Every Angel is Terrifying

Every Angel is Terrifying: The Secret and True Origin of the Slayer and Watchers

Note: This is a repost of something I did on the Eden Buffy boards a while back.  I have been working on collecting all my notes from my three-season run of "Willow & Tara: The Series" for the Buffy/Angel/Ghost of Albion RPG and thought I might share this.  I am not a fan of Buffy anymore for a number of reasons, but I do like this write-up.

I was never satisfied with the version of the Watcher's and Slayer's origins given in the show. Plus the demon connection and overt rape metaphor never sat well with me. So I decided it must be part of a propaganda agenda of the demons. Here then, is the true history of the Slayer and the Watchers. This version also makes Buffy more compatible with WitchCraft and Armageddon. It also allows multiple Slayers (or not) without worrying about what happened in the show.  It also addresses (a little) a shortcomings of the show; where are all the angels?

Something to bide me over till I can get something new up.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
- Rainer Maria Rilke*

The Council of Watchers of today bares little resemblance to powerful organization it once was, most due to machinations of the Great Beast Belial, but that is getting to the middle of the story first, let’s start at the beginning, which is in this case The Beginning.

Everyone knows of the War in Heaven. Lucifer rebels and the Angels are cast out. There was also a second war, and the Watchers and Slayers start here.

After Lucifer fell Man and Woman were created. Adam and Lilith. Lilith, either by her own designs or that of Lucifer also rebels and goes out to spawn demons with the Djinn. Adam gets a new helpmate, Eve, and they are fruitful and multiply. Seeing the Sons of Adam and the Daughters of Eve populating the Earth God sends Angels down to protect them and watch over them. These Angels are known as the Grigori, or “the Watchers”, and their leaders are Azazel and Samyaza. The Watchers though looked upon the Daughters of Eve and lusted after them. They taught them the secrets of divination, of the moon and of witchcraft. They also took them to their beds and begat upon them progeny known as the Nephilim. They were giants of their age, and most are monstrosities; Goliath may have been one of their number. The Nephilim war with both the demons and with other humans. Humans war with the demons and Nephilim. Demons kill everything in their path. All the while, Lucifer and his fallen angels laugh.

The actions of the Angels angers God who casts them into Abyss and sends a flood to destroy the wickedness of mankind. But before this happens the Watcher Shamsiel (in some versions it is Samyaza) goes to the one human woman who was never corrupted by Original Sin, the one who never ate from the Tree of Knowledge, Lilith. Shamsiel asked Lilith for one thing, an offspring. Someone that can fight the demons and the Nephilim while protecting the humans. Lilith laughed, but consented, after all she was giving birth to countless demons, what was one more. She gave birth though not to a monstrous son, but a perfect daughter. She named her Naamah and sent her to live with Shamsiel. Shamsiel in turn gave her to the human woman he had sleeping with and her husband. He instructed them to take on his role as Watcher, for this child would be the slayer of demons and the other spawn of darkness. Shamsiel went to his final battle never to return.

Naamah, daughter of Lilith, protector of Malkuth, grew strong, though she was never loved by her foster parents. They taught her the same lessons the Watchers had taught them, combat, the secrets of the occult, the arts of war and witchcraft. While the demons recognized her as kin she hung on to her angelic heritage. She fought them and the Watchers stood by her in the fight. Some even say that she stowed away on Noah’s Ark, knowing that that evil would find a way to survive. Some texts even still list her as Noah’s wife or sometimes his daughter. Even later when she died, she died fighting. One of her many daughters took up the fight and she too became known as the Slayer. In those days when the demons ran free over the Earth there were many Slayers and many Watchers. The original Grigori had spanned the Earth, and so had their progeny. It seemed that the battle was going well for humanity. Till Lucifer and his left-hand devil Belial took an interest in the Slayer. They had already begun a propaganda war against her. She was the spawn of demons they said, she was the patroness of whores. Indeed, the powers of the Slayer were related to her gender and even to her sexual maturity, so some of the ignorant believed this and forced the Slayer out. Some even began to feel she brought trouble with her. The pogrom against the Slayer had begun.

Even the Watchers, having spanned globe and taking up their cause with the Pagan faiths, were not immune. Here they meshed their beliefs with their own. They believed that they and their books were what were really holding back the darkness. They created their world headquarters on the mystical islands and listed in their charter the charge given to them by God, rendered in the local tongue.

