Broken Wheel Cosmology: If You Were Summoned Into an Alien Reality Against Your Will, You Would Probably Act Pretty Rudely Too

If you have paid any attention to the sermons in the temple, the gossip in the town square, or the warnings on the oldest books in the library at the academy, you surely know that demons are innately cruel, sadistic, soulless monsters. They have no redeeming features. They are pure evil… right?

Well... maybe. Let’s step back and interrogate what we really know about these “demons.” 

The vast majority of human interactions with demons occur on the material plane. Living humans go to the home planes of the demons only very rarely, and only a tiny percentage of those who do ever return to tell the tale. Most humans on the material plane meet demons for one of the following reasons.

• They summoned them. Thanks a lot, jerk.
• They were in the wrong place at the wrong time when someone else summoned them. Sorry bystanders.
• They are the people called in to clean up after a summoning. Hello adventurers!

So most of what we know about demons comes from these incidents. Summonings come in many forms. The evil ritual deep in the woods is a classic. But it could also be a wizardly accident. Or an ordinary, run-of-the-mill massacre, which accidentally triggering a long-forgotten prophecy. Even a muttered curse from one neighbor to another, expressed with sufficient malice, can create a crack in reality that pulls a demon through.

For a demon, being summoned is not like voluntarily traveling the planes through something nice and civilized like the Plane Shift spell. It is more like a very strong force pulling them through a too-small hole. It is painful. It is frightening. They do not come through the process whole. It fragments them.

A summoned demon is an incomplete being. Most of its essence remains in its home plane; this is why demons summoned elsewhere return home when “killed,” rather than truly dying. It’s presence on the material plane is an aspect of its persona, with full senses and awareness, but merely an ego without a superego. A demon’s demeanor reflects this partial, fragmented manifestation. The malice and penchant for cruelty are reflections of the trauma of summoning, combined with the incomplete nature of their manifestation. 

How do we telegraph this idea to players? Some ideas:

• There’s an excellent demon-summoning scene in the first book in the Laundry Files series, the Atrocity Archives. Playing with fundamental elements of sense and time helps make them alien.
• Arnold at Goblin Punch wrote an excellent treatment of demons earlier this year. Centering possession and focusing on the demon’s flaws, not just its powers, really paints a much more interesting picture.
• Previously I wrote about using the idea of someone who believes they are trapped in a simulation as a shorthand for roleplaying a demon. These two ideas can be used separately or together.

Broken Wheel Cosmology: Distinctive Devils and Divergent Demons

"If there is a conflict between two demons, it is their right to work out their differences through violence. Killing another demon is allowed, by law.

Although there is no punishment for killing another demon, the living demon does take on any favors that the dead demon owed. This usually means that they may suddenly be in debt to the Master of the deceased demon.

If the demon now owes substantial favors to more than one Master (Their previous one as well as the deceased demon) then it is possible for one Master to consolidate the debt through favor swapping. This can however be a complex procedure, and the Demon that owes the favors may owe additional favors for taking up the valuable time of the Demon Master's accountants.

In the end although there is technically no punishment for the killing of another demon, it often ends with a substantial increase in favor debt, displeasure of the deceased demon's Master, and an all around bad time for the demon who survives.

Demons rarely kill other demons, if they can help it.

-Year one Demonic Law and Punishment guidelines, textbook excerpt"

How great is that? In less than 200 words, it delivers a more engaging concept for fiends than anything I see in pages and pages of lore in the monster manual.

The problem with demons in modern D&D (and a lot of other similar games and media) is that they really aren’t very different from most other monsters. They might have a few thematic powers and resistance to fire damage, but the players can see through that and tell that they are just sacks of HP to be hacked up. If they’re really evil, so what? That doesn’t differentiate them much. Undead and aberrations and so on are all evil too.

I’ve written before about how to make more interesting demons by portraying a demon on the material plane as someone convinced they are trapped in a simulation. Giving them a truly alien frame of reference makes them act in a way genuinely distinct from other NPCs and people and monsters in the world.

