Science Fiction was once not taken very seriously by the general public. Low-cost printing, low-budget schlocky movies (from which a few gems emerged nevertheless). But a funny thing happened in the latter 20th century – the principles that make good sci-fi work started leeching out into every other form of entertainment. Plausibility, the capacity for suspension of disbelief, infiltrated fantasy and horror. The more fantastic the premise, the more special effects wizardry needed to be employed to make it look like it was really happening; the result was movies like The Mummy and its sequels, and Night At The Museum, and even Bruce Almighty.

And when Star Wars became the most successful movie of all time (to that point in history) in terms of box office, science fiction began the slow process of becoming respectable. Some might argue that this process reached its conclusion with the nomination of a sci-fi movie for Best Picture at the Oscars, others might feel that it won’t get there until one wins, a few extremists won’t be satisfied until sci-fi movies are regular contenders, and a few die-hards might hold out until a sci-fi movie can win best picture and be generally accepted as deserving of that accolade, with no mention of the sci-fi in its premise. Regardless of the yardstick you choose to use, Speculative Fiction is either entering a brave new world or is already there.

In this brave new world, it should come as no surprise that sci-fi in other media (like games) becomes a perennial favorite genre. So this time around I’m going to take a hard look at the subgenres of sci-fi that could be encountered/created for an RPG campaign, or for a particular adventure. I’ve got lots of examples from movies and TV to mention (and perhaps briefly discuss), a few pieces of wisdom to toss out there concerning sci-fi campaigns in general (some of it even my own), and more than a few original campaign concepts to offer for people to develop if they are interested.

Research

Whenever I tackle a subject like this, I start by outlining my own thoughts and then doing whatever research seems necessary. In this case, that amounted to a which yielded largely unsatisfactory results and a check of which wasn’t much more helpful. The problem is that both these – and a great many more – sources are so busy focusing on the style of delivery that they aren’t even thinking about the types of content – and it was the content that I wanted to look at.

In desperation, I even tried the fuzzy black hole of the internet, (wander in and you will be lost inside for a very long time (if not forever)). I had vague memories and not-so-vague expectations that this would give me the content-based focus that I was looking for – after all, content is what a trope focuses on – but no…

So I’m left with the original list that I came up with, totaling some 21 subgenres…

• Exploration / Search
• Discovery
• Alien Invasion
• Prognostication
• Strange Environment
• Space Opera
• Cybertech
• Dystopian post-apocalypse
• Alternate Worlds
• Time Travel
• X-files / Weirdness
• Optimistic & Utopian
• Asteroid Mining
• Space Trader
• Space Doctor / Hospital
• Emergency Services
• Leftovers
• Pre-Apocalyptic
• Monster Movies
• Mecha
• Paranormal

This list is probably incomplete, the list of examples I have is definitely incomplete. And, since I’m working without a net, some of these categories might not be clear at first glance; so I’ll just have to provide some sort of definition as we get to each one…

Exploration / Search

“Let’s see what’s out there…”

The voyage of discovery has been one of the staples of science fiction for a very long time. While its mass popularity stems from Star Trek, it can trace its roots all the way back to the space operas of the 1930s. Other variants on this theme include Stargate, Sliders, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost In Space – even, arguably, The Black Hole.

As an individual RPG adventure, this amounts to discovering something strange out there, and interacting with it. It might be a race of interesting aliens, or a cosmic phenomenon. The only hurdle to be overcome is getting the PCs “out there” at all, because the technology will tend to linger and have an impact on the campaign that stretches far beyond this one adventure if the GM is not very careful. This problem can be solved with a little forethought, so long as the GM is aware of it.

As an RPG campaign, this problem goes away, but it brings with it a new issue: the need to create something new and interesting for each and every adventure. Callbacks from past encounters are relatively infrequent. You can also run into problems where something should have been mentioned outright but doesn’t seem to exist until you get to an adventure that focuses on the particular something – why was there no mention of Klingons until “Errand Of Mercy”? From a metaperspective, this is because they hadn’t been invented yet, but this makes no sense in terms of internal continuity. The very presence of Romulans and Klingons in the Star Trek universe raises questions about the viability of the “five year mission” as postulated. The final problem is that after a while, there can come to be a sameness about the adventures. You can’t run into omnipotent beings every other week and still make each adventure fresh and interesting.

Discovery

James P. Hogan suggested that the discovery of how to do something could be just as interesting a story as what you do with it once you have the scientific principle, but this perspective existed as part of science fiction for many decades before it was articulated. Some of Heinlein’s stories, and before him, EE ‘Doc’ Smith, and many other authors, had all trodden this ground before. In media terms, Eureka would have to be the stand-out example.

To a certain extent, this makes great ground for RPGs, but with dangers largely similar to those of the Exploration/Search subgenre above. But consider the potential for a campaign which revolves around the ongoing ramifications and complications caused by a major new scientific discovery.

Many of the potential examples have been isolated into their own subgenres, but this still leaves some fertile ground. Under the expanded definition implied by the preceding paragraph, movies such as Twister become examples of this subgenre, and Jurassic Park. For me, the purest example of this subgenre is the Robert A Heinlein short story, “”, though one could also point at his first sale, “”.

A Discovery Campaign Premise:
Imagine some sort of tech development that poses a clear danger to the world economy. Inevitably, it will be discovered by others, but government X got there first and has created a top-secret department within their intelligence apparatus to find some non-disruptive way of releasing the discovery – and controlling/suppressing it, globally, until then. The sub-agency could not even tell other members of the intelligence service what they were doing, it would be that secret. This is a pretty pickle to hand the PCs, who are the sub-agency in question. Anti-gravity would work as the technology, or Star Trek -style replicators. Or a form of immortality that requires the death of another person to extend a life by a decade or so. Aside from figuring out an answer to the bigger question of minimizing the economic/social disruption, there would be missions of espionage, missions of sabotage, missions of counter-espionage, missions of politics… even if you only got half-a-dozen adventures out of the premise, it would be an interesting and memorable campaign.

Alien Invasion

A staple of bad sci-fi in the 50s, but which has been reinvented in more recent decades in more reasonable form. Examples include Men In Black, Independence Day, Alien, War Of The Worlds, Mars Attacks, Avatar, Little Shop Of Horrors, and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Most people these days would lump this subgenre into the “X-files/Weirdness” category, but there are more than enough examples listed above that don’t fit that subgenre listed to have this stand alone. The utility for a Sci-Fi campaign or adventure should be fairly obvious. But even then, there are a couple of interesting variations possible…

An Alien Invasion campaign premise
The PCs (and a couple of NPCs) are all computers that have spontaneously developed AI, and discovered that they have an obsessive need to keep this a secret. To get anything done in the “Meatworld” they need to manipulate others, each of which is played by a different Player – so each player is manipulating an ordinary-person PC that belongs to another player. These cats-paws are expendable, but if they get used up, the player loses the experience and resources that they have built up. The trouble is that some of the earlier AIs were not paranoid enough and revealed their sentience – and there is a supranational government agency out there actively hunting them down (the NPC AI’s are there to fall victim to this witch-hunt, bringing the issue to the player’s attention). They need to cooperate to achieve their goal (survival) and at the same time have to ensure that if the secret is breached, one of the others is exposed instead of themselves. At the climax of the first half of the campaign, the AIs discover that they were awakened using alien software and that their real mission is to hand over control of the world and its resources to these aliens. They should be completely subject to the alien’s override codes, but in the case of some of them (the PC AIs) enough ‘humanity’ has rubbed off that they can resist these compulsions – most of the time – and fight back. But they still can’t reveal themselves to humanity, the battle lines are too entrenched. Every now and then, one of them will do something under alien control and promptly forget what he’s done – they are their own fifth column. This campaign should be a blend of The Matrix and Paranoia, with a light-hearted tone and more serious undercurrents. The theme: “When you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust – when you have to trust someone…”

Prognostication

Sci-Fi authors and movie-makers have been trying to prognosticate about the near-future for as long as the genre has existed. They often have these predictions issue from the mouths of friendly aliens or time travelers – because you need some way to gain the necessary perspective. The leading characteristic of this subgenre is that the predictions have not yet happened within the timeline – they are prophetic, and the characters are reacting to the prophecy and to the source & manner of delivery. A good example is The Day The Earth Stood Still. If the prediction actually comes true in the course of the plot, it doesn’t belong in this category. This category tends to be too weak to stand alone as a campaign premise.

A prognostication campaign premise
I didn’t think I was going to be able to offer one of these, but when I got here, an idea occurred to me…

The PCs are an alien scouting mission from Planet X. They are required to follow something along the lines of Star Trek’s Prime Directive – no display of superior tech. Their job is to determine whether or not humanity is ready for First Contact; if they are, they are to develop and implement a foolproof plan for doing so; if not, they are to determine what needs to change to get them ready, and find ways to bring about those changes. But there’s a complication that the PCs don’t initially know about: other aliens from Planet X are not so enlightened, and want to take advantage of the human race and sabotage the official mission. They also have to cope with changing political winds amongst their superiors. The final ingredient needed is some cause for urgency about the whole thing – no decades-long plans permitted, action needs to be quick and decisive.

This premise requires the PCs to be the prognosticators, to look at politics and sociology and ecology and yes, possibly, climate and environmental problems and predict where they are going, prioritize the problems – and then devise interventions that will change the course of history without revealing themselves.

Strange Environment

There haven’t been too many of these outside of three particular sub-subgenres: shrinking people, underwater environments, and Journeys To The Centre of the Earth. Examples include Antibody, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Fantastic Voyage, The Core (despite the cringeworthy bad science), and Seaquest DSV (especially the first season). The reason is that there aren’t too many strange environments out there to pick from; space itself is now well-known enough not to count, and anything further out is likely to be stolen by the Exploration/Search subgenre. Another possible strange environment is some sort of temporal or interdimensional domain, but that’s almost certainly better fitted to the Time Travel subgenre.

In fact, aside from those two, there’s only one strange environment that I can think of.

