A question I anticipate coming up: Is there rational evidence for the Creator/Dark One/the Pattern? Ideas for handling this needed.
Evidence for the Dark One: the taint on Saidin, historical records of the Age of Legends (a lot has been lost, but there must be something, otherwise how would they even know stuff like who Lews Therin was?) Darkspawn like Trollocs and Myrdraal, and the spreading Blight. Possibly invoking the Dark One’s true name, but this could realistically just be a superstition people are too afraid to test. If I had that much evidence the Dark One existed, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to try it out.
Evidence for the Pattern: Balefire, the Horn of Valere and the various heroes tied to the wheel who it summons.
Evidence for the Creator: Stuffed if know. If I lived in the WOT-verse and knew about the Dark One and such, I’d suspect that he might have sort of antithesis who prevented the world from being completely fucked from the moment it came into existence, but if history is actually cyclic then there’s the alternative that there’s actually an infinite regression in which the Dark One has always been sealed up by people. Considering nobody in the entire series ever seems to doubt his existence, maybe he just straight up drops knowledge of his existence into people’s heads so you can’t not believe in him. This may be the least confusing way I can make sense of the degree of religious homogeneity in such an obviously supernatural setting.
This is the first thing that occurred to me as well, but would the characters know about it? Or does this game require a significant barrier between player knowledge and character knowledge?
Come to think of it, I suppose my Sedai would know, but you’re hardly supposed to be telling Novices about it.
That’s good. Wedrifid would have known too—given that he was curious, Cate Sedai was a specialist in arcane research and both were rather direct about seeking out and exploiting any novel sources of potential power.
Every tactic for farming SMOBs, as soon as they came out.
Automatic Ways navigation
optimisation of all forms of intercontinental travel.
Harnessing various previously unidentified features of the magical universe (ie. Bugs) for fun and profit. ie. I probably still have 10 characters with maxed out bank accounts and full stockpiles of weaponry.
Quite possibly the best scripting/mapping/targetting/automation code ever used by MUD players. The ability to write advanced regex was probably even more of a bonus to Wedrifid than Warder multibash, attack, heal and health and stamina regeneration.
Killing just about every possible MOB target in the MUD, simply because they were reported to be hard or impossible. Extra fun if this required using usually useless spells specifically to target a weakness and if, after a month or two of exploitation they had to remove the shocklance or jewelled wristcuff load because we were flooding the economy with top end items.
When they were younger, automatic purchasing of all key economic items the moment the MUD came up. What were they again? The gold breastplate and occasional gold greaves, a large steel spear, an ivory necklace, all the flatwort tea and the yellow vials.
We aimed to have Justice at least every second time. Because Warder spawn sense isn’t nearly as cool as having your light saber light up every time they come within three zones. (We also used that to figure out rather a lot of darkfriends within the Tower. We kept the identities to ourselves unless we found non Justice proof but it is kind of useful to know when to just leave a fight.)
Harnessing various previously unidentified features of the magical universe (ie. Bugs) for fun and profit
And here I naively thought that the thing to do with bugs is to report them so they get fixed...
We aimed to have Justice at least every second time.
Hah, bet you were well loved for it. I remember when I had Justice for about a year and a half (with some breaks). Fun.
Would still be doing it probably except Justice is currently bugged and not loading, ever since a game crash literally 1 second before I was going to pick it up. (The most you’ve-gotta-be-kidding me MUD moment ever, for me.)
And here I naively thought that the thing to do with bugs is to report them so they get fixed...
Sure, when they annoy me. Even fixed a few myself once I got my somewhat short lived coder Immortal. :)
Hah, bet you were well loved for it.
Used to have people scream in outrage when I took it on trips to Seanchan. For some reason north PKers thought I was obliged to go to the blight and die to a gank of 10, not play hide and seek down south.
Used to have people scream in outrage when I took it on trips to Seanchan. For some reason north PKers thought I was obliged to go die to them, not play hide and seek down south.
Haha, so it was you. I remember people were complaining about some guy doing that. I never quite stored the name because nothing that happens south or west of Lugard registers in my brain.
Yeah, I got hated on just for using it extensively.
I was less equipped to live with bullshit at that point in my life. ie. I corrected Nass and he threw one of his tantrums. Obviously now I’d be able to identify the political threat and avoid it. It’s the flipping internet. If it was worth the effort of defending epistemic purity then it was worth using a proxy, an anonymous name and delivering the messages strategically so as to maximise the cost humiliation for enforcing a deception. (Which isn’t hard, Nass humiliates himself without much help.)
Haha, so it was you. I remember people were complaining about some guy doing that.
Don’t know what they were complaining about. By virtue of sheer bulk of hours played I spent more time killing Fades than most players and on the one occasion I managed to lose it to a Seanchan I killed him three days later. Then I let Cate be a Justice Wielding Aes Sedai for a couple of months while I went back to being a proper warder who could throw away his life heroically.
