Carceri: What's the point? [Archive] - Wizards Community

Carceri: What's the point? [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
Lobsopdoy
08-29-07, 06:37 PM All the Planes seem to have an underlying philosophy or point, but with Carceri...I just don't feel it.

The Abyss is full of constant soul-devouring hate, Hades wallows in despair and evil, while Baator has brought evil to a science. But Carceri...eh, people are just stuck in there.

Anything I'm missing?
Zousha_Omenohu
08-29-07, 07:12 PM Well, I'd note that it's full name is the Tarterian Depths of Carceri. The residents of that place are all prisoners, and thus they are resentful of interlopers who can walk the multiverse freely. Also, they had to do something bad, or they wouldn't be trapped there in the first place, so they aren't shy about taking out their anger on unsuspecting and gullible visitors. I imagine that the sort of vibe you get when in Carceri is one of extreme frustration and distrust, since everyone there is basically sizing up their neighbor to stab them in the back. Whereas the Abyss is carnage and senseless destruction, Hades is depression incarnate and Baator is the crooked lawyer's paradise, Carceri is basically a prison and the law there is, beat someone up the first day, or become someone's b****.
Euclid
08-29-07, 07:13 PM Plus, it's great for puzzles. Toss the PCs into a layer there as an adventuring hook.
Arilou_skiff
08-29-07, 07:15 PM Also, no better place to seal of an Ancient Evil of DOOM
.

But yeah, the underlying philosophy is that of a prison.
ripvanwormer
08-29-07, 07:21 PM This is what I wrote on Carceri on Planewalker.com. Basically, it's the plane of treachery.

Tartarus, the Red Prison, the Great Cage, the Hollow Plane, Il Carceri. Built of lies both soothing and violent, secrets preserved and broken, words raped and left without meaning, it was broken from the Mountain of Stories before the Titans' Clash and left to eternally eat itself like a serpent with its tail in its mouth, an infinite circle surrounding nothing. It seems, superficially, to be the most gentle of the planes of evil, but nothing can be trusted here. Even betrayal itself will be betrayed on this plane, for here all plans strive to reveal themselves before their fruition. Carceri can be as savage as the Beastlands, as evil as Gehenna, as conniving and cruel as its sky is wide. It's the plane of chaos repressed, where anger moves like a slow capricious liquid, a plane of death and disease without order, of betrayal, obscenity, stories whose endings thwart their beginnings, rats fighting to the death over a rat carcass, and evil hidden within evil, all of it looking for a way out.

In Carceri, everyone's looking for a way out, and betrayal is the best way to do it. Betrayal is movement, food, and life itself. Most importantly, betrayal is escape.

Has there ever been a cage as sure as Carceri? It holds the titans, primal powers of reality left to rot, separate from the existence they spawned. Older powers are there too, banished paradigms that never had a chance to bloom, imprisoned on the plane before the titans were ever conceived. More prisoners join the boiling sea of treachery; the ghosts of cross-traders and knights of the post, things too untamed for either Law or Chaos to accept, begetting evil begetting evil begetting evil begetting evil in the plane's endless succession of circular forms, endlessly turning on itself in the eternal quest for escape.

Betrayal is strength. Strength is freedom. Freedom and strength are forms of betrayal. The only way to get out is to turn the loop into a spiral. The banished must become stronger than the banisher, nearly impossible on a plane where every plan is eaten by the last, where the flood of lies and revelations buries all within a malific airy sea, and where betrayal is betrayed till all dissolves into the emptiness of its heart.

What can the titans do to trump the great betrayal of the Olympians so long ago? Where can they find their strength, where can anyone find purchase in the slippery ground of Carceri, cut off from all sources beyond by walls of their own making? There are whispers of those who've done it: Pagne Cacolyn, who rode on the failure of a wide-ranging yugoloth plot to destroy a Harmonium officer on Arcadia; Deck Liverpatch, who launched a conspiracy of astral seekers to frame a half-nalfeshnee tyrant in the Abyss. The master translator One-tooth salvaged the half-coherent sputterings of the dying birds (who pecked one another nearly to death) to the satisfaction of a serpent queen, an event that won Liverpatch his liberty. Kern Pon rebuilt her sabataged ship from sawdust into something no one in her homeland had ever seen. Then there was Caspirin the Redeemer, who united a fallen gate town for one day, using virtue to cheat the Red Prison of a piece of itself. Such a thing doesn't-can't-happen very often. Each time is legend, because it requires belief enough to tear away the plane's oily strands in proportion to the crime that bound them. To destroy any part of a universe's system of desire lines is no small feat.