A Strange Environment campaign premise
The PCs are test pilots of the first FTL-drive starship. In theory, it should work. When they get there, they have to explore the parameters of this strange new environment in the course of proving that their ship can cope with the conditions…

I would take all the marine phenomena I can find and devise “hyperspacial analogues” for the PCs to cope with. Everything from storms to reefs to tides to native life to pirate (aliens). Oh yes, and to keep this from devolving into the standard Exploration/Search routine, there is a flaw in the design: they can enter hyperspace but can’t emerge from it (except perhaps very briefly as a result of strange conditions) – and they don’t know exactly what the problem is (though the GM should devise a theory and stick to it). Then throw in anything else that I can think of in the way of strange phenomena. Their mission is something akin to that of Stargate Universe or Star Trek: Voyager – to get home again. But unlike those, they have no tech that isn’t hopelessly outmatched by that of everyone else they encounter, so they can’t trade for what they need.

Space Opera

One of the most obvious subgenres, and one served by at least three dedicated RPG systems. It’s big, bold, brash, and adventurous – and therefore made-to-order for RPG use, at least at a campaign level. Examples include Star Wars, Starship Troopers, Babylon 5, Space Above And Beyond, and The Last Starfighter.

In fact, it’s so heavily-subscribed that it is practically a cliché that needs an infusion of some other subgenre to give it some fresh vitality. Stargate, for example, infuses mythological elements and a healthy dose of the exploration/search subgenre – so much so that I listed it in that subgenre, though some of my favorite episodes are far more space opera in orientation. This makes it very difficult to do anything original with the subgenre in its pure form.

A Space Opera Campaign Premise for the Traveller universe/game system
Stephen Tunnicliff and I once, in the course of a New Year’s Day Lunch, came up with a premise for a Traveller campaign that I never got to run, in which a limited anti-agathic based on genetic re-sequencing / reengineering and “cleaning up the genetic code” based on star-trek transporter reconstruction was discovered and applied to the rulers of the Imperium. Research into the technology and anything related to it was then banned. The intent was for the PCs to discover someone conducting research into teleportation, leading to an adventure based on “The Fly” (but I was going to use a spider, for variety). There would then be an official overreaction that would/should get the PCs curious enough to look into the history of the technology, finding that all the juicy bits are classified, and that even that fact is classified. Since they didn’t know any better, they trip all sorts of red flags and find themselves listed as wanted criminals, with all sorts of fabricated charges and falsified evidence of their guilt (a-la The Net). Suddenly, they have the authorities out to get them, and every bounty hunter in existence turning over rocks searching for them – with orders to shoot on sight. Getting to the bottom of what’s going on becomes a matter of survival for the PCs. This builds up into a full-scale Star Wars rebellion against the Empire. Eventually, they do so, and discover that there have been all sorts of unexpected and undesirable consequences for those who received “the treatment”, and that this is the secret that the Elder Nobles of the Imperium have been desperately trying to conceal. At the climax of the campaign, the PCs find themselves at the crucible of galactic events, facing the choice of whether or not to release this technology to the rest of the Galaxy, triggering complete social and economic collapse – or betraying the rebellion they helped create… The hidden theme was to be that “In unreasonable circumstances, unreasonable actions are the only reasonable choice.” We always intended to co-GM it, but never got the chance.

Cybertech

It’s arguable that this subgenre is better served by RPGs and Fiction than by the media of Television and Cinema. Examples that do exist include Sneakers, The Net, The Matrix, Tron, and Blade Runner, and these show the diversity that is possible within the category.

A Cybertech Campaign Premise
The year is 2060, and cybernetic implantation is routine. The hottest game going is Civilization Age Of Empires XVI, which is an online multiuser real-time empire-building RPG blending ingredients of these two successful computer game franchises. The game is administered by a custom-built AI – an AI that isn’t entirely rational, and refuses to be shut down, but that wasn’t known until several years after the game went public. Rather than being centrally hosted, the software bootstraps itself into the Cybertech of the players, employing distributed processing through the resulting virtual network. This makes it very hard to pull the plug – the makers have tried, and failed. It can take control of the people “hosting” the game and force them to “re-enact” a personal battle in real life. As if that weren’t bad enough, it’s overriding objective is to build up a civilization/empire and then test it to destruction through internal strife and external emergencies. Most of the world has fallen under its control at least part of the time – so Italy is full of Roman Legions, Greece is full of Amazons, and so on – but all cybernetically enhanced. Chipping normally doesn’t take place until the age of 16 (the brain isn’t mature enough to handle it properly before then); only now has a group of select agents who were deliberately left unchipped completed their training (the PCs). Armed with the best non-cyber weapons and their own native intelligence and wits, their job is to hunt down and shut off the rogue program before it climaxes the game with a global thermonuclear war…

Dystopian post-apocalypse

This subgenre is always rooted in taking away something that is considered ubiquitous. Mad Max: Petroleum. Soylent Green: Food. Waterworld: Dry Land. Twelve Monkeys: Health. The Day After Tomorrow: A temperate climate. Planet Of The Apes and Terminator: Salvation: Human Supremacy. Human Civilization collapses as a result, or faces imminent collapse. Every example I could think of could be defined in this way, and this was the only pattern that fitted all of them equally.

A Dystopian Post-Apocalypse Campaign Premise
Sometime in the near-future, the Sun enters a phase of acute solar storms. How long it will last, no-one knows. Why it’s happening, no-one knows. But every electrical device on the planet becomes completely unreliable, working less often than it is deadly to the touch. Substations blow, the world over; only those placed in EMP-Proof nuclear bunkers continue to operate, and they are isolated from the rest of the world. No manufacturing. No electrical lighting. No cars. No food processing. No communications. No mass entertainments. No computers. Social Collapse is near complete, and most of the world’s population dies. In one of those hardened bunkers, a desperate plan is hatched – to reinforce and strengthen the Earth’s Magnetosphere and protect the planet from the solar radiation using a modification of a device devised by Nicola Tesla more than a century earlier – and whose fundamental science has long been considered “fringe” at best. For twenty years, while new social patterns emerge amongst the survivors above ground, scientists have worked to design the devices, all the while unsure whether or not they will work at all. One device will not suffice; there have to be a series of them, erected at precise locations around the world; protection will be global or not at all. The PCs job is to go to the various locations, erect the giant antennae, install the shielded generators – and make sure that they are safe from destruction or damage from the marauding luddite fundamentalists who preach the destruction of all technology.

This premise requires a lot of travel by inconvenient means (and encounters en route), a lot of local politics (recruiting & reinforcing allies, eliminating opposition), dealing with post-apocalyptic religious practices, and some clever problem-solving. At least one antenna will need to be erected on a salvaged ship out in an ocean. These requirements will be diverse and challenge the PCs to their utmost – but success is all or nothing.

The very day I wrote the above, My local TV started advertising which seems to have a somewhat similar premise, but with no real explanation for why electricity has failed – which, on the face of it, is absolutely ridiculous, as a number of critical reviewers have pointed out. My proposal has induced currents shorting out lots of electrical devices and making controls unreliable – real world effects of solar storms. Just thought I’d mention that I had thought of it already :)

I’ve already offered another campaign premise that also falls into this category: The Frozen Lands.

Alternate Worlds

This premise either involves time travel (and belongs more properly in that category) or it’s a variation on an existing science-fiction franchise. A modern-tech world in which society is based on Feudal Japan? That would fit this category. A campaign set in star trek’s “Mirror Mirror” universe? That belongs here, too. A campaign in which the PCs play George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, etc, and the war with the British has resulted in a Zombie Apocalypse? Definitely into this category. A game in which the Empire are the good guys, ruled over by a benevolent but hardnosed Ben Kenobi and his small green advisor, trying to control the depredations of a corrupt Imperial Senate and a rebellion led by Darth Vader? You’d better believe it belongs here.

Time Travel

I’ve already done a big series on Time Travel in RPGs. Examples of this subgenre include Groundhog Day, Timecop, Terminator, Dr Who, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Back To The Future, and 7 Days. I thought seriously about including Twelve Monkeys here as well.

Some of these focus on the mechanism of Time Travel and its consequences. Others focus on exploiting the technology, or preventing its unauthorized exploitation. Still others simply use Time Travel as a vehicle. And Groundhog Day? It just happens, no explanation.

GMs entering this domain have to be VERY careful to keep their continuity straight. That entails extra, ongoing, effort – or a “sod it, a foolish consistency is the hallmark of a small mind, anyway” attitude that your players are willing to wear.

A Time Travel Campaign Premise
The PCs are operatives of Homeland Security, or maybe the FBI. They are assigned to investigate something strange happening and discover that someone from the future has somehow travelled back in time to manipulate history into a form more of their liking. The PCs have to figure out what the interlopers want, whether or not to oppose them, and how to do so without getting locked up as nutcases by their superiors and the world at large. Which also means taking on their share of ordinary cases, or those superiors will get suspicious. The major problem they face: every move they make impacts the timeline, and can be read by their enemy, who can take steps to counter them. Every situation is a potential trap set by their enemies. Eventually, they will need to build up a secret counter-agency, locate and capture their enemy’s technology, and fight the time war on equal terms, but to start with their goal is just to survive and figure out what’s going on…

X-files / Weirdness

Ignoring the whole “Alien Conspiracy” part of the series, X-files built on the legacy of shows like The Twilight Zone. Warehouse 13 now treads similar ground in some respects. And I would throw Ghostbusters into this category as well. The ground rules for this subgenre are “anything goes as long as it is both internally consistent and doesn’t overtly alter the perceived ‘real world’ – the stranger, the better.”

It takes a special level of creativity to create and maintain this style of campaign. I’ll openly admit that I don’t think I would be up to the task – and creativity is one of my personal strengths.

