{General} Mad ideas

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{General} Mad ideas

Post by Heretic »

You know the drill.


I was wondering if in a certain chapter of Guinea Pig, Captain Capitalism goes ill and becomes a moderate (Gasp! The Shoggoths are hiding!) and our crew of Mexican/wizards/socialist have to find a cure for him, or else CapCap will propose a company-funded strike against himself, just to show how trade unions are nice. Sohawk helps find a cure because he can't think of his own brother doing that.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Nah. That is LAEM.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Czernobog »

I've been thinking about writing an arc that has the forces of Hell invading America.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Do not rip off Stuart's Armageddon story.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Peregrin »

Having read about Bioshock, I think someone here who's actually played that game should write a OZC story parodying it, called... Bioschach. No, I have no idea exactly what the plot should be other than that a certain resurrected Swiss psychiatrist should be either the main protagonist or the main antagonist.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Magister Militum »

Since Kamin brought it up, have we actually established anything about how Hell works besides the fact that they would like to invade and kill us all? I was thinking about having Hell fractured into a number of kingdoms (or the supernatural equivilant at least) that are occasionally united by a strongman of sorts, but I'll leave that up to you guys.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Ford doesn't leik bringing in actual deities into the stories. If there is a Hell, then it's not the place where people go to if they don't accept Jesus when they die. It will have monsters and shit, but the closest thing it should have would be like Doom 3's Space Hell.



A secret research facility on Mars has opened a gateway to another dimension.

A dimension of unknowable horrers and terrors.

It is Hell.

In Space.

Space Hell.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Peregrin »

No actual deities? Uhm, hello, I remember Maker/Saver/Taker's profile indicating that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god is really him? :?
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Let me quote what I said of the Anti-Gods back then...
Well, the Anti-Gods don't really fit into the category of "real" gods, like Anubis and Ra and stuff, and we know those guys exist (Baccara handles them in Hydra). The Lovecraftian monstrosities stand on the line that separates "real gods" (Anubis, Ra, Zeus, other mythical supernatural religious beings of massive power) from gods like the Anti-Gods, i.e. tangible seeable cosmic beings of massive but non-supernatural non-mythical powers. I'd say if we have Lovecraftian monsters, they'd be separated from the Anti-Gods and the "real-gods" due to the fact that they exist in strange realities, within the incomprehensible geometric confines of Trans-Yuggothian space, such as the Dreamlands.

Be that as it may, the Anti-Gods are no less "godly" than the likes of Ra and Zeus. I mean, what is a god? A god is a being with immense power, who mortals worship in order to not get crushed like bugs, or in order to get favors, or stuff. Zeus is a "god" by all means and definitions, yet all he does is sit on a mountain, throw lightning at people, and if he feels like it (he does), turn himself into a moose and rape some hot person whose gender he's not really sure of. Our Anti-Gods fit all that, they sit on stars and kill people they don't like. They just don't disguise themselves as obtuse and inane objects for the purposes of raping people in order to procreate unholy progeny.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Mobius 1 »

I'd like to keep gods completely out, and go the obvious route of making the gods simply the extremely powerful metas of ancient times: eg, Zeus went around with an awesome power over electricity, Anubis was a necromancer, etc. It would make sense back then that a meta with half a brain and a decent amount of charisma would be able to organize a "Religion" around themselves.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Invictus »

I would actually prefer to keep some mystery around the gods, including their status as of the present day. Shroom is right in that anything with enough power to get people to worship it can be defined as a god, but it would be hell to decide whether this worship has any effect - or whether this would actually elevate merely powerful entities into 'embodiments of the cosmos' types. Even Siege, creator of Tchernoborg and Saint Anthony and so on, has been pretty vague in his writings. Besides, don't we have a consensus somewhere that metahumans seem to be a relatively modern phenomenon, phasing out magic and mythology and kung-fu and all that stuff? If we accept that the ancient gods were actually all superpowered pretenders, we get into all kinds of thorny debates about the nature of religion in society - and I don't think OZC is really the place for the serious examination of this issue that Mobius' approach should deserve.

