Can thoughts pass from one dimension or reality to another? In the real world, no, so far as we know, but the realities our games create have no such limitations – so let’s examine the concept further.

A composite of two images and two backgrounds, some distortions, and some original line art. The images are man-suit-tie-311134 and avatar-messenger-person-user-beard-153139, provided by Clker-Free-Vector-Images and OpenClipart-Vectors, respectively. The backgrounds are office-7829030 by Graphix Made and vienna-1652799, no source listed, both of which have been expanded and cropped. All images from Pixabay.

Certainly, it can seem that way when a radical concept floats into your head, seemingly from nowhere. In the old days, when everything was viewed through a religious context, this was occasionally referred to as Divine Inspiration. In modern times, subconscious cues and problem-solving would be invoked to ‘explain’ the phenomenon – with really strong evidence that either of these things actually exist, it must be said; they are just the best explanations that we have.

It’s not just that the notion is radically different from others that you might have had; it’s the way that it unfurls in your mind near-complete, with a richness of detail that you might expect if you had been thinking deeply on the subject for quite some time – when you know darned well that you haven’t.

The biggest problem that you face when this occurs is getting it all down on paper before it begins to fade, overtaken by conscious thoughts – because the inspired mind leaps forward from what is on your head, not what you’ve been able to capture on the page, and does so far faster than most people can write or type.

Background Context

So, I have been beavering away on the next part of the Topologia series, as last week’s post should have made clear. As soon as you break a post in two, you need a new feature illustration to give readers a point of visual context, a notion to hold onto and associate with the article – because you’ve already used the best you have available in the first part (unless you plan a long way ahead). Right away, I knew what that feature image should depict – the most complex ecology in Topologia, the Mud Flats and Crystal Spires. I also knew, in my mind, exactly what it should look like, so I was able to immediately go out and gather the resources needed to assemble what I saw in my mind’s eye.

Nineteen source images and more than 6,000 image layers later, and it’s still only 75% done. I had expected that it would take a day, maybe a day-and-a-half – instead, getting to that point has required 4 days plus of intensive effort. It’s been such a complex assembly process that I’ve already had to step my planned full-sized image down in scale from 2000 pixels wide to just 1280. For the first time that I can remember with my current hardware, the ‘working image’ in memory topped 1GB of RAM – the most complex image that I’ve ever created on my old desktop system exceeded this (I can remember 1.2 GB, 1.4 GB and 1.6GB) – but this was enough that the system became sluggish to respond. So I had to scale it down.

But the real problem is that it’s taken so long – it’s cut deeply into the time that I had for writing the text, so much so that by the time I went to bed last night, I was no longer confident of being able to complete both image and text in time. One of the two, yes – but not both, and I needed both to be ready before it was publishable.

No problem – “I’ll just pivot to the plan B that was always in the back of my mind, another part of the Best of 2016. I know that I’ve got enough time to make that happen” – such was my thinking. But this morning, today’s article came to me, whole, and unbidden, from completely out of the blue. And now I’m racing to get it done before the clarity of the original concept fades.

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Thoughts

So let’s examine the fundamental concept. In another reality (which may or may not be part of the same physical space), an individual encounters a situation and thinks about how best to handle it. Thinks so intently that their concentration projects that thought out into the void (completely ignoring things like Psionics that may or may not be part of the conceptual landscape in which they reside). And these are then picked up on, and resonate with, the most receptive possible recipient, another variation on that individual in a different reality – you.

Under the parallel worlds theory, there are an unknowably vast number of realities in which the differences are some quantum fluctuation in a galaxy millions of light-years away. So far as you’re concerned, there is no measurable difference, and hasn’t been since the instant of bifurcation between the timelines. The only non-infinite number that dwarfs this huge reality are the number in which some event turned out differently, for whatever reason – a sliding doors moment – because there are many such possible, and chaos theory dictates that there are even more than we realize, and each of those is bifurcating to the same extent from the moment of initial difference on.

The earlier the point of separation, the more variants there are going to be. Go back far enough, though, and we reach the instants just after the big bang (and I know that it’s not called that anymore, but it’s a convenient label). At that moment, time itself had only just begun, and the other physical laws of the universe had not yet emerged. It follows that there are infinitely more variations on your reality which operate under completely different physical laws than are those with which you are familiar. Unless there is some sort of ‘reality filter’ involved, with only a limited number of stable configurations of such laws possible. And all it takes is for one of them to be a reality in which such communications is possible for there to be a non-zero probability that it will occur.