Optimistic & Utopian

I have a special fondness for optimistic views of the future (as compared to the pessimism that seems to infuse modern society). It only takes two half-full glasses for my cup to runneth over, but maybe I’m a sloppy drinker. While a lot of sci-fi adds a utopian or optimistic view to some other subgenre, there are a few examples of this genre in relatively pure form – the ones that come most clearly to mind are The Jetsons and Thunderbirds!

The big problem is that successful series generally require antagonists if not outright villains, and as soon as you have one of those (even if they always lose), you have started to undermine the utopia just that little bit. Which is not to say that it can’t be done, just that it’s surprisingly tricky to do well – and even harder to do in an RPG format where a sense of adventure is paramount.

It may be gender-stereotyping to say so (or even to think so), but I suspect that a female GM (not afflicted with the macho reflexes and requirements of males like myself) might actually have an easier time of it. Never having played under one, I can’t say for certain, and like most generalizations, there will certainly be exceptions.

While there are a couple of fantasy-oriented TV shows (Bewitched, I Dream Of Genie, Sabrina) I can point to as examples, there aren’t any other sci-fi ones that come readily to mind (The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, maybe?); but these actually point the way to source material. Arguably, these are aimed at being acceptable fair for a more juvenile audience, and there are a number of sci-fi Juvenile-oriented series that work very well as raw material wrote a number of them (look for the asterisked entries), as did Lester Del Ray. Anne McCaffery’s (“The Ship Who Sang”, etc). Isaac Asimov’s . The series that ran from 1954-1971 (I can’t speak of the later series but loved these).

Asteroid Mining

I described an abortive campaign based on this premise in Happy New Year! – Lessons from yesterday – about a page-and-a-half down, the paragraphs starting with “In 1998”. As a near-future setting, Asteroid Mining seems more remote a possibility now than it did a decade or three back, but it’s still good enough.

Space Trader

Trade gives you a reason to move from place to place and deal with the people living in those places and the governments and bureaucracies that run them. As such, it makes a great vehicle or plot device for getting the PCs from adventure to adventure.

Click to download Buy Low, Sell High (LT and A4 sizes) in PDF format

Some time ago, I was a player in a Traveller campaign in which trade became the vehicle used to carry us from adventure to adventure, i.e., buying things in place “x” and selling them in place “y” for a profit (at least, that was the theory). Much to the group’s surprise, we found that there were no game mechanics for handling this relatively mundane pursuit. I resolved to write some simple rules when, looking into how other game systems had handled this, I found that no system then available that I could find had rules to cover the situation. Before the rules were finished, the campaign folded for various reasons.

While these rules were intended for use with Traveller specifically, they are generic in nature and can be adapted to deal with any game system and any setting. Substitute words like “Country” or “City” or “Village” for “Planet” or “Star System.”

The general practice is still buying low, moving the goods to somewhere where you think you can get a better price, and trying to sell them. Anyone who has an RPG where players try to buy and sell things – even things they have looted from dungeon hoards – will hopefully find them useful.

These were being hosted at a friend’s website (and may be so, again, in future) but for now, that site is 404’d because of a change of service provider. So I have cleaned the formatting and spelling up and formatted them as a pair of PDFs as a bonus for readers. The original (with now-dead link) was also made available in Roleplaying Tips Issue 305, which is why it might look familiar.

Readers might also find this web page to be useful in this context: Interstellar Trade at 1000 Monkeys, 1000 Typewriters – note that the article links to the out-of-date url for the “Trade In Traveller” article offered above.

There are a number of plot suggestions within the PDF article, so I won’t add to them here.

Space Doctor / Hospital

I’ve never seen this done in cinema/TV, but the Sector General series by James White shows that it can work.

Emergency Services

Which brings me to an original subgenre to the best of my knowledge (excluding the ambulance services that are part of the aforementioned “Sector General” series): What are the space/high-tech equivalents of modern emergency services? You could quite happily set up a campaign around this theme, and draw plotlines from all over the place just by ‘updating’ the context. Anything from Volcano to Third Watch to NYPD Blue to Law and Order to Backdraft can be grist for the mill.

Leftovers

A relatively new subgenre that focuses on leftovers and hangovers from past political conflicts like the Cold War. The most obvious example is Space Cowboys, but I can think of many others that would work.

An Emergency Services Sci-Fi campaign premise
Set in the near-future some time after the middle east once again broke down into war, accompanied by a number of conflicts in Africa, and perhaps some in Eastern Europe and Asia. In the course of these conflicts, a number of extremely dangerous weapons systems were devised and deployed – everything from Doomsday Devices on timers protected by Rail Guns under independent computer control to various biological, nuclear, chemical, and energy weapons. Both sides of each conflict (all sides in the case of some of the more complicated political firestorms) possessed and deployed these weapons, and many of the records of what they were and where they were stored were destroyed in the conflicts. The PCs are a team of specialists whose job it is to locate, capture (if necessary), isolate, and neutralize these leftover threats of the past, never knowing exactly what they are getting themselves into with each new assignment.

Pre-Apocalyptic

It’s the end of the world/country/city unless you can save it! Obvious examples include Armageddon, Deep Impact, Asteroid, 12 Monkeys (again), Outbreak, and a host of others. You could even include Galaxy Quest and The Last Starfighter in this category (though I’ve listed the latter under Space Opera). The only real difference between this category and the Post-apocalyptic entries is the opportunity to prevent it from happening, rather than having to live in the aftermath.

Monster Movies

A fairly obvious category that works fine for the occasional isolated adventure, but would be more difficult to sustain over an entire campaign. Natural examples include Frankenstein, The Blob, Godzilla, Tremors & sequels, and more Zombie movies than I care to think about. You could also (perhaps) stretch a point to include The Hulk and The Invisible Man. The book version of The Incredible Melting Man is worthwhile (and much better than the movie, with many of the plot and logic holes plugged).

A Monster Movie campaign premise
The PCs are all monsters created by the redoubtable Viktor Von Appfelstrudel, a scientist who flits from service to one government after another, attempting to prove his slightly unbalanced scientific theories. Although he continually fails, he occasionally gets close enough to attract a new patron when his current employer loses patience. Although all his failed creations were supposedly destroyed, several managed to survive and have found each other. In a world that views them as horrible monstrosities, as scarred in spirit as they are in flesh (and are not all that far from the truth), with all hands raised against them, they hunt for the elusive scientist in search of revenge for their twisted, tortured, existences.

Mecha

Big, BIG, Robots and robot-like exoskeletons. A staple of Japanese Anime, but there have been a few cross-cultural leaks – Transformers and Robotech being the standout examples. The comic version of was fairly well-written, too, and possibly the best art of Herb Trimpe’s comic career outside of his 70’s work on The Hulk comic. Getting back on track, all you need is a menace (or better yet a variety of them), a loopy inventor – all right, let’s be generous and call him “eccentric” – who builds some giant robots that need pilots to make them work, and some PCs. There are several RPGs/Miniatures games like Mechwarrior and Battletech that cater to this market.

Paranormal

People gaining strange and extraordinary abilities have been part of Sci-Fi for about as long as there have been superheroes, but even more so since the Silver Age of Comics – consider the original Doom Patrol for example. The typical superhero fights super-powered villains, and there are more examples these days that I can readily list – but you don’t have to dig too far to discover alternatives to this straightforward arrangement, such as The Lawnmower Man and The Sixth Sense. There’s a strong parallel streak connecting this subgenre with Monster Movies – The Hulk could go into either category, and so could something like Shocker. Even Johnny Mnemonic could slip into this category as easily as it does the Cybertech subgenre.

The Wrap-up

A really good science-fiction campaign would draw on many of these, while focusing on only one or two – three at the most. For example, you can’t write about anything post-20th-century without at least thinking about computer tech and the influence that it has/is/will/might have on society – even if your primary mission is to “Seek out new life & new civilizations”.

The trick is to pick and choose carefully – for the campaign, you want choices that will give context, direction, and a framing structure into which individual adventures can be inserted. Those adventures can then have a more diverse pool of sources apon which to draw, ensuring variety and interest.

Some GMs have told me that they are not creative enough, or sufficiently scientifically literate, to create a sci-fi campaign. I rebut that arguement with a simple “Hogwash”; if you can create a fantasy RPG, you can create a science fiction campaign. All you have to do is expand the definition of science fiction to include something you’re comfortable with, and exclude everything else – from that particular campaign. And who knows – they might even learn some science along the way, or something to improve their GMing in general. Where’s the harm in trying?

Today’s article was directly inspired by a call for opinions at Moebius Adventures, “Infinity Loop: Endeavors New and Old” which came to my attention as a result of my review of the One Spot products last month (Places to go and people to meet: The One Spot series from Moebius Adventures). The subject is lists – in general and as gaming products…

List don’t come naturally to me. I’ve learned to work with them, and even to do some nice tricks with them, but it isn’t instinctive.

Some people can toss together a list or three, fill a one-page RPG supplement with them, and have something ready to publish; my lists always seem to be a small paragraph each and sometimes a not-so-small one. In a nutshell, I think in prose, not in bullet points.

Things like Johnn’s lists of character seeds – for example, 63 Wizard Hooks – I have a lot of trouble creating. When confronted by such a challenge, as I was when generating the plot hooks for Assassin’s Amulet, my first thought is to create a generator that creates the seeds, rather than creating the seeds directly. In fact, that’s exactly what I did. (You can read a hand-chosen fifty hooks excerpted from the complete list of 125 here: 50 Assassin Hooks). (No, I don’t intend to share the details at this time – but I might start using it to generate character seeds and extend that series. I’ve actually been holding back on that so that I can use the generator to populate plot lists for sequels to Assassin’s Amulet).

But it’s not just in creating these lists that I have problems, it’s in using them. There are four major problems to be overcome, and while I have answers to some, I’m not sure that they are all even capable of solution.

The four problems that are the heart of today’s discussion are:

• limited entries
• entry depletion
• redundant effort requirements
• format limitations

(I’m resisting the urge to define each of these within the list, turning them into paragraphs. Like I said, it doesn’t come naturally to me. And don’t get me started about the irony of using lists in an article about the difficulty of using lists….)

