On the other hand, there is an urge to accumulate and preserve the evolving folklore; it is the mania to track changes and deviations rather than set, unchanging categories. We know that Kord was in a god Greyhawk, and then a slightly different god in Nentir Vale, because we've collected the oral tradition--often in pdf form, ironically enough. Think of this as D&D's version of Deleuze & Guattari's arboreal model versus the rhizome. Or, if you want to be all Appendix N about it, it's the internal battle of law versus chaos as guiding principle. Taxonomists & mythopoets, glaring at each other across the Maginot Line of the Blood War.
One of my favorite things about D&D's hypothetical ur-text is when those two impulses come into conflict. Tiamat, for example, is the queen of the evil dragons. Or maybe she's the god of evil dragons. But when you check her most recent stats, you see she's actually a fiend. But not a devil (even though she lives in the Nine Hells) because she's chaotic evil. But she's probably not a demon either because she doesn't speak the language (1).
That's the accretion of Tiamat's story working at cross purposes with her place in the taxonomy. Neither is wrong. Neither is right.
We can use this as grist for the mill. This is potential. No need to tweet at Crawford for clarification, and then at Mearls when Crawford doesn't say what you were hoping to hear. The confusion or undecidability at that nexus means that she could empower your cleric (she's a god!) and also make a pact with your warlock (she's a fiend!). Ultimately, Tiamat unites us all and we'll never know who would win in a fight: the Lady of Pain or the Raven Queen.
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(1) - My favored take is that whatever she was (god or dragon), Tiamat has been changed by her time in Hell--the nature of a fiend is acquired, rather than natural fact.
I like your explanation! Of course, the dividing line between "god" and anything else is taxonomically well delineated in D&D's current iteration yet, so maybe she was a god and a dragon, but became a fiend, "fiend" being the name for any being whose substance has been marinated in the ambient juices of hell, or "attuned to its moral vibrational frequency."
ReplyDeleteThe real interesting thing to me about this is that one can pick in choose their level of engagement. Despite complaints about canon-quoting FR and Greyhawk players (and I'm sure it happens), it isn't hard to find casual players that don't give a damn about that stuff. On the other hand, if you want to go all "No Prize" pursuing and fix the flaws in continuity between editions, well, you can probably find an online audience for that too, though they will likely tell you you did it wrong.
Yeah, Asmodeus is a good example of that too. He's an archdevil, but also a god. Well, at least in some places. I like the idea of these beings having godhood in some places, and not as important in others. It's the D&D equivalence of being "big in Japan."
DeleteCan you imagine the continuity brawls over "D&D canon"? Well, we could, but probably best not.
Love it. Sounds like DND is structured like a language, with [SCENE MISSING] where details blur as developers mess around to indulge pet urges, justify paychecks, satisfy market demand for novel (or at least "novel") scenarios.
ReplyDeleteGlorantha reference assumed. I wonder if Trey's no prize motive becomes the professional development path . . . fans consume other people's continuity, pros are allowed to tinker with the IP. Oh yeah, that reminds me what I was originally going to say, which is that I think the semiopen canon of DND is what gives it this elliptical quality. So much of the IP is appropriated and there's an interest there in keeping it open to defend against piracy complaints. But then the parts that are proprietary are closely managed because that's the crown jewel. Nobody cares about pixies but God help you if you make Demogorgon a woman in that one edition because some kid is coming for your no prize.
I like these devils. Maybe hell is where fallen gods cycle into the fiend process, eventually hitting a kind of blasphemous anti-zenith (gearing up to read Bataille again) in Hades and then mostly decomposing somewhere in the Abyss zone. Then new proto gods generate around Limbo, rise as idiot amphibian invaders (ontology recapitulates), a few differentiate and achieve something like consciousness, new angels to "fall."
Maybe people need to imagine the Tiamat beautiful once but that thing is mean!! Can D&D fix her? I don't think it wants to . . . and in this hemisphere coriolis forces are not on her side.
It's probably akin to the linguistic drift that occurs when one faction of the tribe heads out for uncharted territory and then their descendants return to the mother land...only to find out that, although they can make themselves understood, they're no longer speaking the same language.
DeletePart of 4e's larger project was to assimilate all the accumulated D&D lore into something approaching a syncretid whole. Some gods from Greyhawk were presiding over a world where Lord Soth and the Rule of Threes also existed. Fascinating, but it never really caught on.
