1542: Rise of the Witchhunter

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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I’m an evangelical Lutheran myself, but I think a very plausible game could be written in which Luther was a dupe of demons to divide and destroy the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. You’d have no shortage of actual historical material to draw on, as that’s how many people perceived the conflict at the time (much as Luther and like-minded Reformers accused the popes – any pope, not just a Borgia monster – of being devilspawn carrying out the will of Satan).

There would be lots of problems with that concept, but they’d be around the way it feeds into centuries of Protestant-Catholic hate – not with its internal consistency. Unless demons are dumb and only capable of leading people astray in obviously EEVVILLL ways. As Screwtape would tell you, the subtler paths to damnation are much more effective.

And it would be pretty iffy if a Mesoamerican priest (which is also a real world religion!) could be a demon worshiper while Luther was off-limits.

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@Elfwine I’m not really sure I get your logic. I mean, sure it sounds more plausible to someone who can’t see beyond the Christian-centric worldview they grew up surrounded by… But to a Mesoamerican person the pale people in shiny indestructible armor carrying sticks that spew fiery death might as well have been demons themselves. They brought death and destruction where-ever they went.

And why does Borgia make more sense to be a demon worshipper for that matter?

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It’s quite likely I’m going to add a sort of longevity/eternal life aspect to the game. I’ve rewritten the beginning to include a scene where the fountain of youth is discovered. By introducing longevity, I can allow the player character to start in 1542 but live to see for example 1666 (which I’d like to use for the 666 symbolism). It’s kind of similar to Choice of the Vampire where you also get to take multiple slices of history because you’re undying.

I might use this “Fountain of Youth” water as the actual reason for the division between the Catholics and the Protestants. Let’s say the Protestants find it’s use abject and ungodly, while the Catholics think the life-extending water may be used.

I’ll also have to think of some kind of limiting aspect to the water… For example maybe it has demonic origins, or just heathen non-christian origins, and therefore can only be used by some people effectively, while others will find terminal long term effects.

Obviously this discovery of the fountain of youth will be a well kept secret, perhaps only the clergy, and then only high ranking clergy people will know of it’s existence. I can’t have European royalty get their hands on it, and I need an excuse for why the Pope wouldn’t just abuse it for himself.

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@Havenstone

Sure it could be internally consistent, but it would be internally consistent with a lot of propaganda which had a tenuous at best connection to reality. My ability to believe that this is “Our world, but with literal demons” is not strong enough to support the idea that Renaissance propaganda campaigns reflect something about most Protestants (or most Catholics, or most Jews, or most Frenchmen, or most Irishmen, etc.). At some point we get things like “If you want to do a setting involving orcs, why are you calling them ‘Irish’?”, and that point invariably gets more ridiculous the more you make one side unambiguously right in all its propaganda.

As for Mesoamerican priests:

Shoelip mentioned pagans. I specifically picked a fictional pagan who is, to put it mildly, a cruel, malicious dink.

I think him worshiping demons is entirely plausible. Not because he’s a pagan, but because he is the sort of person who would do that.

@Shoelip

If you wanted me to pick whether I thought Montezuma or Cortez was more likely to turn to demons for power, I’d like to think I wouldn’t surprise anyone to say I’d bet on it being Cortez.

But I picked a specific fictional character as an illustration of who I do think makes a plausible demon worshiper - I find “a Mesoamerican priest like him” (as in, this particular individual) to be a lot more plausibly a demon worshiper than “Let’s take Martin Luther, but instead of whatever actually went on in his head, it was demon inspired! Because . . . Catholics are right!”

Borgia as a demon worshiper:

Look at his historical record and his ambitions and tell me that “What wouldn’t he do for power?” never strikes you, or “What, if any, moral scruples actually restrained his use of it?”

To quote from his entry in Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly: “So many had been Alexander’s offenses that his contemporaries’ judgments tend to be extreme, but Burchard, his master of Ceremonies, was neither antagonist or apologist. The impression from his toneless diary of Alexander’s Papacy is of continuous violence, murders in churches, bodies in the Tiber, fighting of factions, burnings and lootings, arrests, torture and executions, combined with scandal, frivolities, and continuous ceremony - reception of ambassadors, princes and sovereigns, obsessive attention to garments and jewels, protocol and processions, entertainments and horse races with cardinals winning prizes - with a running record throughout of the costs and finances of the whole.”