The Demon’s Mirror example above is a great way to rethink how devils behave differently than other monsters (under D&D’s particular law/chaos devil/demon taxonomy, the concept outlined above fits obligation-oriented devils better than chaos-sowing demons). A devil is constantly negotiating within a complex hierarchy of other devils. It is powerful, but its actions are also constrained in a very particular way that is alien to other creatures. 

Factions. Why don’t devils form one continuous hierarchy uniting all devilkind, and use their superior organization to destroy demons once and for all? The network of favors and obligations gives devils strong reason to fracture into diverse factions. Powerful devils might endlessly scheme to consolidate all of devilkind under their rule, but the complex web of favors prevents it, either putting an aspiring devil emperor in an impossible contradiction of obligations, or sparking an outright internal war amongst those who could be next in line.

Minions. Devils have a strong reason to attract other creatures to serve them. They need minions to defend their holdings; even if a devil lord is powerful enough to easily kill an interloper, they would have to be wary of doing so blindly without knowing what favors that interloper owes. Indeed, a devil lord could send a devil loaded with onerous favors to intentionally die at the hands of a rival devil lord for this very reason. Devils also have a strong reason to capture – rather than kill – each other. Interrogating a devil to learn what favors it owes would be a common occurrence.

Hooks. Devils have to be very careful about killing other devils… but mortals don’t. Devils have a strong incentive to involve mortals in their schemes, using them as cats’ paws against their enemies. On a first meeting -- as they measure the PC’s power and consider what use they could put them to -- a devil can be surprisingly cordial and polite... unless they suspect that another devil has already met this PC and sent these adventurers to kill them. If they harbor such suspicions, their demeanor can change very quickly.

High Level PCs Are an Affront to God

Why are there angels in the D&D monster manual? 

In modern D&D – 5E and its third-party cousins – Great Wheel Cosmology necessitates a mirror to fiends, so angels appear for taxonomic thoroughness. Mechanically, I presume the game's designers view the angels in the 5E.14 Monster Manual as summoning spell targets and NPC allies for the (presumably good) PCs.

Fashioning a combat encounter between these holy dudes and those putatively good PCs requires some contortions. D&D 5E makes its angels fluent in all languages, and telepathic as well, edging out the possibility of even a misunderstanding when these creatures descend from the heavens. A footnote in the manual indicates that fallen angels exist, but they don’t get any interesting mechanical implementation (for that, try the Chained Angel from Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts).

D&D in its earliest forms didn’t have them, and many throwback systems still eschew them. The Old School Essentials bestiary, for example, lacks an entry for angels. 

When angels do appear in like-minded products, like Skerples’ beautiful new book The Monster Overhaul, they are decidedly old testament, plausibly dangerous, or decidedly unknowable. In keeping with the book’s focus on table-readiness and applicability to adventures, Skerples’ angels are loaded with danger, friction, and implicit conflict.

This Far You May Come and No Farther 

So imagine an angel confronting the PCs. Clearly it can happen because of something they have done in the game. Some action that made sense to them or solved a material plane-concern, but angered those on high. I’ve done that one myself.

But what else? What if the angels confront high-level PCs because they are high level?

It may not feel like an obvious conflict, but it’s firmly rooted in myth. From Prometheus to Babel, gods have punished mortals for attempting to rival them in power and glory. And PCs get harder and harder to distinguish from gods as they reach high levels.

Applying this mechanically can be quite simple. In a leveling system that goes from level 1 to 20, adventurers might begin to attract the attention of gods around 10th level (5E clerics gain the divine intervention ability around this time; a convenient demarcation point).

The gods might be merely watchful when PCs hit 10th level. I assume tier 3 adventurers are quite rare, unless a setting specifically says otherwise; and many adventurers who do reach that level retire or die before getting much further. But for every additional level the PCs attain, the gods become more wary, suspicious, jealous, and eventually angry.

By the time characters reach level 20, some sort of confrontation – violent or otherwise – is inevitable.

O Come At Me Bro, All Ye Faithful

All well and good for the wizards, thieves, and fighters out there. But what about clerics, paladins, and warlocks? Their adventuring life has been defined by the divine.

Warlock is easiest. Unlike most of 5E’s classes, Warlock has tension built in it at the ground level. A 20th level warlock is strong enough to directly confront the compromising nature of the pact with their patron. Even if they simply want their freedom, the patron may see them as too powerful and dangerous to just let loose. And the PC may even decide to take the patron’s place and begin issuing their own pacts.

