D&D 5E Existentialist Sword and Sorcery

[Steampunkette]

He's far from alone there.

Im in the same boat.

We all deal with our Existential Crises in our own unique ways.


I hope you find the peace that comes with acceptance, in time. Or find the right beliefs to hide you from this terrible world. No one should have to suffer like you do, now.

Spoiler: Series Finale Spoilers for The Good Place

 

[Yora]

Broadly speaking, existentialism has lost most of it's new radical shine decades ago. People have argued that it's become the mainstream worldview of Western Culture over the last 70 years. For Lovecraft the scale of the universe and the vastness of time, combined with the strangeness of cutting edge physics in the early 20th century was an unsettling disruption of familiar assumptions. For us, those things are the only things we've ever known. The problem of telling right from wrong in a deterministic universe with no guidance by higher power has effectively been solved generations ago. (Mostly be deciding that the philosophical question don't actually matter in daily life.)
The weird new discoveries of the cosmos have become our new normal.

 

[Steampunkette]

Broadly speaking, existentialism has lost most of it's new radical shine decades ago. People have argued that it's become the mainstream worldview of Western Culture over the last 70 years. For Lovecraft the scale of the universe and the vastness of time, combined with the strangeness of cutting edge physics in the early 20th century was an unsettling disruption of familiar assumptions. For us, those things are the only things we've ever known. The problem of telling right from wrong in a deterministic universe with no guidance by higher power has effectively been solved generations ago. (Mostly be deciding that the philosophical question don't actually matter in daily life.)
The weird new discoveries of the cosmos have become our new normal.

Which is absolutely true! The advancement of society and technology, knowledge of the world around us and the universe we fit into, has pushed the Existential Dread largely to the side as a simple accepted fact of reality almost invariably learned, now, as children.

Oh, we still tell them the same stories and share our religions and beliefs, but the ever-expanding scope of our knowledge just washes everything in the context of an immense uncaring universe. For Lovecraft Tentacles and oddly pulsing oozing monsters were the edge of madness 'cause the dude lived in New England and the Sea was the single most dangerous "Monster" in his day to day life, for all its beauty.

Meanwhile nowadays tentacles are just a part of a cephalopod for most kids and pornographic for a lotta teens and adults!

The great startling mysteries and horrors of Lovecraft's work have largely faded from the world. Instead we create new forms of Existentialism to terrify us. Things like the whole Black Mirror television series where technological advancement and its endless creative change become our new stand-in for Eldritch Monsters. Where our lives and ourselves can be replaced by computer programs, holograms, and robots. And where even "Heaven" as a concept can simply be a computer network that we upload our flickering brain-patterns into in those final brief moments before the Synaptic Tsunami sends us into the White Light with the continuing question from that point being whether that computer-self which holds all of our memories is the "Real" us, while our body has died and our soul, if any such thing should exist, has left.

Just gotta repackage things based on the new situations we're in, is all!

 

[Steampunkette]

For comparison, here are excerpts from some of my own writing both to try and mimic the vivid descriptions of Lovecraft's style and also to bring things up to a more modern concept of horror.

The Narrator of the book is a Researcher whose mentor and colleague was investigating legends in Louisiana when a Hurricane struck. The mentor was killed but the Researcher follows his footsteps, trying to find out what he'd learned and also complete his work. The short story was laid out in the form of journal entries.

As the entries go on, and the Researcher is exposed to more and more of the Cosmic horror, their descriptions change from simple sensory information of sound, sight, scent, and touch...

The scent of rotting lumber permeated the air. The wind was heavy with moisture that made the heat all the more oppressive, no sweet wind to blow cool comfort this was a hot rag, intangible but present, resting upon me. I was coated in sweat that couldn’t dry. It was miserable hard labor clearing the collapsed barn with the others, but we had to see what was under it, whether anyone, or anything, had survived the tumbling timbers. I could swear I heard the soft huffing of a trapped animal, something large… perhaps a horse? Then again it could have been the man to my left, wheezing with the effort of clearing a beam.

I could hear the thing breathing down the hallway. It was rattling. Like a smoker with a phlegmy cough. Each gasping inhalation gulped at the air, like a fish trying to survive in an environment it wasn’t evolved for. The exhalations were easier. Slower, almost as if the creature took it’s time, savoring the flavor of it’s fetid breath, smelling for all the world like rotten yogurt and cat piss, the funky dairy rot mingling upsettingly with the ammonia-crisp chemical scent.