So much has to remain open because D&D was a magpie in its early years. Orcus, ye were mighty and walked our earth!
Someone more philosophically than commercially ambitious could make a beautiful diachronic record of it, «À la recherche du tiamat perdu» as it were, and be the next Lev Grossman or True Detective guy or whatever. But in the cold light of day, why take the effort raising the magpie's babies when we can just squat the nest . . . fewer hassles, probably bigger bucks as the Stranger Things reveal.
DeleteI accidentally clicked an old URL to get here and was blown away to see what I thought was a new Mars recap. AOS if you see this the world needs you! Maybe two worlds.
I know that AOS is in the home stretch of getting Mars ready for publication. Saw some stuff from the bestiary yesterday. Fearsome.
Delete@bombasticus - It's all a great wheel, as Gygax has already informed us. Beings of power are never truly destroyed, they just rotate through the states of being, which are at once co-equal, but evolutionarily ordered.
DeleteTrey I would love to see a mirror setting where the baseline has rotated 180 degrees, people good clerics pray to now are the new crop of fiends, old fiends have been rehabilitated to the point where they're practically new gods, woe is weal and weal is woe. On the other hand I can see the process getting really nihilistic and depressing, wherein may hang some kind of moral.
Deletei am as you have surmised above, both god and devil.
DeleteAnd yeah, I’ll be done next week, with an obscenely art bloated page count. Wedging all the art in and doing spot illos (I can’t seem to stop) is the hold up.
OT China Meivile said that the quantification was useful to him.
I think I get what Mieville meant; quantification can force you to riff off stuff you'd sometimes overwise just ignore.
DeleteBah! The god Marduk sundered Tiamat in two at the creation of the world, with one part of her becoming the sky, and other the land, and her tears forming the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers! ;)
ReplyDeleteIn the D&D version, we'll sub-in Warduke for Marduk.
DeleteArguably, the same two tendencies - to systematize and to accrete - help explain the complexity of the Marvel and DC comics continuities.
ReplyDeleteOn the large scale, all of DC's various "crises" have been chances to reset and systematize their continuity, with more or less random changes accreting in between the resets. I think Marvel largely resisted that temptation until they created their Ultimate universe and then ended it - which might be why their universe lacks some of the really weird over-systematized features that DC has.
On the smaller scale, each new creator's "run" probably starts with them imposing some order on everything that's come before, and then setting out to unleash their own narrative chaos over the course of their run at the comic. Each new cartoon, tv show, and cinematic franchise is probably also an opportunity to first systematize, then accrete.
The real weirdness, I think, comes up when you organize, then add, then reorganize, then add again. It's the repeated, cyclical nature of alternating the two tendencies that really makes things strange.
D&D's reboots with every new edition work exactly the same way.
Heh, and those are two of the *worst* tendencies when it comes to DC and Marvel, in my opinion!
Delete(Was just noting the other day how much I dislike the "everything is superheroes, eventually" effect where Marvel and DC inevitably absorb their non-capes titles into their capes universes.
I sometimes think we forgot how to tell non-superhero action stories awhile ago, and that was what laid the groundwork for superheroes to take over everything.
DeleteI watched "The Big Sleep," and a couple goons rough Bogey up by punching him like 3-4 times. And he looks A LITTLE bruised, A LITTLE bloody, but he also acts like he's hurt, maybe even has some internal injuries, and he's reluctant to get hit anymore.
These days I feel like we expect to see someone endure beatings that would kill a normal person 2 or 3 times over before they even get knocked unconscious, and we expect them to bounce back from what should be crippling lifetime injuries after a "short rest." To so much as lay a scratch on an action hero these days takes an assault that would likely be the death of any real person.
They're all superhumans, every one of them. It was only after we came to accept and expect that that they all started wearing capes.
(My own personal "everything in superheroes, eventually" pet peeve is the way the CW seems to have decided that every character on every show needs to gain superpowers and/or adopt a superhero identity. No one is allowed to be the hero's friend without donning a cape of their own.)
I think it was largely due to the superhero comics boom in the 90s. Marvel and DC looked at all this non-supers IP that wasn't making them money and shoveled it toward the stuff that did.
Delete