Visitors and travellers who (foolishly) enter the Red Prison of their own free will can exit it with difficulty, but the path is treacherous. They must be constantly on their guard for those who would cut off their escape, for this would be banishment, and the cycle of imprisonment and betrayal would begin. For the banished, the Styx has no outlet-it loops through Carceri's orbs with no beginning and end. For the banished, no ordinary portal key will suffice.
Shemeska the Marauder
08-29-07, 10:02 PM What Rip said. http://arcanofox.foxpaws.net/shemmysmile.gif
Zousha_Omenohu
08-30-07, 12:28 AM :bow: And the great Ripvanwormer has spoken! Seriously, you always have the best insight into these things, sir.
Lobsopdoy
08-30-07, 03:28 PM Wow, ripvanwormer...in my topic? It's an honour sir.

So basically, the underlying philosophy of Carceri is that nothing can be done there because everyone will always be out to screw everyone else over. If you try to make a plan, someone else will end up ruining it. Is that right?
ripvanwormer
08-30-07, 09:41 PM Pretty much. The core theme of Carceri is treachery: it's where the souls of traitors go when they die, and it's where those outsider races (demodands, titans, and gautieres, for example) who have been so mired in treachery that they can no longer escape its endless cycle end up. Who cares, at this point, whether the first betrayal was that of the yugoloths or demodands? Or was the first sin that of the Tiere or of their nameless creator? Or was the first crime that of Cronus, when he refused to free his hecatonchiere brothers, or when he devoured his children, or when his children rose against him? Each betrayal begat more, until treachery is performed merely for its own sake.

Treachery breeds treachery, which breeds further betrayal. The orbs have no beginning and no end. This is why the plane is a prison. The prison is created by treachery and sustained by treachery. The inhabitants of Carceri are imprisoned by their own perfidy.
Lobsopdoy
08-31-07, 10:26 AM Ah, so the theme is evil making existence a Sisyphean exercise in futility. That sounds pretty cool. Thanks for explaining it to me.
Khadmus
09-01-07, 07:04 AM Nerull is there too. That's sort of a shtick.
ripvanwormer
09-01-07, 11:17 AM Nerull kind of stands above the intrigues and betrayals of Carceri - he isn't imprisoned there by anything, and he comes and goes at will. He dwells in Carceri because he likes it, because he enjoys watching the futile struggles of others. The betrayal that Nerull commits is much vaster: the betrayal of both life and undeath, the pitiless execution of the very energies that spawned him. He'll use both the living or the unliving as his tools, and just as quickly cut them down when it suits them. Others in Carceri are victims of their own treachery, but not Nerull - he owns his treachery.

That's not to say he's the ruler of the plane, or anything like that. Although he summons demodands to do his bidding, he's more of an independent agent, and not truly part of the plane.
Lobsopdoy
09-02-07, 06:13 PM Nerull kind of stands above the intrigues and betrayals of Carceri - he isn't imprisoned there by anything, and he comes and goes at will. He dwells in Carceri because he likes it, because he enjoys watching the futile struggles of others. The betrayal that Nerull commits is much vaster: the betrayal of both life and undeath, the pitiless execution of the very energies that spawned him. He'll use both the living or the unliving as his tools, and just as quickly cut them down when it suits them. Others in Carceri are victims of their own treachery, but not Nerull - he owns his treachery.

That's not to say he's the ruler of the plane, or anything like that. Although he summons demodands to do his bidding, he's more of an independent agent, and not truly part of the plane.

That's some scary **** right there
sciborg2
09-02-07, 06:44 PM Rip - are your planar essays collected in their entirety?...scurries off to check planewalker and Rip's website...
Lobsopdoy
09-04-07, 01:07 PM Rip - are your planar essays collected in their entirety?...scurries off to check planewalker and Rip's website...

