SWN Pre-Campaign Reflections (and Jain-tromba syncretism)

The next generation of Vezo sailors involved in serious play. Andavadoaka, Western Madagascar

"In brief, if Western historicity (at least in the twentieth century) can be summed up by the much invoked figure of Benjamin’s allegorical angel of history, that is hardly the Sakalava vision. Instead of turning back toward the mounting ruins of the past onto which the angel mournfully gazes, Sakalava face the future, bearing the past on their backs, carrying it with them." - Michael Lambek, The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar

I've been setting up a SWN game for some of my high schoolers (all of whom have 0 experience with TTRPGs with the exception of one girl who watches a lot of actual plays but hasn't joined a table herself) and I'm noticing stuff that I wouldn't have expected:

Procedural Generation

Trying to push myself out of my comfort zone and use more proc-gen tools for my games (SWN is a good system for it.) Initially intended to keep most of it behind the screen but we generated the important parts of the PCs’ home culture in a presession and they seemed to enjoy it a lot!

Stars Without Number has, in typical Crawfordian fashion, tons of tables to generate stuff with. I knew the players wanted a travel-centric game so I said they'd be from one of the nomadic Scavenger Fleets. We used the tables for generating a fleet (origin, distinctive trait, special skills) to roll up two possible skeletons and they preferred the psitech altrusitic pirates. The winning combo was 

• Origin - Pirates safely in space at the time of the Scream

• What the fleet wants - Data: They’re looking for a long-lost fleet cache.

• What the fleet offers - Psitech: Rare, esoteric, and probably dangerous.

• Cultural traits - Altruistic: They are actively helpful to outsiders.

• Recent problems - A powerful polity has recently turned against the fleet

From there we set up some world anchors - since I've been on a Madagascar kick, I suggested something based on the recent posthumous Graeber book about Malagasy/pirate hybrid cultures (expertly backdooring Vezo, Sakalava, Tsimihety, and Betsimisaraka anthropology into the elfgame) and between that, the kids' own ideas, and some more rolling on tables we got Jain-tromba syncretic nonviolent Malagasy quasi-pirates who all talk like Enlightenment philosophers as the vibe. Whenever we need to come up with something for the fleet later, we'll use the World Anchor roll procedure. I was really impressed by the connection drawn by one of the students between the Altruist trait role and Jainism, it's the sort of thing I'd never have come up with. I asked the player what got him thinking in that direction and it turns out the dude is doing an AP World History project on Jains. Rare W for the Texas public school system, ig.  All in all, I'm rethinking how much of the rolling for sector-building I should do "in public" based on the positive experience here.

Lore and Backstory

The kids were way more interested in lore and way less interested in their character specifics than I anticipated. All of them have asked me tons of stuff about the Mandate background lore - do people normally care about that? - in the corebook + the Malagasy background (most have even requested PDF copies of the academic books!) but very little on their own charas. Natural P/OSR spirit? Just "I want to be the space wizard" or "old navigator" or "buff fighting dude." Well, all except the Critical Role/Dimension20 fan but that's expected and she's also the most into the anthropology stuff so I'm feeling very indulgent. 

One thing everyone has liked so far is Malagasy names - I suggested that we do my usual thing of providing translated names but they unanimously wanted to have longass Malagasy names. Maybe it's the bravado of youth but it was fun to do a mini-lesson on how to pronounce Malagasy (actually not too hard for Anglophones) and I'm collecting some cool ones rn to present them with choices. Perhaps another facet of the lore stuff??? I def assumed new folks would be more into the roleplay side and less into the nerdish book reading aspect from zoomer trends in general. Like many others, I used to be a Gazetteer Andy who loved looking at thick RPG books when I was younger, but I assumed that was p. much dead. It's been a long time since I've played with TTRPG noobs so idk. 

Bonus Stuff - Jain/Malagasy Traditional Religion syncretism

IM DOING IT AGAIN….FUCKING ENCYCLOPEDIA-ASS SOUNDING LORE!!! 

