the Shaking Empress: the demon-queen who invented morality

(This is a Nietzschean myth about the invention of morality; I also have a Kantian one. Nothing says they can't both be true, even in the same setting.) 

stage 0: egoist eden

Once upon a time there was no morality. All gods were demons and all men were knaves.

The world wasn't a guignol of horror: people loved their friends and families, they feared revenge. Far-sighted princes would pass laws saying we'll kill you if you kill someone else, and sometimes the guy who backstabbed his way into power after that would keep the law around (while carving an exception for themselves.) Neighbors often cooperated, both because it's more pleasant and less dangerous than the alternative. The rich might feed the poor, the same as you might feed some ducks, and the poor might feed the rich, same as you might feed a tiger. People told the truth often enough - to maintain a reputation, to economize on memory - that there was some evidential value to listening to them, under most circumstances.

But compared to today, life was nastier, more brutal, and shorter.

stage 1: masochist mystery cult

Back in those days, no more people were motivated by pure nastiness than they are today. But among those who were was the Shaking Empress. Like other petty abusers, she liked to hurt other beings to feel powerful. Like some of them, she was already plenty powerful herself (a demon-queen, in fact.) 

Some such abusers offer a false pretense of love. Some offer power. The Shaking Empress offered - offers - nothing. She feels best when creatures grovel before her knowing they get nothing, zilch, nada in return. The Shaking Empress cannot hurt you if you do not pledge yourself to her, and if you do, all she gives you is hurt. Any deviation from making yourself as meek and pitiful as possible will result in you being tortured in your dreams, in your afterlife, and maybe even in your waking life.

If you hold yourself with pride and say you are better than the meekest worm - if you assert your power over the meanest churl - she'll hunt you down. Not because she disapproves of being prideful or cruel, but because she believes the supreme honor of these excellent things ought be reserved to herself.

None but a masochist would accept this offer. None but masochists did. At first.

stage 2: scale-dependent group selection effects

Places dominated by the cult of the Shaking Empress are not great. People are constantly getting attacked or forced to hurt themselves by the Empress themselves. There's a lot of pressure to engage in ugly self-criticism sessions. But her devoted are not likely to leave you for dead on the highway. Until they invent heroism (an advanced theological doctrine which the Shaking Goddess let out to defend her cult in a moment of weakness and has regretted ever since) they are easy to conquer and a positive delight to rule. Places with a bad case of the Shaking Goddess can, under some circumstances, become an enviable place to join, or to emulate.

stage 3: prison planet

I emphasized at the beginning that, before the Shaking Empress began her reign, people were not all nasty. But I emphasize this for a simple reason: to not pledge your soul to the Empress now is to mark yourself out as one who longs for nastiness. To be, yourself, proud and cruel, rather than offering those on up to the terrible demon-queen.

Even those who, in their hearts, reject her dominion, who do not sell themselves over to her - feign sleepless nights of being attacked, just so their neighbors know they are vulnerable. Some might feign being so meek that the Empress spares them - but few would believe that. Better to say you were under assault for lesser crimes, that no one could think you capable of greater ones. 

The Shaking Empress could not be more pleased. When whole societies worship her, they punish each other for not being meek enough. When societies stray from her, they punish each other by not being meek enough - driving themselves back into her cruel, clutching arms. From the depths of her pride and greed, she crows, in a few short aeons she will be the only enlightened, the only evil, being left.

Antinomian alignment

Here are some facts about the world (i.e., the world I just made up.) They aren't pleasant, but too bad.

First, you should know that alignment objectively exists; people are either Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic - or if you want to be pretentious about it, Nomian, Anomian, and Counternomian. They are so from birth and this cannot change except for your Helm of Alignment Change and so on; notably, behavior cannot in any way affect alignment. 

Secondly, the basic personality and motivational structure of people is completely orthogonal to alignment: people in each have your normal spread of selflessness, selfishness, Dunbar's number dynamics, that kind of thing. 

