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View Full Version : DM Help What would an incarnation of the concept of broken causality want?



PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-16, 05:05 PM
So I have a situation that will arise sometime next calendar year.

The party (D&D 5e, if it matters) is involved with a ruined city that serves as a magical trap for a host of creatures. Lots of factions ranging from cat people to spider demons to self-willed undead bound to an oath of eternal war.

The centerpiece of this trap is an ancient "demon", trapped in the center of the city by a massive, self-sacrificing ritual 200 years ago. At this point, I know (and the party knows) that this "demon" is really a self-aware bodily incarnation of the concept of non-linear causality. Essentially, its very existence acts on the surrounding reality like it was an old-school movie where the frames were shuffled, stretched, and folded. Both space and time are affected and effect can precede cause. It's ancient (predating the start of time) and had been banished "at the beginning" to a separate pocket dimension. It's not malicious, just very alien. It was summoned into this reality to act as a mobile natural disaster for an army of chaos--they magically aimed it at their enemies and followed behind to take advantage of the disruption caused by its very presence.

The party is almost certain to try to negotiate with it. That's been their MO all along--they've tried to ally with everyone they've encountered, or at least tried to convince them to be peaceful. Only things that cannot be persuaded get the sword. Unnatural for adventurers to be sure, but...

All this brings me to my question.

What would such a being want? How would it interact with "normal" beings? What could they offer it? Would it even notice 200 years of "stasis" (I've already established that it's aware of passing time even though it can't act outside its own tiny bubble-trap) since it's a being outside the normal flow of time?

I already know they'll need to find some way of stabilizing their own local realities in order to be able to approach it, and have a plan for that. They'll also need some way of talking to it, which I'm less sure of. They probably won't use whatever means the invaders had to compel it (magical cattle-prods for transdimensional beings? :smalleek:), being a noble-hearted party.

Quertus
2018-12-16, 06:53 PM
My psychology is failing me, but I suspect that wanting is inherent to causality. I don't think that it should capable of "wanting", or even really understand the concept.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-16, 07:42 PM
My psychology is failing me, but I suspect that wanting is inherent to causality. I don't think that it should capable of "wanting", or even really understand the concept.

But what if, for it, causality is normal--it thinks that our linear concept is the one that's broken?

Spacewolf
2018-12-16, 08:10 PM
Well if it's non linear one of the obvious things to do would be for it to turn out the party actually created it by whatever means.
Another possibility would be for it to ask them to do totally innocuous that then turns out to have massive consequences. (An example off the top of my head would be for it to ask them to go to a town centre and bump into a man, he turns to insult them and fails to notice a cart full of olive oil which then has to swerve causing a fire which leads to part of the city being burnt down and his prison being weakened.)

As for it noticing the passage of time, perhaps treat it as if being trapped is the first time it's had to experience the passage of time as a person would making it go alittle insane but also possible to communicate with even if it has trouble with tenses. (Also if you're planned this far ahead I assume you've got further on planned in which case it would probably be expected for it to drop obscene hints for something that is going to happen later but don't make sense at the time. Which might be a good or bad thing since I'd bet your group will look for double meanings everywhere.)

Out of curiosity what does this thing look like? Since that would effect how it could interact with the party.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-16, 08:22 PM
Well if it's non linear one of the obvious things to do would be for it to turn out the party actually created it by whatever means.


Or that the party's intervention caused it to never have been caged at all...:smallconfused:



Another possibility would be for it to ask them to do totally innocuous that then turns out to have massive consequences. (An example off the top of my head would be for it to ask them to go to a town centre and bump into a man, he turns to insult them and fails to notice a cart full of olive oil which then has to swerve causing a fire which leads to part of the city being burnt down and his prison being weakened.)


I'm not sure if it wants its prison weakened or not. I'm not sure what it wants on the mortal plane, if anything.



As for it noticing the passage of time, perhaps treat it as if being trapped is the first time it's had to experience the passage of time as a person would making it go alittle insane but also possible to communicate with even if it has trouble with tenses. (Also if you're planned this far ahead I assume you've got further on planned in which case it would probably be expected for it to drop obscene hints for something that is going to happen later but don't make sense at the time. Which might be a good or bad thing since I'd bet your group will look for double meanings everywhere.)


I like the "being trapped makes it possible to talk to but a bit crazy"--especially if that insanity manifests as being almost normal. It's crazy for it, which is sane for us. That explains why such an alien creature can be talked to (which is a result I want). One possibility is that it's partially merged/absorbed/learned from the people that trapped it in there (who also trapped their own souls as a consequence of the spell) and so it's become a hybrid being--neither true "demon" nor true mortal.

I don't really have things planned out too far in advance--the party has stated its desire to go deal with the army leader (who has the compulsion device and the stabilization device) and then go talk/negotiate with the "demon".



