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Desrtopa comments on Brainstorming help request: teaching rationality basics in an RPG setting - Less Wrong
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Evidence for the Dark One: the taint on Saidin, historical records of the Age of Legends (a lot has been lost, but there must be something, otherwise how would they even know stuff like who Lews Therin was?) Darkspawn like Trollocs and Myrdraal, and the spreading Blight. Possibly invoking the Dark One's true name, but this could realistically just be a superstition people are too afraid to test. If I had that much evidence the Dark One existed, I sure as hell wouldn't want to try it out.
Evidence for the Pattern: Balefire, the Horn of Valere and the various heroes tied to the wheel who it summons.
Evidence for the Creator: Stuffed if know. If I lived in the WOT-verse and knew about the Dark One and such, I'd suspect that he might have sort of antithesis who prevented the world from being completely fucked from the moment it came into existence, but if history is actually cyclic then there's the alternative that there's actually an infinite regression in which the Dark One has always been sealed up by people. Considering nobody in the entire series ever seems to doubt his existence, maybe he just straight up drops knowledge of his existence into people's heads so you can't not believe in him. This may be the least confusing way I can make sense of the degree of religious homogeneity in such an obviously supernatural setting.
This is the first thing that occurred to me as well, but would the characters know about it? Or does this game require a significant barrier between player knowledge and character knowledge?
We're talking about an in-character class, so even though I'll be talking to fellow channelers I don't think any of us is aware of balefire.
On the other hand, Ogier lore on the Pattern, including how some of them can sense ta'veren, might be valid IC knowledge for me.
We weren't supposed to know about Balefire? Oops.
Come to think of it, I suppose my Sedai would know, but you're hardly supposed to be telling Novices about it.
That's good. Wedrifid would have known too - given that he was curious, Cate Sedai was a specialist in arcane research and both were rather direct about seeking out and exploiting any novel sources of potential power.
Oh, such as?
And here I naively thought that the thing to do with bugs is to report them so they get fixed...
Hah, bet you were well loved for it. I remember when I had Justice for about a year and a half (with some breaks). Fun.
Would still be doing it probably except Justice is currently bugged and not loading, ever since a game crash literally 1 second before I was going to pick it up. (The most you've-gotta-be-kidding me MUD moment ever, for me.)
Sure, when they annoy me. Even fixed a few myself once I got my somewhat short lived coder Immortal. :)
Used to have people scream in outrage when I took it on trips to Seanchan. For some reason north PKers thought I was obliged to go to the blight and die to a gank of 10, not play hide and seek down south.
Well, IIRC, balefire is well-documented in the old lore and may be forbidden; I more vaguely recall Moiraine stealing a ter'angreal which specialized in producing balefire, and since she didn't spend her life playing with random ter'angreal, someone else must have known of its function or it was listed in storeroom catalogues. If balefire is discussed in the old books, forbidden by Tower law, and a ter'angreal is documented as producing balefire, it's hard to see how any Aes Sedai could doubt balefire's existence.
That makes sense, though I had vague memories of the existence of balefire being suppressed.
Hm, Moiraine learned how to actually weave it herself. The ter'angreal thing was someone else. Not that it matters.
What matters is that class will be taught to Accepteds and Novices, so discussing something Moiraine describes thus...
... is out.
My understanding is that it's forbidden to use or even know how to weave balefire, but not to know it exists or what it does. Knowledge of its existence moves around among Aes Sedai quite a lot without comment throughout the series.
Letting Novices and Accepted even know it exists is probably bad conduct, if not forbidden though, lest someone lacking sufficient discipline be tempted and try to learn to use it.
The taint on saidin is the only thing there that demands divine interference, as best I can tell. The weirder Darkspawn are clearly supernatural, but they're not supernatural in a way that demands a god when you've already got magic, and their own opinions could be explained as religious differences. The Blight's harder to explain, since receding suddenly by miles when a bunch of Darkspawn get killed is kind of a giveaway, but that could be coincidence or a nonsapient link between them and it; with Fisher King symbology all over the place the latter's not too far-fetched. And since the Dark One seems to have almost exclusively acted through mortal agents during the Age of Legends, those events don't bear any obvious fingerprints of the divine either. All told, I think I'd still assign some probability mass to the theory that most of this Shai'Tan business is just something that one side or the other of a semi-legendary conflict ginned up as a psychological warfare tactic.
Evidence for the Pattern seems to be stronger, though, especially since the magical Pattern-based protagonist powers that the leads get seem to be a well-known and quantifiable phenomenon in this setting. Not to mention the divination abilities that some people get.
Even the taint on saidin doesn't strictly demand divine interference. The fate of Shadar Logoth demonstrates that man-made supernatural corruption can also occur, and the events of the ninth book even indicate that gur zntavghqr bs gur gnvag ba Funqne Ybtbgu vf rdhny gb gur gnvag ba fnvqva, fvapr gurl obgu ryvzvangr rnpu bgure. So it's not vanishingly unlikely that humans could have tainted saidin themselves. The Blight and the Darkspawn are physical corroboration of the narrative that involves conflict with the Dark One though, as is the taint on saidin.
If anyone who's not a Darkspawn or one of the Forsaken has actually been to Shayol Ghul and made it back to tell about it, that would provide additional evidence, but as far as I can tell the only reason anyone on the light side knows it exists is because the legends say so, and maybe because trollocs and myrdraal have attested to it on some of the rare occasions when people actually talk to them.
Glad to see the responses, keep'em coming if you have'em.
Regarding the DO: in-game, my character has raided Thakan'dar itself. And when you try to channel there, the Dark One smites you with lightning. Which I've lived through. And being a channeler, I can claim having felt the nearness of the Bore. So I expect to have the least trouble with that one.
The Creator is a bigger puzzle. He doesn't seem to do anything...
I suppose an alternative is asking your students to ponder the question of what evidence there is for the Creator, and leave open the possibility of being Creator-agnostic. Clearly in a world like the WOT-verse, the prior for a supernatural creator deity is much higher, given that there's a pretty well established supernatural anticreator deity, so there's not much call to be an a-Creatorist, but even if we know from authorial say-so that the Creator exists, there's not necessarily anything wrong with acknowledging from a character perspective that there isn't enough data to be confident.