So, I prefer to stick with the poorly defined poly-paradigmical polytheism we have right now, where everything seems to true at the same time. For a collaborative universe like OZC, it gives the least creative constraints and minimalizes the problem of steppings-on-toes.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Malchus »

Since we're talking about the "gods" in the Comix 'verse, I'd just like to point out my conceptualizations of the Lovecraftian gods I retrofitted for OZComix:

Well, the way I tried to incorporate the Lovecraftian "dieties", the Great Old Ones and Outer Gods are pretty much like how Shroom described. They, however, did originally exist in the same reality but were more concerned about dicking around with mortals and each other than screwing with the fabric of the cosmos and their other "peers". Now, they are currently in a different reality but could come back if they wanted to.

The Great Old Ones are currently asleep in R'lyeh (a pocket universe they created located somewhere under the Earth's oceans) and the Outer Gods are preoccupied with studying and quietly manipulating the Dreamlands (another intersecting pocket universe), which were formed from the dreams of the sleeping Great Old Ones.

Basically, instead of Cosmic Horror you have Cosmic Dickery.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Ford Prefect »

Way, way, way back at the beginning of OZC!, I wasm ore or less hoping that we would avoid creating a whole bunch of characters based directly on mythology, such as Marvel's Thor. Admittedly, one of my first characters was Pai, who is the Maitreya Buddha. Even setting aside the fact that the Maitreya Buddha is not a deity any more than Sakamoto Eiji is a metahuman, this basically makes any of claims to 'avoiding real world mythology' on my part hypocritical at best. In any case, we've seen it used well enough - Siege's Hydra made use of Anubis in a pretty smooth way. However, if there's one thing I definitely would not like to see in OZ Comix!, it's a heaven and hell. There is just something wrong with shoehorning that into the universe we have at the moment - if you want to read about that, go take a look at Damnatica or Apocrypha. Both of these successfully use Hell and Heaven as a central theme and 'setting' and are well written. Things that OZ Comix! does not need is some guy named Satan trying to invade the world with his demon hordes. This just strikes me as being horrifically lame.

In any case, our own burgeoning cosmology has basically run rampant all over any real world myths. Alexei Ross is the avatar of all creation, for example, while Tchernobog is the guy keeping the universe from collapsing in on itself from spontaneous reality failure.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Malchus »

Ford Prefect wrote:spontaneous reality failure.
There simply must be a Comix arc with that title.

EDIT: Oh, wait, I just basically suggested AAOI. :lol:
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Ford Prefect »

As it turns out, the SDI has already fought off an invasion from Hell, as revealed to me by Invictus.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Malchus »

Well, "Hell" is at best open for interpretaion. For all we know, it is yet another dimension which occasionally intersects with the main Comix Earth, populated by horrible, partly mystically-endowed creatures people would label "demons." It doesn't have to be the Judeo-Christian overheated sauna.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Vagrant Orpheus »

Might I remind people of Red Right Hand? The Eternal Wanderer, who is implied to be at least partly responsible for pretty much any Satan-correlate myth of any culture for the past handful of millennia?

Still, I wouldn't consider RRH to be a god at all. We have no idea if his power has limits, all we know is that he can produce anything anyone wants and has the ability to collect souls for whatever purposes he intends, and the ability to cast people through all sorts of dimensions, dream worlds, alternate realities and the likes, as shown by RRH throwing Deadlight Hollow through the Dream Lands and into the Deadlights, which I intended to be the fundamental existential horror that underlies everything in existence and non-existence on every plane possible. Nothing more and nothing less than absolute abject horror, in a state of complete non-existence.

In my opinion, that makes the Deadlights the fundamental "Hell" of any culture and dimension, from which any other Hell is merely an extension built above it.

Basically, not even I know if RRH is a 'deity' as such, because I don't know if he ever claimed worshippers, despite running around with all sorts of mythological names. I don't know if he is the source of these named myths, or if he simply uses the names when he interacts with that particular culture.

However, I'm in agreeance. I want no Panthenon of Gods, no Celestials, no Infinites, none of that crap. Aside from Syntel and my enigmatic characters, everyone I'll create will most likely be firmly grounded in Earth and this dimension.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

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Vagrant Orpheus wrote:Might I remind people of Red Right Hand? The Eternal Wanderer, who is implied to be at least partly responsible for pretty much any Satan-correlate myth of any culture for the past handful of millennia?
Personally at least, I never considered Red Right Hand some sort of Satan inspired character. While you probably drew inspiration from other sources for him, not once did I ever see him as being equivalent to any deity in human mythology. That said, I don't really consider him to be a deity of any stripe (though deity is a pretty fluid term when you consider the content of OZ Comix!). It's my own interpretation of course, but I thnk of him as being more like very skilled at supernatural legalese, which allows him to craft his contracts with all sorts of fine print that gives him power over those who sign on the dotted line. In short, he does not generate his trinkets or bring his vengeance upon people because he has amazing power, but merely because he's very clever and has all the right pens.

