Re: [DL] the problems Manitou face (slight spoiler)

[John Goodrich <Qusoor@monkeybrains.net>]

Patrick Downs wrote:

    Humans do not fear anything for very long if it doesn't have teeth.
We're an adaptable, psychologically astounding race that can learn to
live with anything.  Sure, we get creeped out by wolves howling, but
that's because we know what's at the other end of the howl: teeth.  If
you don't kill someone every now and then, people aren't going to be
impressed.  Ask any Roman Emperor.
    So the Reckoners kill/maim a few people.  Human nature being what it
is, we play the old telephone game and the death gets more scary every
time it's told.  But the point is that it was so scary that someone
died.  We listen to the story and think "that could have been me."  One
good, messy death can create fear in a hundred or a thousand people.
    The West is ideal for this.  Eastern newspapers lock up the facts as
soon as a reporter gets to them, and the story can no longer grow.  In
the West, things get passed around, and have a chance to get bigger and
scarier before it gets circulated by the newspaper to a couple hundred
people.
    And even one murder isn't going to do it.  We compartmentalize so
well that we'll forget.  So you got to do it again, and make is
different, or we'll see a pattern and go after whatever is doing the
killing.  So there have to be more, but not too much more.  Humans tend
to get all heroic when we're cornered and have nothing left to lose.
But you feed us a steady diet of fear and helplessness for a couple
years, and you've got a tremendous amount of fear going on.
    As for manitou making ultra-reliable mad science, I look at it this
way.  What a Manitou is doing when it makes "mad science" is injecting
its own magic so that the device can defy the laws of physics.  I see it
as juggling physics.  Now the manitou aren't all-powerful, so they've
got to keep one law of physics in the air while the machine is
operating.  And Manitou, as we all know, very in power.  So some are
good at juggling physics, but nobody can keep all those balls in the air
all the time--especially on short notice.  Try as they might, sometimes
they just can't do it, even if it's making all the fear in the world.
    I don't know about the rest of you, and it might just be my cynical
soul, but does it occur to anyone else that the powers of the blessed
also come from the Reckoners?  After all, religious intolerance kills...



    John Goodrich
    Doomtown Story Writer
    Whateley Fiend