To justify myself: I'm not doing this for the players. Or at least they're not meant to read this. Most of it will never show up in game, which is just fine. Monastic nudism is a very important religious question for Jains but probably shouldn't come up at a school tabletop club, y'know. This is for me. If you're doing future stuff that involves real-world religions, the absolute least you can do is read a couple books and it helps me direct my thoughts to force the loose notes I take as I read into a marginally-plausible account. I was already doing a decent amount of Malagasy reading, tbh, but I am thoroughly enjoying getting braincooked by all the Jaina material! It's def a work in progress, since I'm still doing more research - quite thin atm. Need to figure out more rituals, esp. since a lot of the classic Sakalava and Betsimisaraka bull sacrifices are right out. Had a fun idea for a hybrid one: abhiseka pouring ceremony using red rum as one of the holy liquids. Anyways, I'll probably toss all that into a different post. Maybe the wise thing to do would be to keep it private until it's in a nice player friendly format but it would be interesting to get some thoughts on it. 

From Balcerowicz's Early Asceticism in India: Ājīvikism and Jainism

The Tromba Gaccha (Possession Branching)

Intellectual Genealogies

The Jaina origins of the Tromba Gaccha lie within the Historicist Panth, a heterodox but largely orthopraxic Sthanakavasi Jain school rooted in the reform movements of the 20th centuries - taking direction from the Kavi Panth and the Kanji Svami Panth in particular. The core distinctions of Historicist Panth writing are its rejection of the official line of tirthankaras and its rehabilitation of the Ajivika master Makkhali Gosala. Historicist Panthis see the line of Jain teaching in much the same way that historians do (hence the name) by beginning with the twenty-third tirthankara Parshvanatha. Arguing that the million year records of the tirthankaras should be classified as Jain wisdom literature, they focused their energies on teasing the philosophical and cultural traditions of the Greater Magadha region where Vardhamana Mahavira, Gautama Buddha, and Makkhali Gosala lived and taught out of their scriptures. Their concern with textual criticism and source analysis eventually led to the radical claim that Gosala and Mahavira were allies and co-instructors. While historians had long believed that the two worked within the same broader Parshva tradition - following explicit indications that early Jaina tradition considered Gosala a Jain rishi - this position broke from both current academic consensus and established Jain theology. The Historicist Panth and its spiritula children supported the reconstructed Ajivikist claim that karma (positive or negative) already accumulated cannot be deflected by later action - what's coming is coming, one can only do as much good as they can moving forward.*

The Psionic Turn

Historicist Panth Jainism was never especially popular but ended up widely spread on the frontier of human space, brought along by wandering ascetics hitching rides on tramp freighters and the thousands of lay Jains involved in aid work through the venerable (and omnipresent) Veerayatan organization. One of the worlds where Historicist Panth Jainism survived the Scream as a minority religion was one of the "lucky" few that rebuilt itself well enough to reopen psychic training research. They succeeded, but only after incurring a massive cost in human life. A handful of the psychic trainers produced by the program were so horrified by the means employed that they turned to the nonviolent love of the Jain path, seeking redemption at the feet of their local monastics like the ancient Terran king Ashoka once had. They discovered Historicist Panth scripture discussing Makkhali Gosala's mastery of a strange firey energy emitted by the mind and were inspired to formulate their own additions to the canon: psychics' extended ability to interact with and understand the cosmos required them to bear greater expectations for right action, similar to monastics vs. lay Jains. They inducted all psychic students they received as yati lay-monastics, an archaic Lonka Gaccha role where some of the strictest monastic requirements were relaxed but moral rigor was still expected.  When the monks sought refuge with the Shawlfolk star nomads and their fleet from governments unwilling to risk the loss of (then vanishingly rare) expert psychics to some naked people treehugger cult, offering access to their store of ancient psitech and psychic training in return, they probably did not forsee the success their message would find among the gasy.

Tromba Gaccha's Thoughtworld

The Tromba Gaccha is the unofficial "state faith" of the fleet, shaping its culture and outlook. The vast majority of fleetmembers are Possession Branch Jains of varying levels of practice; though dissidents are typically accepted with the gentleness required by the Jain principles of many-sided truth - encapsulated within anekantavada - and nonviolence in belief, one who totally rejects Jaina values is considered a bizarre deviant and possibly a psychotic on the more serious end of things (flagrantly unnecessary violent acts directed at other sapient beings.) 

