Alkaloid wrote:Does it, necessarily? What if she were to summon vicious non-demonic monsters for self-defense, and use diabolism to bind wild demons only? Wouldn't that generate net good karma?
Honestly, I'm not sure. It seems like it should, but Black Lambs Blood seemed to indicate that eventually all daemonists fall victim to poor karma eventually. It may be that making deals with demons is bad karma regardless of what the deal actually entails, or it might be that for more powerful demons you can't get around giving them something they actually want when making a deal so you still get hit with the consequences. Or the book could be lying, written by an idiot or pure propaganda.
Black Lamb's Blood has an optimistic tone regarding whether getting a diabolist's Balance sorted out is possible; the pessimism regards the chances of any individual diabolist of actually doing it, because diabolism tends to attract short-sighted assholes. Big Rose seemed to seriously think there was something to it, if her willingness to trade anti-demon measures to the Behaims and her directives to her heirs to improve the family karma are any indication. BLB explicitly suggests that sort of info leak as a means of setting the diabolist community as a whole back, and potentially at each other's throats, to put things Right in the long run.
Alkaloid wrote:Anyway, you don't have to summon demons for bad karma, there are all sorts of ways to get hit with it.
Regardless, that's not what she did. To date she's summoned a gender flipped Jason Vorhees that trashed a city block and from the sounds of things killed a few people, an unnerving creatures that's already started a war between the Sisterhood and the Astrologer as well as summoning what's essentially the girl from the ring. Also a vengeance obsessed wax zombie, although in fairness we don't know what it's actually done yet because Blake was unconscious for it's rampage.
We can presume that Big Rose, like most practitioners, had a means and desire to monitor her own Balance, so she would know what effect summoning, binding, and using each of those monsters (at least for the tasks she wrote about) would have on it. Assuming that what we can infer about her agenda from her seeming adherence to BLB's ideas and suggestions is not an elaborate ruse, why would she have left detailed descriptions of each of those monsters, including their names, habits, uses, and past experiences in her service, if she didn't intend for her heirs to use them, and believe that they could without screwing up the whole long-term plan? She could be wrong, of course, but she has to think it's at least possible, or she would've just edited them out of the notes.
Alkaloid wrote:Given that the chaos and confusion from telling even a small lie nets you bad karma, so she must be stockpiling it pretty quickly.
I don't think lying is lower on the karma significance scale than death and destruction. Lying creates karmic Wrong on a grander scale than mundane chaos and confusion in this setting, because it eats away at reality itself. Lots of practitioners sow death and destruction, but lying is serious business.
