A Familiar Pattern

Over the years I've tried in my creations to utilize objects folks might have at home, like playing cards, poker chips, and dominoes.  One of the reasons for this is availability, but the corollary of that is if they are common things people will be pretty familiar and comfortable with them in mini-games or in-game puzzles.

Just yesterday I thought of a familiar pattern I've never seen any one use-- the pattern on a football (soccer ball).  The pattern, called a truncated icosahedron, has 12 black pentagonal faces and 20 white hexagonal ones.

I think there is a lot of potential here, though for what I'm not sure yet.  We humans have pretty good spacial memories, so if you have a "top" firmly marked it would be pretty easy to remember all the 32 different spots you might interact with, even without numbering or labeling them.

At first I was going to make an angel based on this, using a d4 and a d8 to randomly generate one of the 32 spots.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there is a quite a bit more potential.  For example, each of the hexagons shares sides with three different pentagons.  What if these pentagons had certain qualities, heat, light, or whatever and the different hexagons might be the varying combinations of those qualities.  I'm thinking weather, or maybe beauty, something with lots of possibilities to fill the 12 black spots.

The more I think about it the more I like it as a possible very simple weather manipulator.  And seeing as the Sleestak pylons are one of the weird influences that led to my angels, that would be pretty cool.

I would have preferred to figure an example all out before posting, but I'm anxious to make, share, and converse-- my blog has been quiet too long.  If you can come up with a cool use that has 12 qualities interacting, let me know.

The Angel of Memory

This angel appears as nine alabaster-white discs floating just above the ground.  If touched, they give some but won't move from their position.  If a creature stands on one of the discs it will forget something and remember something.  Stepping off and getting back on, or stepping to a different disc will result in the same thing but the process is hazy and inexact, the subject losing more memories each time.
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Stepping on a disc removes a memory and replaces it with one from someone else that has stepped on the angel in the past.  These may be aeons old.  What you remember could be:

1. The place you buried your ill-gotten gains.
2. Those ruins the great wizards go to to die.
3. The place you left the imprisoned djinn.
4. How to use an uncommon weapon.
5. Your signature spell.
6. Your recipe for a toxin.
7. A shortcut that makes travel between two common points half as long.
8. The name of a forgotten god.

What you forget, hmm, I'll leave that up to you.  I was thinking class skills basically, and that they could be remembered as normal be the time the character reaches next level, or sooner if they hire a trainer.  So a fighter might forget how to use long swords for a level but know a spell they can cast from their mind once.

Stepping on the first disc is free, additional cause the subject to lose 100xp per lvl.

I imagine it would be possible that a character would lose something so important to them they might step again and again onto the angel to try and get it back.  To simplify resolving this I might say a new memory is placed in the upper left disc and is shuffled through them with each new memory added.  So, a player has nine tries to retrieve that particular memory before it is rotated into the aether.  It isn't lost for good, because other memories are rotated into the discs each time they are used, but who knows how many thousands of attempts would take to find it after it has left the discs.

The Angel of Music

The Angel of music appears as three alabaster-white cylinders hanging in mid-air, each shorter than the last.  Disturbing one of these cylinders will produce a clear, resonant tone.  Each cylinder a different tone.  After three tones have been produced all living creatures in earshot will be affected in one of three ways:

1) Reduced in age to the time their kind is first ambulant.
2) Set to the prime age for their kind.
3) Increased in age to the time their kind is still just barely ambulant.

And then the Angel teleports to a random location nearby.
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To keep things simple, I would tie the effect to the first cylinder hit.  To keep things unpredictable I would determine this randomly.  In other words, the smallest cylinder doesn't necessarily turn everyone into a toddler.  But if I rolled that cylinder "B" is the youthening one, then any three tone sequence that starts with that cylinder will turn things into toddlers of their kind.

You have to hear the tones for the effect to work. 

For the second effect I would make it a complete refresh: parasites, scars, tattoos gone, lost limbs regained etc.  This could serve as the bait (they've read about it somewhere and want to get an eye back or something) that could make a cautious party mess with the Angel at all.

If this interests you see this and this.