Yeah, I got hated on just for using it extensively.
That’s what they call “winning”. If folks don’t like it they can bitch and wheedle their own way into the Warder clan!
It’s scary how much of that world I still have stuck in my brain. Four hundred zones, each zone a hundred interconnected rooms. I can probably still navigate most of that via text and a lot of it without even looking. Then the rough location of all the mob spawns, and where all the horses are. And where all the horses end up when any of Cate, I or a Ruy/Patricia alt has logged on. A (now obsolete) social and political map of the nations and key characters in each, with an additional speculative map of which characters are actually alts of others and to what degree they can be expected to be corrupted by their out-of-character incentives. Basically my brain treated it as though it was the real world—except rather more entertaining.
Probably has something to do with the widespread belief that it’s everyone’s business what you do with your equipment. Which I’m not entirely sure where it’s coming from, but it’s always pleasant to see this expectation frustrated.
Well, IIRC, balefire is well-documented in the old lore and may be forbidden; I more vaguely recall Moiraine stealing a ter’angreal which specialized in producing balefire, and since she didn’t spend her life playing with random ter’angreal, someone else must have known of its function or it was listed in storeroom catalogues. If balefire is discussed in the old books, forbidden by Tower law, and a ter’angreal is documented as producing balefire, it’s hard to see how any Aes Sedai could doubt balefire’s existence.
Hm, Moiraine learned how to actually weave it herself. The ter’angreal thing was someone else. Not that it matters.
What matters is that class will be taught to Accepteds and Novices, so discussing something Moiraine describes thus...
‘Something forbidden,’ Moiraine said coolly. ‘Forbidden by vows almost as strong as the Three Oaths.’ She took Aldieb’s reins from the girl, and patted the mare’s neck, calming her. ‘Something not used in nearly two thousand years. Something I might be stilled just for knowing.’
My understanding is that it’s forbidden to use or even know how to weave balefire, but not to know it exists or what it does. Knowledge of its existence moves around among Aes Sedai quite a lot without comment throughout the series.
Letting Novices and Accepted even know it exists is probably bad conduct, if not forbidden though, lest someone lacking sufficient discipline be tempted and try to learn to use it.
Evidence for the Dark One: the taint on Saidin, historical records of the Age of Legends (a lot has been lost, but there must be something, otherwise how would they even know stuff like who Lews Therin was?) Darkspawn like Trollocs and Myrdraal, and the spreading Blight.
The taint on saidin is the only thing there that demands divine interference, as best I can tell. The weirder Darkspawn are clearly supernatural, but they’re not supernatural in a way that demands a god when you’ve already got magic, and their own opinions could be explained as religious differences. The Blight’s harder to explain, since receding suddenly by miles when a bunch of Darkspawn get killed is kind of a giveaway, but that could be coincidence or a nonsapient link between them and it; with Fisher King symbology all over the place the latter’s not too far-fetched. And since the Dark One seems to have almost exclusively acted through mortal agents during the Age of Legends, those events don’t bear any obvious fingerprints of the divine either. All told, I think I’d still assign some probability mass to the theory that most of this Shai’Tan business is just something that one side or the other of a semi-legendary conflict ginned up as a psychological warfare tactic.
Evidence for the Pattern seems to be stronger, though, especially since the magical Pattern-based protagonist powers that the leads get seem to be a well-known and quantifiable phenomenon in this setting. Not to mention the divination abilities that some people get.
Even the taint on saidin doesn’t strictly demand divine interference. The fate of Shadar Logoth demonstrates that man-made supernatural corruption can also occur, and the events of the ninth book even indicate that gur zntavghqr bs gur gnvag ba Funqne Ybtbgu vf rdhny gb gur gnvag ba fnvqva, fvapr gurl obgu ryvzvangr rnpu bgure. So it’s not vanishingly unlikely that humans could have tainted saidin themselves. The Blight and the Darkspawn are physical corroboration of the narrative that involves conflict with the Dark One though, as is the taint on saidin.
If anyone who’s not a Darkspawn or one of the Forsaken has actually been to Shayol Ghul and made it back to tell about it, that would provide additional evidence, but as far as I can tell the only reason anyone on the light side knows it exists is because the legends say so, and maybe because trollocs and myrdraal have attested to it on some of the rare occasions when people actually talk to them.
Glad to see the responses, keep’em coming if you have’em.
Regarding the DO: in-game, my character has raided Thakan’dar itself. And when you try to channel there, the Dark One smites you with lightning. Which I’ve lived through. And being a channeler, I can claim having felt the nearness of the Bore. So I expect to have the least trouble with that one.
The Creator is a bigger puzzle. He doesn’t seem to do anything...