Óir thug sé ordú da aingil i do thaobh:
tú a chosaint i do shlite go léir:

Iompróidh siad thú lena lámha sula mbuailfí
do chos in aghaidh chloiche.

Satlóidh tú ar an leon is ar an nathair:
gheobhaidh tú de chosa sa leon óg is a dragan.

That was not even the start for Belial and the Watchers. The Great Deceiver Belial tricked Lilith into revealing her offspring’s true nature. Knowing this Belial then worked on the Watchers. “Why should she be in charge?” he whispered in their ears. “Why would men of good faith follow the dictates of a demon-spawned female child?” It took him years, but soon he broke down their resolve, their myths and soon under the guise of “the good for all” he had them change their own histories. Gone was the story of Naamah and her sisters. Gone was the relationship between Watcher and Slayer as one of equals. And most tragic, gone was the link between the Slayer and the Divine. Instead only the demonic remained and Slayer but a tool, oft times a disposable one.

But Lilith had her own revenge. If they were to treat her blood so poorly, then she called back her own power only allowing one girl per generation to be born. She infused her other children, the Vampires, with desire to find this girl and hunt her down. Like brother and sister they were then, equal in their strength and parallel in their purpose. Soon the Slayer only became know as a killer of vampires and the Watchers, feeding on their own lies, degraded and rotted from within.

Thus it remained till the dawn of the 3rd Millennium.

RPG Net Discussions; Pirates and Witches

So there are two threads I am currently actively following on RPG.Net.


Normally I don’t air the dirty laundry on other sites, but the issues of these two discussions need a wider audience.

The first is something that I think more people need to know about.

Outlaw Press, known for selling Tunnels and Trolls products, has been stealing art and publishing material they do not own.

It is worth reading for a few reasons. One, to know if anything you have done might be there (though I think all the artists have been identified). Two, as a cautionary tale, if you steal someone else's work you will get caught.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=483885 but also discussed in my T&T centric places, http://trollbridge.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1163

The other is a discussion on Princess Lucinda Nightbane from Witch Girls Adventures.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=484151

That one has to be read to be believed. But I do find it a tad hypocritical that people playing games about their characters killing things and taking their stuff can get so bent out of shape when it is a little girl doing the exact same things.

Eldritch Witchery, Back to Basics

I am returning to work on Eldritch Witchery, my guide to witches and warlocks for the Spellcraft & Swordplay RPG. The idea is simple really; make a witch class for the game. But I want to do this class justice and not just do a retread of the material I have written for other games.


So I am going back to school.

I have been rereading old Dragon and White Dwarf magazines from the 70s to the early 80s to get a proper feel for the game as it was then. What were people talking about and doing in their games. I have also been going over my basic assumptions. Why is a witch needed if we already have Clerics and Wizards? What niche does a witch fill in a Sword and Sorcerery game? For this I am indebted to Jason Vey who has been giving me a crash course in all things Pulp related. Conan (whom I never really read and now understand I know next to nothing about), the works of Robert Howard and how they relate to Lovecraft. Plus I have been thinking a lot about my own influences for D&D. Clark Ashton Smith is a big one for me. I have been rereading all my old D&D books and notes. My first witch character was made in October of 1986, I wrote my first set of rules (20 pages) around her.

What has this done for me?

Well I have a pretty good idea what I want to do and how I want to do it and it is different than say my d20 version of the witch, or even the magic I wrote about in Ghosts of Albion. What does a witch do in the world of Spellcraft & Swordplay. Well the witch is more connected to the primal nature of magic. I hesitate to say “beyond good and evil” but maybe before good and evil. She is like nature. I also want to incorporate a lot of what is old folklore and fairy tales about witches. So these are defiantly more Baba Yaga than Sabrina.

What do Witches Do?

In any game you need to figure out where a character’s niche will be. What is it that the character will do, what can she do and what will she bring to the adventuring party. Where does she fit in this world organically. I also want keep in mind the classical or stereotypical powers of the witch; casting spells, making potions, the evil eye, curses, charms, turning people into animals, flying on brooms, consulting with familiar spirits. The witch then for me needs to provide that air of mystery in a world already full of magic and magical-using characters. She needs to have something special about her, I want the other characters in the group to say, “We need her, she is a witch!”

Hopefully players will say the same thing.

Next time, more on the occult powers of the witch class.

Dracula, use or not?

So, I have an adventure idea that is just jelling and it might be my next Gen Con adventure.