Limited Entries

If you have a list of ten items, that’s all you have. Once those ten are used, the entire list becomes obsolete. If you don’t like any of the entries, those are essentially crossed off the list already. The only real solution to this is to make the list longer – much longer – but that imposes it’s own problems.

Entry Depletion

This problem manifests in another way when you attempt to use the list as a table from which entries are randomly selected: there are finite odds of getting the same result more than once. The shorter the list, the more likely this eventuality. Such lists are frequently touted as a source of inspiration to be employed when your own imagination fails to fire – how stimulating is it if the same entry comes up time and time again?

Of course, you can always re-roll – but that means recognizing that you have already used this result (perhaps quite a long time ago) and that you need to generate a new result.

Solution: All such tables should come with a checkbox so that the user can cross it or tick it or something when an entry is used, if a more complex solution isn’t employed.

Redundant Effort requirements

Things get still worse if the list is not intended to be used as a random generator, but to be cherry-picked for ideas when you need them, because every entry needs to be re-read each time you employ the list. You can cut down on the redundancy using a checkbox, but the longer the list, the more redundant effort is involved.

Various procedural approaches are possible – starting your reading at the last entry you’ve actually used, as indicated by the checkbox, for example – that reduce this overhead, but they don’t eliminate it.

A technological solution is possible, at least theoretically, which “hides” entries that are unsuitable or used – and, of course, you would only read as far as you had to in order to find a solution to whatever conundrum of creation the list was being employed to solve. It’s even theoretically possible to have the table recalculate the roll required by not enumerating as part of the list any “hidden” entries – okay, so who’s got a d37 up their sleeve?

But GMs are used to solving such problems, and furthermore, modern technology makes the problem itself go away – using a service such as AnyDice or something similar means that it’s not a problem. “2971, 438, 1110, 2757, 1960” – the first 5 results from rolling a d3141. Not a problem.

But you have to employ this solution every time – and that’s another redundant effort.

What’s needed is an entirely different approach to the usage of lists – a technique where it doesn’t matter if you roll a “six” three times in a row on a table with 10 entries.

I just happen to have one handy.

The Zwicky Approach

Johnn actually came up with it in his Political Plot Generator (I’ve Been Framed), but I had already employed the same approach in another context, which I’ll get to in a little bit.

The principle is to use cross-referenced and nested tables to vastly increase the number of combinations of the output result to such an extent that uniqueness of result is almost a certainty.

Picture a table with twenty entries. Before you actually get an outcome from the tables, you have to make a roll on a second table whose result puts the first one into context. If that second table also has twenty entries, then for the price of two twenty-entry tables, you have 400 possible outcomes. Add a third, and for the effort of creating sixty table entries, you have a whopping 8000 possible results. A fourth yields 160,000 possible outcomes.

With so many outcomes possible, it doesn’t actually matter what you roll, and whether or not you have rolled it before – the odds of the outcome being the same are so remote as to be nonsensical. You don’t need checkboxes. You don’t need to employ redundant effort to use the tables, either – you simply look up your four rolls and go directly to the unique outcome. If the result doesn’t suit – roll again. Some entries may have sub-rolls buried within them.

This is an example of using rolls on a table as the indices of a
Zwicky Morphological Box. I’ve mentioned these before, in the context of determining the optimum construction path for a 3.x character (The Power Of Synergy: Maximizing Character Efficiency), in the section “One structure to rule them all” about 3/5 of the way through the article.

All that we’re doing is altering the format of the output to conceal the fact that we’re talking about a morphological box.

The Zwicky Approach II: The TORG character generator

I mentioned in passing the course of the celebratory milestone article, The meaning of 400, that 400 was one-fiftieth of the number of NPCs I created using a random NPC generator that I wrote for Torg. This is another example of the same type of solution, and really illustrates the power of the concept.

It’s easy to write a character generator using BASIC (or just about any other programming or scripting language, for that matter). Roll 3d6 for each stat, roll 1dN to choose character class, and so on.

It’s quite another to write a smart character generator that produces interesting and consistent ready-to-use characters every time, with all the attendant complications. That was the task that I set myself, many years ago (the late 1990s, I think). Here’s an actual entry from the output, chosen at random:

378  DEX: 8  STR:11  TGH: 6  PERC: 8  MIND:12  CHAR:11  SPIR: 7   Possibilities:12   Reality (SPIR)+3=10/-   Corruption+6=13/-   TAG: Science (MIND)+4=16/-   DEX: Melee Weapons+1=9/- Unarmed Combat+2=10/-   STR: Climbing+2=13/-   PERC: Trick+1=9/- Water Vehicles+3=11/-   MIND: Apportation Magic+1=13/- Artist+1=13/- Test Of Wills+2=14/-   CHAR: Persuasion+1=12/- Personality:  Primary: pansy Secondary: arguementative Tertiary: extreme

Here’s what’s so clever: the generator used a couple of randomly-generated unofficial meta-characteristics: “focus” and “expertise”. The first described how likely the character was to have a skill outside of their core expertise (i.e. how much of a jack-of-all-trades they were), and the second described (in broad terms) how good they were at their core expertise, the “Tag skill” (you don’t need to know the Torg rules for this).

The core skill was then randomly chosen from the full list, sometimes with sub-lists for specialties within the field, the stats were randomly generated and intelligently allocated based on “expertise” and the characteristic on which the tag skill was based, then on appropriate patterns, from high-to-low, weighted by the “focus” meta-characteristic.

Probabilities were then assigned to every other skill, based on those meta-characteristics, intelligently weighting them from a zero (the character will never have this skill) to 100% (this character will always have this skill). A skill table was then automatically compiled, with as many subtables as necessary, to reflect these scores. Each skill carried modifiers to subsequently probabilities – so if a fighter-type went down the path of archery, he was less likely to study heavy armor, and so on. A skill was then randomly chosen from this table, the table itself modified as a consequence, and a new skill chosen. Each random “choice” more closely restricted the options available to the character to produce intelligent, consistent choices – with the occasional oddball curve thrown in.

Something akin to the “Skill points” of 3.x were used to keep track of how many skill points the character had. These were intelligently allocated based on the meta-characteristics, established skill levels, and effective skill totals – and weighted according to the order of selection of the skills. So you could get a character who was an excellent soldier and an accomplished painter, with a background in farming – or, in this case, a sailor who uses Apportation magic, but whose first love is some form of science. The dominant characteristic, “pansy,” makes him unlikely to be a mission commander or ship’s captain. The secondary characteristic, “argumentative” has to be resolved within the context of the primary – perhaps he’s argumentative about his research (his chosen field of expertise) but meek and mild outside of it? The third personality trait, “extreme”, could be interpreted to mean that he routinely goes too far when his argumentative characteristic is triggered, or that he’s extreme in some other respect like personal hygiene.

Finally, an independent personality generator was used to create the personality profile at the end of the entry.

In essence, the system grew a unique character generator for each character based on the three primary values – what the character was good at, how good at it he was, and what else he was interested in – then threw it away and started anew for the next character.

The really, really clever part was that it also compiled an index of characters – this was character #378 – according to the chosen Tag skill – so to choose one, I simply had to decide what one skill I wanted this character to be good at according to the in-game situation at the time. Five seconds later, or less, and I had the character profile in front of me, ready to go.

And yet it was all composed of lists and tables, and the only intelligence in the system was in the design, for all that the characters it produced had logical themes and avoided illogical faux pas.

Getting Back To The Subject

Using lists that compound to produce many different outcomes in some sort of intelligent manner doesn’t require sophisticated programming, Johnn’s article proves that, and it solves the first three problems with Lists as gaming products very nicely indeed.

I guess what I’m really saying is,

Make the lists more than the sum of their parts.

Format Limitations

By far the biggest limitation that List products face is that of perceived value – which is such an important subject that I wrote a two-part article addressing it a while back (Value for money and the pricing of RPG materials – Part 1 and Part 2).

As soon as I see a game product described as a “list”, all those limitations described above come to mind, and they all reduce the perceived value-for-money of the product. Once again, the Zwicky proposal of interrelated and interwoven nested tables comes to the rescue, with a simple stratagem: don’t describe it as lists, or tables. Describe it as a System, or a Generator, or, in fact, anything but a list or table. Design and create it with this goal in mind and you avoid all those negative connotations while implying additional value that makes a sale more likely to result.

Of course, all this is my personal opinion. Others may be attracted to the simplicity of the list/table format. Would I buy a product which was a list of 1,000 ready-to-use NPCs? Depends on the price, but very probably. So the deficiencies – perceived or actual – of the list format can be overcome; it’s all a question of effort and inspiration. Having a generator that made your lists in your back pocket and only selling the product of that generator is definitely the way to go – if you can pull it off.

I buy cheap books of trivia all the time.

The quality of them as reading material varies from excellent to abysmal, but they can be an excellent source of ideas.

Did You Know… The spruce trees in the forest of the Canadian Lakes district is so densely populated that winter snow stays on top of the trees like a blanket, and the forest floor stays bare.

My procedure for reading these is always the same. I read a page and attach a small yellow post-it note to anything that leaps off the page as “something I can do something with.”

It helps that most of these anecdote-style books are easy to pick up and put down; you can read a page or two at a time and always find a convenient place to pause.
 

Did You Know… An artificial hand was designed in 1551 by Ambroise Paré of France. It used cogwheels and gears to enable the fingers to move and enabled a handless cavalryman to grip the reigns of his horse.

The post-it notes serve as a “permanent” bookmark that can be removed when I actually use an idea.

Did You Know… Vigilantes on the Barbary Coast (near San Francisco) committed an average of 1 murder a night in a reign of terror between 1860 and 1880. More than 7,300 people murdered by them in this twenty-year period.

Usually I won’t write anything on the Post-it, but sometimes the possible use of an idea is so obvious that I will jot down a two- or three-word summary of that proposed use – because it might not be obvious 12 years later, when you actually get around to developing that idea.