The fog. Clinging, cloying, cold. Surprisingly so, for Louisiana. As I raced to the car I could feel something near me, just out of sight, just behind my neck, that uncomfortable terror of darkness that there’s always -something- right behind you. Only now I had seen the shapeless things in the dark, the formless terrors that chase children up the stairs as the living room lights go out. They have shapes. They have forms. It is only names they seem to lack. As the car door closed beside me, I felt the uncomfortable certainty of danger behind me, anew. I looked in the mirror, then turned to check the back seat. I was safe, for now. And with the grace of whatever gods looked down on me in the moment, the engine growled to life with the same sort of guttering coughs as the thing in the hallway.

Towards a Synesthetic chaos in the wake of the interactions.

Touching the flesh of the pustulent mass was at once like pressing your hand to the hood of a car too long in the sun and licking a battery, the electric and acidic tang ran over my hand which, while unharmed by the flavor or the heat, I jerked aside regardless. Eyes like the embers of cigarettes turned on me, and one of it's mouths opened to belch forth a language I could not understand, somewhere between the rumbling of thunder and the dizzying ecstacy of standing too close to the speakers at a rock concert. The world darkened and I lost consciousness… a blessing.

Each interaction with the "Things that must not be known" increases the effect. Until in the end, madness takes hold as darkness, true cosmic blackness, the absence of all light, becomes the inescapable horror.

I looked directly into her eyes, pale blue, surrounding that darkness, the absence of light. I could have fallen into it, the shadowed paths that amble amid the blue of sky, the darkened halls of solemnity where nameless wonder rests and nameless horror thrives. No! No. Her eyes. Her eyes bore into me! I was the watched, not the watcher! My mouth fell open as if to offer words or some insensate cry, but little came of it but a shocked exhalation, a realization. The darkness was within me, as well. The same darkened halls stared from my face, the same shadows that clung to the miserable electric flesh and cigarette smoldering eyes gazed without and within. All held in her eyes, all horror in mine. I screamed, belatedly, my face twisting like rotten pumpkins days into November… but it was her that seemed terrified. She must have seen the monsters clinging to the inside of my pupils.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Broadly speaking, existentialism has lost most of it's new radical shine decades ago. People have argued that it's become the mainstream worldview of Western Culture over the last 70 years. For Lovecraft the scale of the universe and the vastness of time, combined with the strangeness of cutting edge physics in the early 20th century was an unsettling disruption of familiar assumptions. For us, those things are the only things we've ever known. The problem of telling right from wrong in a deterministic universe with no guidance by higher power has effectively been solved generations ago. (Mostly be deciding that the philosophical question don't actually matter in daily life.)
The weird new discoveries of the cosmos have become our new normal.

I have considered that as part of the reason most things are terrible we do things for no reason without a goal and most people just no longer care.

Which is absolutely true! The advancement of society and technology, knowledge of the world around us and the universe we fit into, has pushed the Existential Dread largely to the side as a simple accepted fact of reality almost invariably learned, now, as children.

Oh, we still tell them the same stories and share our religions and beliefs, but the ever-expanding scope of our knowledge just washes everything in the context of an immense uncaring universe. For Lovecraft Tentacles and oddly pulsing oozing monsters were the edge of madness 'cause the dude lived in New England and the Sea was the single most dangerous "Monster" in his day to day life, for all its beauty.

Meanwhile nowadays tentacles are just a part of a cephalopod for most kids and pornographic for a lotta teens and adults!

The great startling mysteries and horrors of Lovecraft's work have largely faded from the world. Instead we create new forms of Existentialism to terrify us. Things like the whole Black Mirror television series where technological advancement and its endless creative change become our new stand-in for Eldritch Monsters. Where our lives and ourselves can be replaced by computer programs, holograms, and robots. And where even "Heaven" as a concept can simply be a computer network that we upload our flickering brain-patterns into in those final brief moments before the Synaptic Tsunami sends us into the White Light with the continuing question from that point being whether that computer-self which holds all of our memories is the "Real" us, while our body has died and our soul, if any such thing should exist, has left.

Just gotta repackage things based on the new situations we're in, is all!

ah, the endless blind remixing of this age, it depresses us so as there seems to be nothing new other than minor change it is just stagnant life.

 

[Steampunkette]

ah, the endless blind remixing of this age, it depresses us so as there seems to be nothing new other than minor change it is just stagnant life.

Sorta!

Philosophies from the past jump into and out of vogue off and on. Whether it's Tech CEOs these days screaming about "Rational Self Interest" just like Sears did in the 90s or the latest "Workers should be thankful for what they have" fad of trying to get everyone under 400k a year to learn about and follow through with Stoicism as a philosophical standard...

Which is the same return to form that it was in England in the 1800s, where Stoic men were suggested to be more likely to advance in the workforce.

Existentialism just got a faster turnaround because it's a more recent one that can be easily adapted into story format to inspire Dread or Hope.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Sorta!