Adding “And to strengthen (or acquire) his position, he sold his soul.” doesn’t really come off the same way that “The Ninety-Five Theses was the product of a mind influenced by demons” does. Alexander VI was, at best, not taking his religious duties very seriously.

@Pilgrim

You could have it grant eternal life to “the worthy”, with a definition of “worthy” more like how Exalted in the game of the same name are people destined for greatness - which may or may not have any relationship with “goodness”.

That would allow the people you want to benefit from it to benefit (hopefully all PCs would count - who wants to play a loser in a game like this?) and the people you don’t would somehow not measure up.

Could go for something else, depending on how you want to present it, but while I’m giving opinions (and realizing that phrasing it as “opinionated” makes it sound more dogmatic than I intend - its not my game and I don’t want to make it my game, nor dictate other people’s beliefs) that’s my opinion.

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Thanks for the interesting commentary, especially the quote about Pope Alexander VI was very interesting to read.

I have pretty much decided against making Protestants = evil demon worshippers, but I will still make up a revisionist reason why there was an actual split with the church besides the historical “factual” explanation. Aztec deities however, they basically look like what I think demons would look like. So I’m going to say that Catholics/Protestants/Sunni’s/Shiite’s/Buddhists/Hinduists and other large religions are “good guys”, but that the Aztec pantheon is decidedly demonic ~ hence the human sacrificing.

As for the actual constitution of the demonic world, I think I might do something along the lines of comparative mythology, where different dieties from different mythologies are simply manifestations of the same “meta demonic source”. So for example the Greek Hades = Aztec Mictlantecuhtli = Norse Goddess Hel = Hindu Yama. So they’re all manifestations of the same “Archdemon”, they just have different names in different cultures, and also varying degrees of “evil” depending on the culture.

I’m toying with using the concept of “predestination” as an explanation why some are suitable to become witchhunters, while others are not. What’s kind of annoying though, is that predestination, from what I can see on wikipedia, is actually a Calvinist term. I’m also going to use stigmata. I think it will be something along the lines of, those predestined to become witchhunters are born with “the mark”, i.e. two stigmata on both hands. I will further extrapolate that these special predestined witchhunters are “christlike” (or maybe a better term would be “martyrlike”, in that they take it upon themselves to accumulate sin through demonic contact, so that innocents do not have to. They bear the burden of being able to see, hear and communicate with demons, which is a blessing as it allows you to fight them more directly, but also a curse, as your soul becomes progressively tainted through demonic contact and you’re more susceptible to their temptations. (And yes this is quite similar to Dragon Age’s Grey Warden’s, but I feel it works as a good explanation and an interesting theme, and it’s not exactly the same).

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Hoo boy.

One can deplore human sacrifice without writing off a whole religion as demon worship. If those elements of Aztec religion invite a demonic explanation in your gameworld, I’d suggest that you apply the same standard to all the ways that other world religions endorsed murder – genocidal conquest, sati, ethno-religious cleansing – and elevate the Buddhists as the religion which did the best job of keeping the murderous demon pantheon from tainting their Scripture, doctrine, and institutions. (It may be particularly challenging for your story that witchhunting and the torturers of the Inquisition are two strong candidates for demonic Powers being outworked in sixteenth century Christianity).

The Aztecs are a long-time favorite for demonization. Take GK Chesterton as one memorably eloquent example: “A South American idol was made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark -red timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked mirror.”

As fantasy, it’s shiver-inducingly good. But he was writing it about a real-world nation. It’s appallingly wrong – the Aztecs were not seeking arcane power through the deliberate embrace of perversion and ugliness – and provides tacit endorsement for the genocidal, colonialist ways that European conquistadors imagined the peoples they were displacing.

Anyway. For what it’s worth, predestination is also a Catholic concept.

[Edit: as @Shoelip points out, the Jains are even more punctilious about non-violence than Buddhists]

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Watching you guys dance the tightrope over a massive pit of religiously inspired genocidal hatred is quite interesting. I guess CoG does tend to care a lot more about sexual/gender sensitivity issues than cultural and religious ones, especially when the people who’d be insulted are mostly extinct thanks in large part to the lack of cultural and religious sensitivity when they existed, but you really ought to be careful.

@Havenstone I don’t know much about them but don’t the Jains basically preach extreme non-violence to the point of wearing face masks to avoid accidentally inhaling bugs?

