In my childhood home, ot drinking when others said “cheers” with glasses held high was to draw misfortune.
To say something was to attract it, so swear words like the Danish kraft-edeme—literally “cancer-eat-me”—were strictly forbidden. To dispel the attraction, one had to knock three times under the table with foucssed intent on pulling the word back.
The inner thought police set up shop pretty damn quickly inside my skullcase as a kid.
But I must stress: I had a wonderful childhood, and I’ve grown out of those habits.
There is a silver lining to having the vacated premises of the superstition gendarmerie up in my neural cortex:
I have a very good feeling for how our little pattern-making impulses can be leveraged to create worlds and steer vision.
That’s the premise of this maybe-series. No promises.
Let's go generate some neuroses.
This is the kind of worldbuilding invokeable by both players and GMs.
When invoked in a situation, it should change the situation if not already fitting the number.
This can also help players decide which roads to take, which panel to press, whatever—based on numerology.
The plan here is to subvert my own ideology of materiality first. Because superstitions are anything but that. They are the beautiful pattern-hallucinations of the chaos-and-entropy averse.
Enough rambling.
I originally made this for Corpse//Work, but really, it’s usable anywhere. I just love-love-love the idea that superstition and thought control have different vectors than thought-technology in cyberpunk worlds... And that the thought control is also something all around the table are partaking in.
The world is in the eye of the beholder. Alphons Mucha (detail)
So, without further ado, let’s get into the concrete play-aid mindspace of cogito-hazardous worldbuilding. Situation-snapping? Playworld redirection?
It's really just player-invokable Cottonmouth Law, really... Sorta the quote below, but not entirely in human language
Cottonmouth to say that the rules of your game are the natural laws of the game's fiction. and to that end it aims to turn rules into simple, streamlined natural language sentences that can be broadly and qualitatively, rather than quantitatively, mastered and applied. Cottonmouth is about the joy of system mastery, except that rather than mastering an abstraction of the game world, you're learning to master the game world itself.
Numerology
Anyone may “read the count” by pointing at a visible number (forks, buttons, pillars, steps, hatch marks, neon digits). This calls it close. (So nobody has to keep this in mind all the damn time. But believe me, you will come to keep it in mind all the time. That’s how superstitions infect.)
Incarnate something related to this place using the table below. All of the columns are vectors.
If an action clearly incarnates something related to the number—or just because—the Psychopomp may further attune the space or situation to that number (pick one, pick many, pick all, whenever it fits the world—because fuck choice trees):
-
Reveal one hidden element that fits the number and its want, or
-
Swap one existing Risk or issue for another that fits the number, or
-
If you act against the number’s want, the Psychopomp adds a fitting Risk.
The Count (d12 or what you see)
And the number is 9. I don't know the artist.
Mnemonics to make this more like real superstition
But I can’t remember! — you say. (A strawman, sorry honey. You are made of straw now. Lean into it for a sec.)
Method of loci mnemonics have worked for me.
Imagine a place you hold dear, with turns and spaces within it (your house, a stretch of beach, your bus ride). For every step, add detail, color from your life.
Here’s an example of how I hold the mnemonic in my head:
Do a division of 3 + an odd one.
So: three words in the bus ride, then one on the threshold, then three on the way to the beach and a fourth as you fall, and then three more on the beach and the last as you dive into the waves.
That helps my mind collect the results. It also helps compartmentalize the themes (which is good for 1d4 results when creating dice results: three related ones and one fucked-up inversion is better than 100 milquetoast ones... And it's literally more memorable)
Imagine this is for the two first numbers. I've painted them with my own imagination. You need yours. Can't reuse. Know thyself.
It is a dark, dreary day. The old inherited wall-clock in my home has struck ZERO—and I am feeling NUMB because the room is SILENT save the crisp scratch of my little green dinosaur ERASER before I knock it OUT OF SIGHT. I fall through the VANISHING FLOOR.
I erupt from the GRAVE in my hometown graveyard, before dropping again, because a SNIPER is sitting on the SINGULAR CHURCH, standing atop it like a LINE, like a ONE.
You get the point.
Now you can install tables of bullshit in your skullcase. It’s better than raw superstition, in my opinion.
Contained, and it lets you spit fire.
Now you can install tables of bullshit in your skullcase. It's better than superstitions in my opinion.
Contained, and it allows you to spit fire.
Comments
Post a Comment