Designing an occult kind of RPG

[Copuldaemon]

I don't know if this is the right place for this thread and I'm SURE there's a certain kind of occult game out there; infact there's a few of them.

My question would be has anyone ever thought about creating one though but with actual magick involved. Not for the sake of selling whole sale to Milton Bradley but...
I don't know something like shadowrun/D&D with real magick involved. Any thoughts?

[Anibis]

Some recent German games are very good. They tend to be simple to learn, but quite elaborate strategically. I know I saw a Dante's Inferno game in the comic store the other day.. I definitely like simple but interesting boardgames...
-Anibis

[fr.novumorganum]

Some chaos types would say all games are magic. I don't agree with them; however, I would have fun with such a game.

[Anibis]

I tend to agree with them to a certain extent. I think if you do something with magickal intent it becomes magic.. All games are a sort of 'simulation', and so are akin to astral work in that they form a definite set of pathways and options for action in different ways which when combined with actual lived experiences can give perspectives... I am much better at social politics because I play chess, for example... I do think that you can go too far and think that the game is 'real' in the same way that your cat is real, for example. That doesn't work too well. I find in general everything is real, but real in very different ways. One must accord each separate reality its own context and conditionality... The reality of games to provide a template that you can draw on to act in other contexts (By translation) is in my opinion pretty clear...
-Anibis
Intelligence to a great degree is pattern recognition... Games develop patterns of greater or lesser complexity. Once a pattern is recognized it can also be applied in new circumstances... such is magick, no?

[Copuldaemon]

Anibus I like your take on it which I do agree to see. However though, I was thinking more along the lines of a real devious intent to actually make a magickal game.
That each game has a certain goal that has to be reached, different characters, yada, yada, yada and then as the week progresses, strange things happen to each players personal life but it doesn't necessarily has to be negative or leaving the players addicted to the game.
I know I'm leaving much open room here, perhaps I've seen too many puppetmaster movies.

[Kain]

This, in fact, has been a pet project of mine throughout my late years of high-school. I love the freedom an RPG allows it's players' actions, and since I was genuinely interested in the occult from quite early in my life, I always felt annoyed with the way magick and the occult is usually portrayed in them. I in fact tried to avoid occult-oriented topics altogether in them, so as the gaming experience would not be spoiled.

After various attempts, I eventually settled with Mage: The Ascension as a close way of giving occultism a workable system in RPG terms while allowing for it's essential nature and inherent freedom and sponteneity to survive. I was also keen on making 'realistic improvements' in the system whenever we played, but everyone tended to complain that I was making any sort of magickal ability almost impossible to accomplish even in rediculously small feats. I called it 'realism', although they just wanted to play and unwind and called it "masochism" on my part. They were right too, in a sense, I had them waste tons of XP for acquiring the ability to perform even the slightest non-conventional feat, trying to convey the difficulty and immensity of the issue of Occultism itself into the game rules, tweaking difficulty levels, ability costs, speed or accuracy of practices etc. . In the end, I had it as colossally immense and difficult as occultism itself is in real life. But I soon realized I hadn't accomplished much, as they didn't enjoy it, and nor did I. Perhaps a more RP approach to Occultism would work better, but I felt annoyed with the ease and triggerhappyness everyone waved their 'super-humanism' around like some sort of macho-measuring contest. I suppose it can be done though...good luck on that one Copuldaemon...!

Kain

[Catalytic Subterfuge]

This would be right up MythMath's alley? Perhaps he should share with you his latest creations. I agree with fr.novumorganum....aren't all games magikal?

[Anibis]

I think a boardgame based on the TOL would be cool As for you're idea CP; sounds like Jumanji, or the box from hellraiser... Fun Fun Fun till daddy took the T-Bird away!
-Anibis

[fr.novumorganum]

Anibis:

A good response, and one that made me think I spoke to fast. I have sort of a pet-peeve with certain 'all is a game' rpg'er s (who often than use that as a put down of occultism).

