There’s a topic I’ve been itching to talk about. I looked around in the usual hiding places of internet ttrpg nerds and honestly couldn’t find anything that seemed to hit on exactly the topic I wanted to explore. So fuck it. Today it’s my turn to bring discussion to the table. 

WORDY BACKGROUND AHEAD. SKIP TO NEXT HEADING FOR JUICY STUFF

As much as I love Brandon Sanderson and all of his wonderful storytelling, I have to start today by picking on him. Little fantasy series called The Stormlight Archive, maybe you’ve heard of it. Regular people live in a world and for two books there’s little hints here and momentary dips there into this mysterious parallel dimension called “THE COGNITIVE REALM”. Which is like… where concepts live or some shit. 

Ooooh! Cognitive realm! So meta! I wonder what crazy bananas weird otherworldly things we’ll find there! 

Well. Mild spoilers ahead for the series (up to Oathbringer): uhhh, the cognitive realm is filled with… animals… and people… and cities… and they look different sure… but like

Where’s the magic? Where’s the weirdness? It’s just the normal world with a different texture pack. 

I found this a little disappointing. I was hoping for something much more ethereal, more psychedelic, more irregular and unnatural. And the thoughts began to churn.

Fast forward some time and I’m writing a dungeon for my Dnd campaign. It’s an abandoned tomb now inhabited by a demon. My players have had some limited interactions with demons by this point, and one player (a first time dnd player) asks “hey so in this world would our characters understand demons to be like literal physical guys with horns, or are they more metaphysical, like sort of conceptual type entities?” First of all, great question. I made up some bs on the spot to the tune of “both, the more powerful the demon the more conceptual and less physical they are” but this question struck a gong somewhere deep in my brain.

What would it look like for the party to do battle against a metaphysical demon?

I thought about it… and it’s kind of an annoying question. I love the idea, but how the fuck would you actually run that? If the PCs also get all metaphysicalified, what are their stats? How do they interact with stuff? Do we go full improv storytelling mode? Will that kind of thing work with my group? I imagine this is sort of the same problem Sanderson had when faced with the task of writing about a metaphysical place that relatable characters needed to travel through and have experiences in. 

I feel like I’m throwing words made of paint at a hydrophobic wall and hoping they’ll stick somehow. There’s a thing I’m trying to describe that feels ineffable. To some degree I have to hope you can reach into your own experience and bridge the gap, but let me try one more time.

You see if you take away the material world, the physicality of it all or at least the rules by which that physicality more or less abides, then all the lines defining things we like to talk about get blurred and it feels impossible to have a story that anyone else can appreciate. This is why you may have a tendency to groan and lose interest completely when your buddy tries to tell you about that insane dream they had last night. It’s just gobbledy goop, who cares?

If you do the opposite and bring the ineffable thing down to earth so the reader can hold it in their minds eye themselves, then it ceases to be anything incredible at all. Think about H.P Lovecraft. The idea of cosmic horror. A man encounters something he shouldn’t. Receives knowledge that he shouldn’t have, and is driven mad. Catches a glimpse of a creature beyond reckoning and loses his mind in a moment. Well that’s an awesome concept, but what’s this creature look like huh? What’s this knowledge that drove him mad? If you show these things to the audience, then unless you have some pocketful of genuine eldritch horror, they’re going to look at it and go “well, I mean yea that’s weird and spooky but like… I’m still sitting here totally sane, a little entertained, but still sane” and you’ve proved that the character who was driven mad was totally overreacting. Think about lovecraftian monsters. Cthulu is just a big dude with tentacle face. The bigger scarier ones appear as, oh lemme guess, an undulating mass of eyes and tentacles? Yea okay, big whoop. Why is everyone driven mad at the sight of them? What’s this forbidden knowledge, is it that we are tiny insignificant beings in an incomprehensibly vast universe and nothing we do has any notable consequence? Or something like that? That we’re like insects compared to the sophistication of eldritch beings? Okay cool but like, these are not new ideas. I’m still gonna go to work tomorrow. Why are you freaking out dude?

You can’t talk about the actual thing itself because in doing so you belittle it to what can fit in and be expressed by your own limited mind. Now I’m not trying to write lovecraftian horror, but the idea is similar. I want characters to encounter something totally beyond and other that shakes and rattles normalcy. But if I define it at all it immediately becomes something they can analyse, assess and normalize. 

So anyway, I chickened out and wrote a dungeon where the demon is an angry guy with horns. It was fun enough.

We can do better though. Let’s fix it.