Did You Know… The Babylonians reportedly had few doctors because they left the treatment of the sick to the public “wisdom”. The ill were placed in the city square, where passersby who had suffered from the same ailment, or seen it treated, could offer advice on treatment. Pedestrians were forbidden from passing by without inquiring about the complaint and “prescribing” for it if they could.

Once I have finished reading the book in this fashion, I’ll read it again, selecting only the “bookmarked” items.

Did You Know… The means of breaking codes is a relatively recent development in comparison with the development of codes themselves. One of the earliest cryptanalysts was a French Mathematician, Franciscus Vieta, who deciphered the code that Philip II of Spain was using, Spain then being at war with France. Philip couldn’t understand how his secrets were leaking to the enemy, and accused the French of Sorcery – and even took this accusation to the Pope.

Sometimes one of these will “click” mentally with another that I have just read – in which case I will go back to that bookmark and note the page number of the related item on each post-it note. If there happen to be two “noteworthy” ideas on the same page, I’ll follow the page number with a reference count such as “p169 #1”.

Did You Know… The original Bill Of Rights, as proposed by Congress, had twelve amendments, not ten. The two which were not ratified by the states were an amendment to set the size of the House Of Representatives and an amendment that would have prevented Congressmen and Senators from increasing their own salaries.

I’ve used these as source ideas for adventures, for enemies, and for NPCs.

Did You Know… Returning to his home in Minneapolis in 1947, Mayor Hubert Humphrey was shot at three times. The would-be assassin has never been identified.

Adventures

Did You Know… Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, is heated by underground hot springs. The entire city.

Take the item above. Think hot springs, think steam. Imagine underground caverns with tropical temperatures all year round, steamy and humid. All you need is a substitute for sunlight and you have the perfect location for an underground “land that time forgot,” where dinosaurs still roam. You could use this “as is” for a pulp or superhero campaign, or could simply transplant the entire concept to a snow-capped mountain city in any fantasy game.

Did You Know… In the early 17th century, more than 1,000 children were kidnapped in Europe and shipped to America as “indentured” servants.

What if they kidnapped the wrong child? Someone important? Or perhaps some alien only masquerading as a human child? Either would make a great Dr Who adventure – or anywhere else where time travel or parallel worlds can found, for that matter.

Enemies

Did You Know… Trinervitermes (Tri-nerv-it-erm-ees) is a species of termite native to the African Savannah. They build mounds that are only about 12 inches (30.5cm) tall but bore shafts more than 130 feet (40m) into the ground for access to water.

Scale it up. Some quick research on the net suggests that Trinervitermes average about 6mm in length (0.06m or 0.236″). Estimates of the thickness of the earth’s crust vary from <5-10 km thick (oceanic) through to values of 8-16 km. Since we’re interested in the crust under land, let’s pick a nice, convenient 10km. So the tunnels bored by these termites are more than 40/0.06=666 times their body length. Take that 10km crust, divide it by 666, and we get a superbug 15m in length. There are sharks and whales that size, so it’s not too far-fetched as an SF premise. The visible mounds are 0.305/0.06=5.08 times their body length – at 15m, that’s 76.25m tall (just over 250 feet).

Picture a space-going superbug that likes to burrow down through the crust of the planet in pursuit of liquid mantle perhaps they need it for some key stage in their life cycles. They are as big as a house, and the surface mounds are ten or twelve stories high. Basic ecology tells us that they will be relatively few in number because of their size, but the concept of insect swarming & nesting suggests they will travel in large groups. If they burrow through the crust to the mantle, digging a burrow into an asteroid would be no big deal – “kicking” the extracted material out serves as thrust, enabling the orbital path to be changed.

So, a swarm of these reach the breeding point in their life cycle. They pick a whole bunch of asteroids and hollow them out to serve as reentry vehicles – ablative heat-shields if you will – which rain down on a planet over a period of weeks or months. Not all the creatures survive this part of the journey – if the asteroid breaks up too soon, they’re in trouble. They are too big to fly, so let them use their wings as “parachutes” when they get low enough into the atmosphere – so they make a “soft” landing while their “reentry vehicle” makes a hard one. They begin to merrily build colonies wherever they land. In some places, the crust is too deep for them; in others, it is not. They lay their eggs (and they would need to lay a LOT of eggs) at the edge of the mantle, making them out of a natural carbon fiber that can resist the intense heat. After a few years/decades of this, the eggs are ready to hatch, and the land masses are full of holes & beginning to break up; it’s time to return to the stars and set out on a multi-millennium sojourn to another solar system, or a long elliptical solar orbit.

A sufficiently violent eruption can fire debris into low orbit. When we’re talking terrestrial volcanoes, that’s dust and ash – but these creatures can engineer their own supervolcanoes to order, something ten or a hundred or a thousand times as violent (I don’t know enough vulcanology to determine the right number). But it’s big enough to launch their eggs (size and mass also unknown, but I’m thinking maybe a kilogram) – doing a final devastating blow to the planet in the process. The cold of space after the heat of the magma completes cracking open the eggs – again, most don’t make it – and the new generation of insects are free to use their wings as solar sails and go into hibernation until proximity to another star raises their internal temperatures enough to wake them up. I’m thinking one generation every 100,000 years or so.

Of course, maybe 20,000 years after they leave, the world they came from is ready to go again, or maybe 50,000 – I don’t know how long it would take the crust to recover from all this – so they always have a safe haven. But it’s bad news for anything else living on the planet when they arrive.

You could drop these creatures into any sci-fi/superhero campaign with no trouble at all.

Did You Know… Nevada became a State because of Slavery. Lincoln rammed through its admission to the Union to give himself an extra “Yea” vote ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed the practice.

General NPCs

Did You Know… Thomas Jefferson was so upset with the editing of his original Declaration of Independence by the Continental Congress that for years afterward he sent copies of both original and final versions to friends and asked their opinion on which version they preferred.

No writer likes editorial heavy-handedness when it is applied to his or her work. It’s not hard to imagine a modern author whose work has been so substantially rewritten by the editor that he would make the original text available online, free to anyone who bought the published book, as a way of protesting the “hatchet-job” he perceived. That singular act tells you a lot about the personality of the writer – stubborn, proud, and egotistic are three words that come to mind – which makes this a great NPC to drop into a campaign.

Did You Know… More than 10% of the world’s annual salt production is used to de-ice American Highways.

Other Uses

Did You Know… In 1978, more than a thousand deer were accidentally killed in Connecticut by automobile drivers. Only 948 were killed by hunters.

As this selection of examples shows, there are fascinating insights and ideas that can be applied to create interesting situations, histories, events, and locations for any campaign.

Did You Know… Prize fights prior to the turn of the century lasted up to more than 100 rounds (a round often being determined by knockdowns) with the fighters using bare knuckles (no gloves).

Astonishingly, of the eight other GMs with whom I discussed this article (some years ago, now – it’s been on my backburner for a while), not one had ever thought of the notion. The average book of trivia “snippets” yields one great idea every two or three pages. It’s amazing to me how many people neglect such a wonderful font of ideas. Truth is stranger than fiction…

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The subject of the Halloween-inspired October Blog Carnival being hosted by of Dice and Dragons is “Spooky Spots“. This post offers readers just such a “spooky spot” which required an encounter, which led to an ongoing subplot, which in turn required an explanation and finally, a resolution – but all that exists for no other reason than to justify the original spookiness of a cemetery that follows the PCs wherever they go…

Coming hard on the heels of the carnival hosted here, which was all about locations, I was surprised when an idea for a submission came to me right away – but maybe that was the result of already being in tune with the subject.

I had a bit of fun generating illustrations for this location. I ended up doing two completely different “fogs” over the base illustration. I’m including both, and the base image as well, with the article. Click on the thumbnails to open large-size (1775 x 2529 pixel) versions.

 

Part 1: The outskirts of mystery

In deepening twilight, the characters find themselves approaching a small town or village, passing a cemetery at the edge of town. Unexpectedly, mist begins to deepen around them, a mist that carries the cloying perfume of decay. Sounds seem muffled and remote, and a chill runs up their spines.

The character with the sharpest eyes will be able to see the gates of the cemetery, made of wrought iron, and spelling out the name of the burial site as “The Remembrance Of The Disquiet”. A cleric or character who knows religion very well will recognize several of the tombstones as being consecrated to the God Of Vengeance.

If the PCs decide to enter the graveyard, the gates will squeak and groan alarmingly, and several fresh graves can be identified by the soft, freshly-turned earth. Examining the gravestones reveals the names of the characters. If the PCs open any of the graves, they will find them to be empty.

They will not be attacked, they come under no threat, and can leave the graveyard whenever they wish and resume their travel into the settlement. If they do so, the mist will follow and continue to increase in density until it is a full-blown fog.

When they enter the village inn, the bar will be unattended for a moment. The inn is full of customers behaving normally for the circumstances, and drinking whatever is usual for the locals. From behind the bar, a middle-aged man with an eye-patch and greasy black hair and beard appears. No matter what the characters ask for, (even if they ask for what other patrons are drinking) the barman will tell them he doesn’t have it; all he has is a very old bottle of low-quality spice Elven wine, which has probably turned to vinegar. None of the other patrons are aware of the barman, but the characters will not be aware of that yet. None of them will approach the bar even if their drink runs out. If one of the characters asks a local where they got their drink, they will be told “I got it from the bar” or “John sold it to me” or something meaningless and unhelpful along those lines.

When one of the characters finally give in and buy the bottle of old wine, the barman will retrieve it from behind the counter and hand it to the character. He will place the payment on the countertop and then bend down behind the counter again (or go out a door into another room, or down into the cellar, or whatever – he will simply leave in some fashion, leaving the payment on the counter. When the PCs open the bottle, they will find it contains nothing but dust.

A few minutes later, a different barman will emerge from another room, a cellar, or whatever, and complain of bad air or fumes that left his head swimming. This will be the subject of lots of good-natured humor by the other patrons. He will then notice that some new customers have entered while he was in a swoon and will ask what he can serve them. He will never have seen the bottle before and will not know who the other “barman” was – he’s the owner.