But certainly underlying game-theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory) is a powerful concept, and one that has applications in many areas (http://www.econ.canterbury.ac.nz/personal_pages/paul_walker/gt/hist.htm), and has a magickal flavor to it.

I'm a life long rpg fan, a pc game junkie, and paid for graduate school by playing poker (http://www.go-poker.com/articles/bad_beats.htm).

[Copuldaemon]

Well, I am a firm believer of mass psychic energy focused to cause great change for ill or bad so perhaps, one day us here could design such a game?????

[Anibis]

Not impossible... MM has worked out a few boardgames... I'm exploring different games... I have big ideas, but often less time to enact them than I suppose... Maybe something will come out of it, though...
-A-
FOr me, I think the GErman games are a great model: EASY to learn, difficult to master... trouble with RPG's is the time investment, and the complexity... if we could design games that would take 45 minutes to an hour to play, and could be learned in a single sitting... That's ideal. Less is more.

[Okazaki Castle]

Yeah, I made Real Life an RPG, sort of. Like the humans are the playing pieces, you can use buildings just like in Monopoly, and you shouldn't take it too seriously, cuz it's a joke.

I find it funny anyway...

Programming the humans is prbbly the most fun part of it. Especially as the other life forms on this planet, eg cats, squirrels, trees are all more intelligent and cooler than the humans when you do this, cuz the humans all have too much ego (of a shallow, stupid, deluded sort) to realise they're puppetts to the Laws of Creation.

Being stubborn and resisting things doesn't make you any more intelligent, it just means that you line yourself up for a bigger breakdown of your ego. That's something that the wunch of bankers who 'rule' the world prbbly haven't figured out yet, being stubborn and falsely arrogant and all. So, you move pieces around them to strategically 'lock them down', just like in Shogun Total War for example, and then do Subedai Technique on them. Previous souls incarnated in this system are useful for things like that. And the targets, I mean humans, never see it coming...

I was actually thinking of starting a thread on this sometime called 'Reality Magick' or smtg like that...

After all, why bother to go to the trouble of baords, pieces and paper, or computer programming and stuff?

all the best,
OC.

[Anibis]

Yeah, I made Real Life an RPG, sort of. Like the humans are the playing pieces, you can use buildings just like in Monopoly, and you shouldn't take it too seriously, cuz it's a joke.

I find it funny anyway...

Programming the humans is prbbly the most fun part of it. Especially as the other life forms on this planet, eg cats, squirrels, trees are all more intelligent and cooler than the humans when you do this, cuz the humans all have too much ego (of a shallow, stupid, deluded sort) to realise they're puppetts to the Laws of Creation.

Being stubborn and resisting things doesn't make you any more intelligent, it just means that you line yourself up for a bigger breakdown of your ego. That's something that the wunch of bankers who 'rule' the world prbbly haven't figured out yet, being stubborn and falsely arrogant and all. So, you move pieces around them to strategically 'lock them down', just like in Shogun Total War for example, and then do Subedai Technique on them. Previous souls incarnated in this system are useful for things like that. And the targets, I mean humans, never see it coming...

I was actually thinking of starting a thread on this sometime called 'Reality Magick' or smtg like that...

After all, why bother to go to the trouble of baords, pieces and paper, or computer programming and stuff?

all the best,
OC.

'Wunch of bankers', indeed! Nicely put. :laugh:
-Anibis

[deviadah]

About a decade ago there was an RPG game made in Sweden called KULT (cult) and it was based on the Kabbalah and featured some Vampire lore, Satanism and other such things as well. It got banned because some stupid morons killed themselves. It was a great game, and it appears it has been translated and can be found in English. It also had a lot of Gnosticism in it and one of the evil entities was Demiurge. Anyway what made it cool was that each game the player started out as a rapist survior, a murderer, a depraved drug abuser. The tag line was: death is only the beginning!

That game still inspires me!

It is not 100% occult and it calls itself a horror game, but most of the stuff in the game comes from the occult.

I found an english site HERE (http://www.kult-rpg.com/)

http://www.catahya.net/bilder/omslag_kult.jpg

[Kain]

Interesting...thanks for that deviadah,

Kain