That is how a thought could – in a theoretical abstract metaphysical possible reality – pass from one mind across the interdimensional gulf to find a new home in another thinking being who happens to be receptive by virtue of being a variation on the person thinking the original thought. To compress the narrative, let’s call such a person a ‘resonant individual’, okay?

Degrees Of Resonance

Originator thinks a thought. Resonant Individual has that thought manifest as an inspiration, complete and from nowhere, in their own heads. Clearly, the more divergent the timelines, the less resonant the individual will be, the more they will be different from the originator, even though they are similar enough that both are recognizably variations on the same person.

In this reality, my current occupation is writer / artist / editor / publisher, and I do this for a website, Campaign Mastery. In a similar but slightly-different one, I might do the same thing but for a different website, being a staff writer for Gnome Stew or something. In a slightly-different reality again, I do the same thing for a publisher of RPG games. Which one? The most probable one, which is probably Paizo. And then through variations of all the lesser-probability ones that are out there. And then we get the variations in which I write on something other than RPGs – maybe I’m a Hollywood scriptwriter or a novelist. With all the possible variations of success, I might add, according to the statistical probability of achieving that success. So in most of these realities, I have another day job on the side. Or maybe I work for a great metropolitan newspaper (if any such still exist). And so on, and so forth.

At one point, I was a MIDI-based composer, and pretty good at it. I was on the verge of transforming the music that I had created into a series of for-sale CDs – Track lists were done, and I had almost completed production of the first CD when random chance – hardware failure and a total failure of the backup software to restore from the archived backup – killed the whole thing. If I had been more successful, or more driven, I might still be a composer. With all the possible degrees of success that this entails, as sub-variants.

And so on. You can see why the number of distinct variations massively outnumber the number of almost-indistinguishable ones.

I’m a big fan of these general concepts in my games because it provides a loophole in the physics that prevents FTL travel and time travel – the act of doing either forces you out of your timeline of origination and into another one. Because they are closer and therefore more accessible, the odds are that this will be a universe of no discernible difference – so it might as well be the same one that you departed from. But there is always a low probability, rising with length / duration of voyage, that you will encounter a variant. It’s most probably a variant that doesn’t personally impact you greatly – “John C Kennedy” instead of “John F Kennedy”, and since I’m neither of them… but changes cascade and multiply, and small fluctuations even on the micro-scale can accumulate like dominoes falling until they create measurably-distinct differences in the Macro world. All Grandfather Paradoxes go away when ‘side-slips’ are involved.

The same statistical modeling would apply to the degree of resonance of a thought that’s crossing over from one reality to another.

What is a thought?

The most pragmatic answer, shorn of all metaphysics, is that a thought is a configuration of electrical energy within a matrix of chemical compounds that react to, and respond to, that electrical configuration. The electrical energy in that particular pattern triggers changes in the chemistry, and the chemistry triggers changes in the (transitory) electrical patterns that are thus created. A domino effect archives the thought in a memory buffer and may trigger associations and further thoughts, like ripples in a pond.

I’m sure this is horribly oversimplified, perhaps to the point of being completely wrong, but it’s my best understanding of the answer to the question.

So, given this working definition, how would a trans-dimensional communication manifest?

The Significance of Resonance

If we assume that in variations of the same individual, the greater the divergence, the greater the variation in personal history, and therefore the greater the variation in the personal experiences that comprise that history, then the greater the variation, the more different will be the arrangement of the chemical part of the brain’s structure. Which means that when a particular electrical signal manifests in the individual’s brain, the way that it is interpreted by that brain will vary. The message that is ‘received’ will have little or no resemblance to the original thought that is transmitted, and the greater the variation between individuals, the greater the divergence in interpretation. The other day, I thought up a recipe for a Tropical Jam (Mango, pineapple, and Passionfruit). I have no idea where that idea came from, and I didn’t write it down – but I can still remember it.

If that thought had originated with some variation of myself, it might have been perceived as something completely different – an adventure idea, or a social / political insight, or the design for a new kind of solar panel, you name it. The interpretation that results would have to have a foundation in the prior experiences of the resonant individual – so, to get the solar panel idea, they would have to be a physicist or an engineer (probably). That foundation is what they use to interpret this garbled thought.

