By James Gildard

One can get a decent idea of a zeitgeist by thinking of its opposite in comparison with ourselves. We are beings that identify as individual. I am one person, a single agent with a unified will (most of the time, when I’m not feeling indecisive or conflicted), yet I am made up of many trillions of individual living things with lives of their own. I am the greater being made up of the bodies and energies of many small ones. What would it be like then to imagine a being made up of many humans? Well we actually conduct this experiment all the time. A nation is one of these things. So is the fan base for a sports team, or for a tv show. A political party is like this, a school of philosophical thought, or a religion. Well that’s all fun to think about, but there’s a big problem with all that, at least within the context of importing into the TTRPG world. None of those examples possess a singular unifying identity, an indivisible agentic force. They’re made up of a bunch of little agents – us – and we all disagree with each other about at least some things. In other words it is impossible to sus out the will of the higher being. This isn’t necessarily a flaw in the logic. I’m certain none of my blood cells have any idea what I’m thinking about at any given moment and couldn’t really prove, if they needed to, that any unifying consciousness existed in and of their parts. 

With this thought experiment however, what I’m more interested in than practical coherence is usefulness to me as a GM. I can’t write an enemy into a campaign that has no centralized identity… or… can I?

Let’s take a different tack then. Fundamentally what we’re talking about is the sentience of a thought. That’s what all of those examples are in their most basic form, systems of thoughts and ideas shared by large groups of people. So picture the moment when a thought comes to you. You have some brilliant idea. Where was that idea 5 seconds prior? Where did it come from? Did you… generate it yourself? If so, then how? You’ll have to excuse a little venture into philosophy bro-ism here but take me seriously for a second: by what method was this ‘thought’ thing created? Did you use psychic hands to sculpt it from the ether of the mind? I don’t think so. If you created the thought on your own, then you must have first thought to begin such a task… so where did that thought come from, and isn’t it essentially the same as the original thought? Maybe you’d suggest you created it haphazardly, as a sausage churned out from a meat grinder. If this were the case though I think a lot more unintelligible mental noise would be noted than actual thoughts, but what we find (however chaotic our minds may be) is quite the opposite. I think instead the origin of a thought is exactly as our language has adapted to call it: the thought came to you. From somewhere else. It is an alien. You – as a being capable of hosting thought – are an antenna. These thoughts are not native to our minds, instead we exist in a field of possible thoughts, just as a magnet in an electric potential field. You attracted a thought, it arrived in your head, and now you think it’s so cute and cuddly and you’re obsessed with it aren’t you? Now it makes sense why your dog sometimes looks like he’s almost having a thought. Compared to people, he’s got weak signal. His mind doesn’t protrude into the potential thought field very far. His antenna is short. Mfer is buffering. Well alright as convincing as I can be surely this analogy isn’t TRULY the way the world works, but who cares? It sounds dope and this is fantasy worldbuilding anyway. Strap in and let’s run with it. 

It is an Alien. It’s alive, at least in part. At least in some sense. In my current gameworld I’m running with the metaphysics that material existence is the spotlight of the universe where all the fun is, and many things vie for influence over it or manifestation into it. An idea cannot be made literally physical, but it can invade the minds of physical agents. It can spread itself and even reproduce. In fact, if we were to imagine these as living things, then we are forced to assume that a form of natural selection should apply to them. Maybe that’s not quite exactly right, I’m not ready to accept that ideas can only come from the successful reproduction of other ideas. That may make perfect sense, but I want to allow for the possibility of completely foreign and alien ideas barging into our minds unprompted. So maybe they reproduce somewhere else? Eh, I don’t think that’s worth getting into, it would be somewhere I don’t ever want to have to narrate my players going to. What brings us pretty much right back to square one is that the gatekeepers of the physical world (us thinking folk) act as filters for ideas. We allow only the fittest ideas to be uttered. The fittest for social conformity and safety. The fittest for humor. The point here isn’t that the filter is functioning in the way we think. Because in attempts to filter for the wittiest thing to say, we often stumble and are awkward. The point is that we are filtering at all. Some thoughts are brought into the world and some aren’t. Some thoughts capture the minds of the masses, and others do not. Some thoughts live on for thousands of years, and others do not. Whether a thought is wise or good natured or sophisticated is in many cases completely irrelevant. I’m trying to illustrate that there is something approximating “survival of the fittest” which applies to ideas, and it does not necessarily have the well being of humanity as its end goal (because sometimes our worst and most destructive ideas catch on and spread like wildfire). Oooh that sounds sinister doesn’t it? Now we’re starting to approach the eldritch horror vibe I’ve been aiming at. 

