Why fight the inevitable?

[KirinLemon]

The world has been consumed.

Hell broke loose some 20 years ago, and with every passing year another nation succumbs to the darkness. Now it's been five years since our nation has heard word from any of its allies. It's very possible we are the last bastion of hope in the world. Our people have fought tooth and nail to hold on for as long as we have, but our will and strength are fading, and soon, we too will fall to the endless onslaught.

A little over two decades ago -someone- we know not who, broke the laws of nature and disrupted the rules governing the balance of heaven and hell. They opened Pandora's box and forced open the great maw of hell, exposing our world to the horrors held captive in the abyss Evils unspeakable poured from the open Hellmouth in an endless torrent.
The world's bravest knights met the charge, fighting the creatures back to a standstill, but to what avail? Where does the vanquished soul of a demon go, if not back to hell? And if the gates of that hell lay open, there is precious little time before it returns to fight again.

We held our ground at first, but no force of man can withstand war for an eternity. The forces of hell have been waiting for their freedom for a long, long time. Fortifications around the Hellmouth eventually fell, and the nations of the world began falling one by one in the years that followed.

Now, all that remains is our island country of Eiyu; a nation of paladins and clerics. The Archangel fortifies us, lends us strength in our efforts to defend our home -one of the few gods who has not retreat into heaven and abandoned their people to the world's end.

For five years now, no word has come from the mainlands. Is the world beyond our island simply desolation? This is what we must discover. This is the mission we have been sent on.

We are all that remains from a small group of the best of the best. Our goal is to discover the fate of our allies, or to discover some way to seal the Hellmouth. We braved the tumultuous seas. We found dry land, then made our way across the continent -watching our brothers and sisters drop one by one. We have found naught but death and destruction, and with so few of us left, it seems our quest was in vain.

Join me in our final days, so that we may honor the name of the Eiyuvian knights. Our quest is doomed, our death assured, but the price we negotiate for our lives will be paid in rivers of demonic blood.

---

Genre: Medeival Fantasy

The gist of it: We're a group of young men and women, late teens to early twenties, who have grown up never knowing anything but war. Our country exists as a solitary island, constantly under attack from a never ending invasion of demonic forces.

We were sent as part of a larger group to discover the fate of our allies on the mainland as described above, but our commanders have all been killed. We are naive, sheltered and unaware of the world outside of what we have been taught as Paladins and Clerics. We have fought, killed and watched friends and family die before our eyes, yet none among us have experienced so much as a first kiss, a sip of wine or a lazy, carefree Sunday sleeping in.

The focal point of this role play is the relationships forged by people in desperate, hopeless times, and the tragic loss experienced when the so preciously fragile lives we care about come to a violent end. Our characters will face overwhelming loss and death so that we, on the other side of the computer screen, might feel something.

I invite you to join me in these final days; as we stumble and falter without leadership through a dead and hostile world. No happy endings guaranteed.

Interest?

[Nevis]

Depending on the fantastical details. This sounds like a historical/Christian demonology fantasy set in an Earth-like world. Am I correct in that?

[ChunkyCaptain]

I'm Interested. I like the tone and the uncertainty of it all, count me in if it's still a thing.

[Sonatina]

I am tentatively expressing my interest. I would love to see how this looks in the OOC phase.

[KirinLemon]

Yeah, Cap'n, I'd be happy to get this off the ground if I could garner about 4-6 people total.

To answer Nevis' question, yes. This would borrow some from christian mythology and on a historical medieval world. The differences lie mostly in the abilities and powers granted to the clerics and/or paladins by the Archangel.

Paladins and clerics are capable of a variety of superhuman feats, the specifics of these powers and abilities I would let players mostly determine for themselves. The caveat being that I would scale the threat of our enemies so that character death is always a possibility.

Hope this thread drums up some more interest.

[Nevis]

I imagine that you've finally posted again will aid in that.

Historically accurate (or to the basic theme and ideas of it) is near always a way to peak my interest.

For the record, paladin is a term that is slightly misused among fantasy settings in modern times; 'paladin' refers to the knights following Charlemagne, not 'holy knights' in general. Use it as you will, though.

Here's to hoping the Divine Comedy (Dante's pieces including Inferno) isn't one of you major sources/inspirations (I do NOT like Dante's work).

[KirinLemon]

No, I am not a fan of the divine comedy either. I'll work up an OOC when I have a little more time, and then maybe people can better decide if the game is worth their time.

As an aside, Nevis....

Semantics, I know, but I disagree with you on the misuse of the term "paladin." The meaning of words evolve over time, and you'd find a disagreement between the original use of a great number of words when compared to their modern meanings. If I told someone there car was 'cool" or "sweet," I don't think anyone familiar with American English vernacular would believe I was describing their vehicle as cold or sugary.