The greater the resonance, the more common experiences there will be, and the more likely it is that the interpreted thought received will match the thought inadvertently transmitted.

Extraordinary Circumstances?

Everything that you’ve read so far was part of that initial wave of inspiration – well, actually, there were three waves following almost instantly, one after the other. Now, it starts to get a little more fuzzy, because now we’re getting into things that are the result of ruminating on the above – something I tried not to do too much of, because that dilutes the clarity of the original thought, and I wanted to focus on documenting that thought before digging into it too deeply.

There’s been little or nothing said about the circumstances that permit / force the transmission of thought from one reality to another. But, since it doesn’t happen frequently, it’s reasonable to assume that these circumstances might have to be fairly extraordinary. Random chance in which everything aligns would be a possible answer, but how often would that occur? Unknowable. I’ll pursue that further in a moment. Perhaps an unexpected end of life? That’s a more dramatic circumstance, one that relies on the concept that when fighting for survival, we’re capable of extra-ordinary things – and that’s something for which there are reams of anecdotal evidence. Maybe you have to be in a deeply meditative state, or in a religious extasy, or just thinking – very – hard. Who knows? But the circumstances have to be pretty improbable, don’t they? Or maybe not. Maybe it’s not the transmission that’s so extraordinary, but the reception and translation into something meaningful. We all have random thoughts that aren’t worth the paper it would take to document them, noticed momentarily and then abandoned. Picking up a thought despite a lack of compatible resonance would probably look very much like having such a random thought or impulse. Whatever the original thought, the interpreted content would derived from existing personality profile, habits, patterns of thought, and prior experiences, so there would be no reason not to consider it your own random thought.

The more discriminating the resonance has to be, the more ubiquitous the process of transmission can be.

But this receptivity threshold doesn’t actually have to relate directly to the degree of Resonance – there can be two different functions involved. A lower-resonance individual could, perhaps, receive such a thought in exactly the right extraordinary circumstances. The more resonant the individual, the less improbable such reception might be, but improbable doesn’t mean impossible. It’s possible (however unlikely) that every individual is transmitting almost every thought that they have across the dimensional gulfs, but only specific individuals whose circumstances happen to match up precisely in the right configuration receive the thought, and only a few of them make anything significant out of it.

Perhaps the most probable configuration of realities, assuming that all this is possible at all – a quite fantastic assumption – is that everything has to be almost-exactly right at both ends. That’s certainly the most plausible.

Robert A Heinlein once speculated on the concept of a “Ficton” as the ‘basic unit” of imagination. The term is applied most frequently to speculative fiction in implying self-consistency within a fictional universe, which becomes important when crossovers occur. One of the more interesting conclusions that can be reached from the specific many-timelines / many-worlds speculation defined earlier in this article is that any fictional reality (or some internally-consistent variation on the premise, where the originator of the fictional reality has not been able to maintain internal consistency for whatever reason) must exist as a reality, somewhere.

An example: Known Space by Larry Niven

Some of the early stories by Larry Niven were standalone science fiction short stories regarding the exploration of the solar system. These were later folded into the broader “Known Space” fictional universe as historic events, and collected into the “Tales Of Known Space” compilation with editorial notes by Niven.

In one such editorial note, he raises the question of what to do when physics makes a new discovery that contradicts what a writer has created. For example, it was assumed for a long time that Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun, always presenting the one face to it; it was on this basis that he wrote his story of exploration of that world by the first humans to visit there. Science then discovered that Mercury does, in fact, rotate, completely and catastrophically undermining that fundamental premise of the short story in question.

An author, in this circumstance, has four options:

• He can revise his story to remove the resulting error – but if he starts down this road, before too long, he will be spending all his time revising prior work, and not creating anything new.
• He can insert something into a new story to explain the discontinuity – but this is only worth doing if the problem is vastly more important than is usually the case, because it’s self-referential and often boring except to the most puritan of purists.
• He can determine that the established story over-rules subsequent discoveries by science, maintaining an existing continuity of concept and internal consistency. This elevates the purity of that consistency over consistency with the known reality of the reader, and can cause the fiction to date, but it leaves the author free to get on with writing more stories set in this universe.
• Or, fourthly, he can ignore the problem and just write something new. This is Isaac Asimov’s preferred solution, citing Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”. Asimov was far from alone in adopting this stance, it is by far the most common approach to the problem.