Out of curiosity what does this thing look like? Since that would effect how it could interact with the party.

That I'm not sure of. So far all that's canon is that the party saw part of the head of a HUGE (>100 ft tall), humanoid figure sticking up over a wall, shrouded by the heavy ward. But that could be an optical illusion caused by the distorted space and time between them and the "demon". I'm thinking something vaguely humanoid in silhouette but obviously alien--maybe a negative image that seems to flow backward as it moves (like the shadow-step-blink of an anime ninja, except in front rather than behind)? Or eyes made of galaxies, lights moving under the skin, which doesn't reflect light properly or consistently...things like that. Or inconsistent shape, as if it's only sort of pretending to wear a human-shaped suit but is...leaking. Emphasizing the alien nature of this being.

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-16, 08:42 PM
This creature sounds a bit like the Anzillu "old gods" from my Greco-Sumerian setting. They were from "before" time and place and objective causality had any real meaning -- "reality" manifested instantly and limitlessly to their thoughts and feelings, eternity and infinity in every mote. There was no want. Then it all "collapsed" into reality as we'd recognize it. They were all fixated, without quite knowing it, on the impossible, on the return of reality to unreality. so they all manifested some form of dangerous monomania -- well, dangerous to any mortal being that interacted with them.

Maybe your entity is like that, frustrated at a world that keeps pushing back with limits and rules and linear time and space...

So, is this entity from somewhere it can go back to? Can it be exiled or released to a place more suited to it? Is there a realm with different causality or acausality?

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-16, 08:54 PM
Maybe your entity is like that, frustrated at a world that keeps pushing back with limits and rules and linear time and space...

So, is this entity from somewhere it can go back to? Can it be exiled or released to a place more suited to it? Is there a realm with different causality or acausality?

There are two places that might work. Easiest is the Abyss, the non-space it was originally banished to at the dawn of creation. That's least satisfying, because it's not really acausal. It's just... empty (of matter and of rules) except for the realms of the upstart demons that claimed it after the old demons (like this one left/were destroyed/accepted reconciliation with the universe). But banishing it back there is well within the party's grasp, at least if it cooperates.

Harder, but more to what I imagine it would like, is the Great Beyond, a real beyond/between reality where matter gives way to thought and to dreams. It's not the only strange being out there. Getting it there would be hard, as that's forbidden by most of the great powers of the universe (who are afraid of things leaking in from Beyond). Only known way is to use an artifact and someone's life to cut a hole in reality, and that's dangerous to everything around.

Both have interesting consequences for the world--one upsets the balance of power among the demon princes, the other risks drawing the attention of greater powers, some of which find the whole of creation distasteful.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-16, 09:05 PM
I guess another option would be for it to be reconciled with the universe--for the universe to accept a bit of non-linear causality (maybe in the form of prophecy, something that's been lacking) and by doing so "absorb" the demon's animating concept into itself and converting the demon into a more normal creature.

NichG
2018-12-16, 09:34 PM
I think something truly a acausal might be very focused on state rather than process - 'I am, that is good' sorts of thoughts. Trying to connect things via conditions e.g. in negotiation might be hard to make stick. Rather than saying 'if I do this for you, then you do this for me' one would have to say 'imagine being such that I have done this for you and you have done this for me'. On the other hand, it might have what one would call superstitious where coincidental patterns of co-occurrence are seen by it as meaningful.

Quertus
2018-12-16, 10:59 PM
But what if, for it, causality is normal--it thinks that our linear concept is the one that's broken?

The world of the PCs is broken - but not without hope. It wanted to come to this world, so the control device was made, and the cultists summoned it.

It wanted to understand the world better, be able to interact with it more, so the cultists bound it, merging their souls with its.

It wanted to meet the one beacon of nonlinear light in the world, and so the PCs came to talk with it.

Yes, the PCs are the beautiful exception to the messed up world.

Their parents exist to create them. Items exist in shops because the PCs search for them. Etc etc. EDIT: cause and effect are, for them, merely an illusion.

Now, where it goes from there can vary.

Perhaps it wants to free the PCs from the world, take them to a better place.

Perhaps it expects that the PCs will want to make their world a better place, and is willing to guide them.

Perhaps it gives the PCs the opportunity to leverage their "mixed heritage" / evolutionary abilities / whatever. (Fun opportunity for custom feats, spells, and prestige classes)

EDIT: perhaps it wanted to help free the PCs to see past the illusion of causality.

Or, perhaps, meeting them was the extent of its purpose, and, now, it just wants to go home. For which, perhaps a) the PCs* need merely break the 4th wall, or b) the PCs need merely "kill" it, removing its "Astral Projection"-style connection to this world.

EDIT: alternately, the PCs aren't the only beacon of nonlinear light in the world, and it wants the PCs to "help" nourish the other light(s).