Dungeons and dragons assigned paladin a new meaning in their game beyond its use in the Matter of France, and decades of use in the fantasy genre helped redefine the word. So today, if I want to describe "an order of holy medieval European style knights who rely on powers gifted to them through prayer by their god" to a group of people versed in fantasy vernacular, the most accurate way to describe that to them is the word paladin.

If we judge a words accurate use by its ability to confer the idea intended by the speaker to the listener -since isn't communicating ideas the purpose of language?- then what is the more accurate use of the word Paladin in a fantasy role playing thread? If I ask 100 people on this website, "Would you like to play as a Paladin in my medieval fantasy role play?" I would wager that few would expect my game to be about Charlemagne's knights. So I think that the word, in the context of which fan's of fantasy use it, is appropriate. I mean, for god's sake, the British call the hood of a car a bonnet.

[Girlie Go Boom]

...

[Girlie Go Boom]

Urms... smart peeps brain fight... k... not interested RPìng in this. Leaving. Nows!!

[Nevis]

Nevis said
For the record, paladin is a term that is slightly misused among fantasy settings in modern times; 'paladin' refers to the knights following Charlemagne, not 'holy knights' in general. Use it as you will, though.Here's to hoping the Divine Comedy (Dante's pieces including Inferno) isn't one of you major sources/inspirations (I do NOT like Dante's work).

Note that I said slightly misused. Using it does make some sense; it's just not correct. That said, I have little regard for the bastardization of language just because it's become accepted. Saying 'paladin' isn't necessarily the most 'accurate', though, just likely the fastest. There are multiple ways of doing paladins, after all-and multiple ways of fitting exactly that description without being one, even by modern conventional terms.

D&D especially has issues with that, though. The 'barbarian' class is actually an insult; the term 'barbarian' was a roman term for 'foreigner'. It referred to the Greek and Roman view that all of the other languages were garbled nonsense that sounded like 'bar-bar', hence the term 'barbarian'. The word is in its very origins and meaning outright bigoted; the 'N word' in modern America is actually [i[less[/i] bigoted, as the 'N word' at least used to be just a literal observation (it comes from negro, coming from latin niger-literally the word for black) that acquired a demeaning attachment over time, rather than an insult in it's literal meaning and origins.

Anyways-awesome! Out with Alligeri.

For some reason, I am imagining the island and society this starts in as similar to Malta and the Hospitaliers. Maybe because of the whole 'militarized Christian-ish island of Knights' part.

[Imperfectionist]

A pointless argument

I have a problem with your argument there, Nevis. You seem to be insulting KirinLemon over her/his use of the word paladin to mean "the thing that nearly every member of RPG has heard of", rather than "what the word meant in the 1200s". The simple fact of the matter is that all word meanings change over time, and the only thing that is correct in language is consensus. You can have an appreciation for history, and for the etymology of words, but that doesn't make the definition of paladin that arose in the 70's any more or less correct, and it definitely doesn't make it a "bastardization"... It's just another, more modern meaning, based on the legacy of the people the original word honored. I mean, really, I doubt Roland would be offended that his title is being used for a group of literal holy knights with God-given power.

Think about this: the Matter of France, one of the most important collections of legends in Europe, is just that. A collection of stories, legends loosely based on the exploits of rather mundane historical figures. It's only because those legends were read, and retold and loved by so many people that we even have the word in the first place! The wide adoption of the word paladin to refer to first the Twelve Peers, and then to other famous paragons of chivalry in the intervening centuries led directly to its use as a character class in D&D, and in turn, to the new meaning it has gained. Through association, calling anyone a paladin evokes the legends of the Matter of France, and D&D paladins are based almost entirely on those and the other medieval legends of chivalrous, God-loving knights.

What I'm saying is, I understand that you believe the title should be reserved for those legendary figures, but the new meaning is no great insult to them or the history of the word, and still carries all of the gravitas that it once did.

And again, with barbarian: the original Greek word (barbaros) means "not a citizen", or "not a Greek", someone (in their eyes) uncivilized and wild, who lives on the fringes of civilization, or has none at all. D&D barbarians... are just that. They're illiterate, they are supposed to come from mostly tribal backgrounds rather than growing up in cities among more civilized folk, and thus completely fulfill the original meaning of the word. There's nothing wrong with that. Really, in English, in 2014, the word barbarian means "guy with a broadsword screaming in rage and chopping heads", ala Conan, WAY more than it means "foreigner who talks funny," making it entirely justified as a neutral title rather than a negative insult. Besides, "someone who doesn't speak Greek" is just as much an observation as "someone who has darker skin than me", so your view of the word as an incorrigible insult in the first place is shaky at best.