@Pilgrim Speaking of “Christlike” there are a lot of different versions of Jesus… So… yeah, that term probably isn’t the best one to use, though I suppose in universe the Catholic Church wouldn’t actually acknowledge that.

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I have absolutely zero interest in taking into account any sensitivity issues whatsoever about anything. I will however be sensitive towards if an idea is original or non-lame, but aside from that I am not going to be making “Choice of the 21st Century Culturally-Sensitive Time-Traveller”. I don’t care at all about this current cultural trend of sensitivity and I won’t take it into consideration at all when desiging this game.

So I have zero problems with painting the Aztec’s as demon worshippers. (That doesn’t mean I will, because making them purely evil would be boring), but I’m not going to take into considerations the feelings of current practitioners of mesoamerican faiths nor do I care about Western “guilt” for “colonial crimes”.

History just happened to happen the way it is, and this game is not about judging it by today’s arbitrary standards which may change again over the next 100 years.

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…except when it comes to “major” religions?

The idea that all religions are fundamentally as nice as each other is 100% modern sensitivity; and (while on this tastes will vary) my vote is that “major religions = nice, minor religions = demon worship” is Lame.

I came in on this thread to defend your right to make a game where Martin Luther was demonically inspired to create a schism in the One True Church. That’s obviously problematic, but it’s more likely to be interesting than the way you seem to be veering.

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@Pilgrim The thing is though, that by going with the idea of popular religions being good and not so popular religions being bad you’re basically perpetuating one of the most tired religious stereotypes in existence.

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What I want to do is make an action-adventure game. Maybe best to compare it to something like Bethesda’s “Dishonered”. That means I want to make interesting “levels” (in this case “chapters”) which are distinct from each other. That means that at the most I will devote one level/chapter to an adventure taking place in New Spain somewhere in the 16th century. I probably won’t paint the entire Aztec faith as demon worshippers, it will probably be a single small sect of Warrior priests worshipping Tlaloc (who requires child sacrifice). For me the Aztec’s are very interesting and I love their pantheon for it’s weirdness. Their pantheon is just kind of off and mysterious and exotic for Western standards. Through the prism of one born in Europe in the 16th century, of course they would be called “demonic”, that doesn’t mean they necessarily are, but that’s what they would be called by the Roman Catholic Church in that day. I will only take a single Aztec deity and try to write an exciting mystery/adventure around it in a contained chapter, then move on to the next chapter. If the reader wants to interpret it as if saying all Aztec deities are demons, they are welcome to do so, but it’s not an interpretation I want to explicitly enforce.

(This is the mental image I have of the Aztec deity Tlaloc which is both exotic and demonic:
http://cangrejo-volador.deviantart.com/art/Tlaloc-29137741 AND http://rowen-silver.deviantart.com/art/Tlaloc-136424004 AND http://kamazotz.deviantart.com/art/Tlaloc-181637457).

The kind of game I want to make will be one with these kind of chapters. Besides one on the Aztec’s, I might do one on fighting a Greek Gorgon, maybe one on a Basilisk in Turkey, maybe one on witch trials in Austria, maybe one on Lithuanian werewolves, maybe one on a Shinto ghost haunting in Japan. The point is it will be about demon hunting in one way or another, but in varying settings, and it’s not necessarily that every minor religion is demonic, maybe it’s more like, every religion has it’s collection of gods and demons (or angles and demons if it’s a monotheistic religion).

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So demons are real in this setting, what about gods?

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I’m still making it up as I go. It’s probably going to be something like, all religions are true and right but just come to the same conclusions in varying ways.

So the Jewish Yahweh and the Muslim Allah and the Christian Trinity, they are all true at the same time, they all refer to the same kind of thing, just like the Greek Zeus and the Aztec Huitzilopochtli and the Nordic Odin are subsets of the higher truth of the “one true God”. It’s probably going to be something like, the older pantheons were about 70% right, while the monotheistic religions are 90% right. The idea would be that religions got progressively more evolved and more accurate and more capable of dealing with demons.

(And I know this is kind of ironic as what I’m suggesting would be entirely blasphemous to the 16th century Church, even though I’m writing a game about fighting blasphemy, but the irony doesn’t matter as the Roman Catholics simply don’t know any better than what they know right now in the conworld I’m creating… This is also why both Tolerance and Orthodoxy are components of the player character (PC). It’s up to the PC to decide if they are open minded to the thruths of other religions, which will raise Tolerance, or if they want to be hardliners, which will raise Orthodoxy).