I too would like to see that
Keenath
09-04-07, 01:59 PM I never had too much problem with Carceri, but what's the point of Gehenna? It's like... infinite slopes of fiery mountains. Whoo. What's the theme? Can anyone post a one-line explanation of what unique aspect of Evil is displayed in Gehenna?
schpeelah
09-04-07, 02:08 PM I suppose it's "working your way up the hierarchy no matter what"
Gehenna is where politicans go. Baator is more for lawyears and beaurocrats.
Keenath
09-04-07, 02:25 PM I don't know, that still seems more like Baator to me -- climbing the ladder is what baator is all about.
Deacon Liadon
09-04-07, 04:16 PM I never had too much problem with Carceri, but what's the point of Gehenna? It's like... infinite slopes of fiery mountains. Whoo. What's the theme? Can anyone post a one-line explanation of what unique aspect of Evil is displayed in Gehenna?

I'm sure Shemmy or Rip can phrase it better, but Gehenna is essentially power at any price. Proably why the 'loths like it there so much.
ripvanwormer
09-04-07, 05:34 PM Gehenna is exploitation. This is the opposite (on the good-evil axis) of Bytopia, which is cooperation.

Gehenna is where the strong-willed take advantage of the weak. They use laws to justify their actions when they can, but they do not hesitate to throw laws aside if it is more expedient to do so.

Will, in Gehenna, is defined as the willingness to do anything for your own gain. Nothing is too nasty. The strong-willed are on top, the weak-willed are on the bottom. This cannot change. The laws of reality are rigged. In every exchange of goods and services, someone prospers and the other person suffers. It isn't possible to gain without someone else losing.

Think of Gehenna, with its fourfold furnaces, as an industrial waste, a sprawling, evil factory and strip mine where unprincipled corporations have taken over everything, heedless of public safety or morality, exploiting the laws or cheating, raping the land and turning it to magma and ash in order to suck out everything of value. It's a place of slavery and pain, where hideous suffering is inflicted for no greater purpose than profit. It is capitalism run amuck. This is just an analogy - the yugoloths, phiuhls, liches, fire giants, orcs, vaporighus, and barghests of the plane don't literally form corporations in the modern sense (unless you want them to) - but it's this kind of savage, ruinous use of self-interest that defines the plane. It lacks the rigid military hierarchy of Baator, or the interest in Order for its own sake that the Nine Hells have, but it's more organized than the Gray Waste, dominated by rival courts, by robber barons and slavers all beholden to the monopolists and mercantile pirates who rule the plane.

The plane's opposite, Bytopia, is the positive side of capitalism - cooperation, community, industry. Everyone there does fulfilling work, and everyone makes a profit commensurate with the amount of effort they put in. No one is exploited - all parties benefit from all transactions, gaining fair wages or a fair price for the amount of work they do. All trade is mutually beneficial. The craftsfolk and traders of Bytopia work with the environment, instead of against it. Its people are partners, not deadly rivals. Bytopia can't really be understood without Gehenna, and vice versa. They define each other; they are opposite faces of the same coin.
Khadmus
09-04-07, 06:07 PM I support communism (lowercase "c", the punctuation is very important. This is the "anti-capitalism" communism, not the "Big Brother is watching" Communism.).
Keenath
09-05-07, 09:30 AM Well, communism works fine on a small scale; a family is essentially a commune, when you get down to it.

The trouble always comes along when you try to get more people in the commune than can possibly know each other. As soon as you can depersonalize others in the commune, it's fine to slack off your job and cheat the commune, because it's not cheating people you know. And on a very massive scale, you start having issues of quality control -- given a large group, you need some way to measure whether people are "doing their job", which often means quotas, and suddenly doing it right isn't as important as doing it quickly and getting big numbers on the quota sheet.

Anyway.

I guess I see where Gehenna goes, though I have to say it seems a lot like the rigid evil beaurocracy of Baator. The difference, I guess, is that devils have to stick to their word, and are bound by the details that they're proverbially in (and so you have to be careful of the exact wording and such), while 'loths will happily ignore clauses and even whole agreements if it's to their advantage.
ripvanwormer
09-05-07, 11:03 AM Well, the difference is that Gehenna's not a rigid bureaucracy. It has hierarchy, with those with greater will dominating and manipulating (and exploiting) those with lesser, but this hierarchy is fluid, not rigid. Inferiors may betray, slaughter, or simply ignore their superiors if their will is great enough. They give lip service to rule and tradition, but the hierarchy only means as much as those with the spirit and fortitude to enforce it can guarantee. The law of Gehenna is more corrupt and hollow than that of Baator.

