still, maybe I can make it useful by considering howthese ideas might be used in ‘Eschat Jihad’?
Time and Causality Related
| | | Kjell Danie Francisco |
Cursed Prescience Inspired by Pauls funky journey in Dune and by the moretragic elements in Dunes racist child 40k and the questions aboutpe-determination, self-causing determination, inevitability, choice, the'golden path', the idea that people with prescience tend to be devoured bytheir own prescience, or that the human mind or human morality becomeirrelevant when considering deep prescience (which interlinks with ‘CursedUnderstanding of History’ below, which is after all a kind of more-accuratecursed prescience, just going backwards).
This is a very old story and in its fundamentals reachesback to Fairytales and the fact that, in a Fairytale, whenever a prediction ismade it often has some monkeys paw self-causing aspect and often the personreceiving the knowledge might have been better off without it. This is Peasantlogic, and I don’t mean an insult by that. Peasant logic might win out in thelong term over liberal cosmopolitan thought. Loss-averse suspicious Peasantsalways get screwed from dealing with higher powers and knowledge from thehigher realm usually has a venomous bite of some kind. There is a line ofdescent from the God Emperor of Mankind, through Paul Atradies, the Foundation,all the way back to some Slavic grandmother telling a tale about a fairy’sfortune.
Use; This most powerful and abstract conflictmight be the hardest to execute in a two-person wargame due to the veryunpredictable nature of events but a possibility might be something like‘Continuum’s ‘yet’ system, which is basically a dark Bill & Ted system inwhich you can ‘create’ knowledge and resources when you need them, because youtravelled in time to place them there, but you absolutely must then makeplacing those resources a core part of your mission going forwards, and shouldyou fail, be destroyed by Paradox. In wargame terms this would just meangetting free stuff in a match but then the placement of that stuff beinginescapable goals in further campaign play.
Cursed TIME LOOPS I’m thinking here more of the ‘sting in the tale’ timeloop stories rather than the Groundhog Day anhedonia with its search formeaning and escape.
Lots of this in Warhammer. In Peter Fehervari's Dark Coilstories characters are often sinking into or moving through non-causal spacesand inflecting or influencing their own or others backstories or futures and indoing so usually bringing about something rather terrible or malign. TheDolorosa Coil in ‘Fire Caste’ or wanderers in ‘The Reverie’ might both fit partof my definition of the ‘Red Lands’.
Use; The Dolerosa Coil is something like an AmazonRiver system; dense jungle, hundreds of shifting tributaries, impossible tomap. As some characters go deeper and deeper into the Coil, the general senseof loss and separation becomes something more; they become lost in depths whichshould not be there, encountering people, places and situations which are outof joint and sequence with each other.
What forms of geography could work well with such a‘passing into strangeness’? It seems to me that anything either very dense orvery nothing might work, the key point being to avoid easily navigablegeography, as well as the sense that ‘maps don’t work here’; the geographycannot be easily related to anything outside itself.
· A curling jungle/river system like the Coil.
· Dense karst or close creek and valley systems
· Dense forest
· Hypnagogic Desert, or salt plain
· Empty ocean
Things to be avoided are those which aid in navigationand in relating one place to another, so;
· No single roads or rivers making neat borders
· No tall points like mountains etc giving goodrelative directions
· No settlements where people can give youdirections
· No roads at all
· No neat coastline giving a clear boundarybetween sea and land
· No coherent ruins, only incoherent mixtures ofrun should be allowed, so the ruins of two cities destroyed at different times& in different places but now overlaid together
· No worked earth or farms
· No clear stars or regular celestial movements(the sky is red)
· The sun should never raise in the same placetwice, and days should have unclear lengths
· Fretted boundaries between ecologies, so no‘treeline’ or ‘desert’, swamp, delta and islands rather than clear coastline
John Frenches Ahriman stories have its own relentlesslyTime-looping protagonist at war with Fate and against himself; looping andmanipulating his own timeline to being about whatever he currently thinks isthe best option while also fiercely resisting his own past or future efforts tomanipulate his ‘current’ existence.
