Mundanity scale

(just an idle thought)

A fragment of recent Dan's post about books had stuck with me:

"Regardless of the circumstances, I think that eventually, inevitably, people will come to understand the basics of the Weird Shit. Sure, we don’t know why the statue shits blood and snaps your neck if you blink, but we know that it shits blood and snaps your neck if you blink. We can work with that." from Throne of Salt blogpost

I can imagine a certain strangeness that is principally unknowable, something that denies either perception or / and comprehension in humans at very basic level, a cognitive dissonance not even as an entry (for the entity is already something defined) but phenomenon; just like in certain hells the pain is always sharp and is impossible to get used to, this one is impossible to get used to either.

To me something truly horrorful never plays (or should never play) by fair rules – otherwise it eventually becomes just a creepy monster from a bestiary, a problem to be resolved and done. A curse or a slasher killer in horror won't go away even if the victim fully and properly follows all steps that are supposed to get rid of it. That tiny hole in reality of Disco Elysium going to seep the pale and grow until it envelops the world, and no amount of heroics (or music, or musical heroics) are going to save the day at the end.

But aside of these two notions I think Dan's words are true: humanity is remarkably adept with turning every strangeness in something mundane, knowable if not by looking at it directly than by looking at the space around it and how already-known part of the world affected by the Weird Shit. A mere hundred years ago Cthulhu was a terrifying force heralding the end of humanity in a cosmos that didn't give a damn about the whole thing, and today it is sitting so comfortably in our common perception that it is likely to be featured in any story as a plushie.

So I thought that in worlds where humanity had a tangible and somewhat prolonged contact with Weird Shit (be it Delta Green, SCP, Cain, something like Consensus in old Mage: The Ascension) there certainly going to be some in-universe assigned scale by which people understand and mundanize this strange stuff.

I think in-universe it would likely to appear around 1950s-1960s, written by some government committee made to either deal with this stuff or write reports as to why this stuff cannot be reliably weaponized to win Cold War. It would be initially 1-to-10 scale, with names for each stage taken from the Tree of Sephirot, and overcomplicated definitions in bullet points, as per pomp and custom of that time. From Keter (fully unknown), through Chokhmah, through Binah, and so on until Malkuth, with mundanity more or less kicking in around Netzach, the perpetual 7 out of 10. Later, in busy 90s, it will be streamlined into a system of three-to-five codes, likely to be also colour-coded black to green to make it easier for people who cannot say "tiferet."

Every strangeness will start with a position of a complete unknown and, through exposure and experience of humanity with it, move through the scale, until the strangeness is, basically, statted in-universe, and stops being such, despite not fully explained by current laws of physics. Depending on the world and how much of its horror is supposed to remain horrorful, all but very few phenomena might ever reach full mundanity stage, but even in this case recurring strangeness will likely linger around 3 out of 5.

In more fantasy settings (such as my perpetually unfinished Shadow Jam where human mundanity could be literally contagious to lesser demons, turning them from a myth into human with horns) stage 5 would be the end result. The knowledge itself of what the the anomaly does and how to deal with it can be less or more obscure in-world, accessible through something like training (Arcane checks) or a mage's library, but it will be there. People might not know what strange forces allow a dragon fly, but they will definitely know to bring a fire extinguisher to deal with the creature.