Baator is as lawful as it is evil. Its inhabitants honestly care about laws and traditions - it's part of their very being, who and what they are, every bit as much as evil is. Establishing a universal law over every plane is the goal of every native of the Hells.

Gehenna is a place where law is a facade with a rotten core. Its inhabitants think of it as a tool to promote Evil - it's their favored tool, but it's still only a tool, to be discarded as is convenient. The baatezu are as focused on Law as their primary goal as the inevitables are, in their way - it's just a very different interpretation of what Law is.

The sentence that sums up Gehenna in Planes of Conflict is: Free will is an illusion. There is only the will of the strong and the will of the weak. The weak are low, while the strong rule. I sum that up as "exploitation," but it suggests more than that, a plane where the laws of the cosmos are truly stacked in favor of the strong-willed, and no relationship can ever be equitable or fair. Planes of Conflict says the best way to show strength in Gehenna is to pretend you know a valuable secret - perhaps blackmail and extortion and the like, or perhaps just knowledge about the ancient history of the planar races, or magic, or ancient artifacts, or the financial markets, something else that others want to know and still others want kept hidden. Secrets and extortion are the main currency of Gehenna, but as most of these secrets are bluffs, it's the will of the wielder that determines their effectiveness.
Khadmus
09-05-07, 12:50 PM Bla bla bla communism was a failure & this is why bla bla.

Exactly. We know what we did wrong. In the future, we can change these (massive) failures and we will all live in happiness. Certainly not the near future, but perhaps in a far-off mechanized age (which, ironically, requires capitalism to develop).
Keenath
09-05-07, 02:11 PM Exactly. We know what we did wrong. In the future, we can change these (massive) failures and we will all live in happiness. Certainly not the near future, but perhaps in a far-off mechanized age (which, ironically, requires capitalism to develop).
"What we did wrong"? I doubt large scale communism could work without getting humans to be honest and compassionate to everyone, even those they don't know -- and if you could do that, any government would be fine, even anarchy, because everyone would have everyone else's best interests at heart.