Use; This works quite well with a Skirmish gamefor in wargames there are always challenges when you have to fight one sideagainst the same side as that’s what your friend has. In Eschat Jihad it canjust be assumed that each of these warbands has the same actual people in them,just at different parts of their timeline, each trying to manipulate or escapethe other.
This could also work well for ‘returning’ dead units tothe board as they did, in fact, die, and the new versions are from earlier intheir timeline, wandering in to find their own dead bodies. (Or realising theyare doppelgangers).
Mushi-Shi did a soft and elegant version of this with aMushi that loops someone and feeds off their life, they don't quite realise butwith each loop they get worse and worse deja-vu and a formless anhedonia theycan't place, explain or escape. Though Mushi-Shi has a more neutral andhumanist resolution in which the main characters wife dies and in the end theysacrifice a non-looped future without them in order to experience their lifeover again, this time with a mixture of sadness and joy.
(Where are the really dark Time Travel stories? Are theredoom-laden Time Travel tales? There are many involving sad inevitability,personal destruction or acceptance of fate but few that are outright horror.)
| | | Rob Gonsalves |
Brain Don’t Work Science merely Alchemy/we are not capable of Science The opening parts of Three Body Problem where it seemslike the flood of physicist suicides is caused by a growing awareness thatscience is not 'true' and is merely an advanced form of alchemy that onlyapproximates truth (though in that book it turns out science is true afterall and the evil alien CIA are just conspiring to pretend it isn't).
Use; how on earth could this be represented in agame, let alone in a Paracosm? Is there a way to deliberately make emergentknowledge from the Paracosm deliberately near-causal? As in the ‘rules ofnature’, can be learned, and will work, 90% of the time, but 10% of the timethey will go slightly or very strange, just enough to indicate that you do not,and cannot, understand the actual truth, which will always be beyondyour reach?
To actually work in an imagined world perhaps someendlessly-recursive and maddening ‘yes-but’ system could be devised in which specificnatural laws work as discovered, until.. some particular status or conditionhas been achieved. Then they work like that in that condition… until some otherquite rare status takes place.. which would be an outlier so they work still differentlynow, but then some other condition happens…
The aim here would be to create the deliberate sense ofreason and nature endlessly and frustratingly slipping away from you, neverinto full incoherence, always with the illusion that you can understandif you just go a little further, but pursuit of this illusion itselfdrives you to madness.
We Cannot Understand the Other I feel this most from Roadside Picnic and Solaris, itfeels very eastern European in origin, though Ballard, Harrison and Vandermeerhave done versions with their own moral and emotional tonality. But at least inthe Slavic originals; all the power of human reason and organised effort is putinto understanding The Zone or The Alien, and we just can’t. We are inherentlyincapable of comprehending what we are experiencing. In ‘Roadside Picnic’ we canjust grub about for semi-comprehended fragments left behind as they wereuseless to their creators, in ‘Solaris’ all humanities efforts result in, for amoment, something like the equivalent of a lab rat managing to scream in painand the scientist withdrawing the probe in something that might be sympathy.
This interrelates somewhat with ‘Powerful Indifference’though in that case it may be that maybe we could understand the Other, but itdoesn’t matter because the Other just doesn’t care enough to try.
Use; well ‘Roadside Picnic’ and Dungeons andDragons have prepared us for the ludic instrumentalisation of this concept withthe idea of ‘useful but incomprehensible object’, a thing which might dosomething useful in some way, but clearly wasn’t intended for that, and alsodoes a lot of other weird shit as well.
Consciousness is a malign virus From damn who the fuck is that guy? The horror writer whothinks life is a conspiracy against the human race? I have never actually readhim. Anyway he thinks the experience of consciousness itself is torture and tolive is an act of horror. We can throw in Peter Watts Blindsight which playswith the idea that consciousness is a kind of malign virus, or fail state ordisease upon otherwise well-working brains.