Before we get freaky with it though, lemme walk back from all that implied big game I’ve been talking. I do not have the answer to this problem. I have some ideas I’m excited about, that’s all. Brandon Sanderson and H.P. Lovecraft are both awesome writers and I’m some guy on a laptop working in a totally different medium and with much less skill. We’re gonna take a whack at it anyway though, and honestly my hope is that someone with better or even just different ideas will read this and enlighten me.

GETTING FREAKY WITH IT

In order to write anything we must have inspiration from something that’s actually been experienced, even if that experience is a dream or a thought we had. So I’m gonna use something that I think gets pretty close to the thing itself.

Without further ado, my take on how to write a metaphysical demon into a ttrpg using psychedelic drug trips as inspiration.

Lets pull the relevant stuff from real life experience and convert it into useful content.

New things appear that one couldn’t see before. They blend and overlay onto what was there before: normal reality. It is as though an extra sense is granted but is sharing the bandwidth of your normal vision.

• The ceiling is still the ceiling. The wall is still the wall, but put extra textures and forms on it that are evocative and suggestive. The ceiling is made of eyeballs and the wall is melting. If you stab the eyeballs, your sword just hits rock and nothing happens to the eyes. The ceiling is still the ceiling, you’re just seeing extra shit. You can be terrified and try to escape before the room melts… but the walls are still normal walls. It’s not actually melting in any way that’s going to affect you.

• We should be careful here not to waste the player’s time. It’s okay to have visual stuff fucking with them to communicate a vibe, but its not okay to spend a bunch of time trolling them for no reason. When narrating these parts we should be succinct, and spend no extra time beating around the bush. There’s no roll for stabbing illusory eyeballs. You just hit it and nothing happens. It’s weird shit and we can move on.

Conflation of the metaphorical with the literal. THIS ONE is gonna be fun.

• Before a session where an encounter like this might occur, we should prepare a list of metaphorical truths that describe something general about the party or a PC or the setting. Something that isn’t super liable to change drastically from unexpected player decisions in the next session or two. Pull from their backstories, pull from their goals as a party, pull from the problems of the world that they’re aware of, etc. We’re looking for something metaphorical that can be taken literally and made interesting but not completely disruptive.

• Say the party are cleansing this tomb of demonic presence on behalf of the church. It was officially sanctioned, they received blessings before departing, the whole nine yards. You might say they are the hands of the church in this instance. Okay. The PC’s notice, after some time spent tiptoeing into the dungeon, and without much dysphoria, that they have become literal giant hands. Sensory is as normal, but speech is now impossible, and their strength scores are now boosted. Maybe they can’t really hold their normal weapons and items, but they can grab really big stuff now, and maybe they’re extra ethereal and sort of float around rather than having to crawl on fingertips. This condition can be easily reversed by simply acting against the interest of the church. Using unnecessary brutality or not showing mercy, or rather showing mercy where the church is very clearly bent on annihilation. 

Feeling of being in a new space

• The entrance they just passed through vanishes. It melts, or is whisked off into the void. Be sure to introduce something to replace it relatively quickly so the group doesn’t feel trapped without warning.

• Mess with the horizon and the background. While they’re focused on a point right in front of them, tell them about the sound of birds chirping in the distance.. They notice their torches aren’t really necessary anymore. The ground becomes soft and wet. Slowly introduce elements of a totally different scenery. They’re in a forest now. That passage on the side of the room is still there, it’s just a well trodden trail through the wood now.

Entanglement. Things that don’t normally interact or relate are now adjacent and communicating

• Mess with their character sheets a little. Your AC is now equal to your Charisma score. Your max HP sinks a little if you don’t tell the demon an interesting secret every couple minutes.

• That masterwork sword you saw in the royal armory last week is floating in your eyeball. Pull it out and wield it! It works just as normal, except that it’s shaped like, acts like, and legitimately just is a 30 year old box turtle named sampson. Yep. 2d10 piercing damage. Sampson the turtle. Careful though, he bites.

Introspection and trauma. The bad trip. Deep aspects of the subject’s psychology are brought out to the forefront of perception and the subject is forced to deal with them.

• I think we should do this literally. Character is on a vengeance quest to avenge parents? Well now your dead parents are here and scolding you. Maybe its a heated debate about your current course in life, or actually maybe its just traumatic memories of them being actually kinda shitty parents. Dads beating you with a belt and you’re taking damage. What are you gonna kill him again?

• Bring out their worst fears (I always have my players list at least one great fear when they roll up a character) and put them in the dungeon. Your favorite pet from childhood is caught in that terrible fire and you can see it about to burn to death five stories below you. Run. You won’t get there in time, and your friends will suffer without you.