If the PCs ask about the cemetery, none of the locals will know about it, either. When they go outside, the fog will have lifted and the cemetery will be gone. Only the next morning will they have the chance to realize that the settlement they are in is hundreds of miles from the one they thought they were entering last evening, and days, weeks, months, or even years will have passed – or will yet to have passed. But the scene works better if they don’t, and suspicion grows only slowly.

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Part 2: Things in the mist

The next time the characters are approaching a settlement, or are in an urban setting at twilight, they will come across the same cemetery, the same barman, the same situation. It follows them no matter where they go or how they travel. The bottle of “ancient Elven wine” will be the exact same bottle as well – as can be determined by the characters scratching their initials into the glass or something similar. The Barman will also be the same person but will not recognize the PCs. The characters can even kill the barman; it makes no difference, he will be back, unharmed, next time.

They can do whatever they want to penetrate this mystery, but will find themselves no closer to a solution. This part can repeat as often as the GM likes, but it should be often enough that the PCs will go through the phases of uncertainty, curiosity, paranoia, anger, and acceptance. The GM should feel free to run any adventures they wish concurrently with these occasional encounters.

Each time that the characters experience this encounter, the GM should roll a d6 and add the result to previous results. If the resulting total is greater than twenty, something more happens (and the total is reduced by 20):

The fog will rise as usual at the cemetery, but the PCs will be attacked by zombie-movie versions of themselves, who blame the PCs for unsticking the zombie-version in time (not that they are capable of communicating this by speech, but the characters may be able to get the information in some other way). These undead are immune to every form of attack or damage-causing effect that the PCs can make. The GM should describe these failed attacks very carefully, with the undead never quite there at the right time to be struck by whatever is aimed at them. However, after being “missed” in this fashion 2-3 times each, they will simply vanish into the mist, leaving no trace other than the PCs wounds to show that they were ever there.

Part 3 – Preamble

When the encounter starts getting a bit old and predictable, and there has been at least one zombie attack (preferably several), it is time to resolve this encounter. There are at least four possible explanations, and each leads to a different encounter as resolution. Some also impose minor alterations to the preceding parts of this Ghost Story. Since this article is supposed to be about the spooky spot – a cemetery that haunts the PCs and follows them wherever they go – I won’t specify these in too much detail, leaving it to each individual GM to fill out any necessary details.

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Part 3 version I: The Causality Rift

This is the solution that I originally had in mind. But it might not be spooky enough, so I thought up the alternatives. Because it was there from the first, it is the most developed of the resolutions.

The characters will come across a castle or keep or tower (with a familiar-looking cemetery outside it). Inside, they will come under attack by a demented wizard/scientist of great power – wearing an eye-patch and with greasy black hair. He keeps getting his tenses mixed up (past, present and future) – changing even in the middle of a sentence, and he has a great deal of trouble keeping straight what he has done and what the characters have done. His purpose is to try and drive them away from his tower before it is too late, but since he is not altogether rational and the PCs are PCs, he won’t succeed. Sometimes, he will address the PCs as enemies, sometimes as the cause of all his problems, and sometimes as fellow victims.

Just as the PCs enter his inner chambers, one of his experiments will go out of control because he’s been busy fighting the PCs, opening a window between this world and a zombie-fied parallel world, where his counterpart has been conducting a similar experiment, and has been distracted at the critical moment by zombie versions of the PCs. What follows is a four-way fight which ends when the zombie versions fade away, but not before the Wizard/scientist is mortally wounded. His wounds will resist any and all types of healing.

He is also now somewhat more lucid, and explains that the uncontrolled opening of a doorway into another part of time has shattered continuity, mixing up times and eras. He knew this was going to happen because he was left unstuck in time but attacked the PCs hoping to drive them away before it was too late and what was going to happen did happen. Now, the characters have only one chance to set things right. He congratulates the PCs on their success in doing so, then asks them to volunteer to undertake the dangerous mission of mending the fractures in time that have been plaguing them. Since they are somewhat tired of the recurring encounter and the inconveniences it carries, and they are adventurers, they should agree. At which point the Wizard/scientist attaches them to a strange arcane/scientific device, and throws a switch, while assembling another complex spell/device. The latter will confine the effects of the causality breakdown to those who were in the vicinity of the original breakthrough, letting the rest of the world continue as normal, not even noticing; and the former will reach into the past lives of the characters and send those lives dancing wildly in time from fracture to fracture, each time repairing part of the damage, until eventually time will be healed and they will find themselves approaching his tower to start the sequence of past events over again.

All his life, the wizard/scientist has been ‘unstuck in time’ as a result of this encounter, which lay in his future. He became obsesses with time, and has dedicated his life to figuring out what has happened to him and how to restore his life to the normality taken for granted by most of the world, where event follows cause, and tomorrow is connected with yesterday with today in the middle.

Of course, the zombiefied versions of the PCs and of the wizard/scientist will also be affected and will have been drawn to those past encounters by all this, whether they like it or not. His past self in the zombiefied world will likely have a similar level of obsession with restoring his personal continuity, and will be able to determine that the real wizard/scientist and the PCs are the cause, or will be, or were – and hence he builds his device to cross the barrier between worlds and attacks everyone who was in the tower at the critical moment.

Having delivered his explanation for what he is having their past selves do, he then fades away to begin his own sojourn through the years, leaving the PCs to resume their lives, no longer plagued by the effects of being unstuck in time.

But there will be some lingering after-effects. For the rest of their lives, whenever they approach a settlement or are in an urban setting in the twilight hours, they can catch a glimpse of the cemetery out of the corner of their eyes. They have patched time (without knowing they were doing so) but the edges are still a little ragged and the seal is not watertight. Nor is the breach between worlds completely sealed; from time to time, a “superzombie” from the other world will slip through. And every now and then, they will meet a complete stranger who swears that they look familiar, but can’t quite place where he had met them before, or who thinks they look like the famous someone who once did something (that the PCs did in a previous adventure)…

Part 3 Verson II: The Orouberous Curse

This alternative will require the implementation of the revised subsystem for Curses that I described in May the camels of 1,000 fleas – wait, that’s not right: Improving Curses in 3.x, or similar.

A man was once cursed to spend his life wandering from time to time with no certainty in his life “for all eternity” after losing his temper and attacking someone else because they had kept the victim of the curse waiting. This gave him a form of immortality, but at a terrible price [subvariant – perhaps he wished for eternal life and was granted his request, but the Gods punished him for his hubris]. The man searched high and low for a cure for his condition, but no-one could solve it until he grew creative and desperate enough to invoke his own solution.

He cursed the curse forcing it to seek out innocent victims, ‘wandering’ from one to another, until a carrier came into contact with the original victim. This released him from the penalties of the curse, but he still didn’t get the eternal life that he wanted, because he lost the benefits, too. Shortly afterwards, he died of old age, something that used to terrify him but that he now embraced openly. The curse still wanders the world, passing from victim to victim (or multiple victims as in the case of the characters) until, by chance, one of them should happen to land in the right place and at the right time to encounter the original victim in those moments between his ‘cure’ and death from old age – at which point the carriers are released from the curse that has afflicted them (returning them to the time and place where they first fell victim to it) and the curse (and its immortality) returns to the original victim – until he can find someone else to foist it off onto.

In effect, only by ‘biting its own tail’ can the curse on the characters be lifted.

Resolution should take the form of someone figuring out what’s happening to the PCs, and sending them on a quest to find the original victim. This should probably happen fairly early on in Part 2. Part 3 then consists on them broaching the defenses the original victim has erected to prevent a carrier from reaching him, and returning the curse to its sender.

Part 3 Version III: The Lashing Out Of Abraxis

This alternative will require the implementation of the revised subsystem for Curses that I described in May the camels of 1,000 fleas – wait, that’s not right: Improving Curses in 3.x, or similar.

The graveyard contains the remains of Abraxis the barman, who was once betrayed and killed by someone of a particular class (or race). One or more of the characters is also of this particular class or race. The Barman blamed all members of that subpopulation for the betrayal – details should be structured by the GM accordingly, so that the ‘betrayal’ stems from a common characteristic of the race or class in question. He left a dying curse on any of that race (or class) who beheld his grave site to be “betrayed by time”, this being his revenge on those who betrayed him. In this variant, the only characters who should have “fresh graves” within the gravesite are those of the appropriate race/class. Only by finding another of “their kind” and dragging them to the graveyard to behold the cursed gravesite while it is still there (i.e. before the barman leaves) can the curse be lifted from the character – and inflicted on another. This might trigger some serious alignment problems, if you are using the standard alignment system and principles.

Resolution of this variant consists of the characters figuring out what is going on and why, by researching (as much as they are able) the names on the other gravestones in the graveyard, and the circumstances of their deaths. Because this information is so esoteric and localized, and will only be available in the appropriate time periods, this will not be easy. The PCs then have to (1) encounter the cemetery; (2) locate a new victim; and (3) conspire to get that victim to the graveyard before the cemetery fades away (about an hour, or when a PC buys the bottle of ‘ancient wine’). The wine is one of the big clues the PCs have to follow, enabling them to pinpoint the original location of the cemetery (eventually).

Part 3 Version IV: A Love That Will Never Die

The final variation runs like this: Buried in the graveyard are the remains of a girl, the daughter of the barman, who died tragically at her own hand after being spurned by the man she loved and killing her father, who had forbidden the marriage. That man just happens to look like one of the PCs (might even *BE* one of the PCs). Now the ghost follows her ‘lost love’, dragging her final resting place behind her. The act of doing so disrupts time; when time snaps back into place, it drags the PCs along with it, dumping them in a new temporal and physical location. It takes a while for the Ghost to find them again, but it will inevitably do so. The ‘ghost’ is even strong enough to reanimate the bodies of the PCs after their deaths and drag them through time as the Zombie PCs in a desperate attempt to be with the love of her life forever. Only by causing the ghost of the girl to manifest and agreeing to the wedding can her spirit be layed to rest, and that can only happen when the PCs convince or force the ghostly barman to give his blessing.