So you get an idea in your head. It seems like a pretty good idea. Little do you know that this thing you’ve allowed into your skull has been meticulously bred to RULE and though you may find it charming, it will bring empires crashing down if you let it out. This is no conspiracy either, it is necessarily true. Every bad thing that has been done by the hand of humans was started by an idea, and many of them by an idea which originated from some unsuspecting bystander who’s been forgotten by history entirely. 

I guess now is as good a point as any to explain my objective here. I’m writing a dnd monster dude. I’m trying to start with a real world mystery, come up with a plausibke answer that yields spooky results, and stack some fantasy bullshit on top of it so that the final product is interesting to work into my games. Well we’ve pretty much got the first two parts down, now we need to plan for the third. 

The first tactic that comes to mind has to do with the order of events. Somewhere on Goblinpunch our lord and savior Mr Kemp himself has a great little rant about deciding certain things about our games after they’ve happened (edit: here it is). Sometimes it’s far more advantageous to us as storytellers to preserve the mystery by delaying information disclosure until it is most immediately relevant. Let the players discover the results when it counts. Whenever a roll is made for information to be disclosed, The player saves against a cursed sword controlling their mind, the party tries throwing a torch at the troll to see if this species is weak to fire, or decides to hide from it instead, etc. When we roll for these kinds of results right away it can cause players to have more information than their characters (metagaming ensues), makes us roll twice, and sometimes gives us results that don’t even end up getting used anyway. You can read more about it from the source, he does a better job explaining anyway.

So in this spirit I say that these idea viruses shouldn’t be something we run an encounter with whenever a PC gets a bright idea. That would be weird and difficult to narrate and probably not fun at all unless you come up with something really really clever, and then it’s probably only fun for the one player who gets to explore their character’s brain in a meat-action scene of some kind. 

No, instead let’s just use the ideas the players already have. Their character has an ambitious scheme, or a flagrant devotion, or some ideal they bring forth into the world in some way. The Paladin blesses her defeated foes and forgives them for however they may have wronged her, no matter how egregious the offense. Fantastic. Sit on it for a moment. Go home after the session and let that idea stew. Melt it into the bread of the world you’ve built. What are the fundamental assumptions being made? How do others react to this idea? Better, how could this idea have been twisted by flawed perception and imperfect communication and already unhealthy minds to create something terrible festering in the community? Forgiveness purifies, cleanses, and yields salvation, even to those already passed. The townsfolk are inspired after seeing the paladin work. Yeesss. Now tickle the players with it. Regurgitate a mutated clone of the player’s idea into the theater of the mind, and let the players observe it and… hopefully just kind of brush past it after a weird look or two. A villager is being brutalized by some thugs who finish up and have their bystander goons tap their head and say “I forgive you, all wrongs have been righted”. And they walk away with obviously clear consciences. PERFECT. It’s time to fan the flames. Let the word spread. Escalate. A cult forms. A revolution begins. A witch hunt erupts. The minds of the masses have been infected, and it’s the players’ fault. All sorts of depravity run rampant in town, and a town “Witness” opens up shop in the square. People come by to confess their horrifying crimes, the witness casually forgives them, and they go on about their day. Meanwhile rape murder and thievery have rapidly grown to destroy the village.