The Hound and The Ogre, Inverse Monsters in CAIN-Noelle

     In this blog post, I will be building off of my original on the role of sin in the CAIN tabletop roleplaying game. I will be talking about two types of Sins in particular: The Hound and the Ogre, my personal favorites. I will also be discussing how they relate to Cohen's Seven Theses, and how they are inverse, mirror selves of one another. 

Ogre

    The Ogre is a monster created by despair; born of the soul-crushing weight that can creep insidiously into a person's life. They are often huge and grotesque, bloated with muscle and fat and rot. This is to such an extent that the Ogre itself does not fit within its domain; forced to squeeze through corridors and tunnels for which it is far too large. In the area they have been created, they produce a miasma that causes things and people to decay. Concrete cracks, metal rusts, flesh melts away. It becomes easier to get lost, to become trapped, grinding those trapped within down to the extent that their host has been. Speaking of the host... 

    Of the sins, Ogres are among those who care more for the person that manifested it. This care, however, is usually maladaptive. The Ogre will encourage their host to withdraw from everyone and everything, seeking deeper and deeper isolation. It will go to the extremes of twisting space itself to make their host more difficult to reach, or seeking out and destroying any record that their host ever existed. It is no mistake that this closely mirrors the response to soul-crushing despair that many of us have. 

    

    In relation to the theses, I can immediately think of a couple that the Ogre connects with the most. One is Thesis V: The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible. The Ogre does so quite literally, twisting the landscape itself to make it all the more difficult to reach its host and its palace. It will go to such an extent of erasing all entrances and exits to an area, breaking all electric or mechanical things that might make your life easier, or even changing the weather to intense cold or torrential rain to make your progress all the slower. In a metaphorical sense, it often focuses on making the idea of defeating it alone seem impossible, sapping away ones health and motivation. 

Hound

    Whereas the Ogre is about apathy and withdrawal, the Hound is all about passion and direct action. The Hound is a monster born of rage against injustice, most common within victims of abuse, or others crushed under the sheer weight of institutions. The Hound often manifests from hosts who have already died, acting as a revenant or vengeful spirit against those they perceive to have wronged them. The Hound is obsessed with justice, choosing violent action to amend a wrong. Hounds often create an interesting moral quandary for players, as oftentimes, they are wholly justified in their actions. The problem arises, however, in the fact that the list of those who wronged the Hound's host never ends. It will usually begin with the person most directly responsible, but if not stopped, can expand to someone for a reason as simple as: "They saw my host when they were crossing the street once, six years ago, and did nothing to prevent the injustice they fell victim to." 

 
    The Hound is a directed sense of rage over which the host can rapidly lose control. Its presence often twists the host into an increasingly angry person, righteously or not. It is the representation of how anger can consume a person whole just as easily as despair can. At the same time, as mentioned above, the host and by extension the Hound at least start off as justifiable- raging against people and institutions directly responsible for their suffering, and in some cases, the suffering of thousands of millions. 

    In relation to the theses, there are two with which the Hound most strongly resonates. First is Thesis IV: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference. Of the Sins, the Hound is undeniably the most beastial, yet so deeply human in motivation. Their forms so often incorporate both human and animalistic features. For instance, a Hound may appear as a massive bat with a human face, its body bristling with swords and gun barrels rupturing through skin. The second is Thesis VI: Fear of The Monster is Really a Kind of Desire. The Hound is born of something that is a near-universal human experience- injustice at the hands of another person, an amorphous institution, or even just the intense feeling of directed anger at somebody else. We have all experienced injustice of one form or another, and what's more, often desire to have it rectified. What makes a Hound, though, is the refusal or inability to let go. Most people have felt the desire to just "crash out," to take direct action to get even.