Memetics in RPGs

>GURPS
>Not memetic
I disagree user.

I remember some user posting about a predatory street name that locked anyone who saw it into a perpetual loop of itself.

So suddenly your party looks at a sign on the road or on a post and they see "Mulberry St. 6785." They keep walking and come to another sign with the same name. After a while they realize the scenery around them isn't changing very much, and then the scenery stops changing altogether. Then as they keep walking they see figures in the distance. They slowly catch up to the figures, and realize the figures look an awful lot like themselves from the back.

I don't know what happens when they get close enough to those things, but you get the point. Don't fuck with Mulberry St.

>Perfect for Lovecraftian horror style games
What is the King in Yellow

Degenesis has them as one of the major plot points, actually. The sleepers are cryogenically frozen memetic agents that are operating off of half-remembered plans of the grand meme-master, whose voice and speech patterns were enough to inspire people to devotion.

>this monster is as powerful as its enemies' imagination lets it be
>therefore we are sending you, a crack team of the most unimaginative idiots we could find, on a mission to kill it

it's the perfect crime

What the fuck

I live on Mulberry St.

And I just picked wild mulberries!

Many of us do user. It is a common glitch. Same houses same people. The glitch is the reason that THING was able to exploit it to quench its appetite.

>PC1: And that means that the body was dead BEFORE it came anywhere near the bonfire. But we know nobody could have been there to move it, so what happened?
>PC2: ...Raccoons?
>PC1: Yeah, probably.

>PC1: Well, why would they kill all the hostages?
>PC2: Because they were really, really stupid?
>PC1: Eh, that works. Oh, and all the bodies were exsanguinated.
>PC2: Well, alright, I don't know why that would happen.
>PC1: Coroner made a mistake, most likely. Or maybe the hostages just didn't have a lot of blood— y'know, medical condition.

>PC2: Anyway, Dr. Goodwin told me that the message carved into the wall was written in an extremely obscure language associated with the N'tali people of southeast asia, who mysteriously vanished about 1,300 years ago, leaving almost nothing in the way of archaeological evidence. The message itself is just some gibberish about "devouring the moon," but Dr. Goodwin was able to link it to a notorious occult text—
>PC1: So we're looking for a group of rare book sellers gone bad.
>PC2: Exactly. You know how much those first editions go for.

I'll just leave this here

goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2014/09/false-hydra.html

Please keep going

Double Dutch Bus, is that you?

You could always make it temporary, just until they sleep.

And you always will.

Have another street like that, slightly antimemetic and a space anomaly.

>Secure. Contain. Protect.
SCP has a lot of dumb shit but I liked it way better when the acronym stood for "Secure containment protocols".

>PC1: Coroner made a mistake, most likely. Or maybe the hostages just didn't have a lot of blood— y'know, medical condition.

This one made me groan out loud.

Just for you Veeky Forums

>PC1: Break it down for me: what'd you get out of the interrogation?
>PC2: Not a lot. Mostly some bullshit about "T'gogolech." Guy must have fried his brain on drugs years ago— he kept babbling about "The Pale Lord", "Eater of Names", shit like that.
>PC1: Fuckin' junkies. There's probably some truth in it somewhere, though.
>PC2: Yeah. I'm thinking that we nail this "T'gogolech" guy and their whole operation collapses. He's got to be the kingpin. Dude practically worshipped him.

Just figured out what I'm doing for my Halloween one shot. Thanks man.

They're a super old idea and there's actually a lot of them - see for example Hastur.

You're saying we should look into Hastur?

this reminds me of something

reee.

Thanks, that was great.

(My own experiences run closest to Example 13, the total derailment scenario, minus the YouTubing. It seems entirely plausible for pizza to have been "the sushi of the fifties," given that it was categorized as ethnic food for years— maybe it still is, for all I know.)

c'mon thread

Anti-memetic entities would be really hard to run, as it would eventually rely on the characters not knowing something the players do. You'd better have some damn good roleplayers for that.

Unless you don't tell the players about the entities or what they do (they forgot immediately), but that would be a hell of an encounter.

