LibraryPlane: Underpinning Theme

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Back when I played Magic, I designed several cards with friends. But we were stupid, and bad players, and the cards sucked. So I set that hobby aside for a decade until nostalgia hit me and I decided to look into present-day Magic. This coincided with the release of Rise of the Eldrazi. I liked the look of that set; not so much that I would spend money to play it, but enough to revisit my childhood interest in Magic design.

So, plagiarism! the block I am planning will be an expansion of RoE's themes. Or more specifically, the theme of stalling until the late game, in this way making possible big splashy plays. I can see how level up and totem armor contribute to this theme, but I'm leaving them out since they're clunky and the flavour doesn't connect with me (and rebound doesn't seem to fit into the theme or have any flavour at all).

I suppose I was also attracted to the flavour behind the eldrazi. I'm not all that keen on Lovecraft, but I have some training in philosophy, so I recognize the basis for his horror as metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism, put simply, is the thesis that reality is essentially metaphysical rather than physical/empirical/reducible to sense data/qualia/etc. Descartes has the most famous characterization of this thesis with his 'what if I'm dreaming/what if I'm being deceived by an omnipotent demon' doubts. And we still have metaphysical realists today, though they may resist the label, in the form of eliminativists like Daniel Dennett who hold that perceptual experiences do not exist, but is rather an artifact from an ancient and mistaken conceptual scheme.

Most metaphysical realists flesh out their philosophy with a companion theory detailing how it is that we arrive at metaphysical knowledge, what it is like, and so on. But this philosophy itself is a little boring; the potential for sizable drama isn't there, but rather it's in the idea that we cannot access reality as immediately as we had thought, that we perhaps can never access it. If we can't perceive the real world, who knows what's going on there? maybe we're in danger there? maybe we don't matter there? etc. etc. Tapping into this drama is a little tough, especially since there are a lot of twilight-zone-like stereotypes that must be avoided. Lovecraft managed it, though, and I think this is because he arrived at metaphysical realism in the following way: he presented reality as being so infinitely horrifying that our senses distort it as a kind of defense mechanism. To put it clumsily: our eyes refuse to see this reality; they present us with an attenuated, PG-rated, pseudo-reality. So, he articulated his metaphysical reality as a metaphysics of horror, where real objects are so inscrutably disturbing that they can only be characterized as real at a cosmic or transcendental level.

And their physical manifestation (as I understand it, the basic structure of Lovecraftian storytelling involves a portal-mechanism that brings the metaphysical horror into the physical world, so that we can confront it [and say 'damn, we probably shouldn't have opened that portal']), is only realized through a perversion of our natural laws. That is, a cthulhu/eldrazi, with its alien ontology, is not entirely reducible to a coherent manifestation in our world. But if we force this reduction to take place, the metaphysical remainder must be omitted, so that we are left with a quasi-being. This is why Kozilek has eyes popping out in odd places; the essential element that would organize its existence into something comprehensible could not form, so we are left with a chaotic flesh-husk, a vandalism of our earthly physiology. Or that's the idea, anyway.

That's my take on Lovecraft. But I'm not interested in pursuing the drama of metaphysical realism as he constructs it. I want to go in a different direction if just because I don't have the talent or the interest to make entertainingly grotesque monsters. I'd like to work with a metaphysical realism that's 'trippy' rather than horrifying. I'm not certain that trippy metaphysics can provide the same level of drama that a metaphysics of horror can. On the other hand, trippy fits better with the philosophy of metaphysical realism, since it's difficult to attribute sinister propositional attitudes to metaphysical objects. (Of course, even if there is no direct route from metaphysics to horror, there IS a passage from inscrutability to horror, but my feeling is that Lovecraft overemphasizes the horror and loses sight of the inscrutability along the way.)

Meanwhile, I have a copy of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in my desk. His critical epistemology takes Cartesian real world skepticism to its logical extreme (where he refutes it, but several of its tenets are preserved all the same). So, I plan on building the drama of my metaphysical realism on that epistemology. I suspect there's enough intrigue in the Critique of Pure Reason, and in the history surrounding it, to write an interesting background to my block.

Alright, to sum up 1. This is a late game matters set in keeping with the RoE model. 2. Its flavour is driven by inscrutable goings-on in keeping with RoE flavour. 3. I'm looking to realize more philosophy in these inscrutable goings-on rather than horror.

Created on 10 Apr 2011 by Putnam