Obviously though, this is just what I think. Red Right Hand is a character who is up for a lot of misaligned misinterpretations due to the weave of lies permeating his character (much like Maker/Saver/Taker or Father Disquiet).
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Siege »

Ford Prefect wrote:Siege's Hydra made use of Anubis in a pretty smooth way.
I've used Anubis the way I did because I assumed that Comix!' cosmology isn't a static thing: before Tchernobog, there were a bunch of entities that did the job the Dark God does now (upholding the pillars of creation, making sure past, present and future remain seperated, that sort of thing). Anubis stood at the gates between our existence and that of wherever the dead go, the ancient Egyptians figured this out somehow, and came to consider him as the God of the Dead. Whilst that means they got some details about Anubis' vocation right, it doesn't mean they were correct in everything they wrote about him.

Basically I consider deities like Anubis exceptionally potent forces, which for want of a better term we might as well label 'gods', because most of the time they are involved in pretty darned godlike affairs. But just because most 'gods' have rudimentary personalities doesn't mean you have to worship them, or that worshipping them will even do anything for you - you might as well worship the Universal Law of Gravitation: it still won't stop you from falling when you trip over. Roughly 99,99% of the time the affairs of mortal creatures would be completely irrelevant to them in the same way that we don't care about the wellbeing of the bacteria in the kitchen sink.

There are some notable exceptions to this rule of course (Alexei Ross, Saint Anthony the Machinist) but as a general rule I'd think that you'd have to have something special about you to be able to even convene with these entities, much less get them to do anything for you. The 'gods' are cosmic entities, they've got jobs to do, and sometimes they 'retire' (EG Anubis & Co. were replaced, for some unfathomable reason, by the Dark God Tchernobog), but they shouldn't figure heavily into (or even care overtly much about) the affairs of mortal men.

This is my main issue with the Judeo-Christian YHWH and Satan. Not only do they presume a monopoly on godhood (being a jealous god and so on), they do inordinately care about the affairs of mortal men, which is why I don't think we should incorporate them into Comix!. They simply don't fit into the bigger picture. And if you ask me, any attempt to fit them into a continuity under a different name (like Mephisto in Marvel for example) is inherently lame. People would recognize them from miles away, and they still wouldn't fit into the cosmology outlined above. What does YHWH even do for a living? If we're going to use him, he ought to do a job that makes him worthy of the label 'god', and I can't think of anything that isn't inherently lame and unbefitting of Comix!' nature.

And besides, I've always been a big proponent of calling a cow a cow myself. If you're going to use an existing fictional characters (be they God of Sherlock Holmes), use their actual name. Don't muck about with someone who's exactly the same in all respects, except with a different label slapped on.

Finally, just because there's loons worshipping them today (or even in Comix!) doesn't mean the deity has to actually exist. They might not. Or the figure being worshipped might be just an aspect of a bigger and far more interesting personality. And so on - there's plenty of options here. If we're going to make a 'hell' type place that tries invading Earth every once in a while, we might as well try and make it a little bit more interesting than 'demons + brimstone'. There's plenty you could do with a hell without losing the initial hell-like qualities that would make it far more interesting than just 'demons live there who eat people's souls'.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

And for all we know, the Judeo-Christian God could just be some Magical Negro.

Sort of like how Red Right Hand is a magical John Glover.

It would be fun to portray YHWH as some dick that goes "meee! Me! ME!" and annoys all the other deities.

But really, I don't have time for much of that stuff either. I'm too busy with my own Celestial Cubans.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Malchus »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:And for all we know, the Judeo-Christian God could just be some Magical Negro.
Sounds like a Jim Carey movie. :P
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Heretic »

*sigh* I get a little weird when someone makes fun of God's Y name. It's a little scary, so please keep it a notch down, or I'll go insane and make Peregin pair up Tasha (Black Cat) with someone at gunpoint in the 'ship thread.
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

What are you talking about?
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Heretic »

I can tolerate making fun of God as long as I don't do it, but the Y name is a little sacred for us Jews. I'm not saying shut up and bow down, just "keep it down a notch."
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Re: {General} Mad ideas

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

You don't want us to say your god's name? Or is 'YHWH' making fun of his name?
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