For paladins and clerics, there’s always the option to say that at the end of the day, their arrangements with their gods were just warlock pacts with better optics. Maybe the conflict plays out in a similar fashion to warlocks. But it can go other ways.

A good-aligned god might stand aside for a worthy paladin or cleric to replace them – that actually happened in the 5E game I ran past level 20. But even if the god in question is fine with ceding the stage to their protégé, there’s no guarantee other gods will be OK with it. Most mythological gods in the real world do not tend to their portfolios in cool isolation, but instead are highly social creatures, fostering alliance and rivalries within a contentious pantheon. And there could be many reasons for those rivals to see the PC’s ascension as an affront to the gods.

Seven Very Boring Cultist Hooks

Cultists are among the most common enemies in low-level D&D. As the modern style of D&D pivots further away from orcs and goblins as “default” enemies, cultists (like bandits) increasingly populate low-level adventures from Wizards of the Coast and third party publishers. 

In the real world, we can easily understand cults as those dabbling in dark, mysterious, or sinister arts; and that their interest stands in clear opposition to monotheistic religious norms among the broader population. A cult in a Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies game makes sense.

But in a world where a multi-polar pantheon is factually known, what is a cultist? Presumably someone worshiping an evil deity or a fiend. But relying on the Great Wheel and the good-evil alignment spectrum makes for static, uninteresting gameplay.

What if we define cults and cultists not by good and evil but by their social functions? How do they support or undermine the norms of the society they exist within, and how does their existence activate factions and create interesting roleplay scenarios?

It’s a secret society. Like the ancient Greek and Roman mystery cults, it is complementary to mainstream religion, but highly secret and prestigious. It may even allow for social power and advancement among marginalized outgroups like women and the poor.

It’s a schism from a mainstream religion. The “cultists” are in their own view the correct and true practitioners of the faith. It’s the majority of worshippers who are in the wrong. All the better if the same god seems to be granting spells or other divine favors to both groups…

It’s a back-to-basics movement. The cult legitimately wants to reform either the current predominant religion, or wants to return society to an earlier, purer, or better religion (possibly prior to foreign influence or conquest).

It’s funded by a rival power, whether spiritual or temporal. Another church, state, or entity is secretly supporting the cult’s efforts, hoping to sow unrest. 

It’s an elaborate scam to cheat a gullible rich person or persons. The lead cultist is officiating rituals as part of a long con targeting bored, wealthy citizens.

It’s just an excuse to throw parties. No legitimate religious purpose, just purely bacchanal. All the better when it actually does create a connection to the divine.

It’s just an excuse to kill people. Well, not every cult has to have some deep and complex motivation. Sometimes it is simply a charismatic sociopath draping themself in the legitimacy of the divine, or a cold killer using cultic trappings to throw off investigations into their (ultimately kind of secular) murder spree.

Next week: 20 Extremely Boring Bandit Hooks

Broken Wheel Cosmology: Demons

Previously Broken Wheel Cosmology posts explored different ways of thinking about gods. Implicit in the exercise is that godhood is not a yes/no state, but a spectrum of conditions across which various immortal, supernatural, and extraplanar entities exist.

D&D’s own metaphysics in recent editions support this idea. The warlock can gain many of the same benefits as a cleric through a pact with a fiend, fey, old one, or even a celestial. Implicit is the idea that the “gods” merely have a strong brand as the distributors of power to the mortal realms; but that’s not exclusive.

So how can we think about those other creatures that have god-like power? How do they fit into our cosmology? Let’s start with demons.

What is a Demon?

The chaotic planes of the demons are worlds where pure Id can shape existence. Will to power is a concrete, observable law of their universe. Will something into being, for good or for ill, and it can just happen.

Demons are repulsed by the material world, bound by inert, inoperable physical laws that individuals largely cannot influence. It’s abhorrent to demons. To them it feels like an artificial, dead, soulless, nothing-place.

