Re the Seventh Son movie and Last Apprentice books by Joseph Delaney:

Quote from: markfitz;875712Yeah it's strange. Good cast, and pretty good source material. Hard to know why it seems to have gone so wrong. I'd be interested to hear what you think of it if you make it to the end.

The books are interesting. A little simplistic, but really quite dark and flavourful. Very D&D-able, or other RPG of your choice. The Spook's role as a monster hunter for hire, with his semi outcast status, are very appropriate for adventurers. I wonder what class would work for him though. You could certainly, based on the books, include a Witch (Warlock) who was conflicted about evil with the party though, as the apprentice is allied with a young trainee witch, Alice, throughout. What class would a witch hunter be though?

The movie seems a counterexample to the discussion here; it could have been set in any D&D-ish world ever.

The Spook in the books is different (and a lot more interesting) than the movie character. The Spook has a substantial library about various supernatural beings, and he and his apprentice use materials like salt, iron, silver, running water and so on rather than actually casting spells of their own, but clearly they know a lot about magic. Alice comes with a lot more use of magic than the Spook is comfortable with. Among other things, they practice entangling witches in a silver chain, so perhaps they were some form of Monk as a character class. Alchemist? Spell-less Cleric?

Restating what I think are the main points:
A) Adding the fantasy elements makes a departure already to another world.
B) You avoid pedantic quibbles.

So, Katherine Kurtz in her Deryni series could have a medieval dynastic saga (plus psionics) without being tied to known historical dynasties, Church politics, etc.

Robert E. Howard's "Hyborian Age" could eclectically mix whatever bits he liked regardless of anachronism (or even actual history, if popular fiction versions were more fun) -- along with sorcerers and giant slugs.

In actual medieval times, the Arthur and Charlemagne cycles took real-world referents as just a jumping off point into their own fantastic worlds.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;875892I think Pundit does believe in magic,

I don't need to 'believe' in it, I've done it. But again, the sort of magick I do is very different from the assumptions involved in the medieval paradigm about magic.

QuoteI mean if someone summoned a demon and killed Elizabeth in 1558 that would most certainly have changed history.

To put it in context, for example, during the attempted "Spanish Armada" invasion, both sides were convinced they had divine providence guiding them, and not in the way some republican politicians today might think that sort of thing about some modern military action. They also understood their respective victories or defeats in that context, in a way that dramatically affected the English and Spanish psyche.

It was in fact claimed that John Dee raised the storm that sank the Armada; this is almost certainly not historically true (even in the sense of Dee attempting to do it), as Dee was not in the country at the time.  But what is true is that he had received a prediction about the Armada five years before the invasion, from one of his frequent invocations of angels (the angel Uriel, in this case). He almost certainly alerted Walsingham about this (the latter being the director of the secret service, in which Dee was agent 007), which may have contributed to the English discovering the Spanish plans before the invasion occurred. The important point is no one questioned the possibility of magic being involved; and indeed the character of Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest was inspired by John Dee.

Quote from: Bren;875906That was the job of the Spanish Inquisition along with ferreting out false converts among the Moriscos. Spain had a huge fetish about false converts and about whose ancestry was pure enough and/or could be traced back to the Visigoths. Inquisitions outside of Spain had other jobs. IIR, the Roman Inquisition was heavily involved in book approvals and bannings, but not too concerned with ferreting out lapsed converts.

That was still for the purpose of uncovering Heresy, which was the Inquisition's main job, wherever it was.

QuoteYes. This is exactly what I was saying. And that is why it is ontologically incorrect to say that people saw witches fornicating with the devil. Because that is not, in fact, what they saw. It is what they thought they saw.

And people in the United States today are convinced that daily use of shampoo is essential for hair cleanliness. It doesn't necessarily make it true, but the belief is so strong that people who don't use shampoo (at all, or even 'enough') are considered weirdos and looked on as 'dirty'.

What is or is not objectively true doesn't have very much to do with what defines culture.

QuoteIt makes all the difference as far as reality goes. In one case a ghostly apparition exists. In the other case it doesn't exist and in the light of day (and one's reason) one can clearly see the clothes piled on the chair.