Use; perhaps perfected unconscious warriors?Sleeping warriors? A warband leader their mind replaced with clickingclockwork, immune to stress and fear but producing strategies and tactics likean ‘A.I.’ card deck for something like Kingdom Death. (It should be obvious bynow that Eschat Jihad would be a relatively noncompetitive arty/hipster wargamefor people as interested in playing against themselves and the rules as eachother, and probably for campaign play for those who want to find out whathorrors and time loops happen to each Warband.)
| | | Kjell Daniel-Francisco |
Fake Realities – Immaterial Edition Reality can be Raped From Fehervari and from Grant Morrison, realityviolations; where characters and general situations remain in place but realityitself decays and changes, which we see but they can't quite sense. Meaningtheir world, their entire timeline, from beginning to end, gets progressivelyworse and they can emotionally percieve this but not reason their way out of it.
Use; this would be a frankly insane thing to putin a game of any kind let alone a wargame. How could you do it? It would meantriggering something and some kind of games master would come in and just makeeverything awful and worse, and change even the background of characters aswell as their current situation, and the characters and playing pieces wouldnot be aware of this, except they might have some emotional recognition,but the players would… Perhaps this would work as a kind of nuclearweapon, an unleash-the-demon element employed either deliberately oraccidentally? It might have to be a once-a-campaign thing.
Reality Decay We can maybe add to it the concept of 'Reality Decay',where what is normal and causal seems to blend imperceptibly into theother-natural. This is probably most clearly shown in horror movies in whichnearly all are based around a very-normal-maybe-sinister early bit and then thegradual introduction of an horrifically malevolent alteration to reality. WhatI'm trying to capture here isn't the 'there are hidden monsters' vibe, or even'there are dark other powers' vibe of Hellraiser, but a more nebulous, formless,near-madness in which the very engines of cause and effect seem to be broken.Sometimes this is actual madness, sometimes demons, sometimes the Matrixfugueing, sometimes conspiracy. I can't think off the top of my head of a storywhere the horror has no source and no shape but exists only.
Use? Man the dice are rolling backwards.. Maybesome semi-random alteration to the dice or other decision system that frets orinverts the results? Its hard to systematise the formless.
The Enemy are Editing the Text If we bring in Warhammers chaos gods then we can includemalevolent extra-causal entities, who are simultaneously present at all pointsof the timeline and can 'edit' the story - to some extent, to producetheir preferred forms of suffering.
Use; I cannot think of any sane way to includethis in a wargame unless perhaps allowing the players to mess with the metadataafter a campaign?
Fake Realities – Material Edition From the great well of schitzoid-adjacent horror, fromthe Shaver Mythos to the Matrix and similar films of its era, to Comics like'Saramis' where an entire city is a physically simulated stage set for one man,to the Truman Show, we have;
It’s a simulation It’s the Matrix, the 13th Floor or similar.
Curious thing about the Matrix; the majority of thepeople in it are real living embodied humans, when they ‘die in the game, theydie in real life’. So, how real do you want something to be in order for it tocount as ‘real’?
Its Dero mind control machines Evil forces under the earth using super-technology toinvisibly tilt the nature of society in their preferred manner. The ultimateuntraceable outside corruption. Add memory alteration to taste.
It’s a literal Stage Set In ‘Saramis’ an entire city is a literal mechanicalmoving backdrop, only a few places actually have interiors, most of the peopleare automata. You can get up on top of the stage sets and run along them.
Use; the deeply physical and embodied nature ofthe deception lends it a tantalising aspect to me.
The Truman Show is another physicalisedfiction-in-fiction story of this kind with the conspiracy-victim on an actualstage set.
The metaphor of theatre, and of theatre interweaving andoverlapping reality is something that might be usable in a game or wargame; cults and societies oftheatre-like ‘players’ (40ks Harlequins are already this), grand physicaldeceptions and ‘plays’ put on by deranged structures of power, actors and thoseplaying a role intermixing with those doing something ‘for real’. The structureand aesthetics of performance being counterpointed to ‘actual’ conflict. That might be something that the already exitingfive or so act structure of wargames, and their highly rules and ritual-basedarrangement could actually help to bring about. It’s already the case thatarmies ‘perform’ differently, Ork armies going for a turn-two Waaaagh! in anassumed five-turn game, Dark Eldar used to have a ‘power from pain’ rule thatmade them nastier the more losses they took, Necrons popping back up unless youkill the whole squad, etc etc. I feel like there should be somethingthere, though I can’t see it yet.