Philosophies from the past jump into and out of vogue off and on. Whether it's Tech CEOs these days screaming about "Rational Self Interest" just like Sears did in the 90s or the latest "Workers should be thankful for what they have" fad of trying to get everyone under 400k a year to learn about and follow through with Stoicism as a philosophical standard...

Which is the same return to form that it was in England in the 1800s, where Stoic men were suggested to be more likely to advance in the workforce.

Existentialism just got a faster turnaround because it's a more recent one that can be easily adapted into story format to inspire Dread or Hope.

it just seems to be a loop no change no victory or defeat just endlessly going nowhere.

 

[Azzy]

This is really an interesting discussion. While I've never thought about exploring Existentialism in D&D or Sword and Sorcery, I have had ideas to explore it an urban fantasy/low-level supers style conspiracy theory-laden game and toy with the player's expectations of whether they really are facing a supernatural threat or that they are victims of self-delusion. Are we really heroes or are we deluding ourselves into beieving ourselves heroes in a narative that we've created to feel empowered against a reality in which we ultimately are inconsequential.

 

[Steampunkette]

it just seems to be a loop no change no victory or defeat just endlessly going nowhere.

I mean... That's just Media in general unless there's an intent to explicitly end the story.

Every Superhero Comic restores the Status Quo 'til their villain breaks out of jail to go on another crime spree. Unless they -kill- their villains like the Punisher. In which case someone new puts on the villain's cape (Or the villain wasn't -really- dead, or just gets brought back to life for REASONS) and gets killed later 'cause that's just how comic books work.

Same thing for the Forgotten Realms. No matter how many times you save that world it's -always- on the brink of some new evil world-ending catastrophe. From Tiamat busting through to Toril or Demogorgon parading through the Underdark or an inter-planar Lich sucking everyone's life-force away. And it's -always- been that way. Your big victory over Tiamat means nothing in the long term because less than one year later some new terrible event happens with the next Adventure Path release.

How many times did the Winchesters split up at the end of the season, how many times did they die, how many times did they have to have the -exact- same melodramatic conversation about being Honest with each other? It's just a function of open-ended or episodic storytelling, not specific to Swords and Sorcery.

And I'm really glad you think so, @Azzy! And I hope you get to explore it in that game!

 

[Yora]

This is really an interesting discussion. While I've never thought about exploring Existentialism in D&D or Sword and Sorcery, I have had ideas to explore it an urban fantasy/low-level supers style conspiracy theory-laden game and toy with the player's expectations of whether they really are facing a supernatural threat or that they are victims of self-delusion. Are we really heroes or are we deluding ourselves into beieving ourselves heroes in a narative that we've created to feel empowered against a reality in which we ultimately are inconsequential.

Speaking of which, I think both Sword & Sorcery and existentialism have to be done without alignment. Right and wrong are subjective, at least insofar that any objective right or wrong is unknowable by humans and unprovable by reason. There is no magic spell that can determine who is good or evil, and players and GMs can fall back on a monster description saying so.
Which is where faith enters the picture. Trust that your path is just, even when you can't prove it, and trust that your intuition and emotions on values actually helps promoting what you consider to be good.

But it also means acknowledging that you're flawed, and that you can make mistakes and be mislead. Your convictions have to be questioned and compared to your new experiences and knowledge. Heroic and virtuous characters have to accept that they did wrong in the past and change so that they will do better in the future, instead of continuing with something that has become doubted to avoid the consequences of past mistakes.

I think change is actually quite a big element in existentialism. Some guy or another created the phrase "existence precedes essence", which opposes and rebukes the idea of Platonic Ideals. Things don't have a fixed nature that exist as a universal abstract that manifest themselves in the world as physical objects. The essence of a thing does not exist as an ideal even before the thing itself appears in reality. Things, and the one thing it's really all about is a person, begin their existence as a blank slate. What defines a being are the things it experiences, does, and thinks. And as such, all beings are in a constant process of changing, or more fancifully, in a constant state of becoming.
Which is not necessarily a process of improving. Corrupted heroes fit perfectly into even the most broad strokes abstractions of Sword & Sorcery, but in the same way there needs to be a space for redeemed villains as well. Though I think to keep with the overall tone, people shouldn't be expecting miracles. Vile genocidal maniacs won't suddenly renounce the Dark Side and join Team Heroes because they lost a duel and suddenly find themselves not wanting to be killed by the hero.
Evil (as a subjective judgement, of course) becomes a lot more meaningful if doing evil things is not in the nature of villains and monsters, but a choice. Villains who do evil things but can freely chose not to are much more interesting antagonists.