I don't think you can "fix" the problems, because they're not failures of the system so much as human nature.
Zousha_Omenohu
09-05-07, 02:35 PM I think this discussion of political and economic systems would probably be better somewhere else. No offense, but we're discussing the planes here, not our own world and how it should or shouldn't be run.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Lobsopdoy 08-29-07, 06:37 PM	All the Planes seem to have an underlying philosophy or point, but with Carceri...I just don't feel it. The Abyss is full of constant soul-devouring hate, Hades wallows in despair and evil, while Baator has brought evil to a science. But Carceri...eh, people are just stuck in there. Anything I'm missing?
Zousha_Omenohu 08-29-07, 07:12 PM	Well, I'd note that it's full name is the Tarterian Depths of Carceri. The residents of that place are all prisoners, and thus they are resentful of interlopers who can walk the multiverse freely. Also, they had to do something bad, or they wouldn't be trapped there in the first place, so they aren't shy about taking out their anger on unsuspecting and gullible visitors. I imagine that the sort of vibe you get when in Carceri is one of extreme frustration and distrust, since everyone there is basically sizing up their neighbor to stab them in the back. Whereas the Abyss is carnage and senseless destruction, Hades is depression incarnate and Baator is the crooked lawyer's paradise, Carceri is basically a prison and the law there is, beat someone up the first day, or become someone's b****.
Euclid 08-29-07, 07:13 PM	Plus, it's great for puzzles. Toss the PCs into a layer there as an adventuring hook.
Arilou_skiff 08-29-07, 07:15 PM	Also, no better place to seal of an Ancient Evil of DOOM . But yeah, the underlying philosophy is that of a prison.
ripvanwormer 08-29-07, 07:21 PM	This is what I wrote on Carceri on Planewalker.com. Basically, it's the plane of treachery. Tartarus, the Red Prison, the Great Cage, the Hollow Plane, Il Carceri. Built of lies both soothing and violent, secrets preserved and broken, words raped and left without meaning, it was broken from the Mountain of Stories before the Titans' Clash and left to eternally eat itself like a serpent with its tail in its mouth, an infinite circle surrounding nothing. It seems, superficially, to be the most gentle of the planes of evil, but nothing can be trusted here. Even betrayal itself will be betrayed on this plane, for here all plans strive to reveal themselves before their fruition. Carceri can be as savage as the Beastlands, as evil as Gehenna, as conniving and cruel as its sky is wide. It's the plane of chaos repressed, where anger moves like a slow capricious liquid, a plane of death and disease without order, of betrayal, obscenity, stories whose endings thwart their beginnings, rats fighting to the death over a rat carcass, and evil hidden within evil, all of it looking for a way out. In Carceri, everyone's looking for a way out, and betrayal is the best way to do it. Betrayal is movement, food, and life itself. Most importantly, betrayal is escape. Has there ever been a cage as sure as Carceri? It holds the titans, primal powers of reality left to rot, separate from the existence they spawned. Older powers are there too, banished paradigms that never had a chance to bloom, imprisoned on the plane before the titans were ever conceived. More prisoners join the boiling sea of treachery; the ghosts of cross-traders and knights of the post, things too untamed for either Law or Chaos to accept, begetting evil begetting evil begetting evil begetting evil in the plane's endless succession of circular forms, endlessly turning on itself in the eternal quest for escape. Betrayal is strength. Strength is freedom. Freedom and strength are forms of betrayal. The only way to get out is to turn the loop into a spiral. The banished must become stronger than the banisher, nearly impossible on a plane where every plan is eaten by the last, where the flood of lies and revelations buries all within a malific airy sea, and where betrayal is betrayed till all dissolves into the emptiness of its heart. What can the titans do to trump the great betrayal of the Olympians so long ago? Where can they find their strength, where can anyone find purchase in the slippery ground of Carceri, cut off from all sources beyond by walls of their own making? There are whispers of those who've done it: Pagne Cacolyn, who rode on the failure of a wide-ranging yugoloth plot to destroy a Harmonium officer on Arcadia; Deck Liverpatch, who launched a conspiracy of astral seekers to frame a half-nalfeshnee tyrant in the Abyss. The master translator One-tooth salvaged the half-coherent sputterings of the dying birds (who pecked one another nearly to death) to the satisfaction of a serpent queen, an event that won Liverpatch his liberty. Kern Pon rebuilt her sabataged ship from sawdust into something no one in her homeland had ever seen. Then there was Caspirin the Redeemer, who united a fallen gate town for one day, using virtue to cheat the Red Prison of a piece of itself. Such a thing doesn't-can't-happen very often. Each time is legend, because it requires belief enough to tear away the plane's oily strands in proportion to the crime that bound them. To destroy any part of a universe's system of desire lines is no small feat. Visitors and travellers who (foolishly) enter the Red Prison of their own free will can exit it with difficulty, but the path is treacherous. They must be constantly on their guard for those who would cut off their escape, for this would be banishment, and the cycle of imprisonment and betrayal would begin. For the banished, the Styx has no outlet-it loops through Carceri's orbs with no beginning and end. For the banished, no ordinary portal key will suffice.