Its Robot Rape I’m thinking of ‘I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream’mainly, though there may be other forms I don’t know about. This story has some‘Fake Reality’ deception I think, but only as part of a larger goal ofspecifically inflicting as much suffering as possible for as long as possibleHere the hyper-powerful entity is usually non-human but still material andwithin the same causality.
Use; Is there much that AM does in ‘I have nomouth’ that a reasonably wealthy King or Sultan couldn’t have done to a smallselect group? Some of the more extreme memory alteration, bodymorphing andresurrections sure but I could easily see a gothic story with an AM-like Sultanor King or Pope having a sadistic super-labyrinth made and getting to watch aselect group of victims be endlessly tortured. There might be something thereagain, with the deep physicality of the idea.
I suppose the ‘Saw’ franchise is built on this kind ofthing.
Deep Time Horror
| | | Calum Diggle - Humanity Lost |
Cursed Understanding of History There is also the idea that the simple action of history,when perceived across too deep a stretch of time is essentially horrific to thehuman mind, becoming more so when one mind becomes inexorably aware of theconsequences of their own actions in a way that cannot be denied or avoided.
I’ve often considered it fortunate that people are bothquite ignorant and quite unimaginative when it comes to consideration ofHistory as very deep views of whatever the engines of history are tend to leaveme with the feeling of, at best, systems with an utter indifference, or ‘orthogonal’to human suffering or morality, yet from which we all inevitably descend. Inparticular, ‘demicide’ involving male extinction and mass female rape, whichforms the basis of modern European genetics, and how many more are there oflike kind, stretching deeper and deeper back into history, crime upon crime?
Use; a key element of this seems to be a ‘loss offaith’, in a manner similar to Lovecrafts guys finding out they have gypsyblood or the physicists of 3-Body finding out science isn’t real. It’s hard tohave the gradual or dawning horror of realisation if you have no strongpre-existing beliefs that sustain your world.
An advantage of a game/wargame like Eschat-Jihad is that allthe factions have really extremely strong beliefs and particular points of view,and they can all be wrong somehow and therefore go mad with the terribletruth of the Universe. Not only that but some are from the future and some fromthe past so they can each find out some terrible thing about either how theycame to be, or how they end up, and so go crazy about that. There must be a wayto gamify that somehow. Hopefully without just adding ‘faith points’.
If I was going to use a ‘certainty’, ‘faith’ mechanic, itwould have to be something other than basic morale, it should only be able tobe altered by scenario-specific events, should only go down, and steal a trickfrom the OSR and instead of just lower points add to each reduction a madness,behaviour or fetishtic action that leader or character has to perform incertain circumstances.
The Origins of Life and Humanity are malign From Lovecraft and I suppose from Alien: Covenant, theorigins of life being, worse than accidental, some kind of weapons test orlaboratory runoff or malign experiment. (Though I think in ‘Covenant’ theexperiment was not specifically malign but the general tone of the film made itseem like it was).
This hits a lot less hard in a post-Christian West wherevery few people think we are the product of divine creation so the loss of suchdoesn’t hurt much. Still there may be possibilities in the concepts of someonecoming back to ‘harvest’ humanity, of being deliberately ‘made wrong’, withlife on Earth being an accidental biproduct of an inherently flawed process andthen in the sci fi future we discover that we are from the only planet wherethat happened and in fact humanity, and all of earths life, has the equivalentof Downs Syndrome, and that this is inherent to the nature of our evolution; wecan’t escape it, and every other space borne life form is ‘correct’ or theproduct of some more perfect and fruitful system.
Use; ‘man is an inherently inferior species’;there must be some way for me to use this.
| | | Calum Diggle - Humanity Lost |
Biologically Instrumentalised Posthumanity in forms horrific and degradedto us. From Diggle, and perhaps Geiger, we have a decayed andhorrific Posthumanity re-made, (wait, who made 'Man after Man'?) intobestial or horrific instrumentalised forms. Diggle has whole bio-hive worldswith everything made from human-derived flesh. Geiger weaves the human formwith Biomechanoid horrors. (I guess the Matrix pod-people work for this too).