Thirdly, if you were born with a Lawful soul (about 5-20% of the population), you'll go to heaven if you acted benevolently in life and hell if you acted malevolently in life, and you Know this, but not where the threshold is. If you were born with a Chaotic soul (about 1-5% of the population),  you Know just the opposite - that some indeterminate about of badness will damn you up to heaven and goodness will bless you straight to hell. If you're Neutral you don't Know shit.

a fool sees not the same tree

If you're Lawful or Chaotic, you can speak an alignment language. Alignment languages contain concepts that cannot be grasped in other languages, but speaking them doesn't feel any different from speaking your other languages. 

Moreover, hearing an alignment language, if you speak it, just sounds normal. If you don't speak an alignment language, it tends to sound like vague mystical patter, or people describing ineffable mystic concepts, which in fact they are - ineffable to you, anyway; they can be perfectly well effed by native speakers.

(What are these concepts? Unfortunately, I have a Neutral soul and can't tell you. But there are probably some spells and such you need them to grok.)

nor seeks to know / the law by which it prospers so

Lawful and Chaotic characters Know about their afterlife fates and Know their languages; they don't Know that alignment is a thing, or who has what, or that they're doing something unusual when they use Alignment languages, or that when people treat their alignment-talk as mystical nonsense or vague moralizing (n.b. many people like either or both of those things!) they're being anything other than just a bit dumb or lazy. People have to figure this out, and what they piece together is probably wrong.

Note that due to some perhaps obvious dynamics people of all alignments mostly grow up in societies where it's accepted that there's heaven for the good and hell for the bad, or one of the standard corruptions of this idea (living on in people's memories, heaven for the people who do the right rituals and hell for everyone else, rebirth into an infinite layer of heavens and hells around which this world is somewhere in the middle, whatever.) Chaotic souls Know this is incorrect but have a number of incentives not to say it out loud. Lawful souls Know it's true. Neutral souls hear everyone saying it and so, aside from a few village atheists, don't have a good reason to doubt consensus.

Magic that interacts with Alignment doesn't necessarily clear things up either. If you start using alignment detection spells, you'll get some interesting correlations, sure. You might even start burning people at the stake and feel good about it: the Universe is backing you up! There are scientific studies! But those correlations are going to miss out on a lot, and some of those Chaotic victims burnt at the stake are going to be, from any objective measure, good people who have passed the greatest of moral tests.

Cults of Chaos!

Chaotic souls often lead lives of quiet desperation and confusion, but they're especially likely to join weird cults. This has two basic reasons: one, they Know the dominant religious outlook is incorrect (the Chaotic outlook can almost never become the dominant one, outside of weird brief situations where a cult captures the state on some weird Chaos project), and two, they need one way or another to assuage their fears about the afterlife.

Remember, mind you, that Chaotic souls don't have inverted moral intuitions. They don't intuit that kicking puppies is good, they intuit that it's awful, just like you. But they also just intuit it's the kind of thing that gets them sent to Counternomian Heaven. 

Accordingly, Chaos Cults often really play up the aesthetics of evil, because it's the kind of thing that "feels" like it would damn you without inspiring actual guilt. Many Chaos Cults are just play-acting in this sense: they're made up of decent people who don't have what it takes for real-deal evil. Just shit on some holy symbols, gurgle the names of some demons, and call it a night: that should be enough, right? Right? 

Then you've got cults that are actually, efficiently trying to do as much evil in as short a span as possible. They've done the math. But note that in some way's they're often just as reluctant to descend into snuff-film stuff as the cosplayers: it's unpleasant, after all, and there are more efficient and less risky ways to make the world a worse place.

Sadistic jerks exist, of course. Neutral or Chaotic sadistic jerks often end up as the leaders of Chaos Cults for the same reason sadistic jerks end up as the leaders of cults generally. Base rates mean there are many more Neutral ones, so you’ll frequently have a Chaos Cult led by a jerk whose attempts to give religious explanations are pure gibberish. The speakers of the Chaos language will have to do some work kludging it into something workable.