Also... Yeah, the above paragraphs are argumentative, but on this note I'm just puzzled: what's so bad about the work of Dante? I mean, I've never really thought of any reasons why the Divine Comedy would be a bad thing. It helped to establish the Italian vernacular, its imagery is the basis for nearly every cultural interpretation of Hell and Heaven from the 14th century to today... I'm interested why you seem to have some offense against it. Maybe you can teach me something I don't know?

[Nevis]

Imperfectionist said
And again, with barbarian: the original Greek word (barbaros) means "not a citizen", or "not a Greek", someone (in their eyes) uncivilized and wild, who lives on the fringes of civilization, or has none at all. D&D barbarians... are just that. They're illiterate, they are supposed to come from mostly tribal backgrounds rather than growing up in cities among more civilized folk, and thus completely fulfill the original meaning of the word. There's nothing wrong with that. Really, in English, in 2014, the word barbarian means "guy with a broadsword screaming in rage and chopping heads", ala Conan, WAY more than it means "foreigner who talks funny," making it entirely justified as a neutral title rather than a negative insult. Besides, "someone who doesn't speak Greek" is just as much an observation as "someone who has darker skin than me", so your view of the word as an incorrigible insult in the first place is shaky at best.

That was not an insult. Note, again, my use of the word 'slightly' regarding the use of the word paladins. The stretch from the notion of the historical paladins to the fantasy type draw on the same basic idea.
The actual people the term 'barbarians' was applied to weren't, though. That's a bit like saying the actual people were 'illiterate mindless savages'; it's as respectful as the Lone Ranger and Wild Westerns are to actual Native Americans. It carries a lot of implications and creates a lot of cultural damage to those people.

There was no such thing as a 'broadsword' until about the 17th century. Broadswords are a modern word and apply to several types of swords basically only from the Victorian period onward. What people often imagine are longswords, bastard swords, arming swords and/or a spatha type.

Also-no, the Greeks and Romans weren't so much racial bigots as cultural bigots.More than once, they were openly accepting of members of other races so long as they were from a Roman background, yet not for people more closely genetically related to them yet from a 'barbarian' culture. They term barbarian implied that anyone from a different culture was innately lesser than them; the entire intent behind the word from its very creation was as a bigoted slur-and the use of the word (alongside how the peoples who were targeted by the term are often presented) in modern times often implies that they were right. Paladin I was pointing out as semantics and the term isn't harmful or even far off; barbarian is taking a racial slur and making it hip.

As for Dange-because he basically did to Christian myth what Disney did to German fairy tales. He outright made up a lot of his stuff, at least half of the specific people in Hell were for petty vendetta's he had and he presented it as practically canonical material-and people believed it and that caused a wide array of negative cultural effects.

[Imperfectionist]

My response to the response

Okay, yes, I understand what you're getting at, when it comes to barbarians... And you've stumped me. All I can say is that it comes down to context. No matter how I think of it, the fear the Romans experienced, and the terrible defeats they suffered at the hands of those they called barbarians endured throughout the intervening centuries, and the word made its way into Old French and Middle English and all those other Latin-influenced languages throughout Europe because of that. Thus, the image of the vengeful, uncivilized warrior pillaging the countryside and chopping off heads with (excuse my fucking ignorance) some kind of choppy weapon has remained in the popular consciousness for all of these centuries...

So, yeah, um... You're right. About barbarian, at least. Its etymology is rooted generally in fear and derision, and it is probably not the best thing to call yourself. The truth of the matter is, though, if you lived in the Empire circa 400CE, you'd see them as uncivilized as well. So, in the end, all the lingering presence of the word means is that Roman and "Classical" culture in general has had an incredibly lasting effect on European culture, including language... And not much can be done about that. Still, I will maintain that the modern, 20th century use of the word in literature (again I point to Conan) had more influence on the idea of the D&D barbarian than any actual Germanic or Celtic peoples, so I can't quite find the same disappointment in it.

Anyway, anyway, moving on to Dante... He never presented it to people as canonical material, and it wouldn't have existed anyway without the previous work of medieval Christian scholars, Thomas Aquinas and all that. He took the predominant cultural theories of the afterlife at the time... and wrote a very complex, allegorical epic poem detailing them in verse, including as characters some of the most important (to him) people in the history of Western civilization in their various circles of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. It's literature, not scripture, and most of the ideas contained within were pre-existing (which makes it very similar to the work of the famous poets of Rome and Greece). Seriously, what kind of negative cultural effects could it have possibly caused that wouldn't have happened without it?