* Or, I suppose, the players / GM could "break the 4th wall", and remove it simply by removing its figure from the board...

Frozen_Feet
2018-12-17, 02:43 AM
It wants a treasure from a long-gone sunken city, a jetpack and icecream from a city that does not exist yet, it was to meet a character's parents when they were young, and it wants another to kill their grandfather, because it has not met the grandfather and that makes him bloody annoying.

It wants these things now. It does not understand why they'd be impossible.

For a more classic case of acausality, the being could be acting on a self-fullfilling prophecy. F. Ex. it wants a thing because it perceives itself having the thing in the future, and it has the thing in the future in because it wanted it because it perceived itself as having the thing in the future (on and on it goes).

For direct anti-causality, all its wants are informed by things that haven't happened yet and won't happen if it gets its way. F. Ex. It wants someone killed, because a decade from now, someone will kill a puppy. The more far-flying, outlandish and nitpicky requests become, the clearer it becomes that the entity is not making forward-facing predictions based on known events, it is basing its decisions on information acquired from (potentially hypothetical and imaginary) future timeline with little idea of the past. Double points if it starts rewarding or hating characters based on things they have not yet done while seemingly forgetting all about requests it actually made.

Quertus
2018-12-17, 10:31 AM
Given the forum, I'm loving the idea that linear causality was just a rule that the gods implemented to prevent the snarl.

PastorofMuppets
2018-12-17, 10:39 AM
It could want pretty much anything, maybe even demand the party helps some other group to create the ritual trapping it in the first place. The whole “trap” might actually be it tricking this reality into creating a bridge or lens it can use to obs eve us in a way that it can better understand and manipulate the world through.

If uninterrupted it eventually creates a cult that casts the ritual that’s binds it in place allowing it to create the cult and so on, repeating inifinitly. If causality is a toy to this creature why not? The party’s quest could be figuring out how to stop a ritual from taking place like 100 years in the future(kill any long life cult members now, maybe eliminate the grandparent of a normal lifespan member or two).

Maybe it demands that they give it ownership of the color twelve. When it doesn’t really get how our reality works anything could be possible and things don’t actually have to make sense if the reasons come from understanding a different dimension.

Xuc Xac
2018-12-17, 11:07 AM
When the PCs approach and try to say anything, the acausal entity says "Your task is complete. Thank you for closing the loop." Then it is released from its prison. It appears in the form of the first quest giver they met back at level one. It's the innkeeper who hired them a few copper pieces to kill the rats in his cellar. He holds a dead rat, drops it at his feet, and vanishes.

Much later, maybe years later, the PCs find a book describing the ritual that trapped the acausal being and how it can be undone by killing a bunch of rats followed by several other actions that the PCs performed in later adventures. The acausal being arranged for the PCs to set it free after it got out (because it's acausal and doesn't have to make those arrangements in advance).

Max_Killjoy
2018-12-17, 11:09 AM
When the PCs approach and try to say anything, the acausal entity says "Your task is complete. Thank you for closing the loop." Then it is released from its prison. It appears in the form of the first quest giver they met back at level one. It's the innkeeper who hired them a few copper pieces to kill the rats in his cellar. He holds a dead rat, drops it at his feet, and vanishes.

Much later, maybe years later, the PCs find a book describing the ritual that trapped the acausal being and how it can be undone by killing a bunch of rats followed by several other actions that the PCs performed in later adventures. The acausal being arranged for the PCs to set it free after it got out (because it's acausal and doesn't have to make those arrangements in advance).

That's actually pretty cool.

Particle_Man
2018-12-18, 01:17 AM
Since it is not malicious, I would think it is less a Demon and more a Great Old One, but that is mere flavour.

You could go full-on David Lynch - have players swap character sheets with the NPC (with nothing listed except "Acausal entity") when talking to it - and then have them swap character sheets with each other when talking to it or each other in its presence. See if the players can work out an order of conversation with it that will allow them to leave the conversation with their own character! And the entity might gain twisted versions of the goals, etc., of any PC it has traded with.

PhoenixPhyre
2018-12-18, 07:31 AM
Since it is not malicious, I would think it is less a Demon and more a Great Old One, but that is mere flavour.


That's actually an important thing. One of the big changes I made in my setting is that fixed alignments don't exist. Even for extraplanar creatures. Descriptors like "demon", "angel", "devil" are mortal-centric words that denote the role of the creature on the mortal plane. A lot of this is tinged with superstition.

Angels are creatures of duty by choice. They are empowered by serving in (basically) an army that protects reality from threats foreign (from the Great Beyond) and domestic (uprisings in the elemental planes, particularly uppity demons or mortals, etc). They're the cosmic police. They don't answer to the gods at all and tend to be quite severe in dealing with mortals.

