These notes are a followup to the class document I put together yesterday, and try to bring together some thought on how the magic system presented there (basically a summoning system) would work in play.
Planning to come up with a list of examples eventually, but didn't like my attempts today so will come back to it. The material takeaway is that intelligent entities are NPCs with magic abilities that have relationships with your character, and non intelligent ones are bestiary entries that will need some management. You should approach their design as a collaboration with your DM, who will play them, like a more hands-on warlock patron. Your access to pattern languages gates what it is possible for you to say and do with them.
The killers in Giallo films would make great entities. So would Pyramid Head.
ENTITIES
Entities are strange things that inhabit the world along with humans. They are called the first, the nobility, or the good neighbours by most people— there is a superstitious belief that praising them will ward off their interest. This is not always true, entities have differing temperaments and different ideas about humans. Many of them are indifferent to human society, just as many are frightened or wary. But they are odd enough that most people desire not to be perceived by them at all.
There are very few entities in the towns and cities. They are by nature difficult things to incorporate into legal and policing structures, and so they are generally hunted and driven off or destroyed in organised efforts. Entities are often individually powerful, but only very rarely organised, so these hunts and purges are usually successful. There are exceptions to this. Very intelligent entities can more easily coexist with humans— either hidden or tolerated. Angels are a whole family of entities aligned with God and the church, and are openly worshipped by religious people and lauded by the state. There are also the Academies, institutions with long histories, dedicated to learning the strange ‘pattern languages’ that the entities use to communicate with one another, and also to conceive of and instantiate themselves.
Common heresy: God is an entity like the others, maybe the first among angels, maybe something else. Angels will kill you out of hand if you try this one with them. Slightly less common heresy: humans are a type of entity, maybe the original type, whose intelligence has somehow drawn out the others— entities are in some sense automatic or procedural, a process of the will or intelligence elaborating itself in space and time.
Strange things about entities: many of them, notably both angels (if they really like or trust you) and demons (while pulling your arms and legs off, or strapping you to the wall of a torture cellar), will tell you that they are from the future. There are long standing debates and positions among the learned academics as to whether this is literally true, or if they have confused the human idea of linear time with simply coming from some ‘elsewhere’ that would otherwise be difficult to conceptualise. Another strange thing: most entities have some revulsion or difficulty with jointed and articulated limbs, even those that usually appear in a nominally human form. Possession by all but the most intelligent entities will result in an instantly recognisable stiff, awkward, lock-limbed gait and movement style. It is known that most entities view those that do not share these issues as deviants or perverts of some kind. Angels and demons both fall into this category, and have no issues inhabiting human bodies.
There are always the classics.
HOW TO PLAY THEM
The thing to remember is that entities are basically NPCs, and that pattern languages are literally languages. The more specialised your pattern language is, the more fluently you can communicate. Entities are not attack animals, and they do not owe you their loyalty. They can be very powerful (entities with human-like intelligence are always reality-warpers to some extent), but you are unlikely to be able to get them to use that power on your behalf. If someone you didn’t know, who spoke maybe four words of your language, pointed at someone you didn’t know and said ‘kill’, it probably wouldn’t stick. If you’d known them for years, and they’d helped you out, and they were in danger, and you were holding a pistol, and they said they’d take care of the body and give you ten thousand dollars to kill someone, you might think differently about it. You may also enjoy killing.
So if you know the one who is called, in the vulgar tongue, The Queen of Ice and Air, and you can speak with her in a sophisticated way, she might agree to do you a favour. Maybe she will lend you her Black Light Blade for three days if you burn down a building that she hates, or kill a priest, or deliver her a kiss without any guile in it. It will be a negotiation with someone who is clever and extremely dangerous, but who probably likes you (because you’re one of like five people who has ever put the effort in to learn how to really speak with her). This has the effect that less intelligent entities are far, far less dangerous to work with, and far easier to ‘train’ and get results with. You speak Enochian, so you can talk to zombies. They usually need pretty minimal convincing to go and try to kill people. However zombies are entirely physical, and have no powers of instantiation, so you actually need to go physically to where they are and talk to them face to face, and then they will need to walk to wherever they’re going. A wisp is a common Academic companion, because they are about as clever as dogs, can be dangerous to whatever they’re pointed at, are incorporeal and capable of instantiating, and won’t ask for much more than blood, sugar, iron, days of your life, the memories of the things they kill for you, the fingers of artisans, or whatever it is that this particular one eats.
All academics know that if you allow an unintelligent entity to possess your body you can more or less expect to die. You might not, but this would be like giving a wild dog full manual control, and you would have to be an idiot to expect it to work out well. Some academics do it anyway, usually in desperation when trapped or otherwise close to death, and you will sometimes find feral humans with strange magic and the minds of insects ‘living’ in the black spaces deep beneath the earth. Entities that are entirely physical are rare, but do exist. They cannot possess a human body, although will sometimes attempt to mimic the process by manually puppeting the limbs in various ways. It is thought that non-physical is in some sense the ‘natural’ state for entities (and that possession of human bodies comes instinctively), and that those trapped in physical form are aware of it as something like a disability.
Most academics end up with one or two generalist languages (Enochian is nearly universal with academics, like Latin once was in the church, and allows for communication with both angels and demons), and one or two specialist languages that give them a personal connection with a couple of entities. The general ones will allow them to make very basic three or four word phrases (which will work fine with dumb entities, and might piss off intelligent ones), and the specific languages will allow for formal, sophisticated communication with strange and inhuman things.
There are some entities whose minds are really, really alien. There is conjecture in the academies, amongst those who believe that all entities originated in the minds of humans, that this happens naturally over time, as the particular being ages further and further away from the memory of human existence. It is well known that these things are very dangerous to talk to, and that insanity often follows from attempts at communication, and especially from possession.
Angels and demons, (and fairies, to a lesser extent) are conceptually stable enough to enter into formal relations with human societies. They are have states, institutions, and hierarchies, although these often ‘more’ than their human equivalents, more just, more sadistic, more, more, more… The non-sociopathic ones make good, stable, intelligent allies for academics.
The entities that come into being when artists are born are almost always intelligent, and the very rare exceptions to this tend to produce art that is deeply instinctual and hostile to interpretation.
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