This is a role-playing game. I’m not interested in absolute truth (i.e. which religion is the “right” one) NOR presentist moralizing (i.e. being sensitive towards anyone). I just want to give people options to play certain RPG archetypes within the setting of the Early Modern world (16th - 18th century). You just happen to come from a Western religious frame inititially, but if you want to change your religious orientation down the road, that’s quite possible. It’s even possible to chose the side of demons, possibly.

I’ve also updated the first post to reflect more accurately what I want to do with this game!

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As would Luther, let alone the Sunni mystic and Vedic ghost-trapper.

If this is really about writing an action game that runs with 16th century sensibilities rather than 21st century ones, I vote for consistency. Read Europe’s Inner Demons and write as if it were all actually true: Europe's Inner Demons - Wikipedia

When the game goes international, the MC witchhunter should be fighting both the Vedic ghost-trapper and the ghost: they’re two different forms of the same enemy. Tlaloc would be just as much a demon if it was advocating flower sacrifice rather than child sacrifice.

If on the other hand you’re going with a world description that’s different from what a 16th century person would have recognized – say, far friendlier to cultural diversity and tolerance – you legitimately open yourself up to challenges on why you’re picking and choosing the 21st c. sensitivities that you’re going to embrace. Why go mushy on some “archetypes” while sticking with others?

At the end of the day, it’s your game. You’ll get questions here which you can answer or ignore as you see fit. No one’s going to stop you from writing what you choose.

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In any other forum, this particular topic would end up causing a nasty controversy and people would be screaming all sorts of obscenities, verbal abuse and death threats to each other. It speaks alot about this community that it’s been incredibly civil so far. It’s a large reason why I adore this community. :heart_eyes_cat:

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Have you thought about how you’ll deal with all the contradictions between different religions and even within a single religion?

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My personal feelings:

There are plenty of ways to get a good Catholic in this time period fighting pagans, Muslims, and so on and so forth that don’t involve Witchhuntnig having effects when fighting Janissaries or Aztec warriors or whatever nonCatholics you want to characterize that way.

So take the Ottomans.

If we’re playing someone sympathetic to the Habsburgs, we don’t need Witchhunting damaging Janissaries and Imams to fight them anymore than our ancestors may have needed French knights being burnt by holy water to support the rightful claim of Edward III (my initial PC was English, you can tell).

But a Frenchman (this is based on the actual historical policy of the kingdom) might see the Ottomans as the enemy of my enemy in that fight. Not because of some “all religions are equally good” belief in setting, but because sheer realpolitick won over “fellow Christian”.

That’s interesting. But Chesterton as right is no more “unlame” than Dances with Wolves, it just makes the game completely black and white with no reason that our character might ever have to make a more complicated choice than what weapons work best.

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@Pilgrim Technically Hel wasn’t one of the worse Goddess, she was considered as the gentle (or nice ?) Death goddess.
Then again while she is not supposed to take part in Ragnarok she will send an army of dead warriors to her father.
You might consider that etymologically the name Hel comes from helja which means (approximatively) to welcome or to hide. And it actually is accurate as she guides those that died of old age through one of the twelves Elivagar (technically twelve rivers), one of those leads to the land of Gimle [which means “protected from the fire” in old Norse] (about the same thing as the greek Elysium or to the abrahamic paradise) where the good and vertuous people will live in after the Ragnarok.

I won’t say that there is no way for her to be a demon but I still consider her as being a bit more ambiguous than that. And to be fair I don’t know where the other rivers lead.

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@Pilgrim I applaud you for taking your stance about this whole ‘sensitivity’ issue. Personally, when I see the option of “someone who prefers to avoid gender titles” or any equivalency to the choice of gender in these games I can’t help but roll my eyes at the stupidity of it. I say, make the story you want, if someones over-sensitive little heart is offended then they can just not play, right?

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@TheSnakeandTheKnight

How, exactly, is it a bad thing to make it possible for people who feel that way to have that choice in a game where that choice in no way hurts the story?

If you want to write a story where “someone who prefers to avoid gender titles” is inappropriate, well, Sabres of Infinity is a good illustration of that.

But it doesn’t look for fingers to stomp on at the expense of just saying that “No, this isn’t one of the stories.” and telling the story as best as the author can.

An author making a point that he or she doesn’t care how others feel is not filling me with confidence that the author is putting “telling the story as best as the author can” first.