I suppose an alternative is asking your students to ponder the question of what evidence there is for the Creator, and leave open the possibility of being Creator-agnostic. Clearly in a world like the WOT-verse, the prior for a supernatural creator deity is much higher, given that there’s a pretty well established supernatural anticreator deity, so there’s not much call to be an a-Creatorist, but even if we know from authorial say-so that the Creator exists, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with acknowledging from a character perspective that there isn’t enough data to be confident.
Evidence for the Dark One: the taint on Saidin, historical records of the Age of Legends (a lot has been lost, but there must be something, otherwise how would they even know stuff like who Lews Therin was?) Darkspawn like Trollocs and Myrdraal, and the spreading Blight. Possibly invoking the Dark One’s true name, but this could realistically just be a superstition people are too afraid to test. If I had that much evidence the Dark One existed, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to try it out.
Evidence for the Pattern: Balefire, the Horn of Valere and the various heroes tied to the wheel who it summons.
Evidence for the Creator: Stuffed if know. If I lived in the WOT-verse and knew about the Dark One and such, I’d suspect that he might have sort of antithesis who prevented the world from being completely fucked from the moment it came into existence, but if history is actually cyclic then there’s the alternative that there’s actually an infinite regression in which the Dark One has always been sealed up by people. Considering nobody in the entire series ever seems to doubt his existence, maybe he just straight up drops knowledge of his existence into people’s heads so you can’t not believe in him. This may be the least confusing way I can make sense of the degree of religious homogeneity in such an obviously supernatural setting.
This is the first thing that occurred to me as well, but would the characters know about it? Or does this game require a significant barrier between player knowledge and character knowledge?
We’re talking about an in-character class, so even though I’ll be talking to fellow channelers I don’t think any of us is aware of balefire.
On the other hand, Ogier lore on the Pattern, including how some of them can sense ta’veren, might be valid IC knowledge for me.
We weren’t supposed to know about Balefire? Oops.
Come to think of it, I suppose my Sedai would know, but you’re hardly supposed to be telling Novices about it.
That’s good. Wedrifid would have known too—given that he was curious, Cate Sedai was a specialist in arcane research and both were rather direct about seeking out and exploiting any novel sources of potential power.
Oh, such as?
Every tactic for farming SMOBs, as soon as they came out.
Automatic Ways navigation
optimisation of all forms of intercontinental travel.
Harnessing various previously unidentified features of the magical universe (ie. Bugs) for fun and profit. ie. I probably still have 10 characters with maxed out bank accounts and full stockpiles of weaponry.
Quite possibly the best scripting/mapping/targetting/automation code ever used by MUD players. The ability to write advanced regex was probably even more of a bonus to Wedrifid than Warder multibash, attack, heal and health and stamina regeneration.
Killing just about every possible MOB target in the MUD, simply because they were reported to be hard or impossible. Extra fun if this required using usually useless spells specifically to target a weakness and if, after a month or two of exploitation they had to remove the shocklance or jewelled wristcuff load because we were flooding the economy with top end items.
When they were younger, automatic purchasing of all key economic items the moment the MUD came up. What were they again? The gold breastplate and occasional gold greaves, a large steel spear, an ivory necklace, all the flatwort tea and the yellow vials.
We aimed to have Justice at least every second time. Because Warder spawn sense isn’t nearly as cool as having your light saber light up every time they come within three zones. (We also used that to figure out rather a lot of darkfriends within the Tower. We kept the identities to ourselves unless we found non Justice proof but it is kind of useful to know when to just leave a fight.)
And here I naively thought that the thing to do with bugs is to report them so they get fixed...
Hah, bet you were well loved for it. I remember when I had Justice for about a year and a half (with some breaks). Fun.
Would still be doing it probably except Justice is currently bugged and not loading, ever since a game crash literally 1 second before I was going to pick it up. (The most you’ve-gotta-be-kidding me MUD moment ever, for me.)
Sure, when they annoy me. Even fixed a few myself once I got my somewhat short lived coder Immortal. :)
Used to have people scream in outrage when I took it on trips to Seanchan. For some reason north PKers thought I was obliged to go to the blight and die to a gank of 10, not play hide and seek down south.
Why was it short lived?
Haha, so it was you. I remember people were complaining about some guy doing that. I never quite stored the name because nothing that happens south or west of Lugard registers in my brain.
Yeah, I got hated on just for using it extensively.
I was less equipped to live with bullshit at that point in my life. ie. I corrected Nass and he threw one of his tantrums. Obviously now I’d be able to identify the political threat and avoid it. It’s the flipping internet. If it was worth the effort of defending epistemic purity then it was worth using a proxy, an anonymous name and delivering the messages strategically so as to maximise the cost humiliation for enforcing a deception. (Which isn’t hard, Nass humiliates himself without much help.)
