Discovering The Beast

 

I saw it first on YouTube

Beast : The Primordial

"What I have found about this game,

it is the best yet at grappling with personal shadow.

Confronting the Darkness by glorifying in becoming it, to understand it.

A necessary outlet, a Jungian safety valve for unspoken desire,

 hidden from yourself and from others, to the point of delusion.

This game takes away the veil and rewards you with integration.

Better than Vampire, Werewolf, etc; 

This time it is personal, without compromise of masks.

This game releases The Inner You at your worst.

It is love at first sight, 

Obviously." 

Released March 30th 2016. That's ten years ago. The time it took Odysseus to stop fucking around and go back to his wife, life and responsibilities. The Beast was released by Onyx Path Studios, as part of the Chronicles of Darkness. I am now sincerely contemplating the possibility of Mandela Syndrome being a real thing, and not merely the dominion of the 'half of all humans are less than average intelligence' syndrome. Back in my day there was thing called White Wolf studio who published World of Darkness. That's the page I am on and that's the hill I died on, long ago, at Carthage. I said 'back in my day', I was updating things a little. Back in my day we didn't have laws, the printing press or chocolate. Those were better times. 

Anyway. The Primordial. It's simplified and enhanced. The lever here is abuse. The enjoyment one gets from looking into someone's eyes and seeing the fear there. Feeding on it. Not feeding yourself, necessarily. Feeding an extra-dimensional nasty, your own personal incarnation of the Mother Of All Darkness. Home turf, then. 

Of course I immediately got the .pdf from DriveThruRPG and have been using an AI to run a story for a character in my homebrew campaign world, living in the same city as all my other WoD characters, a gothpunk-noir pastiche of a real city in SouthEast Wales called Zooport. She fits right in nicely there, filling a gap from the other campaigns I have got the AI to run recently with other characters (a vampire, a mage, etc). 

All of this is somewhat of a memoir as I patch together just exactly what it was happened around the turn of the millennium. Being as ancient as I am, making notes from retrospect helps somewhat. They're also interesting short stories, if you're into that sort of thing. Whether I edit and publish it or not,  depends on laziness as much as what the laws are on such things. It's World Of Darkness. It's 18+ mature content. Playing the games the way they were designed to be played. Horror. 

Anyway, it is the first game from this universe since Vampire, Werewolf, Mage and Wraith, which has really held my attention for long. My favourite is still always going to be Wraith, although it's also the most difficult to deal with. Simply because it is so close to the bone. 

There is A Great Temptation with Beast: the Primordial which is to do a sweet little tweak to it. Although the game structure is beautiful in allowing custom modification of characters to evolve into their own madness as they power up, the compatibility of this with Kult: the Original by Metropolis games is amazing. In that game, characters can find portals through to Reality, often by experiencing events which drive them crazy beyond Human comprehension to cope with what Reality actually is. It is similar to the Sanity rating in Call of Cthulhu. 

With Beast, the growth of a protagonists personal Otherworld, the empowerment of an incarnation of their monstrous perversion which manifests as an actual environment which its possible to travel into, the creation of their Lair in the Dream, is something useful for any game where journeying through Otherworlds is a feature. The structure of this in Beast is quite simple enough to be flexible. Although it's a game about a monster, the same system could in theory be adapted to anyone at all. Non-monstrous Dreamers would be able to do a similar thing, sourcing their energy from the same source that the Dark Mother sources it from, but flavouring it differently, more positively perhaps. 

Now, the Hunger calls. I must feed. 

Random Slave Maker Button

 

Slave Maker NPC Generator

Based on charts from the +O+TH TUNNEL

Click a button above to generate a slave.

Imagination As Portal

Imagination as Portal :

Creativity Against the Forces That Flatten Possibility

Imagination is not the production of things that do not exist. It is the capacity to perceive, inside present conditions, forms that are already possible and not yet actual. A sculptor looks at a block of stone and sees the figure. Most other people look at the same block and see only stone. The difference is not talent. It is whether the perceptual window is open.

That window can be narrowed. Shame does it efficiently. When certain desires, refusals, or forms of attention are repeatedly punished or mocked, the mind stops offering them as live options. Convenience does it more quietly. When food, safety, and stimulation arrive without requiring observation or decision, the habit of looking for what else a situation could become weakens. Institutional training that rewards only already-approved answers does the same work at scale. None of these forces need to announce themselves. They simply reduce the number of shapes a person can still see inside the given material.

The Portal Function

Creative work reverses the reduction for the duration of engagement. A story, a game, a piece of music, or a drawn line presents a constrained situation and then leaves openings the audience must complete. The completion is not arbitrary. It draws on whatever capacity for possibility the person still has. Repeated engagement with material that requires this completion keeps the capacity from atrophying. The same disc, the same text, or the same scenario does not produce identical inner results in every person, but it reliably exercises the same function: the translation of constraint into selectable form.

Tabletop play makes the exercise explicit. The Games Master sets bones. Players must perceive what those bones still allow and then choose. A player who can only see the most obvious action has a narrower window than a player who can see three. The session does not install new possibilities from outside. It requires the use of ones that were already latent. Over time the requirement itself becomes practice.

What Flattens and What Resists

The forces that flatten are ordinary and cumulative:

-Shame attached to specific classes of desire or refusal, so that those classes stop appearing as thinkable.
-Environments in which outcomes arrive without the need to notice or adjust.
-Systems that treat deviation from the already-described as error rather than information.
-Trauma that collapses the difference between a past threat and a present opening, so that every opening is read asthreat.

Resistance is also ordinary. It consists of any repeated practice that demands the perception of unused form inside a real constraint. Writing that leaves consequences open, games that leave player choice decisive, drawing that begins from observation rather than from a finished template, and conversation that does not immediately correct an unexpected reading all perform the same maintenance. None of them require the belief that imagination creates reality. They require only the continued ability to see more than one actionable shape in what is already here.

Limit

The portal does not override material conditions. A person who cannot leave a room still cannot leave the room. What changes is whether the person can still perceive differences inside the room that affect what happens next. When that perception is gone, the room becomes identical to every previous room and no further distinction is available. When the perception remains, even a severely constrained situation continues to contain selectable differences. The creative practices that keep the perception available do not promise escape. They prevent the final reduction in which escape is no longer even visible as a category.