Your individual anecdote involving a misperception means nothing in terms of what we're talking about here.  If you were to be capable of realizing there's something you AND EVERYONE IN YOUR CULTURE are absolutely sure is true but is in fact not objectively true, then you'd maybe have a better grasp on this, but then it would only prove my point about how little the lack of objective truth would matter in terms of the effect this paradigm has on the culture.

QuoteFixed that for the rest of us.

You can phrase it how you like, but the point is he was having conversations with something (be it angels, aliens, his own mind, a gestalt he and edward kelly formed out of their joint subconscious, extradimensional entities or whatever else you want to think it was), and we know from his meticulous surviving diaries that he was TOTALLY FUCKING SERIOUS about it, that he had not the slightest doubt that it was really happening, that a significant number of events occurred that confirmed it to be happening for him, and (and this is the really fucking important part) that it informed not only his life-decisions but also the affairs of state of a half-dozen kingdoms of Europe and changed the course of history.
Whether you want to think it was real or not in your own little atheist paradigm, the EFFECT it had was very real. And he and everyone involved were quite certain of its reality.

QuoteIt is not clear that no one is making that argument. Pundit is ambiguous in his use of language. That ambiguity may be intentional and caused by his personal paradigm including some kind of magic. Or he may just be sloppy in his language either due to laziness or for polemical effect. In any case, his beliefs and his imprecise use of language does muddy the water about what, precisely, he means when he repeatedly says people back then saw the devil, talked to angels, received practical advice from angels, killed people via curses, and practiced magic that had an affect on the world

I think you're seeing an ambiguity that isn't there, because the language I'm using doesn't fit your own personal dogmas, and the whole thing is an inconvenient reality for you.
You still desperately want to pretend that the entire medieval world were just trolling us down through the ages and couldn't possibly have been serious about this. Which, frankly, is something only a moron could allow himself to be led by his inept personal dogmas to believe.

You are, in other words, making a faith-based argument here.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;875919In my own life, my wife believes in spirits and I don't. She'll tell me some mornings that she saw a ghost, or she was visited by a dead relative. When she and I talk about these experiences, it turns out we both have the same or similar sensory experiences, but what she calls a ghost, I call seeing something out of the corner of my eye. What she calls being visited by a dead relative, I call sleep apnea. Now I believe I'm correct but I don't think she is lying about what she saw. I think she believes she saw a ghost just as strongly as I believe I stopped breathing in the middle of the night and woke up gasping for breath. That is the sort of paradigm difference Pundit is pointing to.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your wife is Asian, right (specifically Thai, if I'm not remembering wrong)? And not born in the U.S.?

Because that would be a very important point here: she is operating from a different paradigm.

Now, modern Asian cultures (and of course, it's a very broad brush to use that term at all, because modern Thai culture is radically different from modern Japanese culture; or for that matter modern urban Chinese culture is radically different from modern rural Chinese culture) are ALL far, far less bound to the 'magical paradigm' than medieval Europe was. What they have is at best a kind of remnant; outside of some remote hill tribes and stuff like that, they're half-way out of actually really truly BELIEVING this stuff, but it's still powerful enough for people raised in those cultures to appear very "superstitious" to us.

You'd have to magnify this at least tenfold to approach just how binding the paradigm was to medieval Europe.

Quote from: Gormenghast;875921Uruguay is unusually secular for South America, isn't it?

Incredibly so. It's one of the only latin-american countries to have full separation of church and state, and it has the lowest rate of religious attendance or active religious affiliation of any latin country.  If you break it down not just by country but by states and provinces for the U.S. and Canada, only Quebec has as comparatively high a rate of secularism as Uruguay does in all the Americas.

QuoteI have not read any pertinent research on the matter, but my impression is that belief in the reality of miracles is fairly common in most of South America. It certainly seems to be among the immigrant population here.  
Again, I have no research before me on this count. I could be much mistaken.

This is true in many latin countries, but absolutely not the case in Uruguay. Though of course, like all countries, you see a higher rate of religiosity and superstition among the lower classes (where not only is Catholic devotion still a little higher, but there's also a growing demographic adherence to both Evangelical Christianity and Umbanda, which is an afro-descendent religion). But even in the lower classes the rate of religious affiliation is much much lower in Uruguay than anywhere else in Latin America.