Dungeon Inscription Resources & a Weird Text

For the curious, educated lot you all are, none of these are probably new.  But I thought I'd share anyway.  Some resources for dungeon inscriptions:

My first plan was to extract some of these symbols, and then make a single sheet that you could use as an index to record your own sounds or meanings for them, but there are just too many.  So I decided to just point you to the resources themselves.  The first book is Early Chinese Writing.

There's a cool example of how a Read Languages type of spell doesn't necessarily let you know what an inscription means in the page above.  The sign that looks a bit like a dollar sign to me is for "steadfast."  Imagine it inscribed on a tomb passage.  Perhaps it means "be steadfast and you will prevail", perhaps it means "this passage is a steadfast defense and you are likely to die." *(whoops, it was "unyielding").

Also an example of how symbols change through time.  You could pick some of these oldest symbols to use and I doubt anyone would even associate them with Chinese, they look so different.

This book, Central American Hieroglyphic Writing, has fewer symbols.  It does have the Mayan symbols for months and days though, which could be interesting if different tombs can only be accessed at certain time of year.  Or that's when a ritual needs to be performed to be successful.

The meanings of the symbols in Cretan Pictographs and Prae-Phoenician Script are largely unknown, or were at the time of this book.  So if you are the type to get hung up on accuracy just grab some of these and feel free to make them mean what you want. Another example from the same book:

A post like this wouldn't be complete without some Egyptian hieroglyphs.  The page above is from The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo Nilous. 

Now for the serendipity.  Apparently that last book was supposedly written by an Egyptian priest to catalogue the meaning of some 189 hieroglyphs before they were lost to the ages.  This text was translated into Greek by someone named Philippus much later.  The book was then found on an island in the middle ages and became very popular.  Except the whole thing is, not a hoax, but a misunderstanding of what hieroglyphs were, and feeding into what folks wanted them to be, mystical, religious symbols.  So by 1543 you end up with this edition of the book, Orvs Apollo de Ægypte, with woodcuts for all the symbols that don't even depict the Egyptian hieroglyphs any more!

 

 

What better weird text to find in a dungeon library?

I'd like to do more with dungeon inscriptions, maybe a chart of who inscribed this kind of like the Why is the secret door secret one.  But we'll see.  My boss is on leave and so my work has been extra hard lately.  I haven't even gamed in weeks.  Feels good to just find and share those last weird pics for now.

The Maximalist Dungeon

A few posts back a commenter was not too happy with the push toward minimalism in some parts of our hobby.   Since then I've been thinking of what the opposite would look like.  And, while it would be easy to be snarky, I want to do this seriously: what would a maximalist dungeon look like?  And by that I mean a maximalist dungeon that I, the lover of small and streamlined, would really want to see and use?

I think if you're getting a dungeon from someone else it should be giving you something you can't do yourself, either because you are unable to do it or you don't have the time.  This could be several things including ideas you might never have had or DM experience you don't yet have cooked into the design of the place.  But I think the two most obvious are drudge work and art work.  I'm not an artist so that's something I could get from someone else.  And there are plenty of things that might be worth trying at the table but which take so much prep time you never get around to them.  Let's think along those lines a bit.

The Maximalist Dungeon could have:

1. Illustrations of every room.  There's precedent with the image booklets in some of the TSR modules like Tomb of Horrors.  I think a lot of those were produced because a trap needed visualization, but even just an illustration to show you the decay and layout of the rooms would be cool.  As a kid I loved David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries and the detailed images of those rooms, in what was essentially a dungeon, unearthed.
2. Illustrations of cluttered crime scenes.  This is related to the above, because once you have high enough level of detail and once you have illustrations of every room, so that showing an illustration isn't a tip off of importance, you can hide clues in plain sight.  Keys, notes, scraps of cloth.  I have always been interested in solo play and I remember reading about (but never seeing) a solo gamebeook that had some full page illustrations for this kind of close examination/exploration. If you know what it was called let me know.  Of course traps can become more brutal too, if the trip wires or pressure plates are right there in the picture.
3. Illustrations of every monster, or at least every new monster.  We are limited in our ability to imagine based on things we've seen before.  But if you show us a picture your new monster can look like whatever you can draw.  If you've followed my blog you know that I've tried to come up with new monsters through lots of different angles.  This would be one I haven't tried: something hard to explain or describe but that you can easily understand by looking at a drawing.  There could be all kinds of dreamlike, nightmarish, warped possibilities waiting for the right artist to unleash them on us.
4. Portraits of every NPC.  Without a face players don't have much to remember NPCs by, an accent, a cliched personality.  Portraits could help with that.  With portraits you could get a sense of class, wealth, general demeanor, scars, familial resemblance etc.
5. Illustrations of treasure items.  This is pretty simple, one way to make the +1 magic swords unique is to make them look different.
6. So these have been about art so far how about the drudge work?  Well, related to the NPC portraits above would be NPC personalities fleshed out for all the folks in the adventure/dungeon.  I don't think I would personally need a whole backstory, because after a certain length I'm probably not going to read it.  But if the background could inform how they act and make choices that would be cool to know.  If the person was orphaned and has had to struggle alone they might not like the idea of accepting help, for example, and will become irritated if they can't pay for services.
7. Along those lines, if we are dealing with factions, or politics, or romance, illustrated and annotated relationship webs of NPCs would be cool.  What is the chain of command?  Who will rumors spread to first?  Who owes favors to whom?  Who do you need to talk to find out intimate details about a particular NPC?
8. And of course, going right along with the illustrations of treasure items would be unique treasure items with back stories.
9. This is related to having detailed pictures of rooms but takes it one step farther.  I've posted before about the idea of a grab bag store room, where everything in a room is on cards, so imagine if you combine a room's illustration, with small illustrated cards that you could hand players when they ask about particular objects or details.  There comes a point where this would almost be better suited as a video game with items you can pick up and examine, a whole immersive digital world, but even in those, details are sparse or duplicated because of the work it takes to make things.
10. Unique spellbooks is a subset of unique treasure items.  And it doesn't have to be a cheesy facsimile, but having some illustration or physical card with the contents for each spell book found would be cool.  And, of course, each would have unique spell variations.
11. Give me a constructed language and a script or system of runes.  I love this stuff, and I think it adds to the atmosphere in a game, but it takes so much time it falls by the way side in my games.  But having even something that is little more that pig-latin for goblin inscriptions peppered around the dungeon that players can try and decipher would be fun.  Or different aged scripts denoting excursions into a megadungeon at different times, that would be sweet.  You want to talk about something that would be cool but I don't do just because of the amount of work, there it is.
12. Along the lines of musing I did about sandboxes, it would be interesting to have the locations affected by different times of visit.  So, maybe in the wet season this cave is half full of water and there are different creatures here, maybe during festivals this cult encampment has an entirely different population and feel to it.  That is in essence asking for multiple modules.  Yes.  And players are likely to only ever encounter one of these states.  Yes.  But if you want maximal, that's maximal to me.
13. Designer notes is something I don't think I've ever seen.  Presumably, if you are selling a dungeon you have run multiple parties through it, multiple times.  So, what did those folks do?  What choices did they tend to make?  I can see not wanting to read this stuff and experiencing my party's choices with them, but I can also see wanting to go back and read how that compares to the other folks that visited here.  Designer notes would also be cool just to get a sense of what the maker was trying for and how this module/adventure fits in with their experience and other creations.
14. DM notes would be slightly different.  I'm thinking tips and advice gained through experience.  So, this section of the dungeon is invisible, here's some ideas on how to run that at the table.  This monster causes fear, here's a way you might handle what players under the fear power will do.  Etc.  Obviously this stuff isn't necessary to run a night of D&D, but if you are good enough and experienced enough at designing dungeons to sell me one, one of the assets you have is that experience.  So why not share it with me?

What else?  That's all I've got right now.  And I suppose it might seem a little absurd to put so much effort into a single module.  A module you might use with your friends once.  A module that would probably be crazy expensive with all the art and labor involved.  But maybe that's the difference between products and art.  The difference between processed food and a nicely cooked meal.  Anyone can generate random contents for a set of megadungeon rooms, but how are yours notable?

So, yeah, I can envision a module that is a piece of art because of its elegance, how it gives you just what you need to run it and then gets out of your way.  But I can also imagine a module that is a piece of art because of its ridiculous abundance, its richness that spills out at you like coins from a coffer.