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 9th 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.