But here is my question to you all.

Is Dracula too overused to be a credible threat anymore?

I want to use him in a Ghosts of Albion game, set in Transylvania around 1850 or so. So sometime before he meets up with Harker and the events of "Dracula".

It could be that this encounter is what has prompted his move to England.

Looking for input.

Thanks!

Elizabeth Bathory, Unisystem

Here is my write-up for Bathory for C.J. Carella's WitchCraft RPG. This version focuses more on her sadistic need to cause pain (to release Essence) than some other versions.

I am pretty pleased with this version of her and it helped shape my Mutants and Masterminds and Witch Girls Adventures versions.
She is not a physical powerhouse, but she more than makes up for it with her metaphysics and she is no slouch. Typically she will have minions to help her out in more physical realm and she will have one or two special humans she has enthralled to help her out during the day.

Elizabeth Bathory

Unisystem (Classic)
Character type: Vampyre

Strength: 5
Dexterity: 6
Constitution: 6
Intelligence: 4
Perception: 5
Willpower: 5

Life Points: 63
Endurance Points: 0
Speed: 24
Essence Pool: 114

Qualities
Vampyre 1 15
- Sades Curse
- Bloodthirst
Age 4
Attractiveness 4
Charisma 2
Hard to Kill 3
Increased Essence Pool 7
Nerves of Steel 1
Resources 5

Drawbacks
Covetous - Lecherous 2 (despite lurid tales, Erzsbet is not a lesbian, though she does gain sexual satisfaction from torture).
Cruel 3
Mental Problems, Sadism 3
Mental Problems, Sanguinephilia 3
Obsession 3 (stay young and beautiful)

Skills
Acting 5
Beautician 1
Dancing (Ballet) 2
Fine Arts (Painting) 5
Play Instrument (Piano/Keyboards) 1
Acrobatics 2
Dodge 4
Hand Weapon (Knife) 2
Unconventional Medicine (Herbal Medicine) 1
Craft (Weaver) 5
Humanities (Art History) 3
(History) 5
(Philosophy) 3
(Christian Theology) 4
Instruction 3
Myth and Legend (Slav) 4
Occult Knowledge 7
Rituals (Vampyre) 4
(Voodoo) 2
Sciences (Biology) 1
Writing (Creative) 2
Intimidation 3
Notice 5
Seduction 7
Smooth Talking 3
Riding (Horses) 5

Metaphysics
Greater Shifting 5
Manipulate Emotions 2
Bloodthirst 1
Sade's Curse 1

Alternate Forms
Raven
Strength: 2 Dexterity: 7 Constitution: 3
Intelligence: 4 Perception: 5 Willpower: 5
Life Points: 63
Endurance Points: 0
Speed: 20
Essence Pool: 129

WolfStrength: 4 Dexterity: 5 Constitution: 6
Intelligence: 4 Perception: 5 Willpower: 5
Life Points: 63
Endurance Points: 0
Speed: 22
Essence Pool: 129
Natural Attacks: Bite:1D6xStrength (12) Slashing
 

The Old School Renaissance Will Eat Itself

I love all the old school renaissance / retro-clone games out there. They are great fun to play AND are very clever adaptations of the very flexible OGL. There are some neat game-design choices too, such as Spellcraft & Swordplay's alternate evolution of OD&D or Basic Fantasy's middle ground between Basic D&D and Advanced D&D. I love these games.

It's the people I am not overly fond of.

Now to be fair, it isn't everyone, or even a majority, but rather a very, very small but very, very vocal minority that seems to have this "it's my way or the highway" mentality. Or that somehow the design changes of *D&D were done not to improve gameplay but rather some nefarious plot to screw Gygax, Arneson, or whomever or screw the players out of more money, or insert crazy conspiracy here. But there have been a few dust-ups of late on what the OSR "Really" is or what "playing D&D is really about". As a gamer and a designer I pay attention to these things, they are the pulse of what the customer likes. It is the closest thing I have to market research, but as a fan they really irritate me.

I LIKE the old school games. I liked them then and I like them now, both the originals and the clones. I like the divergent evolutions, the what-ifs and the thought experiments that we get in game design from the OSR.

I DO play them out of nostalgia. Don't know why "nostalgia" became such a bad word in the OSR, but I play these games because I enjoyed them when I was 10.