Use; these guys could definitely go in the game.An horrific posthumanity could be anything from fauna to flora to buildings toa sufaction, to riding beasts for other groups that don’t know they are ridingtheir own descendants/ancestors. They would go well with the ‘Hordes ofCausality’ faction.
| | | Claude-Joseph Vernet's - The Storm |
No Classification Powerful Indifference Clark-Ashton Smith did one little-regarded story whichwas basically a Roalnd Emmerich film where Aliens arrive to terraform the worldaccording to their liking, and do. Humanity fights back but fails and the worldis gradually consumed and transformed into a wonderous but nightmarishly toxicand dangerous environment. We can add that story about Aliens who take overearth & don't really notice us & humanity ends up living like spacerats in their giant machinery. There is a slight difference in inflection inthese stories in that they are less about the fundamental incapability ofhumanity to understand the aliens, since in many of these stories we don’t getthe chance, but simply that the Other is so powerful on contact that anythingwe can do is just irrelevant. We can’t communicate and they wouldn’t care evenif we could.
Use; there are mighty THINGS. You can barely seetheir feet. They are doing stuff specific to them.
| | | Aibek Begalin |
Hidden Sin/Degraded Blood/Syphilis horror I'm trying to avoid Lovecraft here because he is thedominant force but I suppose I shouldn't bother. Lovecraft had a kind of‘miscegenation’ horror where the Anglo finds out they have Fish ancestors, thisleading into madness and physical mutation, (though also a connection with thedark sacred truth of Reality).
This doesn’t play quite the same way with a modernaudience though I suppose later versions include the more-pure body-horror ofCronenberg where much of the terror comes from physical mutation.
Use; other than just mutating people I got nothingon this one. I guess mutations are always good, good for modelers and a kitbashingcommunity.
Jason Shiga The Jason Shigaverse. I have only read 'Meanwhile' amultiple choice comic book masquerading as a kids story with a background sodark its clear none of the bougie reviewers fully understood it, and 'Demon'about a battle between a person/being who discovers they have the ability tohop bodies on death (their mind devours and annihilates that of the closestperson), vs the World Government. In 'Meanwhile', depending on what choice theymake the Protagonist discovers that a previous version of themselves alreadyannihilated humanity except for them and uses a time machine to 'loop'themselves millions of times, 'filling in' every role and person again, tillthe world is full once more. So everyone in his world, has always been him. Isuppose this includes transhumanism, time loops and reality being amalign/beneficent stage set. Also; you already lost before you walked in thedoor and everything you are seeing is a bandaid over your nightmare failure.
| | | Samuel Arya |
What Have We Got? · Bill & Ted cursed time gifts system with aspiralling cost.
· A geography made to allow a ‘passing intostrangeness’ (I did a whole list of qualities above, not going to repeat ithere.)
· Possibly recursive of incoherently failing‘natural laws’ (which probably means core game mechanics).
· Arguably useful but fundamentally incoherent‘magic items’ which you never understand which probably can’t be understoodby human minds.
· Replace your leaders brain with a Kingdom DeathA.I. card system. Even you don’t know what you will do.
· Reality Rape extra-causal nuke option; makeeverything worse for everyone, and always have been worse.
· Theatre cults, theatre-type scenery andperformance-based faction rules.
· Evil Magic Sultan sadism labyrinths along with Iguess the guy from ‘Saw’. Powerful sadists arranging impossible moral andpersonal tests could be a thing.
· Everyone can lose their faith orcertainty and go more and more crazy.
· ‘Man is the Least of All things.’
· Horrific Poshumanity; they’re the trees, they’rethe hills! They’re the buildings! They’re the ground. They also turn upin some factions. Also they are also you from the future or past!
· There are mighty THINGS in the distance, theocean, the earth, the sky.
· People get mutated and altered a lot.
· Jason Shiga is somehow involved.
| | | Piotr Ruszkowski |