Then there are the really ambitious ones. Some Chaos Cults, reasoning that everyone is like them, work to corrupt the rest of the world into permanent immorality to save as many souls as possible. Others form gnostic cells to overthrow an obviously unfair universe.

All of these can and are combined. 

feywild and shadowfell

If you like these, they might, potentially, work as Counternomian Heaven and Counternomian Hell, respectively.

hyperstructuralist pantheon generator

The following started out as an attempt to automate Throne of Salt's Pantheon Generator, then drifted into something that is a bit more smooth and conceptually "neat" - the sortof thing Levi-Strauss would come up with if he wasn't limited by empirical examples - and by that point it acquired too much technical debt to be hacked back into its original purpose. Still, it's been a while since I posted, so like a panicked undergraduate scrounging to get from a C- to a C+, I will submit you some work that has been done in lieu of good work that hasn't.

Who's my warlock patron?

Tlön: janissary and public magician lodges

All of these magician lodges are active in Mlejnas, some more widely across Tlön. Although I (or others?) may turn some into GLOG wizards at some point, they’re meant to be easily implemented with common classes across editions. 

Janissary Lodges

Of the various magician lodges of Tlön, Janissary Lodges are personal possessions of the state (in this case, the senatorial government of Mlejnas,) as are their members. The conditions of their servitude are given by the lodge charter and oath of service, both ancient, and in practice the lodges regard themselves as powers equal to the senatorial families, their charter with the state rather than any individual family ensuring their independence, proud of their status as skilled elites. For all that, to serve in either is to live a short life of obedience into an inevitable painful death. Peasant youth doing their service years in the city may be assigned as adjuncts to Janissary Lodges, but actually joining is voluntary.

Although they appreciate their de facto independent status, it suits their partners in the senate as well: the College and SIDCEG exercise powers too dangerous and necessary to be exercised by any but slaves, or to be entrusted with any one family among others.

College of Exorcists

The College is charged with defending Mlejnas against plague, undead, and other demonic incursions; in doing so, they wield the tools of the three learned professions: physick, priest, and lawyer. Through physick they exorcise with knife, fire, and alcohol (especially the tiniest demons, who can only be seen through magically ground glass.) Through priestcraft they wield moral authority, confidence, and placebo. Through the legal authority of the state they issue injunctions and negotiate plea bargains, mostly through surrender of their own bodies.

Continuing on in bodies progressively surrendered to charred ash and minds surrendered to nightmare, Collegiates are regarded as heroes and feared as creeps. Voluntarily letting demons of various sorts consume their being, the immortality they seek only comes in knowledge of service and in the cybernetics they lovingly pass down from mentor to initiate. A Collegiate at the end of her career (perhaps ten years in) is an iron lung on wheels, connected by tubes and gears, flickering with imprisoned ghosts. Modern craft has lost has lost the way of making such wonders, and for the shells of a fallen member the College will fathom any depth.

Per its charter, the College reserves the right to exercise, with an i, vast emergency powers in the event of plague or other relevant event. So far the College has certainly never used such powers to liquidate opponents, wall them within infected areas never to be seen again, offered as ransom in the manner of the Exorcists themselves, or the like. 

Special Intergovernmental Disputes Compliance Ensurement Group

Like the College of Exorcists, the SIDCEG carries out important lawsuits by the state against nontraditional criminals. As a loyal province of Tlön surrounded by other loyal servants, Mlejnas would never go to war. However, sometimes disputes with other loyal servants reach a legal impasse, or they refuse to respond to a proper legal injunction, or to pay damages the Imperial Carpet would most certainly award were it not centuries incommunicado.

