kontextmaschine:

Police Navidad.

So in response to some of my recent posts, people have pointed me towards two really good stories that I want to share onwards.

First, in response to my musing on Santa Claus/Batman as the modern good/bad dual gods, pureamericanism pointed me to Nackles: A Christmas Story, which is a 1964 piece specifically about Santa Claus and a dark counterpart as modern gods, it’s always a mixed bag of glee and frustration to see someone’s already taken up your brilliant idea years before you were born.

Second, in response to my Scientology backgrounder, bloodandhedonism pointed me to The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga, an alternate history tale of Ayn Rand being inspired by L. Ron Hubbard to found a country in the Congo as Belgian rule collapses. If you don’t know much about Rand or the decolonization of Africa don’t worry, it’s written well enough that you’ll pick up most of what you need, and it was written piece by piece on a message board with inline commentary from the author and readers that’ll fill in the rest, in a manner that reminds me of the old Shadowrun sourcebooks.

Man, the Shadowrun sourcebooks were absolutely great. The system itself was kind of a mess - they used tons of D6s for everything, on I think the business principle that before the rise of gaming-specific stores in the ‘90s obscure dice would be hard for entry-level players to find but books could be gotten from bookstores and D6s from board games or anywhere. This made rolling anything a mess, and also contributed to a system where there was very little range separating a miss and a catastrophic hit. Also between decking, vehicle rigging, and astral plane stuff you too often got into a situation in which only one character could meaningfully participate.

But the sourcebooks! They were written as BBS posts interspersed with comments from a recurring gang of regulars, and the worldbuilding was great. Some of the best books didn’t even add any game mechanics but just explored the dynamics of the world - Corporate Shadowfiles was an incredibly readable introduction to corporate finance, and Dunkelzahn’s Will, which was, well, a will and testament that was basically a long list of adventure hooks, rivals it as my favorite RPG book ever.

I love stuff like that. I think the L5R RPG - also a great world, and with a better system, open-ended D10, skill/attribute::roll/keep, though I don’t know if they ever got dueling to work in a way that made sense - did some good stuff like that too. The Merchant’s Guide to Rokugan, which turned out to be an unnanounced book about the conspiratorial Kolat, for one, though that was in the period after the Clan War when the worldbuilding was sort of stumbling around in the dark tripping over its own feet for a few years.

Police Navidad.

kontextmaschine:

Specifically, how much weight to give it when you hear that some ancient culture celebrated this ceremony, or venerated this figure, or whatnot.

Like, I could say “Americans venerate a divine figure named Jesus Christ associated with life and rebirth”, and that would be correct. Even if we’re not…

Specifically, how much weight to give it when you hear that some ancient culture celebrated this ceremony, or venerated this figure, or whatnot.

Like, I could say “Americans venerate a divine figure named Jesus Christ associated with life and rebirth”, and that would be correct. Even if we’re not all believing Christians, he’s a big part of the culture, most of us could give a fair sketch of his legend, and he plays a big role in two major seasonal festivals.

But I could also say “Americans personify the yearly cycle as a man, growing from infancy to senility as the seasons passed”. And I mean, recognizing what the old man and baby with the sash represent in early January cartoons is a minor part of cultural literacy, but it feels wrong to give it such weight.

And in between we have, say, Santa Claus. Whose current mythology is almost entirely developed in America, with storytellers developing new takes and refinements on it almost every year. Some share of the population is supposed to believe in him, but some share is supposed to not. So where does he fit in?

I’ve long believed that Santa Claus is in fact the appropriate modern American understanding of the Judeo-Christian God, actually.

God in the time of desert nomadism created food and water out of nothing and rearranged inconvenient geography to allow for straight-line travels; God in the time of early settlement influenced victory in battle and enforced tribal distinctions; God in the age where pastoral societies coalesced into Mediterranean empire was a fisherman/shepherd who united the tribes; God in the time of kings and a bureaucratic churchly world-government was at the head of an angelic hierarchy and people who did his work on earth would be rewarded with facetime with which to serve as an intercessional patron for their clients.

So of course God in the time of democratic industrial capitalism is a kindly factory-owner who rewards socially approved behavior with material goods.