>GM: You enter the house. There is the smell of decay coming from upstairs.
>PC1: I move upstairs to investigate.
>GM: *passes PC1 a note* You may act when you're done reading.
>PC2: Fuck that. I'll make sure the first floor is clear.
>GM: *rolls* There is nothing in the kitchen.
>GM: *rolls* There is nothing in the dining room.
>GM: *rolls* There is nothing in the living room.
>GM: *rolls* ...What's your max HP?
>PC2: 46. Why?
>GM: You have found nothing on the first floor.
>PC1: I take the journal with me and rush downstairs, calling PC2's name.
>PC2: What? What did you find?
>PC1: How bad is it?
>GM: He's bleeding pretty heavily from claw marks in his chest. His left arm dangles uselessly from his displaced shoulder.
>PC2: Who is?

>Hastur
what does he do besides appearing and murdering you if you say his name 3 times?

The yellow sign.

Hastur this, Hastur that. Why does everyone keep talking about Hastur?

Because of Old Man Henderson.

>The joke
>Your head

No, I got it. Doesn't mean I have to play along.

I'm doing this. I'm doing this for hours my next session.

I'd love to do that as well, but I don't have a group I could pull it off with.

Silent Legions has a pretty neat antimemetic example monster: the PCs can see it and remember it exists, but they can't do anything to acknowledge its existence unless they'
re willing to take some hefty sanity damage.

I'll regret that, but I just told my Call of Cthulhu DM about this entity.

Make sure to balance the fact that you're not telling information to the players with the fact that there are in-game consequences.
Killing someone with no save is not fun, but telling them every time they take damage misses the point.
I'd run it like the example, with other players being able to see the damage, but only if they weren't there for the attack. If they saw it, it'll get anti-memed, but seeing only the aftermath is fine.
Besides, not only does this encourage splitting the party, but new wounds won't show up if you're watching, even if you're still being attacked. How long have you been bleeding?

At the start of each session, ask your players to recap the previous session together.

If they misinterpreted or misremembered details, adjust your prep to match their view.

>scp-wiki.net/scp-2140

how would you know...

I believe this kind of SCP tricks is the only way to do yog-shoggotery right.

Every other thing is either a monster from DnD splatbook or a monster from DnD splatbook that also consumes your secondary health ba called SAN.

You don't need tricks for yog-sothothery.
You just need to give vague, little, contradicting or abstract descriptions and describe spooky atmosphere.

scp-wiki.net/scp-3002
'attempts to assassinate thought'

I'm loving it. My favoirte part of RPGs are monster manuals.
Do you have more?

This is some really interesting stuff.
Has it been explored in other mediums which can be used to source or other games?

Dr.Who (2005) uses "The Silence" which is pretty much the entire anti-memetic shtick.
It gets pretty damn spooky.

>The characters agree to try counting whatever it is.
>They suddenly realize they are covered in numbers.
>Panic.

if only those guys had been there for the end of ghost busters

ok, so I ran an entire campaign in eclipse phase 3 times that centered on memetic hazards. technically they were memes but I will get to that later. If any one wants I will post green text tomorrow.

>I will post green text tomorrow
just going to lead us on like that?

He doesn't really do that.

Going back to the source, we've got three things to worry about.

Dramatis Personae:
The Yellow Sign (a sign)
The King in Yellow (a play)
The King in Yellow (a god)

Act I
The Yellow Sign is a glyph in a script unknown to man. It is the first stage of infection, for having seen the sign, you're open to manipulation by those filled with the King's power.
Sometimes its servants have been known to approach and ask "Have you seen the Yellow Sign?"

Act II
The King in Yellow is a play, divided into two. The first half describes a great masquerade ball held by the final members of a great dynasty. About their politics, and of a stranger who appears amongst them. The act ends with the end of the masquerade, when everyone removes their masks. The stranger refuses, claiming he wears no mask.
The second half is where the true horror lies. It is where the King in Yellow is revealed, and its contents are unknown, but merely its first line is incredibly important.
The effect of reading the play inspires a kind of cosmic apathy. Something in the second act brings about a change, a despair that leaves one unable to resist the inevitable.
Or leads them to madness.

