alien enneagram- how do They treat us?
When contact is made – or, if they’re already here amongst us, hidden: now – how will aliens treat us? To Fort, there’s a predominantly paranoid worldview, a kind of implied subtle gloating that the true powers up in the sky are at best indifferent to us. In things that fall from the sky I want to expand this outwards, include more options lest it become like call of cthulhu with proplasmic ether cruisers.
If you move beyond a baseline of cold indifference, the intentions of aliens become important:
I’m looking at a variant of the enneagram personality diagram to indicate nine different ways that aliens view and treat humans. While enneagrams aren’t Fortian per se, they were supposedly developed by mystic G.I. Gurdjieff during world war one, putting them close enough in time and theme to Charles Fort’s paranormal interests.
The nine types each have a title and a dominant way of viewing humanity. When a type is secure, it shifts to take up the view of another of the nine types. Another shift occurs when the type is stressed. Each type/view will have mechanical impacts/ bonuses/ penalties through the game system. Players and/or characters will be able to take actions to try to shift an alien from their normal type into their secure or stressed variant.
I haven’t placed these on the diagram yet, I will need to adjust some of the stress/ secure shifts if I want it to work exactly like a personality enneagram:
- the Epicure views humans (or parts of the human anatomy) as food (or commodities). Its secure type is Breeder, stress type is Exterminator.
- the Exterminator views humans as pests. Secure type is Researcher, stress is Epicure.
- the Researcher views humans as data. Secure is Exterminator, stress is Agent.
- the Watcher views humans as entertainment. Secure is Helper, stress is Enemy.
- the Enemy views humans as rivals. Secure shifts to Watcher, stress to Overlord.
- the Agent views humans as pawns (in an interplanetary version of the great game. ) Secure becomes Enemy, stress is Researcher.
- the Overlord views humans as slaves. Secure becomes Agent, stress Breeder.
- the Helper views humans as potential (for improvement & uplift). Secure becomes Overlord, stress Watcher.
- the Breeder views humans as genes. Secure shifts to epicure, stress to Helper.
Love the idea of personality manipulationon a chart. It can be very simple. However because you’ve already charted this you may find yourself required to say when exactly (either numerically or narratively) an alien becomes stressed or secure which may add a level of frustating complexity to this seemingly simple system.
Hi JM
thanks for the comment. Not sure about anything, yet. Good point that one would have to keep track of how aliens shift, what type they are in, does it shift back automatically etc. I haven’t posted about human characters yet but would probably have a similar 9 type diagram for humans too. Perhaps if I keep the rest of character record keeping simple- no skills, no stats, maybe one resource to track, then the shifting won’t be too onerous. I like how it could allow aliens to be outside their standard role from time to time. (shifting would be mechanical)
[...] are not alien species- there can be more than one of each type in the solar system/ galaxy. I already posted a list of types. I need to modify it to fit within the [...]