Quote from: RPGPundit;876327Incredibly so. It's one of the only latin-american countries to have full separation of church and state, and it has the lowest rate of religious attendance or active religious affiliation of any latin country.  If you break it down not just by country but by states and provinces for the U.S. and Canada, only Quebec has as comparatively high a rate of secularism as Uruguay does in all the Americas.



This is true in many latin countries, but absolutely not the case in Uruguay. Though of course, like all countries, you see a higher rate of religiosity and superstition among the lower classes (where not only is Catholic devotion still a little higher, but there's also a growing demographic adherence to both Evangelical Christianity and Umbanda, which is an afro-descendent religion). But even in the lower classes the rate of religious affiliation is much much lower in Uruguay than anywhere else in Latin America.

Indeed.

I blame the Freemasons. And the Jesuits.


As for the stuff about paradigm, I think this is essentially what I was taught to call " worldview." Or at least it is closely related.
I would agree that it is vitally important in the study of history. And in anthropology, comparative religion, politics in multiethnic or multi-religious states, international affairs, etc.

Quote from: Bren;875952I think he is leaving a lot of room. Which is unnecessary in analyzing what we think that people believed at the time. And I use the phrase "what we think that people believed" intentionally because we don't really know what most people believed. All we have is what a small minority of the literate population (which was already a minority of the entire population) wrote about what they thought or what they thought other people thought. All of which makes me a bit skeptical when someone claims to know (a) what people saw and (b) what they all believed about those reported sightings.

Right... because obviously the highly-educated elite were far more superstitious than the notoriously hard-atheist dawkins-reading peasantry. That happens in all societies. :rolleyes:

QuoteOne should also keep in mind that publishing views contrary to what the Church or State mandated could, at the very least, get your books burned and your press destroyed. So it is not surprising that the preponderance of the available writings support the official views on magic.

There's lots of stuff that survived from the medieval and renaissance period that surely would not have met with Church approval, and yet that stuff generally also doesn't point to people having been voracious fans of "The God Delusion".

And ironically to your point, the Church was frequently one of the most carefully skeptical examiners of supernatural claims and phenomena, both in order to discriminate true miracles from fraud, and to hold onto their control over the monopoly on spiritual power.  They were just as often telling people not to assume that some event was witchraft or a miracle when everyone else was eager to assume it was. None of which is to say that the Church didn't believe in magic or miracles, they just recognized (being educated men within the paradigm) that there was also fraud and false reports, and that it was important to discriminate between real magic/miracle and false reports of the same.

Quote from: Bren;876003It's not uncommon direction for extreme relativist to assert that all world views or paradigms are equally valid. A point with which I take strong exception. Pundit in this thread seems to be treading right up to that line (or over that line) in regards to magic,

No, I'm not. If anything, I'm saying that ALL paradigms (including our own culture's) are equally INVALID. They are all socially/collectively-constructed projections of artificial reality that distorts reality as it actually is.

Which, by the way, is very much in line with true occult teaching (as opposed to the medieval paradigm of belief about magic).

Quote from: TristramEvans;876146No, you're just so willfuly ignorant to the point I made that you're galloping around on some ridiculous mountebank high horse off on some ridiculous tangent that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything I said. It has nothing to do with a point of view, or a paradigm, or any other projectionyou're putting on me because you're trying to make an argument that is so far beyond beside the point that you're tilting at some massive strawman windmills with your panties in a bunch.

Let me try one last futile attempt to explain this in as simple as terms possible:

1. No one in history died because of a magical curse. People may have believed that certain people died because of curses, certain deaths may have been attributed to magical curses. But the cause of death of no historical figure in our reality was "magical curse".

This changes NOTHING. If you are sure your Uncle Louis has cancer, the doctors are sure, everyone else in your family is sure, it looks and acts like cancer as far as everyone expects cancer to act, the eventual autopsy concurs that it was probably cancer that killed him, etc.; the fact that it wasn't actually cancer even though no one knew or would ever come to know for the next 1000 years that it wasn't means that it changes NOTHING.