Tlön has no swords, but in Mlejnas plasma rifles fulfill a similar purpose - a noble weapon with no peaceful use, not to be wielded except by the warrior elite. (The regular police, colloquially referred to as the “army” and commanded when necessary by the Group, wield appropriate civilian-commoner weapons such as spears, axes, and billy clubs. Some cliff people and other bandits will operate plasma rifles, but this is regarded by all respectable parties as proof of their disrespect for decorum.)

SIDCEG members, among their other magical training, learn to bond with their mounts, most typically emus. Sometimes this process goes wrong and the human body goes forth into the wilderness to live as a bird, while the bird body is possessed of a particular form of rationality. These could in principle serve as especially qualified mounts, but in fact they are the souls of initiates who failed their most important test, and so are unceremoniously sold to private menageries. Other initiates who prove especially skilled in bonding may be assigned an even more fearsome beast to bond with and bring to warintragovernmental settlement actions, or to serve as liaisons with other ecological communities in the region covered by the Carpet.

Public Lodges

“Public Lodges” aren’t a formal arm of the state, at least in the same way Janissary Lodges are. While they are still mostly weirdos, though, they still operate as a part of the normal public world. You can bring a lawsuit against a Public Lodge and they’ll grumble (or laugh) and send their lawyers.

Cyclopædists of Anglo-America

The Cyclopædists are masters of illusion and hronir, the phenomenon of objects found because they are imagined first. They work across Tlön to expand the collective mythopoetic project describing the fanciful world of Anglo-America, or Tierra. To do so is at once the peak expression of the Sublime Philosophy and, some say, its undoing. For to describe another world, an imagined world, not just with one’s family or lodge is to engage in imposing the mind upon this world, the finest idealism one can manage, even more so than the Cartographic Commission that the Cyclopædia in some ways resembles. But at the same time the people of Tierra as described by the Cyclopædists are mostly benighted fools unaware of the Sublime Philosophy and subscribing instead to some variant of the Nine Coins heresy; and, some worry, the base materialism of these people has infected the structure of Tlön itself. Is perhaps it not the case that issues like the water reservoirs, absurdly affecting men even though they are not part of the continuously observed social world, are a result of the incursion of Tierran metaphysics? Cooler heads point out that water reservoirs ARE plainly part of the continuously observed social world, and that some magicians can speak to them showing their status as observers as well - but then, the incentives are always there to attack the Cyclopædists. Protected by Imperial law though they may be, their function is often one of social criticism.

Romina Ressia

After all, whisper opponents, don’t the Cyclopædists have a great deal of latitude over the world they’re spinning? When one of the baseball-capped mythopoets describes the inbreeding, cultural chauvinism, and eventual downfall of the Ptolemies, isn’t that just a metaphor to criticize the Core-Cadet Houses? When one tells the story of Spartacus or Turner, isn’t that just a metaphor encouraging the bondsmen of the real world to rebel? When they tell the story of Hitler or Croesus, military leaders so confident their nations would destroy all enemies and destroyed only themselves, is this not just a very thinly-veiled analogy with which to cast unpatriotic doubt on Mlej or even the Imperial Carpet itself? Cyclopædists only slyly reply that Anglo-America is quite real, as real as Tlön, but they tend to do with such a smirk that this is almost some sort of metaphor as well, or undermine it with a comment like “as real as this!” as they cast some cheap glammer.

In addition to parlor tricks and insubordination, Cyclopædists also maintain an interest in finding out hronir or dream-ghosts. The most prized dream-ghosts are isekai, whole (?) people (?) imagined (?) into being from Tierra itself, and who tend to end up in unenviable roles like messianic figure or zoo exhibit. But the Anglo-American Archives also maintains an interest in investigating ruins, by far the best place to find hronir, both sending their own members and sponsoring expeditions to find what can be found. Sometime the Archives even prefers not to send a Cyclopædist on such missions, to avoid biasing the results.