Entities. Theres fucking aliens in there bro. Real world portal to the spirit realm my dude. 

• Doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. Voices of your ancestors guide you on a good perception or intuition check. Voice of the demon deceives you on a bad one.

• Open a door and find yourself on top of a giant wooden table surrounded by life size figurines. Several enormous giants hold dice in their hands and look at you with faces of confusion and maybe horror. Shut the door SHUT THE DOOR THAT WAS THE FOURTH WALL WHAT THE FUCK

Death. Ego dissolution. Ultimate union with all that exists.

• Depending on the situation we might use this as a cheat death shortcut. When PCs drop to zero hitpoints in this area instead of starting the normal death process they go straight to the full death narration. Character is dead. Take them through a little journey of experiencing connection to all the people they’ve gotten to know over the course of the game, back to all the places and have them sense what’s currently going on there as their awareness is expanded and dissolved and mixed with all things. Maybe then take it up a level and bring them up to speed on the current thoughts of the deities that run whatever world you’re in, as their consciousness is melded with higher ones. Give them a final little spin of peace and release, and then bring that shit crashing back down and have their character wake up completely. All these psychedelic effects are gone and their character is back in base reality. They died and came back. If we’re feeling spicy we might have them rip their character sheet up when the scene starts and then at the end have them try to rewrite it from memory, as they’re more or less re-born. Maybe keep a picture of the original for reference, and if they rewrite all their stats correctly they get a small bonus, +1 to a stat of their choice or something. Correct mistakes at the end.
  
  

Let’s get specific. I want the demon in the tomb my players explore to be a high ranking servant of demogorgon. He’s got that whole two heads thing going on. Okay sick lets lean into that, this is gonna be a demon of duality, separation, and confusion. The walls aren’t melting, they’re mirrors… except if you move slow enough you can grab your reflections hand through the surface and swap places. Or maybe the reflections are slightly different in uncomfortable ways. Your reflection has eyes that flicker and burn, it slits its own throat and you start to take damage.

Maybe any time the party makes a decision an alternate version of the party splits off and occupies the space next to them, chooses an opposite or contrary option and argues with the original party for a moment before dispersing. This keeps happening until the dungeon is just flooded with copies and it’s impossible to move around unless something is done about the alternate versions. They can be dispersed if the party convinces all their versions to agree on one decision. This is DM fiat entirely, and that’s okay for just one little element. Wait til the players think of something satisfying, but don’t wait too long. One of the other versions of the party figures the same thing out, but whoever convinces everyone gets to be the real party at the end (and whatever different decision they had made becomes canon).

Anyway the point isn’t that we need all these strategies, these are just some possible tools I came up with for getting the idea across that you’re interacting with something that isn’t just a physical body, it is a phenomenon distributed across an area or experience. It is a non-localized enemy.

NOW KILL THE BASTARD

So we’ve got an attempt at writing a non localized enemy. A demon of the mind. A metaphysical enemy. So uh. How we gon kill the bastard? 

Well I got a couple ideas.

-Destructive interference. The Party needs to figure out what this thing is doing to them or the place they’re in and do the opposite in a way that is infectious. Maybe this is something that’s just common knowledge about banishing demons in this world, that way you don’t have to hope and pray the party just magically figures it out.

So let’s continue with the example of my little demon of duality and division and confusion. The walls are mirrors and in them you are reflected demonically. We can pull a naruto waterfall scene here, and the way you defeat the other version of yourself is with open arms. You must assimilate. Look into your own terrible eyes and forgive the evil spirit inside. Call it your brother and tell it to come home. Push through the glass and hug that sobbing wretch until it melts and absorbs into you. All the madness fades from the cave and it slowly returns to a normal deep dark dungeon. Now you have a demon inside you that’s halfway under control. Go to the temple to get him exorcised, or keep him and see if you can make something positive out of it (you can’t, it’s a demon)

-Accept the gambit. Adopt a mentality of radical acceptance. Play right along with the new reality as the demon has twisted it and defeat him in his own territory. So you’ve been turned into giant hands? Excellent, all the better to throttle a deserving neck with. You’re now faced with all the terrors of your childhood, yes well what a great opportunity to learn and grow from them. If the demon’s tricks make you stronger, has he not lost?

Well this turned into a much longer thing than anticipated, so I’ll save the second source of inspiration for next post: ZEITGEISTS!

But keep in mind that I haven’t tested any of these ideas. 

This is 100% shitposting.

Mostly I’m just frustrated cuz I couldn’t find anyone in my brief internet investigations who seemed to be talking about this same thing.

Lmk if I didn’t look hard enough.