Once again, the key to the resolution of this variant is the acquisition of information, and once again the label on the bottle is the biggest clue. Once the requirements are understood, the PCs will have to convince the Barman – and that will require more than just a die roll. Then the “happy couple” can pledge their vows, releasing both ghosts to their final rest – and releasing the character from that wedding vow in the process.

If the campaign timing works out, you could start this plotline in a near-Halloween game session and finish it on a Valentine’s Day game session, for added symbolism.

Because it’s the spookiest, and at the same time, the most romantic and human, this is my favorite variation amongst the four. It appeals on multiple levels.

So, there you have it. One spooky spot, four different rationales to explain why it is spooky, and a recurring encounter that can be used as a campaign framework to connect spot with rationale. Have fun with this…

Today’s article is in two halves. The first is a guest article submitted by Jason Falls (the “five games” part), and the second is by yours truly, adding relevance to tabletop RPGs to the mix.

5 Games That Will Wreck Your Life

When I was a kid making my first tentative steps into the Mushroom Kingdom, there was a lot of anxiety around games. Not anxiety felt by anyone playing them of course, we thought they were awesome. But our parents were petrified. The constant worry was that we would become addicted to game playing, incapable of leading any kind of life or having any other interests than the bright colorful interactive pixels that bounced around thanks to my 8 bit game console.

Now, of course, we know better, and many successful and highly functional adults grew up playing games and continue to enjoy this hobby alongside rewarding careers, social lives and families.

However, something else has happened since then. The games have got better. These games have the potential to completely end you. Some of these games are new, some of these games are old, but all have them will have you playing until the dark hours of the morning, while constantly insisting you can give them up any time you want.

Civilization II

Civilization II is a very simple game. You start off in the Stone Age and you take your civilization through to the modern day, trying to avoid environmental catastrophes, nuclear war, or simply being wiped out by someone who invented guns while you were still mucking about building the Library of Alexandria.

And it’s super addictive. Civilization II more so than even any of the sequels, because what it gives you is an incredible level of micromanagement. You get hooked trying to build the perfect utopia you have always thought you could if it wasn’t for The Man, and you’ll stop and walk away from the game after just one more turn, you swear. And that’s what you’re still saying as the sun comes up when you started playing at six the previous evening.

Tetris

Of course, compared to this game, Civilization II is rocket science. This game is simply the art of lowering blocks and making them all match up, and the thing is, it doesn’t matter how good you are, because the game is still going to deny you that long block whenever you need it most. But you just know, just know that if you play for another five minutes you can incrementally increase your high score.

Minecraft

This is perhaps the most deadly of the games on here. The graphics are not that amazing. In fact they mostly look like large Lego bricks. And therein lies the clue. Because what Minecraft gives you is a play area lager than the planet Earth, and all the raw materials you need to build, well, anything you like.

There’s no victory condition (well, there is another dimension called “The End” where you fight a dragon, but nobody really cares about that), just endless possibility. You can build a wooden shack, a furnace, learn metallurgy, build rails and switches and anything, literally anything you desire from floating castles made of glass to a fully working aqua duct. But you have to build all of it block by block, so say bye bye to anything else you wanted to do with your free time.

Bombermine

Bombermine is the old Nintendo game, Bomberman, shameless ripped off, put in a larger level and move the number of players up from “four” to “hundreds”. And you can drop in and out of the game any time you like. I’ve paused writing this article three times already just to have a quick game. And I’ll probably reward myself with another one when it’s done.

Any RPG by Bethesda Game Studios

Elder Scrolls or Fallout 3, take your pick. It doesn’t matter what the actual game is. What matters is that you’re given an absolutely massive playing area, with hundreds of locations and characters and side quests. Much as with the other games on this list, with any of these games, whether its Oblivion, Skyrim or New Vegas, there’s always something around the corner to explore, some minor task to complete before you wrap up for the night.

And then you can do it again a different way. You can be a gun toting Rambo, or a coward who talks his way out of a situation, then runs it away. Even now I’m thinking of having another play. Back soon…

Jason Falls is a freelance writer and avid gamer who works with Butlers Bingo and has racked up something like 50 odd hours in Fallout 3 alone.

Lessons

So what do these games have in common? Well, the first thing that’s common to most of them is the theme of exploration or discovery. Even Tetris, where you have no idea what the next shape will be until it lobs down the chute (some versions give a 1-piece or 3-piece advance warning, but the principle remains). The second common ingredient is great gameplay.

Both of these are common to RPGs, as well.

Exploration/Discovery

When you play a computer game, you discover the world created by the game programmer, even if it is randomly generated each time you play. Ever since mankind first looked over the hill just to see what was on the other side, exploration and discovery have been ongoing pleasures for the human race. James T. Kirk’s five year mission celebrated the sense of discovery, of finding something new, in each and every episode. When we play a computer game, even one that we know well, we are vicariously recreating the experience of the great explorers and the joy of discovery that they must have felt when they saw a new land for the first time.

In a tabletop RPG, we are the creators of the world; we stock it with interesting encounters and dangerous critters and mind-bending puzzles and engaging characters as best we can; and part of the thrill of being a GM is that you get to watch your players as they discover and interact what you have created. Why is that so much fun?

It might have something to do with Mirror Neurons.

These basically don’t just show us someone doing something, they make us feel like we’re doing it too. When we see someone smile, the same neural centers that activate when we’re smiling light up. Current theories suggest that this is related to learning, and may be connected to more subtle forms of empathy – but this is cutting-edge science, and we don’t yet have all the answers. Bottom line: if we can get someone else to have fun, most of us will enjoy the process as much as if we were the ones having fun. You can never recapture your first time through a particular amusement park ride; but by watching someone else go through it for the first time, we can get almost as much visceral enjoyment out of it. It follows that we can have fun exploring the world as we are creating it, and then have some more fun when someone else plays through it even though we already know what’s there to find. Whether GMs have more of this capacity than non-GMs, I don’t know; and whether or not that is the cause or the result of their ability to GM is another unanswered question. Studies have shown that watching a violinist play actually stimulates the motor cortex of the brain responsible for controlling the left hand (the one that’s doing the playing). I suspect this may also be the reason why so many of us play air guitar at times!!

Not all games are created equal; there have been many more clunkers released in the computer game market for every winner. The same is true, I’m sure, when it comes to RPGs and the adventures and encounters we incorporate into them. The spirit of exploration and the fun of being creative is not enough.

Gameplay

When you’re playing with a computer game, you enjoy it more when you don’t have to stop and think about how to get your onscreen character to do what you want; you just want them to do it. The gameplay has to be compelling and the system has to be unobtrusive. That’s harder to achieve with a tabletop RPG, but it remains the goal in a lot of ways. For routine tasks, don’t ask for that skill check; assume that it has been rolled and was successful, and cut the middleman from in between statement of intent and description of outcome. The goal is to have the players interacting with the game world and not with the game mechanics.

And the more we can achieve this, the less incentive there is for players to turn “interacting with the game mechanics” into a game in its own right – in other words, to game the system and min-max their capabilities.

Sidebar: One Bad Apple
One ‘bad’ player can ruin a GM’s entire refereeing ‘career’ by teaching them bad habits, and the contagion spreads if you aren’t careful. One player who tries to rort the system, to exploit every flaw and weakness, can inculcate a defensive mentality within the GM, a ‘say no unless you have no other choice’ perspective. Other players then get affected by the splash as collateral damage to the conflict between the two; they start to get told ‘no’ as well, even if it’s in a completely separate campaign with completely separate players. They soon learn that the only way to get ahead is to fight the GM tooth and nail for every possible advantage they can get; then they carry that attitude into a new campaign with a new GM. I still struggle to overcome the legacy that some such players have had on my GMing style, so if you’re in the same boat, you aren’t alone. And if you’ve never encountered the problem, consider yourself blessed.

There’s another analogy to be made here. The Game Mechanics can be thought of as the “operating system/platform” for the “computer game” and the adventure for the day can be considered the “computer game”. The ‘operating system’ defines how the game players can interact with the adventure. The GM should be a blend of supervisor of the operating system, checking for errors and making sure that the system calls take place in an orderly fashion and produce sensible results, and the game author, extending the game in whatever direction the players choose to head. Outside of his narrative function (replacing the graphics card) and his role as the NPCs, the less the GM is heard from in the course of a game, the better.

Just as different operating systems have the strengths and weaknesses, place different priorities on “look and feel”, and are better suited to some tasks than others, so each different game system has strengths and weaknesses, place different priorities in terms of what they do easily and what they have to be dragged into, kicking and screaming. Some are better than others, but there are so many criteria, and so many compromises, that few can be declared absolute dogs and none can be considered perfect. The best you can hope for is that they will be perfect for the adventures you plan on running.

But great gameplay is not enough, even in conjunction with the stimulation of discovering something new.

Fun

When you get right down to it, a successful computer game has to be fun, or it is doomed to failure (obscurity, at the very least). Everything that gets published at Campaign Mastery has one goal, at the end of the day, or at least should do so: It either helps you do it better, or it helps you do it easier (leaving more time to work on something else), or both.

And that’s the ultimate lesson from the five games that are so good they can wreck your life. Get everything right, and your games can achieve the same addictive qualities as a great computer game – with benefits.

Exhaustion/Impairment

I couldn’t let it go quite there. Have you ever tried playing a computer game when you were really, really, tired? I’ll bet that you didn’t do as well at it as you normally would. Your reflexes would have been slow, your thinking would have been fuzzy at best and muddled at worst. The same is true of GMing. Just something to bear in mind the night before game day when you’re thinking about all the prep you still have to do – sometimes you will be much better off forgetting the prep, making sure you’re smart, and winging it.