Shemeska the Marauder 08-29-07, 10:02 PM	What Rip said. http://arcanofox.foxpaws.net/shemmysmile.gif
Zousha_Omenohu 08-30-07, 12:28 AM	:bow: And the great Ripvanwormer has spoken! Seriously, you always have the best insight into these things, sir.
Lobsopdoy 08-30-07, 03:28 PM	Wow, ripvanwormer...in my topic? It's an honour sir. So basically, the underlying philosophy of Carceri is that nothing can be done there because everyone will always be out to screw everyone else over. If you try to make a plan, someone else will end up ruining it. Is that right?
ripvanwormer 08-30-07, 09:41 PM	Pretty much. The core theme of Carceri is treachery: it's where the souls of traitors go when they die, and it's where those outsider races (demodands, titans, and gautieres, for example) who have been so mired in treachery that they can no longer escape its endless cycle end up. Who cares, at this point, whether the first betrayal was that of the yugoloths or demodands? Or was the first sin that of the Tiere or of their nameless creator? Or was the first crime that of Cronus, when he refused to free his hecatonchiere brothers, or when he devoured his children, or when his children rose against him? Each betrayal begat more, until treachery is performed merely for its own sake. Treachery breeds treachery, which breeds further betrayal. The orbs have no beginning and no end. This is why the plane is a prison. The prison is created by treachery and sustained by treachery. The inhabitants of Carceri are imprisoned by their own perfidy.
Lobsopdoy 08-31-07, 10:26 AM	Ah, so the theme is evil making existence a Sisyphean exercise in futility. That sounds pretty cool. Thanks for explaining it to me.
Khadmus 09-01-07, 07:04 AM	Nerull is there too. That's sort of a shtick.
ripvanwormer 09-01-07, 11:17 AM	Nerull kind of stands above the intrigues and betrayals of Carceri - he isn't imprisoned there by anything, and he comes and goes at will. He dwells in Carceri because he likes it, because he enjoys watching the futile struggles of others. The betrayal that Nerull commits is much vaster: the betrayal of both life and undeath, the pitiless execution of the very energies that spawned him. He'll use both the living or the unliving as his tools, and just as quickly cut them down when it suits them. Others in Carceri are victims of their own treachery, but not Nerull - he owns his treachery. That's not to say he's the ruler of the plane, or anything like that. Although he summons demodands to do his bidding, he's more of an independent agent, and not truly part of the plane.
Lobsopdoy 09-02-07, 06:13 PM	Nerull kind of stands above the intrigues and betrayals of Carceri - he isn't imprisoned there by anything, and he comes and goes at will. He dwells in Carceri because he likes it, because he enjoys watching the futile struggles of others. The betrayal that Nerull commits is much vaster: the betrayal of both life and undeath, the pitiless execution of the very energies that spawned him. He'll use both the living or the unliving as his tools, and just as quickly cut them down when it suits them. Others in Carceri are victims of their own treachery, but not Nerull - he owns his treachery. That's not to say he's the ruler of the plane, or anything like that. Although he summons demodands to do his bidding, he's more of an independent agent, and not truly part of the plane. That's some scary **** right there
sciborg2 09-02-07, 06:44 PM	Rip - are your planar essays collected in their entirety?...scurries off to check planewalker and Rip's website...
Lobsopdoy 09-04-07, 01:07 PM	Rip - are your planar essays collected in their entirety?...scurries off to check planewalker and Rip's website... I too would like to see that
Keenath 09-04-07, 01:59 PM	I never had too much problem with Carceri, but what's the point of Gehenna? It's like... infinite slopes of fiery mountains. Whoo. What's the theme? Can anyone post a one-line explanation of what unique aspect of Evil is displayed in Gehenna?
schpeelah 09-04-07, 02:08 PM	I suppose it's "working your way up the hierarchy no matter what" Gehenna is where politicans go. Baator is more for lawyears and beaurocrats.
Keenath 09-04-07, 02:25 PM	I don't know, that still seems more like Baator to me -- climbing the ladder is what baator is all about.
Deacon Liadon 09-04-07, 04:16 PM	I never had too much problem with Carceri, but what's the point of Gehenna? It's like... infinite slopes of fiery mountains. Whoo. What's the theme? Can anyone post a one-line explanation of what unique aspect of Evil is displayed in Gehenna? I'm sure Shemmy or Rip can phrase it better, but Gehenna is essentially power at any price. Proably why the 'loths like it there so much.
ripvanwormer 09-04-07, 05:34 PM	Gehenna is exploitation. This is the opposite (on the good-evil axis) of Bytopia, which is cooperation. Gehenna is where the strong-willed take advantage of the weak. They use laws to justify their actions when they can, but they do not hesitate to throw laws aside if it is more expedient to do so. Will, in Gehenna, is defined as the willingness to do anything for your own gain. Nothing is too nasty. The strong-willed are on top, the weak-willed are on the bottom. This cannot change. The laws of reality are rigged. In every exchange of goods and services, someone prospers and the other person suffers. It isn't possible to gain without someone else losing. Think of Gehenna, with its fourfold furnaces, as an industrial waste, a sprawling, evil factory and strip mine where unprincipled corporations have taken over everything, heedless of public safety or morality, exploiting the laws or cheating, raping the land and turning it to magma and ash in order to suck out everything of value. It's a place of slavery and pain, where hideous suffering is inflicted for no greater purpose than profit. It is capitalism