What you're doing here is a Flying Spaghetti Monster argument. It's like saying "maybe Martin Luther King was actually killed by a tiny alien spaceship that just looked and acted in every respect like an ordinary bullet and could never ever be proven to be anything but a bullet! That fact changes everything!!"
No, it fucking doesn't. As far as everyone involved is concerned, it was just a bullet.

Maybe gravity works in a TOTALLY different way than we today assume it works. Maybe in 1000 years people will laugh and chuckle at just how stupidly naive we all were for everything we assumed about gravity and how nonsensical it all was.
What exactly would that change in our culture today, dumbass?

Quote2. If people had died from magical curses this would have altered the course of history as we know it substantially. This is the echo effect. The "butterfly beats its wings" on a colossally grander scale. Not because of anything to do with belief, nothing to do with a medieval mindset vs a modern mindset, but because a person who would have, in our reality, continued to live, have children, affect others people's lives, die a natural death under different circumstances instead would be dead because of a magickal curse, at the whim of the person who could cast this curse. Not just one person, but anyone who any person wanted dead that was willing to put the effort in to learning a manner in which how to curse them. Fuck, if I could go out and learn a rite that would put a death curse on someone, just the political landscape of our world in the last 20 years would have been insanely different.

Not if magic worked the way it was assumed to by the medieval paradigm. You are assuming that magic would be something easy, commonplace, safe, at little to no cost, essentially unstoppable, learnable by anyone, and that wouldn't get you in trouble with the authorities.

NONE of those things fit the medieval paradigm with regards to magic.

So all you're saying here is "If magic really worked AND if magic was totally different from how people understood it in the middle ages that would change the medieval setting radically"; but you don't actually need anything in that sentence before the "AND". The question of whether or not magic actually works is irrelevant in terms of how it affects the culture, if magic works exactly the way the medieval mind thought it did.

QuoteAnd all that is ONLY taking into account beliefs of witchcraft extant of those time periods. Add in D&D style magic and you're talking about a world completely alien to anything we could conceive of. Wars would be massacres between wizards. In fact simulations of this were actually run by Gygax and his wargaming buddies, who took the basic concepts of D&D and applied them to a massive army scale conflict. What they found was ancient wargaming was essentially turned into World War 2.

Let's remove the historical analysis from this and look at what you're claiming about D&D.

No one here, I think, is claiming that you can use the AD&D 1e or BECMI rules exactly "as is" and end up with a credible magic system for an authentic medieval setting.

But you are claiming that there's no way that you can modify the D&D magic system in a way that would still be D&D and make it credible for an authentic medieval saying.

But THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I DID IN DARK ALBION.

And it certainly works. And I've run a nearly six-year long campaign of it (and a second shorter campaign, and various one-shots) and it worked JUST FUCKING FINE.

Wars were not 'massacres between wizards', because with the Dark Albion mods in place wizards are mostly useless in battles.  Almost all wizards are level 1 magic users, and there is no fireball spell even if you do have some maniac who gets to level 5. Having a typical Anglish Wizard in any battle in the Rose War was practically insignificant having a bombard, or flemish crossbowmen, or squadron of Scots Men mercenaries.  It was usually even less useful than having a decent knight of the same level in full plate and warhorse.

I can think of only one or two incidents in a campaign that saw the PCs involved in every major battle of the war where magic-use was of any kind of significance (in the sense that something a magister did was of decidedly more significance than the impact of a typical knight). And even in those, in no case was it of sufficient significance to be the deciding factor in the battle.

So either way you look at it (historically or in terms of D&D), you're full of shit.

Quote from: Gormenghast;876345As for the stuff about paradigm, I think this is essentially what I was taught to call " worldview." Or at least it is closely related.
I would agree that it is vitally important in the study of history. And in anthropology, comparative religion, politics in multiethnic or multi-religious states, international affairs, etc.

The main difference between a 'paradigm' and a 'world-view' as I'm using it is that people within a given paradigm assume it to be absolute natural reality. You might recognize that a world-view is a social construct, and allow room for other people to hold other views, but a paradigm is something so firmly-held that you would think anyone who thought otherwise was either dangerously insane, lying about actually believing differently (as some people's comments here seem to suggest) or unbelievably ignorant in a harmful way.

