Are you a cat person or a dog person?<\/p>\n
What is your favorite color?<\/span><\/p>\n Pick a number between 1 and 100.<\/span><\/p>\n Do you love your family?<\/span><\/p>\n Why did you do it?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Those are the five questions that the poets, the (mostly) bad guys in Max Barry\u2019s Lexicon<\/em><\/a> use to test potential initiates and victims. You can take a version of the test that matches you up with a character from the book <\/span>here<\/a>. The answers help the poets to classify the person answering into one of 228 segments, which are basically personality types or psychological profiles that reveal what kinds of persuasion the person is most vulnerable to. Knowing a person\u2019s segment is useful for traditional con artistry, marketing, and other forms of manipulation, but since this is a sci-fi novel, the poets of course have additional reasons to find out a person\u2019s segment. If you know someone\u2019s segment, you know what words will get them to do what you want. Not conversational words like \u201cplease\u201d or \u201cpolice,\u201d but \u201cmagic\u201d words like \u201c<\/span>justitract<\/em>\u201d and \u201c<\/span>kassonin<\/em>.\u201d As one character explains it:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cA word is a recipe. A recipe for a particular neurochemical reaction. When I say ball, your brain converts the word into meaning, and that\u2019s a physical action. You can see it happening on an EEG. What we\u2019re doing, or, I should say, what you\u2019re doing, since no one has taught me any good words, is dropping recipes into people\u2019s brains to cause a neurochemical reaction to knock out the filters. Tie them up just long enough to slip an instruction past. And you can do that by speaking a string of words crafted for the person\u2019s psychographic segment. Probably words that were crafted decades ago and have been strengthened ever since. And it\u2019s a string of words because the brain has layers of defenses, and for the instruction to get through, they all have to be disabled at once.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n In other words, if you use the right trigger sounds on the right person, you can hack their brain. One character in the book compares a person\u2019s mental defenses to tumblers in a lock; Each word disables one level of defense, so with enough of them you can unlock a person\u2019s brain and make them do whatever you want them to do.<\/span><\/p>\n What does this have to do do with gaming? Well, I think it would be a cool power for a character. A campaign set in the ficton of the book would be fun, but the concept could also easily translate into other settings. Wizards already use magic words to affect reality, the explanations from the book are close enough to scientific-sounding to work as \u201cscience magic\u201d in a sci-fi game, and I could easily imagine several different Hobomancer<\/a> variations that start with the basic premise. A storyteller could use power words to affect emotions, the con-man is obvious, and a preacher or demon hunter could know magic words that exorcise or weaken supernatural opponents.<\/span><\/p>\n As far as implementation goes, I would set it up so that learning a person\u2019s segment would give the poet a better chance of persuading the target. In the book, the pro\/antagonist, Emily, uses four \u201cpower words\u201d when she\u2019s going up against the leader of the poets, so it\u2019s probably safe to assume there are four \u201ctumblers\u201d to a person\u2019s brain. The book touched on the idea that some words are broad and work on more than one segment, so it\u2019s not much of a stretch to set things up so that each word targets a progressively smaller range of segments. In game terms, a poet would make a series of rolls to narrow down a person\u2019s segment. Here\u2019s how I\u2019d gamify the process (using QAGS<\/a> rules):<\/span><\/p>\n Once a poet knows a person\u2019s words, he can attempt to use them against that person. The poet needs at least three words (two in the case of mooks) to simply command a person to do something. Otherwise, he still has to rely on the words supplementing traditional persuasion techniques. Since persuasion falls under the \u201cPoet\u201d Job, the mechanics are the same, but role-playing-wise the player still needs to provide some patter if he doesn\u2019t have enough words to hack the person\u2019s brain. To command\/persuade a person (in game terms, commanding the target allows the poet\u2019s player to dictate the target\u2019s next action), the poet makes a Job roll resisted by the target\u2019s Nerve (or \u201cPoet\u201d Job\/appropriate Gimmick). For each trigger word the poet uses, the target suffers a -4 penalty. If the penalty reduces the Word the target is resisting with down to zero or less, the poet rolls a Lucky Break, or the target rolls a Bad Break, the poet is in complete control of the target\u2019s actions for the rest of the scene.<\/span><\/p>\n Lexicon<\/em> also introduces the concept of \u201cbare words,\u201d which are basically ancient words from the pre-Tower of <\/span>Babylon ur-language which have immense power. In the book there\u2019s only one bare word and it\u2019s central to the plot. Bare words don\u2019t have to be (and maybe even can\u2019t be) spoken, working more like magical glyphs; just seeing it puts you under the control of whoever wields it. In a game, I\u2019d give poets (or characters with a Gimmick of \u201cImmune to Trigger Words,\u201d like the book\u2019s protagonist) a chance to resist the brain hacking, but even they would suffer a penalty equal to 20 minus their Job Number. As for the things bare words do to the people who use them, that\u2019s probably best handled through story with perhaps an occasional roll if you\u2019re feeling sporting.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Are you a cat person or a dog person? What is your favorite color? Pick a number between 1 and 100. Do you love your family? Why did you do it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2005],"tags":[69,872,1636,1637,1638,1640,1641],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-qags-corner","tag-magic","tag-hobomancer","tag-max-barry","tag-lexicon","tag-persuasion","tag-neurolinguistics","tag-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3075,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions\/3075"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n