Devils are the gods' messengers (in which case they're clothed in appropriate bodies rather than the stereotypical ones--people mistake devils for angels all the time). They also can be summoned in exchange for some soul energy, which is when they take the more traditional "fiendish" bodies. That's not their true form, merely a wrapper.

Demons are exiles. Those creatures that damage the world merely by existing in it, either due to their nature (conceptual demons like the one in question) or because they feed on souls (which the world is made of).

Great Old Ones are any of the spooky-scary-weird beings that exist. It's a category that overlaps with the other three and includes other things--one of the major GOO patrons is Leviathan, a single-mind-in-many-bodies deep sea creature that is the repository of the world's memory as it endlessly sings to itself. As well as the creatures of the Great Beyond.



You could go full-on David Lynch - have players swap character sheets with the NPC (with nothing listed except "Acausal entity") when talking to it - and then have them swap character sheets with each other when talking to it or each other in its presence. See if the players can work out an order of conversation with it that will allow them to leave the conversation with their own character! And the entity might gain twisted versions of the goals, etc., of any PC it has traded with.

This is a good idea, but it wouldn't work due to the nature of the group. This is for an after-school club and so we only get short sessions with teenagers. Going too cerebral is a mistake :smallwink:

------------------

My current idea is something like this:

The "demon" is trapped in a web made of the memories and lives of the people who sacrificed themselves to make the trap. It has to experience all these lives (in parallel, because it's acausal) from beginning to end, over and over. Since the world is made of soul-stuff, this traps it into linearity. It could break free, but only at the cost of fragmenting itself. The goad the army used to push it on was similar, just less voluntary--sacrifice a person and blast the "demon" with the memories and life of the person. Since this is unpleasant, it moves away from this nudge.

As a result of this constant deluge of linearity and experience, the demon is changing. As if it's a chrysalis, waiting to be reborn. What will come of the chrysalis? That depends on how the party interacts with it. I'm thinking that as they cross over into the region it can influence, the demon will reach out and make them interact with historical scenes. Times the demon has been summoned before. It'll let them make choices that affect the future (which could have interesting results). It will also judge them (based on its own weird standards). Depending on how they act, it may let them go deal with the real threat (the army that trapped it there which is trying to use the demon as a vehicle for world domination by riding it to key times/places) or may interact with them directly.

It certainly wants to be free, but the question will be what kind of being emerges from that cocoon. Beautiful and benevolent? Bitter, filled with hatred toward mortals? Uncaring and aloof?

Zhorn
2018-12-19, 11:46 PM
Ooooooh! This sounds like a fun thing to work with.

For the types of quest interactions with the party, I'd image events playing out like that Doctor Who episode "The Doctor's Wife", every now and it just spouts out a line or comment that seems like utter nonsense, but a few sessions later was actually the answer to a riddle or puzzle, or is a key piece of information to an even the players haven't even come across yet. Or it plans out things like Prismo from Adventure Time (episode "Dream Trap" for example). Mix in some referencing comments to events earlier in the campaign so the players get a subtle hint that this being isn't just seeing the 'current' time.

As for what the entity wants... Something new. It wants to witness something entirely new to its conceptual understanding of reality. Not caused by causality, but a true paradox in events, where something exists that shouldn't, and can't be traced back to any defining event that set it in motion. Maybe the players never encounter this thing, and it never exists, but to a being that sees the whole of time in an interconnecting thread of causality, it is the only thing worth desiring.

Kaptin Keen
2018-12-20, 02:22 AM
Hm ... how about ...

It's only trapped because it wants to be free. See? It can't escape, because it wants to, and that makes the causality linear, and we can't have that. Maybe it could - but it is unwilling to submit to such low and unworthy tactics.

So what it wants is for the players to give it a reason to remain trapped. So that it can randomly disregard that reason, and free itself. A loophole.

That ... just moves the problem: What does it want?

I dunno, maybe it enjoys a piece of art painted by a raving lunatic - then you destroy the painting, only to trap it at the very last instance of it's existance, in the same bubble. Propably too convoluted, too hard to convey as a solution.

Maybe a loophole within a loophole: Maybe you can just reason it out? So, you can't escape because that would be linear - but doesn't that mean that you now want to remain trapped? And then, that's linear, and the only way to break that is to escape!

Very convoluted. Good luck =)

Seto
2018-12-21, 01:59 PM
It wants wherefore to desire above from beyond, in order to.

In less alien terms, I agree with the people who think that "wanting" is outside its realm. Would make him too relatable. If you're married to the idea, inverted causality is easy and we CAN wrap our heads around it. It wants to shape our own reality into something that he understands better. It wants dogs to breed cats, fires to extinguish water, it wants rocks to heat the Sun, and the living to be born from the grave. Our brains tend to be creeped out by things that violate the natural order, and causality is a pillar of it. You can adjust the phenomena to make them more or less disturbing, from standard heroic fantasy apocalypse to full on horror.