Quote from: RPGPundit;876326Correct me if I'm wrong, but your wife is Asian, right (specifically Thai, if I'm not remembering wrong)? And not born in the U.S.?

.

Yes, she was born in Bangkok (or rather a suburb of Bangkok). How much of this is cultural or individual, I really can't say. I've met plenty of people in the US who believe in spirits, magic and are religious. So it isn't stuff I've never encountered before. Some of what she believes is comparable to things my religious aunts believe for example, but maybe a little more intensely. And there is more of a folk magic aspect to some of her beliefs (which usually come to her by way of her mother).

It really hasn't been much of a source of debate or disagreement for either of us. But then, I did grow up in a very religious household.

Quote from: RPGPundit;876356This changes NOTHING. If you are sure your Uncle Louis has cancer, the doctors are sure, everyone else in your family is sure, it looks and acts like cancer as far as everyone expects cancer to act, the eventual autopsy concurs that it was probably cancer that killed him, etc.; the fact that it wasn't actually cancer even though no one knew or would ever come to know for the next 1000 years that it wasn't means that it changes NOTHING. [snip]

So at this point either 1) you still have no idea what I'm talking about and are still pursuing a strawman argument that has nothing to do with what I'd said or 2) you are putting forth the theory that if magick and witches as historical cultures believed in them were real that history would have played out exactly the same as in our history because every single piece of magick done would simply recreate everything that happened in our history through natural circumstances but got blamed on magick. Which has to be the most retarded idea I've ever heard.

Either way, I don't have even the slightest motivation to continue debating this.

Quote from: RPGPundit;876323I think you're seeing an ambiguity that isn't there, because the language I'm using doesn't fit your own personal dogmas, and the whole thing is an inconvenient reality for you.
You still desperately want to pretend that the entire medieval world were just trolling us down through the ages and couldn't possibly have been serious about this. Which, frankly, is something only a moron could allow himself to be led by his inept personal dogmas to believe.

You are, in other words, making a faith-based argument here.

It would help in having an intelligent conversation and an actual dialog, Pundit if you addressed what I actually said instead of making up things I did not say and do not believe for you to argue against. I have said absolutely nothing that would support the claim you made in bold. If I had said anything that supported that you could (and likely would) have quoted it here. But you didn't quote anything that supports what you claimed. The reason you didn't quote me is because you can't. The reason you can't find an appropriate quote is because I didn't say any such thing. Nor is it that what I believe. So then we are left with a bit of a puzzle. Why did you make this false claim?

Now maybe you honestly confused what some other poster said with what I said. It's a long thread and that happens. Certainly that's the most charitable interpretation of what you've said and done here. And I always like to start by assuming honest mistakes from others rather than malice or stupidity. And if this was just an honest mistake, you can just clarify and apologize for your mistake.

Or maybe you know I didn't say that but it is easier create a caricature of my position and use rhetorical tricks to disguise instead of creating a reasoned argument of your own. That certainly fits the persona of a pundit and a polemicist which you often adopt on line. In that case, no clarification or apology will be forthcoming because it doesn't fit your adopted persona.

Or maybe this is just a story you made up and told yourself to feel better about how smart, unique, and generally misunderstood you are. In that case you may, despite all evidence to the contrary, actually believe it to be true. Because you need it to be true. People often delude themselves with beliefs that support their world view. Most especially when their world view is unpopular or just flat out irrational.

EDIT: Or maybe you think your lies will somehow help you to sell more games.

Quote from: RPGPundit;876356But THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I DID IN DARK ALBION.

It seems unlikely, but you do keep mentioning your game. A lot.

Or maybe Dee's angels whispered this false truth in your ear during Tantric meditation and you believed them because the world, in your view, is filled with magic and the supernatural. But that's one of the problems with belief in supernatural spirits that whisper in one's ear. Typically the recipient cannot distinguish true whispers from false.

In any case, what you said above is false. It is not what I said. It is not what I believe. It is a lie.

I'm not talking about real life magic, in historical gaming, and all it entails.  I'm talking D&D style magic in historical gaming, which simply has never worked in my experience.