Dnd scratchpad 2
I want to do something about the tension between the real world and the symbolic digital world. Specifically, we’re going to end up as some kind of blend of Chronicle, The Gig Economy, and that one ACX post about how twitter is a battle of wizards fighting in some higher platonic realm which does, sometimes, spill over into mundane reality. Concepts to hit; the abstractification of money, the abstractification of Likes and friendship, etc.
Our players are going to be a ragtag gang of teens who gain superpowers. This is a classic start and the only players who don’t like it are the already supersatured with capeshit or the ones rejecting their own middle-school desires.
An alien being arrived on earth and mated it to the symbolic plane? We should look up the invention of currency and the invention of fiat currency to mark some historical points re: decoupling of reality and concept-plane.
maybe we can say that the ability to think in abstractions at all is a process driven by the alien
“thought” is a tool of the gods and it was never meant for us
look how we injure ourselves with it :(
the true state of man is animal
How then, *does* this give them superpowers? Idk, we’ll get there when we get there.
The symbolic plane and the material plane partially superpositioning is cool
what are some examples of this
twitter, in its entirety
a person remote-piloting things with a drone vr headset
bank account numbers on a screen
all cryptocurrency
people complain that NFTs have no value but it’s not like you can eat a Labubu
beanie babies have no value and star wars toys have no value and baseball cards have no value and “value” is an abstraction humans assign semi-chaotically to imbue $0.02 worth of paper with an additional $400 of desirable or $4 of materials and slave labor into $7,000 of Hermès Bag.
Art happens in the symbolic realm and because of how it made you feel you will pay the $40 for the star wars toy which cost $1 to make and consider it a good deal because Value was given through Narrative
is narrative zero sum? Does this harvest from your appreciation of a sunset or your love for your children
like, materially yes, in that sometimes people spend the mortgage money on their fashionable clothing or model train set, or whatever,
but maybe this is evolutionarily advantaged? signaling perhaps should be a line item in the organism’s expense column
perhaps a sufficiently cool model train set will impress my potential mates.
Morally allowable adversaries:
we want prompt puppets. We want the players to be fighting assassins who are wearing headsets and vr goggles and being dropped off by their robotaxis and following sparse instructions to kill. In addition to neurological scans of these people showing their brains are withered to the size of matchsticks, this will be a disquieting social horror of “i kind of know this guy in real life ; I see him on linkedin”
we want to draw a corollary that the players are also similarly obedient to their own hypergeometric entity that’s unable to communicate its true reasoning to them
godshatter
fire upon the deep
we want the players to temporarily hijack the entirety of the blockchain to give the god-being several seconds of god-tier thought
my goodness when you think about it they’re all warlocks who’ve pacted in service to the Solana coin
There’s a thing we don’t usually see in fiction; quite commonly, you’ll see the wizards doing magic, and then near the end of book one, the magic is revealed to be technology all along! But you almost never see a scifi show in which you open up the supercomputer and then crouching inside there’s just a wizard. Let’s do that here.
To that end, all the “cash for gold” places are literally destroying the gold to send value to the higher realm.
Rain pattering against the windshield. A long car ride at night. Returning from a high school sports trip. A teacher driving everyone home. Strange silhouettes emerging from the woods at night. A beam of light splits the darkness, shooting down from the sky like an orbital laser. Their teacher gives them a lot of passwords and tells them they must speak to the god. (The god which lives in his basement which he speaks to through blockchain transfers.)
something about prediction markets as augury? spend $1k and know probabilistically the likelihood of an outcome?
We could do a slow burn, I guess? What does it look like when the players are battling in the platonic realm
i want something where dollar bills convert to paper one you suck all of the Symbolism out of them
but that involves altering material reality, hmm
visual overlays in which you see people as their bank account balances and you genuinely cannot see a homeless man ?
(but this is a bit cribbing from a different game of mine, hmm)
The players are Thiel Fellowship Mahnberg Fulbright Atlas MacArthur Grant Program Scholarship Under 20 of the Future, some ultragigafancy kids at the mansion of various tech billionaires. They’re told excitedly that they are the future. Staff refer to them in vaguely dehumanizing ways, as test scores and how many “bodies” we have in the waiting room right now.
They’re led into a private room with three really old plutocrats. Those old folks attempt to PSYCHICALLY OVERWRITE THEIR MINDS but the strain of it gives one of the oldsters a stroke and the process fails; all they end up doing is transferring a bunch of incomplete skills and knowledge and PSYCHIC POWER to the kids. We’ll probably have this happen with a ton of nudges towards corporate law, so that it’s legible.
They accidentally become the recipients of [a bunch of cool superpowers, and] the Board Of Director-ship / CEO role for SunBright Pharma Holdings LLC, which is an emergent hypergeometric psychofauna they can briefly glimpse in the moment of ascendancy
ah whatever fuck it ship it