How do you roleplay a demon on the material plane? Basically like a person who believes they are in a simulation of reality and wants out. A demon feels no remorse for killing or destruction, because nothing here is real. In fact, this place is a mockery of true life (demonic life). Imagine the movie the Matrix from the perspective of one of the ordinary people oblivious to the fact that they are in a simulation; to them, the movie's heroes would be like demons.

Demons are sometimes drawn to mortals who wish to bring extreme change to the world. Such mortals could be anyone from an obsessive artist to a driven serial killer to a revolutionary who wants to see the kingdom burn. The moral valence isn’t interesting or important to the demon. The important thing is the person wants to bring disruption and entropy to the system.

While demons can’t be reasoned with, they can be swayed by emotional appeals. But this rarely lasts for long. Even a relatively sympathetic demon is going to end up killing and destroying sooner or later. A demon is a bull in a china shop full of china decorated with horribly offensive anti-bull illustrations.

Broken Wheel Cosmology: Dull Gods and Static Pantheons

The typical fantasy pantheon vaguely follows the mythological models of antiquity, but removes a lot of the visceral personality. The Greek pantheon was like a squabbling family, with each god struggling to gain the upper hand or advance their interests, driven by complex relationships of marriage and heredity, thick with plots, schemes, and betrayals. But D&D’s pantheons feel static and lifeless. How could we present the gods in more interesting ways within our Broken Wheel cosmology?

Demiurges

Broken Wheel gods are not world-creators nor saviors. They once were adventurers, just like the rest of us. A 20th D&D level character borders on godlike-power. The 5E DMG’s epic boons, even moreso. Godhood is simply the next step on that path, entailing rulership of a plane that the god can bend to their will, and the capability to extend their power back to the material world through their followers. They are ageless, but not deathless; and the spheres and domains they claim are subject to fierce competition from their rivals.

Pauper Gods

Attaining godhood is monstrously difficult. Losing it is a lot easier. Whether they were violently deposed in a matter of hours, or watched as their worship fell out of favor slowly over generations, these lingering spirits survive on the psychic residue of praise to other deities; the occasional misguided prayer; and the rare warlock pact, forged with some obsessive who dug their name out of an ancient tome. Dead gods are good for creating dynamic worlds, but deposed gods are better.

Small and Petty Gods

There is a lot of competition to become the god of death or the god of war. Who wants to experience immortality with a target on their back? Why not set your sights a bit lower? Perhaps a couple altars in the dungeons of the mortal world would be enough to secure the worship of a few foolhardy ratcatchers? Or perhaps a comically narrow sphere of influence will win the faith of a handful of passionate weirdos?

Genius Loci

What if a druid doesn’t represent some vague, ambient sense of “nature,” but represents that particular river or this particular mountain? What if a god embodies and is worshiped solely by a particular city-state? These choices ground the gods in the material world; even if they are not literally present, they are acting upon the geography, and can be indirectly encountered.

Immanent Gods

Most of the ideas above bring the gods down closer to the world of mortals, with recognizable, human-like desires and motivations. What if we go in the other direction? What if the gods are more like physics concepts, universal laws, or equally abstract ideas? Such gods are, I think, harder to introduce as game objects, because they are distant and unknowable. But they present an interesting challenge and a compelling worldbuilding exercise for the right game. 

The key to implementing any change is to evaluate how much it percolates at the table. Rumor and prophecy, not lore and legend. Problems and opportunities, not backstories. Setting things on fire, not set dressing.

Broken Wheel Cosmology: Comic Gods

After watching Thor: Love and Thunder in July, my mind returned to RPGs and Broken Wheel Cosmology. The following is limited to RPG worldbuilding, and is not a general review, nor is it written with deep familiarity of the cosmology of Marvel Comics.*

Briefly, and without spoilers, the premise is that a cursed, symbiotic sword (very D&D) drives the antagonist, Gorr the God Butcher, into a god-killing rampage. Thor and his companions pursue Gorr, traveling to strange worlds and risking their lives to stop his mad quest.

What does it take to kill a god? 

Much is made of the Necrosword’s ability to kill gods, but… that’s hardly a unique quality within the Marvel movies. Indeed, in summarizing the (considerable) backstory of the three previous Thor movies and the various related Marvel properties, the film alludes to Thor’s brother, father, and sister – all gods – dying by various means.