I DO play new games. I love D&D 4e. And to me it plays great, I have a wonderful "D&D experience" (what ever the fuck that is supposed to be) with it. I like minis, they make my game fun. And I used them back in the 80's too. So to me, they ARE old school.

I like to write for both. Every game I work on serves a different need, different function for me. If I am not going to quantify which one is "better" to me as the creator, then why should I expect the player to do so?

Lots of people would love to play these old games too. Why? Because they were fun, and still are. But trying to get a gamer to play by telling him or her that they should play this way or that way and the game they are playing now is for idiots isn't going to win you any fans. And if you are publishing then fans > customers, so the less you have one, the less you have of the others and customers mean sales.

I am not naming names at all, cause that is tacky (but man are there plenty of good examples), but we have some people in this movement that will be the death of this movement due to their own inflexible thinking. Which is odd, cause one of the reasons they claim to like the OSR was because the rules are more flexible. Actually it's not that odd at all come to think of it.

I just don't follow the logic of "the old-school/70's games were fun, therefore the newer games are crap".

It doesn't help that many of the OSR member are all up in arms about something that doesn't even exist: people playing new games calling their style crap. News Flash: The vast majority of gamers out there are not even aware of the OSR, and those that do I'd say the vast majority of them do not have an opinion.

Plus Edition Wars are the lowest form of Nerdrage. Better off arguing who would win in a fight, ninjas or Jedi.

Ærypt and Zakhara

Following up on my previous post on Desert Elves & Orcs, I thought I might detail the region they live in some more.

Ærypt is a pastiche of Arypt, Erypt, and Egypt with Gygax's Necropolis and Ravenloft's Har'Akir thrown in.

 
So Zakhara was detailed in the Al-Qadim boxed set and I am going to use that as much as possible. Ærypt is different. I mentioned that I want to use Gygax's Necropolis product as a basis. "Necropolis" is actually two products. The first was Gary's "The Necropolis - And the Land of Egypt" for the Mythus RPG. The second was "Gary Gygax's Necropolis" for d20. Both offer me something that my Ærypt needs; a springboard.

What if we took 3^rd or 4^th Dynasty Egypt, and then made it very evil and full of undead? We get Ærypt. I will also borrow from my other favorite setting, Ravenloft, and use the background for Har'Akir and its Darklord Anhktepot combined with the Masque of the Red Death background on Egypt and Imhotep. I never liked MotRD's treatment of Imhotep, but Anhktepot is fair game! I have some ideas here, but I also have an issue now. My Ærypt is sun-baked deserts and Zakhara is a land of sands, dunes, and trade routes by camels and oasis's. Looking at the Mystara Map, Arypt is a land of some savannas, scrub land, and jungles! That won't do at all.

So I was comparing these two maps. One is of Arypt of Mystara and the other is Erypt of Oerth. The shapes are similar and fit well with the "Lower Ærypt" on my map. What can account for the changes? Simple. Dark Sun. Or at least the ideas from Dark Sun. Combine those, knowing that my starting point is lush Pre-Dynastic Egypt and my ending is the sun, baked, undead infested lands like Har'Akir or Necropolis, I have my history. Plus the nice thing is I am using the Mystara timeline, but about 640 in the future.
Here we go:

Long Ago* the lands known as Ærypt and Zakhara were once a fertile plain. The inhabitants were few, but they made peaceful lives. To the far west Jungle Gnomes and Jungle Elves lived. Along the Eastern Coast lived tribes of Catmen, known as Rakastas. Till one day a great hole opened in the sky and down came gods (Humans really) they brought with them their slaves (orcs) and began to settle. While the peace of the land was broken, there was no outright warfare. The Gnomes went farther west to avoid contact, but elves were fascinated by the new gods. The Rakasta found much in common with these humans and were soon integrated into their society. Yet as the years grew on it was obvious that these gods were not the benevolent kind. To erect their giant pyramids they soon took elves as slaves as well, with the Rakasta as their cruel task masters. For years untold the elves suffered under the yoke of the humans and watch as their forests were plundered and cut down to build more and more temples, all for the glory of the Sorcerer Kings. But even this was not enough.

The latest Sorcerer King, Anhktepot craved more and more power. Eventually he came upon a ritual that would enable him to take magic from the very Earth herself. He drained the land to fuel his own urge for power. The there was a price. The land around him died and became a desert and he became a withered undead thing. The growth of this desert was horrifically fast. Within 100 years the lush green land was nothing but sands. Having enough of this the tribes of Elves and Orcs banded together and overthrew the Sorcerer King. Anhktepot was defeated and buried alive deep in his own pyramid in the dead city of Har'Akir.