Core-Cadet Houses

Back in the heights of the empire, some aristocrats decided that passing down their enormous wealth and notorious names to their children wasn’t enough: they wanted to pass down other powers and aspects of their identity as well. They stole blood from the First Folk, gave spit samples to Stalactomancers beneath the red earth, and submitted their internal organs to haruspicy. Through this and other bioengineering projects they achieved their dream: they became true superior beings, and their children acquired their magical powers - along with their memories.

To maintain such feats in these latter days, against the effects of mutation and diffusion of patrimony, without the biochemical wonders of the past, required centuries of inbreeding. The “core” line of a Core-Cadet House consists of true-bred descendants, close to catatonic, who mumble carefully recorded prophecies and memories from long ago, and have to be assisted with their core responsibilities - eating enough to remain alive and having sex. The “cadet” part of the family consist of the children of a “core” member and an outsider, and it is these that serve these families as matriarchs, senators, and other leaders. Cadets are themselves sterilized in order to preserve the scarcity of the bloodline, and so nouveau riche are continuously being brought in in alliance.

There is one other part of the family: the founder. Haunting their dreams, trying to exercise control, flashing up in memory: the founder is intelligent in some ways but a slow or at any rate stubborn learner, and bewildered by the modern world. Most cadets learn to ignore them eventually, most of the time. Because of their psychological rigidity and seeming incomprehension at any forms of domination other than the most direct, one can safely dismiss any possibility that these ancient beings are directing their families behind the scenes.

random religion generator

In the spirit of my alignment generator, I shall pointedly refuse to define what a religion is.

religion in Tlön and Mlejnas

There are no big salvation religions on Tlön.[1] What there are are cults, understood in the nonderogatory sense; mythopoesis, which is sort of like worldbuilding; and rites, which are just traditional actions that are taken and don't require a lot of belief. Additionally, there is petitioning for hronir or dream-ghosts, which might be compared to prayer - you're asking for something - but is probably a lot closer to The Secret or the like - the mechanism is that the universe is responding to what you're consciously or unconsciously thinking about.[2] Finally, there are various altered states of consciousness, but just like American culture thinks of some of these under various banners (religion, recreation, increasingly mental health with stuff like light mindfulness) so does Tlön and Mlejnas.

Mythopoesis and family cults

Mythopoesis involves describing and elaborating another world; the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia is merely the largest, most public, and most prestigious of these projects.[3] Almost every family in Mlejnas (other regions differ) has at least a cult of its ancestors and a mythopoetic tradition internal to itself; these are not to be shared with outsiders and, in fact, if you know enough about someone's family mythopoesis you can curse them. Married couples construct a private mythopoesis that is only shared with them and certain health specialists from magician lodges, which may diagnose problems with their children as stemming from mythopoetic errors - defects from inconsistencies, weaknesses from lack of elaboration, and of course curses from inappropriate sharing.

Each family also has a very large blanket representing every member as a section - newly expanded for children, cut off and the sewn into for husbands, and delicately cut off and used for garments in the Laughing House for the dead. (It is in fact individual disclosure from someone who is part of the family garment that allows mythopoetic curses; hearing it second-hand doesn't count. What's more, hearing it under duress doesn't count. However, even this kind of second-hand sharing is seen as highly socially inappropriate, very similar to how we would see the sharing of revenge porn.) Those who share family mythopoetry and expose the family to curses are ritually expelled in highly emotional rituals - pelted with dung, their section of the blanket cut off, never to be accepted in polite society again. (This may be how you became an adventurer.)