Presumably this just means the Necrosword is just unusually good at killing gods… but it drains a lot of the mythic cache from the idea of a god-killing weapon.

What do gods need from their worshippers?

The movie’s prologue is Gorr’s inciting incident. His prayers to his god Rapu are ignored, and his daughter dies. Soon thereafter, he meets Rapu, who is indifferent to Gorr’s suffering, even when Gorr tells him that Gorr himself is the last of Rapu’s followers; Rapu dismissively says something to the effect that more will follow, and tries to kill Gorr.

Pretty strange! I’ve always assumed that in most fantastic cosmologies, the gods have some practical need of worship; either broad appeal among many mortals, or sustained worship from an intensely devoted minority cult. In T:L&T logic, why have worshipers at all?

Why worship gods at all? 

The other side of the coin is, of course, why do people care about the gods? The gods presented in T:L&T are, at best, an indifferent and ineffectual aristocratic class; at worst, they’re actively parasitic. The film seems to vaguely imply that there are good gods out there, but the movie doesn’t show them. Besides Gorr’s prologue, the most detailed look at the gods in the film is a visit to Omnipotence City, where the assembly of the divine is more concerned with orgies than stopping Gorr.

In the real world, the inherent unknowability of the spiritual, and the resulting need for faith, mediates human relationships to the divine.

But in a world where ordinary beings can go see the gods at work – where they are knowable – why worship them? 

The movie grapples with this question… briefly. In one of the most compelling scenes, Gorr interrogates Valkyrie, observing that her sister… valkyries were sent to die in battle at the whims of the gods. It's a good scene, but the heroes never make an affirmative case for the gods to counteract Gorr’s criticism.

What about D&D? The Marvel universe (cinematic or otherwise) is a good analogy for the world of D&D because they’re both kitchen sink assemblies from many different sources. Thor is mighty because he is a god, but he encounters aliens, mutants, magicians, and monsters who are as strong or stronger than he. Is there anything special about a “god” in such a world, or is this a “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” situation? We should ask the same question in fantastic RPG worlds.

*I appreciate that I am probably only scratching the surface of the Marvel cosmology as developed in the comic books. Elaboration from those more knowledgeable is welcome.

Broken Wheel Cosmology: Say No to Plato

D&D’s rules and game culture introduce implied and assumed setting elements to every table – whether that table is planning a rigorously lore-compliant Forgotten Realms adventure or a homebrew with no preconceived setting. Many of these implied elements come from the common fantasy vernacular. But another layer represents D&D’s own accumulated history through its various editions. The art, the presentation, and the rules themselves subtly inform the game in ways many players don't appreciate.

For example, D&D’s planes of existence provide an easy way to gameify and synchronize disparate alternative dimensions, afterlifes, faerie realms, and fantastic planets, drawn from folklore and Appendix N fiction. And the planes of existence go hand in hand with the pantheons of gods that populate them. It allows the game to contain a jumble of disparate elements that would defy belief if they were kitchen-sinked into a single fictional world.

But these planes can feel static and unchanging. Not dynamic, not driven by faction interaction, not open to player meddling. So let’s start with the basic Great Wheel cosmology and make some interesting changes to produce what I call Broken Wheel Cosmology.

Inert Platonic Elements

The four classic platonic elements are a major part of the fantasy vernacular, and come through most prominently in D&D in the four elemental planes. Because they are assumed to be constants underpinning the universe, they can't really change, and that makes them less interesting. 

There are various ways to improve them. We could use a five- element system from a source old or new. We could create a four-element pantheon that embodies the weird science fantasy of the setting. Or apply the full periodic table of elements in knowing commentary on genre conventions.

But for a 5E game, I enjoy a system that twists or subverts those assumptions, rather than replacing them outright. So in my Broken Wheel cosmology, the Elemental Plane of Fire has conquered the Elemental Plane of Earth, renaming it New Firelandia. Xorn and Dao live in exile communities, their migrations disrupting other planes as they travel. Air and Water have formed an uneasy alliance against this new power. The assumption that the four planes needed to be in some kind of cosmic balance to preserve the metaphysics of reality turned out to be… wrong, and now all bets are off as to what could happen next.