Act III
The King himself, the King whom Emperors have served. He is unknown, Hastur is not even his name, it's a city -- likely the one in which the play takes place. What he is, and what he can do is unknown, but it is suggested that he may take possession of the corpses of those who serve him, and wear their flesh as a body.
But what we can know, is he is best avoided.
Not for nothing is it said "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God."

Thanks user

>No mentions of Transhuman Space

Are there any good sci-fi novels with this sort of stuff?

Delta Green has pumped a lot of good blood into The King in Yellow.
archive 4plebs org/dl/tg/image/1461/32/1461323187119 pdf

Memetic infection is my jam. Trying to fight something that gets stronger and harder to contain if you try to learn how to beat or contain it. Realizing that this helpful NPC that saved you life has to die because they've seen something that lives in memories. Gleefully informing your players that there's no sign that the entire session's encounter even happened, or even giving hard evidence against it having been possible. Look up "Night Floors" by Dennis Detwiller, or if you're a richfag throw a dollar at the Delta Green patreon to listen to the podcast play-sessions for "Impossible Landscapes".

>Memetic enteties are ones that once you know about them, or have seen their photo start affecting your. Mere knowledge about them have a measurable effects.

lol

Well, now we know what the Yellow Sign is.

Not using "I, Madman", "Candyman", or Freddy Krueger as examples is pretty sad. Pontypool is even better.

Speaking of Dr.Who monsters that can move when you look at them and don't look at are pretty cool.

You wouldn't able to introduce a blinking mechanic in a game (Fort saves are lame) so a monster that moves only when you DO look at him is better.

PCs can scenes with the monster on top of his last victim even if weeks passed since the attack. Or some pour soul got his eyes clawed out and so was able to escape.

Aren't Bards technically always memetic?

Oh god, Pontypool was amazing.

Yes. We DO want.

I wanted to make a T-shirt with it. Images on the be can be goggled, but on a physical shirt... Only the ones that know will get it, and they will be too ashamed to reveal it ot others.

No, it really wasn't.

does anyone have the modified version?

The Basilisk is a memetic peril. It is an extremely persuasive argument or idea that persuades otherwise sane and well balanced people to kill themselves and those they care about. Those persuaded by the Basilisk will also seek to communicate the Basilisk to others.
Those under the influence of the Basilisk do not seem motivated by anger or hatred; they seem to believe that what they doing is for the good of their victims. They will eagerly explain themselves if offered the chance, communicating the Basilisk in the process.

The details of the Basilisk are not safe to know, lest the knower deduce the Basilisk and be persuaded by it, but there are a few parameters than the Committee on Informational Peril has deemed safe to know.

1. The Basilisk is a reasonably complex idea. It takes a few minutes or about a page of text to explain; it cannot be communicated in its entirety in a sentence.

2. The Basilisk has emerged independently multiple times; it is an idea that seems to arise naturally from deep, usually AI-assisted, study of psychic powers and the nature of the sapient mind. For this reason, the CoIP has issued a broad-spectrum ban on such research.

3. The Basilisk, while persuasive, is not perfectly so. Some individuals exposed to the Basilisk or, more frequently, to partial or interrupted communication of the Basilisk have expressed incomprehension or rejection of the Basilisk. Nevertheless, such individuals frequently (in 78% of known cases) act as carriers or incubators of the Basilisk, deducing the full Basilisk at later date and coming under its influence in the same manner as those who suffer full exposure. As such, the CoIP segregates those exposed to partial or un-comprehended Basilisks to a space station under informational quarantine.

>hey this meme is a meme
wow

> it is an idea that seems to arise naturally from deep, usually AI-assisted, study of psychic powers and the nature of the sapient mind.

Google deepweb discovers the source code of insanity

>what if pascal's wager but EBUL
fuck roko

What if that Memetic Hazard poster is itself a Memetic hazard?

Like, it's a parasite that attaches to other hazards and warns us about them. Because it warned us, we spread it and use it. It's just piggybacking on other Memetic entities.