An author can even prevaricate between answers 3 and 4, refusing to even acknowledge the problem until forced to decide, one way or another, by a new story that runs headlong into the contradiction. And, under the many-worlds paradigm described, there is a fifth option:

• The author’s entire fictional universe is contained within one reality until an internal contradiction assets itself, at which point his narrative shifts from one universe to a parallel version in which the old story is not what happened, and reality is consistent with the new version of events. There is no contradiction, no paradox, that results because any contradictions get exiled from the primary reality described.

Application to RPGs

All that means that somewhere, there is a universe which mirrors the events in your RPG campaign. And innumerable variations which cover the roads not taken by the PCs. Which means that whenever conditions – as defined (or not) by the GM – permit, a thought can pop into the mind of a PC or NPC, either from the player, or from some other variation of the character.

We’ve all seen players make incomprehensible decisions on behalf of their PCs, ones that the PC in question should know better than to follow, because they know the experienced reality around themselves far better than the player does. A good GM will have warned the player or at least hinted that the decision in question is not a good one, and that the player should probably rethink it, but sometimes such advice falls on deaf or paranoid ears. Suddenly, acting on such stupid ideas has some sort of explanation from the perspective of the affected character – a ficton has been communicated from the player to the character and the character has made a mistake in interpreting it that has caused him to do something stupid – and to have to ‘live’ with the consequences.

We’ve all seen NPCs who appear – rightly or wrongly – to have ‘plot armor’. This can now be explained as consequences of the GM communicating a ficton to one of the participating characters, with any dubious or otherwise inexplicable decisions put down to misinterpretation of the thoughts running unbidden through their minds.

But it can also be used as a plot device to help everyone out of a jam.

The character has a problem. The GM is aware of a solution. The player can’t find that solution. Play has ground to a halt, and this halt has gone on long enough that everyone is getting frustrated and bored. A random thought from an alternate-world version of the character then manifests in the mind of the character. Because he is focused on the problem at hand, his interpretation of that thought focuses on the solution. Either he gets a hint, seemingly from nowhere, or a whole solution suddenly manifests in his imagination – depending on how direct the GM thinks he needs to be.

Sometimes, it’s enough for the GM to point out the flaw in the assumptions of the player that are blocking the discovery of a viable solution. This premise explains how that would manifest in the game world. Sometimes, the GM needs to be more explicit in his instructions, effectively going around the player to interact directly with the character.

Opening Plot Sequences

When a character participates in an adventure for the first time within that adventure, it is generally incumbent on the GM to describe where the character is and what he is doing. This provides a baseline from which the player can roleplay and make decisions on behalf of the character than then further the adventure. There are all sorts of nuances that can be discussed about such “establishing shots”, but the bottom line is this – in order for the character to be where they are, doing what they are doing, the GM must have created circumstances in which the current situation, as described, is what would have resulted.

I have seen some discussions of such practices in which this was described as a “plot train” but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s a beginning point, not a pathway to a defined endpoint. Most GMs will incorporate any indications from the player of what the character wants to do next that were offered in prior game sessions IF such were offered – so this is not a violation of player agency, it’s a manifestation of it, or of the lack of it being applied.

It’s inevitable, though, that some decisions on the part of the character will have to have been made on the player’s behalf by the GM, in order for the character to find themselves in that situation. It’s incumbent on the GM to ensure that these decisions are reasonable ones in terms of the characterization; the better the GM knows the player and the character, the more “in character” such decisions become.

The bottom line is that this cuts out the tedium of getting the character to that point in the adventure, letting the player take over just when things start to get interesting. This keeps the game moving forward and creates dramatic situations that are of interest to the players instead of burying the game in the minutia of the characters’ daily life. Since the GM has (presumably) envisaged a pathway leading from these opening sequences into the actual adventure, this is – by definition – metagaming, but it’s another example of when that is NOT a bad thing.

All this is, of course, a fictional conceit for a mode of interaction between the observed reality around us all and the fictional world inhabited by our characters. It might not be the only such approach. But it’s one that works, and that possesses a certain level of utility for both players and GM that can be used for the betterment of the game as a form of entertainment. And that makes all this thinking about thinking anything but a wasted exercise.

When you give a character an INT check to think of something that the player is overlooking, when you give them a skill check to become aware of something that you can’t mention to the player without giving the game away on a silver platter, where does the thought in the character’s head come from? Now, there is an answer.