Don’t know what they were complaining about. By virtue of sheer bulk of hours played I spent more time killing Fades than most players and on the one occasion I managed to lose it to a Seanchan I killed him three days later. Then I let Cate be a Justice Wielding Aes Sedai for a couple of months while I went back to being a proper warder who could throw away his life heroically.
That’s what they call “winning”. If folks don’t like it they can bitch and wheedle their own way into the Warder clan!
It’s scary how much of that world I still have stuck in my brain. Four hundred zones, each zone a hundred interconnected rooms. I can probably still navigate most of that via text and a lot of it without even looking. Then the rough location of all the mob spawns, and where all the horses are. And where all the horses end up when any of Cate, I or a Ruy/Patricia alt has logged on. A (now obsolete) social and political map of the nations and key characters in each, with an additional speculative map of which characters are actually alts of others and to what degree they can be expected to be corrupted by their out-of-character incentives. Basically my brain treated it as though it was the real world—except rather more entertaining.
Probably has something to do with the widespread belief that it’s everyone’s business what you do with your equipment. Which I’m not entirely sure where it’s coming from, but it’s always pleasant to see this expectation frustrated.
Well, IIRC, balefire is well-documented in the old lore and may be forbidden; I more vaguely recall Moiraine stealing a ter’angreal which specialized in producing balefire, and since she didn’t spend her life playing with random ter’angreal, someone else must have known of its function or it was listed in storeroom catalogues. If balefire is discussed in the old books, forbidden by Tower law, and a ter’angreal is documented as producing balefire, it’s hard to see how any Aes Sedai could doubt balefire’s existence.
That makes sense, though I had vague memories of the existence of balefire being suppressed.
Hm, Moiraine learned how to actually weave it herself. The ter’angreal thing was someone else. Not that it matters.
What matters is that class will be taught to Accepteds and Novices, so discussing something Moiraine describes thus...
… is out.
My understanding is that it’s forbidden to use or even know how to weave balefire, but not to know it exists or what it does. Knowledge of its existence moves around among Aes Sedai quite a lot without comment throughout the series.
Letting Novices and Accepted even know it exists is probably bad conduct, if not forbidden though, lest someone lacking sufficient discipline be tempted and try to learn to use it.
The taint on saidin is the only thing there that demands divine interference, as best I can tell. The weirder Darkspawn are clearly supernatural, but they’re not supernatural in a way that demands a god when you’ve already got magic, and their own opinions could be explained as religious differences. The Blight’s harder to explain, since receding suddenly by miles when a bunch of Darkspawn get killed is kind of a giveaway, but that could be coincidence or a nonsapient link between them and it; with Fisher King symbology all over the place the latter’s not too far-fetched. And since the Dark One seems to have almost exclusively acted through mortal agents during the Age of Legends, those events don’t bear any obvious fingerprints of the divine either. All told, I think I’d still assign some probability mass to the theory that most of this Shai’Tan business is just something that one side or the other of a semi-legendary conflict ginned up as a psychological warfare tactic.
Evidence for the Pattern seems to be stronger, though, especially since the magical Pattern-based protagonist powers that the leads get seem to be a well-known and quantifiable phenomenon in this setting. Not to mention the divination abilities that some people get.
Even the taint on saidin doesn’t strictly demand divine interference. The fate of Shadar Logoth demonstrates that man-made supernatural corruption can also occur, and the events of the ninth book even indicate that gur zntavghqr bs gur gnvag ba Funqne Ybtbgu vf rdhny gb gur gnvag ba fnvqva, fvapr gurl obgu ryvzvangr rnpu bgure. So it’s not vanishingly unlikely that humans could have tainted saidin themselves. The Blight and the Darkspawn are physical corroboration of the narrative that involves conflict with the Dark One though, as is the taint on saidin.
If anyone who’s not a Darkspawn or one of the Forsaken has actually been to Shayol Ghul and made it back to tell about it, that would provide additional evidence, but as far as I can tell the only reason anyone on the light side knows it exists is because the legends say so, and maybe because trollocs and myrdraal have attested to it on some of the rare occasions when people actually talk to them.
Glad to see the responses, keep’em coming if you have’em.
Regarding the DO: in-game, my character has raided Thakan’dar itself. And when you try to channel there, the Dark One smites you with lightning. Which I’ve lived through. And being a channeler, I can claim having felt the nearness of the Bore. So I expect to have the least trouble with that one.
The Creator is a bigger puzzle. He doesn’t seem to do anything...
I suppose an alternative is asking your students to ponder the question of what evidence there is for the Creator, and leave open the possibility of being Creator-agnostic. Clearly in a world like the WOT-verse, the prior for a supernatural creator deity is much higher, given that there’s a pretty well established supernatural anticreator deity, so there’s not much call to be an a-Creatorist, but even if we know from authorial say-so that the Creator exists, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with acknowledging from a character perspective that there isn’t enough data to be confident.