I don't get it. *shrug*

funfact
The author of HPMoR and employer at an AI research institute will delete any posts on his facebook upon mentioning the Basilisk.

This was in Doctor Who also.

People would commit mass suicide, mostly very learned people. Anyone else who received communications from them and read/heard the communication would follow suit.

It turned out that the whole world was a simulation of the real world being run to find weaknesses for extra dimensional aliens who were planning to invade. Mass suicides were the only form of resistance the simulated people could offer.

i'm not really seeing what i'm supposed to am i?

>Mass suicides were the only form of resistance the simulated people could offer.
youtube.com/watch?v=qV0I-iA5lJU

...

Antimeme division is a really a nice reading on the subject.

scp-wiki.net/antimemetics-division-hub

Spoiler of the first story: An entity that can only be percieved by its prey. Once prey is designed the prey also becomes an antimeme and no longer can communicate with other people.

The entiety can only be hurt by objects containing data: books, cell phones, hard drives etc.

That's the second story. But it's a bunch of very good stories, which I enjoyed a lot

...modified version?

The Delta Green version of Hastur is so much better than the original.

That whole space/dimension Hellraiser schtick gets pretty much into Kult's realm. Might want to check that out if you're interested?
mega.nz/#F!utlm3KxA!Qx9DDuD8p8J1IKyIChHKXQ

The anime re: creators, maybe

This post has some serious irony in it, given the original notion of a meme.

Memes were, of course, originally proposed as units of behavior; the idea was that human brains are essentially tools for mimicry, and a meme is something that is transmitted from one human to another via mimicry and expressed through behavior. Human behavior could thus be explained in terms of the action of selection on memes: shifts in the frequencies of behaviors must reflect shifts in the frequencies of the memes generating them.

This turned out to be a remarkably barren explanatory framework, partially because human brains aren't mimicry engines and partially because nobody could figure out what a meme actually was. (For the details, read the memetics page on Wikipedia.) The term "meme" came to refer to a variety of internet fad or joke using a modifiable template in a sort of call-and-response way; the high variability of internet memes actually disqualifies them from being Dawkinsian memes, as far as I can tell. "This meme is a meme" is true under the current colloquial definition of a meme, but false under the older definition (to the extent that anyone could agree on what constituted a meme), and this dichotomy exemplifies the kind of shift in behavior that memetics was intended to explain in the first place.

Or various other j-horror offerings.

So there is something similar that have been happening to me
From time to time when I learn something new I loose perspective of it. I know that I learned that soon but it feels like I have always known this thing. And when did I hear it? Yesterday? The day before? And I start wondering and get almost memories of the thing but I can't really remember it. That combined with the general inability to connect memories to date.
Now for players you can keep a journal, physically or online, with everything that have happen so far, some questions and all sorts of things they know. Then change it. When they go to fight werewolves and bring silver weapons make the werewolves vulnerable to iron. They wonder what is happening but in the journal is written "werewolves are weak to iron touched weapons". Change dates, quest resolution, etc. Mess with their memories and act like it was always like that.
Even better keep three different journals and switch them around.

Like good bacteria and bad bacteria I suppose, interesting idea.

Goblinpunch and Falsemachine on blogspot are chock full of cool stuff like that.

>CTRL + F "Global Frequency"
>0 Results

A damn shame I don't have the pdfs. It's a good read.

>Has an entire issue dedicated to a completely alien memetic virus implanting itself in a city block's worth of people
>They develop a flock mentality, never separating much from each other and attacking much like avians do.
>They are attempting to build a radio tower to broadcast it to the world
>They attack police, passerbys, everyone really
>Specialists are called in to "re-program" the people
>Their memetic specialist has to try and re-write this un-earthly thing to represent humanity
>Despite her eyes bleeding, she pulls it off and broadcasts it to the group
>Turns out the only way she could was to broadcast the basic principle of "love"
>They all start making out with each other and collapse into what is assumed a massive orgy
>My face

>too ashamed to reveal it ot others
why?

I don't think that really would inspire an "oh cool" moment, even if they managed to figure it out

Plays Demon's Souls and get back to us on how good of an idea that is.

the book cover but with the taglines replaced by greentext