The Blood War

I'm a Gamer, as anybody who knows me well can tell you. I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons since I was ten years old. I started playing it, with a group of kids in the basement of the Lutheran church my Mom and I attended. The Cosmology, Gods and other planes of existence always fascinated me. The Forgotten Realms was far and away my favorite world, followed closely by the Planescape setting...which was actually many worlds. Here's flavor text from my .pdf of the (Third Edition) Manual of The Planes:

Infinite Layers Of The Abyss

It is an infinity of clutching horror.

It is home to demons.

It is where morality crumbles and ethics perish.

Nine Hells of Baator

It is Hell, where sympathy withers and malice blooms.

It is home to devils.

It is the plane where the rule of law reveals evil’s heart.

What does this have to do with anything? Funny you should ask! My games (for I have most often been the Dungeon Master/Game Master/Storyteller and I've both played and run every edition of D&D up to Fourth, many other D20 System variations, BattleTech and MechWarrior, Rifts, the Robotech Roleplaying Game. And the various White Wolf systems...and every last one has had at least some degree of social commentary and such woven in. Sometimes, Gaming informs and affects other aspects of my life as well. One learns a lot of skills and stuff playing tabletop RPG's and for a good Storyteller, research is life. For a good player, some acting skill helps.

I liked the Lower Planes as a PlaneScape DM, but I was also a player. One of my favorite characters of all time was this Lawful Neutral female Tiefling Mage (later Wizard, eventually 9^th Level, at that. Tieflings are basically part Fiend and part Human. She got carried over into Third Edition and picked up 3 levels in Monk) named Desolation (She picked up the name because I couldn't think of a name and was watching the new Special Edition of Star Wars during character creation. C3P0's line of “What a desolate place this is” while looking over the desert was what broke my mental block.) As a character, she was an employee in and eventually the owner of a Magic shop in the City of Dis (Second of the Nine Hells) that supplied spell components to important Devils who were Generals in the Blood War, and also, sometimes an agent of said Devils in said War. Not too long after Third Edition came out in 2000 and this character had picked up a few levels in Monk...I got with my ex-wife and I basically didn't game very much for a year or so. As it turned out, Desolation's career as my character technically ended here. My gaming group drifted apart while I was married.

Now, here's where Gaming informs life: I've told this story to only a few people down through the years and everybody I've told it to...especially anybody who knows my ex-wife...thinks it's hilarious. I rolled a “1” on picking partners and my ex-wife and I lasted about six months before we split up. It would take almost another year to get divorced.

My ex-wife basically acted completely different before we got married, from how she acted after we got married and she thought she had the claws sunk in deep enough. My ex-wife is a Pentecostal, and while I knew this going in, she got a lot weirder after we got married, the religious woo woo bullshit got pretty bad, in point of fact. Also, she didn't like to keep up household responsibilities or work, and she loved to spend money. I had and still have little tolerance for bullshit and my family has even less. Still, she pretty much wiped out my savings and even left me a little bit in debt. So we had issues to try and deal with in settling things up. It never failed, she'd tell me “Hey, come over and we'll work out the bills for the month” and we'd end up arguing or having sex and nothing would get done. She lived with her Mom at the time, so mostly this was while her Mom was at work.

Then, I slept with somebody she Really didn't approve of, and things got weird and I got tired of it. She kept bugging me to come to her church for prayer and finally, I just Snapped. I don't even remember what we were arguing about, but I'd had it. I knew...I Knew it was wrong, but like a Republican voter (which I still was at the time) I just held my nose and did it anyway:

Right at the kitchen table, I dropped into character as Desolation; Accent, feminine voice, linguistic tics, mannerisms and everything...and instantly, seemlessly shifted topics to telling her she should sell her soul to Dispater the Arch-Duke. The response? First, confusion and then a Holy-Roller flip-out of epic proportions, through which I kept my game face on right through getting a glass of ice water thrown in my face, until my ex-wife literally ran out the door and briskly walked down the street and around the corner to her church, the Huron Street Tabernacle (It was a Wednesday night and there was something going on) my character's mad laughter followed her out the door. With her gone, I literally put my head down on the table and took a nap. The whole ordeal was exhausting, as I'd blown off a lot of steam and put a lot of emotion into it all.

A couple hours later, my ex came back. She woke me up, I did a pretty convincing job of acting like nothing happened and I had no idea what she was talking about.

My ex-wife hardly ever made another rational decision or fought any legal procedures throughout the remaining four months or so of the divorce process. She never got over the incident, and remains convinced to this day, that she witnessed an actual Demonic possession. The state of the Church being what it is...her church people believe so too.

How does this relate to current events? Think about this: Donald Trump pulled the same long con on his voters and (apparently, so far) on the alt-right that my ex-wife did on me...except that he's pivoted hard back to the Establishment (or at least the 1990's and Bush-era versions of it) in who he has surrounded himself with. We don't have some alt-right nut nobody's ever heard of being suggested for Secretary of State...we have Newt Gingrich. Trump is going back on his campaign promises one by one, stuff is dropping off his website like Viagra pills from Newt's spilled pill bottle. He's scrubbed his Twitter account. Not that any of that will help any, those of us who will fight against him and anything he wants to do were there for the whole thing and we will not forget. He has one other problem that's purely self-inflicted:

Alignment-wise, his cronies and the Republican establishment of those eras is Lawful Evil. Devils, pure and simple.

The alt-right is Chaotic Evil, and revels in being so. Demonic, and I'm pretty sure they would enjoy the label.

The Blood War:

The word “war” is too simple to describe a conflict that has

raged for millennia, ravaging the planes between the Abyss and

the Nine Hells. The brutal quest for annihilation is a war of

fiend against fiend. Split along ideological lines, it’s demon

against devil—and given the treachery of both sides, demon against-

demon and devil-against-devil battles sometimes

happen. But the Blood War eventually touches every creature

on the Outer Planes, one way or another.

The origins of the war are lost to time. Now, it’s all about

genocide. As long as there are fiends, they’ll fight each other in

a contest in which no quarter is given or asked. On those

planes and layers most directly affected, great siege engines

rumble across the battle-plains like mobile mountains,

attended by a surging sea of fiends and mercenaries. When

two armies clash under hellish suns, the very landscape is split

with the terrible energies of war unleashed.

Like my ex-wife, Trump (whether he really believes it or not) associates with a lot of crazy people and thus has drawn a lot of crazy people to him. We're talking people who believe all type of silly woo woo bullshit including religious nuts like my ex-wife, not to mention the alt-right and other racists and Islamophobes. These are people whose crackpot social theories literally make no sense for the actual modern world in which we all live. The one alt-right guy that I used to know, and know well (he's an old boss of mine, and my own experiences with my ex-wife are how I came to be employed by him) while never overtly racist, he thought that the United States of America should have a king. Think about that for a second. These people have beliefs that make them stupid.

Trump's base is going to turn on him, the conflict will be terrible. It may lead to the same revolts I worried about if Hillary would have won. But, that's when the rest of us...if we get to work, keep at it and stay organized, can strike to defeat both sides at the ballot box and elsewhere if need be.

We know Trump can be baited and manipulated, let's see if Mike Pence believes in Demonic Possession.

Together, We Rise.