[Nevis]

I meant no insult with the part regarding 'broadswords'; I was just pointing out an incorrect term.

I know one thing that goes into this is my view of the Romans as well-which is very unconventional. I view Rome as an extremely negative element in history, all empires besides. The Romans also were no 'victims'; they played the same game of raids and conquest and antagonized those same 'barbarians' more than once.

Not exactly. Yes, he did put in a lot of local Italian Christian folklore (Italy was really four areas just referred to as one; it was not a unified nation like England and France); he also invented a lot of stuff. And I am referring to the trope Word of Dante when I say that he presented-and had his works taken as-canon. The main was an ousted politician and his works were extremely political, besides that half of his specifically named subjects in Hell were people that had slighted him or that he didn't like. The Church-including the Roman Catholic of which he was member-also doesn't recognize his material as canonically correct, even though it altered the public perception of it to think that it was. In short, his work had a similar effect on the public's idea of the world and religion as a modern viking movie will give on vikings-and people who are into the actual history get the short end of the stick because 'everybody knows vikings wear horns on their helmets' and so on, besides that that influences how people perceive their descendants and the state of the world.
Beyond that, I just don't like Dante's work even as art. I find his rendition of Hell rather lacking in horror besides absurd and outright canonically incorrect (demons themselves were mentioned as chained and imprisoned in the actual Bible, besides that it was referenced as a place of howling wind, emptiness and dark at least as much as fire. It was depicted more like Tartarus with demons as prisoners as well more than a volcanic wasteland of proportional punishments). Bluntly, I find Dante's version of Hell to be lacking and far less horrific than I think the canon material implies.

Now, I prefer to get back on topic now. I imagine this tone will be a off-putting to others who may glance over this, besides.

[-DepthCharge]

Never have I seen a thread derailed by an etymological argument sparked from something as wholly ridiculous as the origin of a common RPG character archetype.

And on Dante, its not like he was just writing whatever he wanted straight into canon. That's the Church's job. The reason his work is so prevalent in people's imaginings of Christian mythology speaks of nothing but its impact in popular culture at the time. You can observe the same thing happen today in hyper speed. What is the general idea of how Thor acts and looks nowadays? He's a blonde haired, blue eyed hero right? When originally he was a ginger. And kind of a dick.

[Imperfectionist]

My last few words

-shrug- I'm not even sure how correct most of those statements are (esp. that the Church actively portrayed Dante's poem as biblical canon, which I am nearly sure is a complete falsehood, and that the Divine Comedy changed how the public viewed religion, which is rather preposterous), but whatever. The point is, it's a work of art, and if you don't like it, you don't like it, and I can accept that.

Two very definitely final points:

1. It's an allegory, it isn't meant to be canonically correct. If he limited himself only to what was detailed in the scripture, well, the whole Comedy wouldn't have worked, as there wouldn't be enough material to work with. He took what he had read, and heard, and what he believed, and used them in an allegorical interpretation of the soul's journey to God (among a ton of other things... it's really, really complex).

2. I'm sorry for starting an argument, but your blatant dismissal of Dante (along with the whole paladin thing) irked me quite a bit... I have a feeling KirinLemon might want us to delete all this, as it was rather pointless and got neither of us anywhere.

EDIT: OH! A third point, about the Inferno not being horrific enough: the Divine Comedy is just as much about Paradiso and Purgatorio as Inferno, even if most people stop reading after the latter. It isn't meant to be horrific. It's meant to make sense, in the context of Dante's beliefs and the ideals described in the second and third sections of the story. So, the whole "karmic punishments" thing... It was just supposed to make sense, and I believe, given the context, that it does.

EDIT 2: Yeah, Thor? A total dick. Ever read the Sandman? :) The whole "key to Hell" thing? It's good stuff.

[Imperfectionist]

In other news, I think this is a fantastic idea for an RP, and I don't want to ruin this thread with my arguing. I think I'm going to go ahead and delete my couple of posts, other than the last one. I really am sorry, KirinLemon.

EDIT: On second thought, just putting them in hiders would work, too.

[Agent B52]

I am very much reminded of Dark Souls. If you've ever heard of/played that game you would know it was a compliment. Count me interested.

[Nevis]

Same.

Also, to Agent b52-Another Dark player! <D

Also... 'kind of a dick'?

Dante's works in particular I dislike more as art than a lot of other similar works. Ultimately, I just don't like his stuff and I'm glad to see this isn't drawing very heavily off of it.

[Daemon Est Deus Inversus]

I don't know. Both Nevis and Imperfectionist are making solid points. And really, in each case, showing off top quality writing talent & passion for expression. I mean if you guys are going to do that in character, I'd love to join this just to roleplay with the two of you.