Magician lodges

Magician lodges are understood as a substitute family, and in fact when someone joins one, the lodge pays their family a dowry. Each magician lodge has its private mythopoesis, private rites, often has a private cult, and so on, which must not be shared with outsiders. (While sharing familiy mythopoetry results in shame and expulsion, revealing the secrets of a magician lodge typically results in being tortured to death and put on public display somewhere in the desert, your spirit warped into some kind of awful monster.) In Mlejnas, magicians are generally understood as so far outside the normal system of family life and reproduction that they are seen as being genderless regardless of anatomy, though many magician lodges have been implanted from elsewhere and have different ways of looking at this. (If you feel uncomfortable with your gender identity and/or role, you can probably find a magician lodge that more closely matches what you're looking for... but you can probably also get that through moving to the city of Mlej, where middle-aged people are mostly foreigners and have all kinds of conceptions. Joining a lodge means cutting all pre-existing ties, being subjected to far worse hazing than you're likely to get from your family for just about anything, and engaging in a variety of dangerous and dubious practices. Don't join unless you want spiritual limit experiences and/or power.)

Most magic-using classes are part of magician lodges, but not always - particularly skilled hronir-seekers may be diviners or illusionists, and disciplines like astrology, dowsing, and engineering are understood as difficult skills to master but ones that can be practiced by the general public. Mythopoetic curses can be practiced by anyone. There may also be weird stuff like the bacteria-drinkers.

"Civic" cults

The city of Mlej, like most major cities through Tlön, has a civic cult; these city cults are remarkably like sports fandoms in that (1) they have an anthropomorphic "mascot" figure at their center (2) they may be brought in to deal with athletic and other cultural events or contests (including lawsuits and diplomatic overtures) between other cities, as well as matters of formal civic events like the opening and closing of the senate, (3) they help organize the calendar, (4) they are the center of mass rallies and slogans at certain festivals.

The mascot of Mlej - who is also called Mlej - resembles an ichtyphallic, three-eyed cortical homunculus painted yellow and green, with long red and black hair that is woven into a bun in times of war and mourning and hangs loose otherwise. The Captain of the Senate (a position rotated between the matriarchs of the major families) marries him at the beginning of each year, and divorces him at the end at a humorous ceremony where each engage in staged bickering. (Prominent poets look with envy on the right to write these, which represents not only a display of wit but also one in which criticism of both the leadership of the city and city as a whole can be criticized - within, of course, certain limits.)

f.n.

[1] There is one arguable exception in the soteriological aspects of the the Sublime Philosophy. According to the Doctrine of Modal Realism, every possible world exists, according to the Doctrine of Counterfactuals of Freedom, transworld identity is established by being the sort of being who would act in such-and-such a way under such-and-such conditions. You will always be you and act in the way that you would, holding external conditions the same (after all, once we take away, that your internal character is all that's left.) Now, obviously, worlds full of good, kind, cooperative people are better places to be than ones full of inveterate jerks. But an inveterate jerk is likely to end up in a world only in proportion to how often inveterate jerks appear there. What this shakes out to is that there are an infinite variety of heavens and hells, of which Tlon (or Earth, and so on) is just one, and on average, the better version you are, the better the place you'll be reincarnated.

[2] You might ask if anyone has put these to an empirical test. Of course they have. While all acknowledge that the effects are probabilistic, researchers setting out to prove hronir have found it, while researchers subscribing to no-hronir Nine Coins Heresy have found evidence that this is all illusion. This itself is taken as excellent meta-evidence for the orthodox position, as is the difficulty of the later in accounting for printer glitches (see question 3), Earth isekai, and so on.

[3] Yes, this does mean that people can know about religious and political doctrines from "our" world; no, this does not mean they take them any more seriously as plausible methods of worship or organization than we would most fictional works, even if they take the project as a serious religious and cultural one. Isekai dream ghosts from Earth sometimes do appear and try to proselytize these, but the fact that these usually end up in miserable failure only reinforces that they're ridiculous. Of course, maybe your character sees things differently.)

Hexicule: hypereutrophication

a sandbox in twelve hexes:

almost cliche cults

Cults! Unlike Cthulhu, this post isn't going to break open your mind about that or anything else. Everything in here is just close enough to the cliche that you can substitute it with almost no other changes.