The elves. Homeless began to travel the deserts in search for a new life, but unwilling to leave the lands of their birth.

Let the place simmer for 500 years and voilà. Instant new land with history and reasons to adventure. All that treasure that the locals won't touch. Danger, mystery, everything we game for.


Enjoy your Fourth of July weekend!

Mystoerth: Hyborea / Hyperborea

One of the common links on my Mystoerth world is Hyborea / Hyperborea. Both seem to be about the same thing, that is a pastiche of "the cold lands to the north". Given the roots of D&D in pulp fantasy it seems odd not to have one. With my world the question then is not so much of why to have it, but where to put it?

Mystara's Hyborea is on the continent of Brun far to the north in what would be the Arctic Circle, a rough analogy to Earth would Alaska. Oerth's Hyperborea is also firmly in the Arctic circle, some 30 degree south of the north pole, west of the Dramidj Ocean, north of the Sea of Hyerpborea. Not really an overlap, but close enough for me. On the Mystoerth Map, what would have been Oerth's Hyperborea is now the Empire of Alphatia and the Island of Dawn. So my solution is to go with the Mystara placement of it. Works and helps me fill in that area some.

Now what to do with it? Ah, that is the reason for the post.

Over at Jason Vey's The Wasted Land Blog he has been working on his Hyperborea. Now I respect Jason's opinion when it comes to Old School, anything remotely Conan or Howard related, so if he has something to say about it I listen. Plus he has really cool ideas. I'll import the White Orcs from Mystara to use in place of his orcs. I like the idea of Hyborean Halflings/ Hobbits. This might even help me solve the "problem" of hobbits vs. Halflings and why both hemispheres of my world are populated with the same sorts of creatures. The hobbits of my western world (Mystara) are the Tolkienesque hobbits that like to sit around, be fat and not really adventure. Hyborean hobbits are hardier and more prone to pick up a weapon. The Halflings of the eastern world (Oerth) are more adventure prone and are more like the Halflings of 3e/4e.

Adding Hyborea gives me license to add all sorts of other weirdness. And that is always good.

 

Generation HEX: Design Blog #2.5

So Generation HEX. Nice title huh? I like it.

I had this idea, and stop me if you have heard this one before, a school for children to learn magic. Sure, it has been done, a lot. Not just in games, but books (I seem to recall some books like this), TV shows (Charmed dealt with this for a bit) and other media. So why should I do it.

Simple. I wanted too.

I like the idea of a group of kids getting together and saving the world from destruction while dealing with the normal issues of growing up, school, social lives (or lack thereof) and interaction. To me it seems like a genre rich in potential and rich in storytelling. Part of my education was to go beyond the aforementioned books and even avoid really cool products like Green Ronin's "Hero High" which would cover some of the same ground. For this I went back to source. If you want to read the Bible and really get a feel for it, you read it in Latin or Greek. Freud or Jung, go back to the original German. For magical high schools, you got back to Magna and Anime. Yup, I took a crash course in Sailor Moon! I watched anime, in particular Shôjo anime, for ideas. I was surprised to see how close it all was to the kind of game I wanted to do.

I originally set it all up in a document was going to do an 80k word draft and talk to Guardians of Order about it. They (He really) seemed interested and then GoO disappeared. That tale is best told elsewhere by others. But Now I have all these ideas and all of these things I have written that need a new home and a new system. I also thought about using Unisystem (same as Buffy and Ghosts of Albion) and it would fit great, maybe too great. I can kinda do this game with Ghosts now and not really alter much and be too tempted not to alter the rest where it would be needed. Plus Unisystem is licensed and I don't have that sort of cash to do this on my own. I have been looking long and hard at True20 and really like what I see.

Why High School?

Simple, unlike college, or getting married, or having kids, High School is the last true universal everyone has and everyone shares. Getting on Facebook and seeing some old high school friends has got me thinking about these things again. It's odd really. I have contacted and been contacted by more High School friends than I have college friends. The time line is not that different. If you add Junior High to one and Grad School to the other, the span of time is about the same, and generally speaking I liked college life much more. But why is it that the High School friendship endure and more importantly whatever that thing is how do I capture it and emulate properly in my magical high school game?

I have some High School friends here. What do you all say?