A good deal of Possession Branch teaching would be familiar to Jaina thinkers of the past three millennia. They still uphold the Three Jewels and the Five Vows (often reinterpreted as Malagasy fady taboos), remain intensely devoted to universal compassion, study Historicist Panth recensions of Jaina scripture, and engage in many of the same mindbending philosophical exercises. Tromba Gaccha is often distinguished by the inclusion of the fifth tirtha, legendarily formed when Victorious Ancestor Ranalava of Right Thought (one of the first Shawlfolk converts to Jainism and a revered early theologian of the Possession Branch) pointed out that third-gendered Malagasy** like them did not fit within any of the four classical tirthas - nun, monk, layman, or laywoman. Relatedly, the Tromba Gaccha has sided with its parent school in adopting the ‘intermediate’ position on monastic nudity of the extinct Yapaniya sect; when interacting with non-monastics, monastics may wear clothes but - if possible - should remove them when outsiders are not present. Unlike the Digambara Jains of old Terra, monastics of all genders are granted the right to go sky-clad. 

The faith's relationship to psychics remains similar to that their immediate predecessors - all psychics are trained as yati lay-monastics with the choice of transitioning to full ascetic, but the majority of monastics are not psychics. Psionic energy is another area where Malagasy traditional religion has made its mark on the faith; Tromba Gaccha adherents say that psychics come in contact with hasina, vital force that is manipulated and tapped through the interaction established in evolving ritual. The circulation of metadimensional energy in the universe both materialises and visualises the power of hasina as a flow penetrating all that is. Tromba Gaccha monastics have also adopted the roles of diviners and possession vessels, in true gasy fashion. Ancestor ritual like double-burial and tromba possession is believed to create a space for spirits (human or otherwise) to extend the time they have to accrue karmic merit in one "lifetime" before rebirth. The poesis of relived history through possession retains its extreme moral weight; Possession Branch scholarship is deeply concerned with the dialectical tension between the ways the past irrupts in and confronts the present (largely by means of the tromba) and the way it is conceptualized in and from the present and contained by it. 

Sources (for now):

• Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
• People of the Sea: Identity and Descent Among the Vezo by Rita Astuti
• The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar by Michael Lambek
• Ritual Imagination: A Study of Tromba Possession among the Betsimisaraka in Eastern Madagascar by Hilde Nielssen
• Forget Colonialism? - Sacrifice and the Art of Memory in Madagascar by Jennifer Cole
• Freedom by a Hair's Breadth: Tsimihety in Madagascar by Peter J. Wilson
• Recollecting from the Past: Musical Practice and Spirit Possession on the East Coast of Madagascar by Ron Emoff
• Early Asceticism in India: Ājīvikism and Jainism by Piotr Balcerowicz
• Jaina Scriptures and Philosophy, edited by Peter Flügel and Olle Qvarnström
• Making a Mantra: Tantric Ritual and Renunciation on the Jain Path to Liberation by Ellen Gough
• Jaina Ontology by K.K. Dixit
• Jains in the World: Religious Values and Ideology in India by John E. Cort.

*It's classic Wiki that they cite both Long and Balcerowicz in the page on Ajivika and almost entirely miss their point on both historical record and the actual beliefs Makkhali Gosala might have held. The only part they actually cite from Early Asceticism is the part that misrepresents the whole argument Balcerowicz was making - firstly that they almost certainly WEREN'T fatalists in the way that later Jain and Buddhist texts portrayed them, but also that we've likely been misreading even the polemical writing on them. They also drop the ball on the tromba stuff, lots of misreading or not-reading of Nielssen who they also fucking cite. Jesus.

** Thinking particularly of the Vezo sarin'ampela here - there's probably an argument to be made where they'd be classed as transwomen (and not without reason, they are "image-[of]-women" after all, like the "men-images" of the neighboring Maikoro) but it seems a bit limiting and maybe an imposition on Vezo thought. I suspect it's best to consider the category one of third (or fourth) gender considering local nuances.