run amuck. This is just an analogy - the yugoloths, phiuhls, liches, fire giants, orcs, vaporighus, and barghests of the plane don't literally form corporations in the modern sense (unless you want them to) - but it's this kind of savage, ruinous use of self-interest that defines the plane. It lacks the rigid military hierarchy of Baator, or the interest in Order for its own sake that the Nine Hells have, but it's more organized than the Gray Waste, dominated by rival courts, by robber barons and slavers all beholden to the monopolists and mercantile pirates who rule the plane. The plane's opposite, Bytopia, is the positive side of capitalism - cooperation, community, industry. Everyone there does fulfilling work, and everyone makes a profit commensurate with the amount of effort they put in. No one is exploited - all parties benefit from all transactions, gaining fair wages or a fair price for the amount of work they do. All trade is mutually beneficial. The craftsfolk and traders of Bytopia work with the environment, instead of against it. Its people are partners, not deadly rivals. Bytopia can't really be understood without Gehenna, and vice versa. They define each other; they are opposite faces of the same coin.
Khadmus 09-04-07, 06:07 PM	I support communism (lowercase "c", the punctuation is very important. This is the "anti-capitalism" communism, not the "Big Brother is watching" Communism.).
Keenath 09-05-07, 09:30 AM	Well, communism works fine on a small scale; a family is essentially a commune, when you get down to it. The trouble always comes along when you try to get more people in the commune than can possibly know each other. As soon as you can depersonalize others in the commune, it's fine to slack off your job and cheat the commune, because it's not cheating people you know. And on a very massive scale, you start having issues of quality control -- given a large group, you need some way to measure whether people are "doing their job", which often means quotas, and suddenly doing it right isn't as important as doing it quickly and getting big numbers on the quota sheet. Anyway. I guess I see where Gehenna goes, though I have to say it seems a lot like the rigid evil beaurocracy of Baator. The difference, I guess, is that devils have to stick to their word, and are bound by the details that they're proverbially in (and so you have to be careful of the exact wording and such), while 'loths will happily ignore clauses and even whole agreements if it's to their advantage.
ripvanwormer 09-05-07, 11:03 AM	Well, the difference is that Gehenna's not a rigid bureaucracy. It has hierarchy, with those with greater will dominating and manipulating (and exploiting) those with lesser, but this hierarchy is fluid, not rigid. Inferiors may betray, slaughter, or simply ignore their superiors if their will is great enough. They give lip service to rule and tradition, but the hierarchy only means as much as those with the spirit and fortitude to enforce it can guarantee. The law of Gehenna is more corrupt and hollow than that of Baator. Baator is as lawful as it is evil. Its inhabitants honestly care about laws and traditions - it's part of their very being, who and what they are, every bit as much as evil is. Establishing a universal law over every plane is the goal of every native of the Hells. Gehenna is a place where law is a facade with a rotten core. Its inhabitants think of it as a tool to promote Evil - it's their favored tool, but it's still only a tool, to be discarded as is convenient. The baatezu are as focused on Law as their primary goal as the inevitables are, in their way - it's just a very different interpretation of what Law is. The sentence that sums up Gehenna in Planes of Conflict is: Free will is an illusion. There is only the will of the strong and the will of the weak. The weak are low, while the strong rule. I sum that up as "exploitation," but it suggests more than that, a plane where the laws of the cosmos are truly stacked in favor of the strong-willed, and no relationship can ever be equitable or fair. Planes of Conflict says the best way to show strength in Gehenna is to pretend you know a valuable secret - perhaps blackmail and extortion and the like, or perhaps just knowledge about the ancient history of the planar races, or magic, or ancient artifacts, or the financial markets, something else that others want to know and still others want kept hidden. Secrets and extortion are the main currency of Gehenna, but as most of these secrets are bluffs, it's the will of the wielder that determines their effectiveness.
Khadmus 09-05-07, 12:50 PM	Bla bla bla communism was a failure & this is why bla bla. Exactly. We know what we did wrong. In the future, we can change these (massive) failures and we will all live in happiness. Certainly not the near future, but perhaps in a far-off mechanized age (which, ironically, requires capitalism to develop).
Keenath 09-05-07, 02:11 PM	Exactly. We know what we did wrong. In the future, we can change these (massive) failures and we will all live in happiness. Certainly not the near future, but perhaps in a far-off mechanized age (which, ironically, requires capitalism to develop). "What we did wrong"? I doubt large scale communism could work without getting humans to be honest and compassionate to everyone, even those they don't know -- and if you could do that, any government would be fine, even anarchy, because everyone would have everyone else's best interests at heart. I don't think you can "fix" the problems, because they're not failures of the system so much as human nature.
Zousha_Omenohu 09-05-07, 02:35 PM	I think this discussion of political and economic systems would probably be better somewhere else. No offense, but we're discussing the planes here, not our own world and how it should or shouldn't be run.