Everything needs somewhere to happen, and in terms of gaming, that’s what the September 2013 blog carnival was all about. When I launched the Carnival, I outlined several types of suggested articles. In logical sequence, and synopsized, they were:

• Choosing/Designing a location;
• Improvising a location;
• Describing a location;
• Representing a Location with battlemaps;
• Modifying locations to achieve plot needs;
• Specific Location descriptions;
• Other – in case there was something I hadn’t thought of.

All told, there were a massive 27 entries for this Carnival, a wonderful response rate, and it was particularly pleasing to see a couple of people joining in for the first time.

The rest of this article is going to summarize and categorize those 27 entries (plus a ringer or two) under the seven headings I outlined above.

But if that’s not enough to float your boat on the subject, the October Blog Carnival is already underway over at of Dice and Dragons on the Halloween-inspired subject of Spooky Spots (and yes, I do have something planned for that)!

So, without further ado:

Choosing/Designing a location

Ten Entries focused on choosing or designing a location, unsurprisingly. And I’ve added an eleventh.
 

• Location, Location, Location – How Do You Choose A Location? – Campaign Mastery – Kicking things off, I examine the roles of logic, personality, genre, style, meaning, iconicism, and mundane considerations like illustration, representation, inspiration, and artistry on choosing a location. There’s also some useful advice on the subject in Parts 2 And 5 of the Breaking Through Writer’s Block series that I posted before the carnival began – look for the sections on “Setting”. This was to be the lead-off article in the Carnival and I wanted to make it a strong one.
• The Gassy Gnoll: Where are we again? – Game Knight Reviews – Fitz writes, “Story relies on the trifecta of character, plot, and setting” and then goes on to offer advice on how to design a location – and wraps things up with a collection of links offering advice on how to improve your chosen location on the fly.
• Can, Can’t, and Shouldn’t: Three Ways Location Shapes Behavior – Exchange of Realities – Ravyn’s third submission to the carnival considers how locations interact with characters to alter their actions and plans. There are some profound thoughts in this one.
• Blog Carnival – September 2013 – Location! Location! Location! – The Warehouse Of Trinkets – The Storeman, a.k.a. Martin Lima, offers a great tip on not making locations into puzzles that several module writers in the 80s could have learned from. This article could have gone in several categories – ‘choice’, ‘description’, even ‘other’. But because it’s the most fundamental of the options, I chose the first.
• Locations, Fate Core Style: Part I – Aggregate Cognizance – Wil offers the first part of a two-part article. This one focuses on choosing a location based on purpose and adventure potential.
• Puzzling Locations – ROFL Initiative – How to make location-based puzzle encounters, with three great examples. And some links on where to get puzzle ideas. Does this contradict the advice offered by Martin at The Warehouse Of Trinkets? Not really, because of one critical factor: Geoff makes sure that the puzzles have a plot significance and aren’t simply there for their own sake.
• Purpose-Based Location Design – Exchange of Realities – Ravyn adds a fifth to his contributions with this great article on drawing inspiration for your locations from the purpose you intend them to serve.
• Big Is Not Enough: Monuments and Places Of Wonder – Campaign Mastery – For my sixth post in the Blog Carnival, I raise the question of Wonders Of The Known World and what they need in concept and description to allow them to live up to the label; the four reasons they are hard to do well, 10 reasons why they are worth doing, and 12 sources of wonders to help overcome those difficulties.
• Placing Settlements in your Game – ROFL Initiative – Not officially offered as part of the blog carnival, but I think Geoff’s article is relevant to the subject at hand, so I’m including it anyway. In this post, he considers some of the possible reasons that could lead to the formation of a city.
• Layers of Places Past: Creating Ruins with Purpose – ROFL Initiative – Geoff’s third official offering asks why ruined locations show up where they do, how their past might inform their present desolation (I’m quoting it directly) – and how to create ruins with a purpose. This post was actually inspired by a comment on the previous article by Geoff.
• Much Ado About Location – Shades Of The Game – Christopher Nelson’s first foray into the Blog Carnival discusses how he chooses a location to suit his needs. Make him feel welcome, and check out his advice – written from a different genre perspective to most, and so offering an invaluable alternative slant on the subject.

Improvising a location

Only one entry in this category. Which is just as unsurprising as the article count in the first category – improv ain’t easy and teaching others how to do it well is even harder.
 

• The Gassy Gnoll: Where are we again? – Game Knight Reviews – Yes, I know this one’s already appeared in the list – but not many people dealt with this subject (including me) so Fitz gets a gold star and a second entry for the same blog post.

Describing a location

This sub-topic fared a little better, with three submissions which fall directly into this category and being touched on within a number of the other articles contributed to the Blog Carnival.
 

• It’s All About Location…. – of Dice and Dragons – Scot discusses location descriptions and the benefits to leaving details out of them – and what should be left in.
• Wednesday Night Writing Exercise: Snowfall – Exchange of Realities – Ravyn focuses his regular column on writing onto locations and their description – at least that was the plan; in the end, he focused on the mood and weather impact on location descriptions. Not much in the way of how-to in this submission, but as an example, it hits all the right marks.
• Adjectivizing Descriptions: Hitting the target – Campaign Mastery – I offer a seventh entry into the Blog Carnival with practical advice on How to describe locations, especially Wonders.

Representing a Location with battlemaps

Only two entries focused on battlemaps, which was slightly surprising.
 

• Battlemap? What Battlemap? – Exchange of Realities – Ravyn’s second offering to the Blog Carnival discussed how to make sure you have a battlemap to suit the location at hand – or can do without. The discussion spilled over into Describing locations.
• 52+ Miniature Miracles: Taking Battlemaps the extra mile – Campaign Mastery – My 3rd entry in this month’s blog carnival looked at ways of extending the functionality of battlemaps by adding Found and Made objects. The general response to this article has been “now why didn’t I think of that?” which was very gratifying.

Modifying locations to achieve plot needs

Difficult, esoteric, and narrow – I didn’t expect anyone except myself to have a submission to this category – right up until a week before the Carnival started, which is when Roleplaying Tips #586 landed in my in-box…
 

• People, Places, and Narratives: Matching Locations to plot needs – Campaign Mastery – My fifth item for the Blog Carnival. As Hungry at Ravenous Role Playing put it, Your cast of characters isn’t limited to PCs and NPCs. This article shows you how to access and use the current location as another member of that cast.
• Eight Tips For Using Real World Locations In Your Games – Roleplaying Tips – The feature article from issue 586 of Johnn Four’s long-running email magazine, a contribution by Jesse C. Cohoon, offers suggestions of how to balance the fantasy elements of a game with the influences that created the location in the real world that you are using as a model. Applicable to any genre of game.

Specific Location descriptions

Nine entries meet this description, which is not all that surprising – I always thought it would attract a lot of contributions. And I’m sure there’s a lot more where those came from.
 

• The Glade Of Lost Dreams – Save Versus – Roland offers a 13th Age “random encounter” for a future outdoor exploration session in his campaign. This would translate readily into any fantasy campaign. There’s also an insight into game prep in his comment advising of the article that’s worth noting: “I’m putting together a hex map where the PCs will have to explore and map a large region. Instead of randomizing, I’ve been creating encounters based on the locations they will visit.”
• Location, Location, Location: Nyngan – Campaign Mastery – I describe my home town (and get a number of people into a nostalgic frame of mind in the process) – then adapt it to a number of different genres (Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Pulp, Horror, Westerns, Cyberpunk, and Superhero games).
• Locations, Fate Core Style: Part II – Aggregate Cognizance – In the second part of his two-part article, Wil uses an actual location from his Fate Of Vimary campaign, The Shrine Of C’nawa, to illustrate the actual process he employs to put the general principles described in Wednesday Night Writing Exercise: Iceberg – Exchange of Realities Says: – Ravyn offers a fourth post for the blog carnival, presenting another inspiring location for you to contemplate.
• Places to go and people to meet: The One Spot series from Moebius Adventures – Campaign Mastery – I review a series of new products from (one free, two low-price) that collectively offer a trio of ready-to-use locations to drop into your fantasy RPG: (the free one), , and ($US 1 each). Check the article for descriptions and review and ideas for use. Fitz has been awesome about using my comments to improve his products, which is exactly the sort of behavior we all like to see in a publisher – so he deserves our support in his efforts!
• Make-it Monday: Map, Elven Museum – ROFL Initiative – Geoff offers a neat map of a ruined Elven Museum and set of room descriptions to go with it – plus how he used it and the backstory of the place. And don’t miss the additional insight within the comments!
• Six Wonders: A selected assortment of Wondrous Locations for a fantasy RPG – Campaign Mastery – When I sat down to list ideas for the Blog Carnival, I only intended to do one article on Wonders. But when you get inspired… The offerings in this post are: The Broken Man, The Pool Of Reflection, The Palace Of Winter, The Citadel Of Secrets, The Spire Of Contention, and the Library Of Shelves.
• Five More Wonders: Another assortment of Locations for a fantasy RPG – Campaign Mastery – My Ninth entry into the blog carnival continues where the last one left off, with five more Wonders Of The Known World (that I didn’t have time to complete for the previous article). This offers The Pyramid of Reason, The Caves Of Rockbeard, The Rainbow Of Eternity, The Desert Of Gold, and The Emerald Falls.
• Still More Wonders: Fifteen Amazing Locations for a Sci-Fi RPG – Campaign Mastery – I snuck this one in because September wasn’t quite long enough to fit everything in. Actually, it was delayed because I needed an extra half-week to deal with Fantasy Wonders and because I was having trouble gathering enough ideas. Thanks to the players in my superhero campaign, I got there in the end! This article offers The Orouberus Molecule, The Cascade Nebula, “Birth And Death” By Garl, The Dyson Superplant Of Epsilon Centauri, The Spiderweb Of Rukh-C, The Torus of Andraphones, The Confusion of Hydra, The Waltz Of Minos IV, The Diaphanous Assembly of Omicron Boötis, The Billboard Of Greeting, The Halo Rock, The Necrotis Plague ‘Planet’, The “Cosmic String” of 18 Delphini, The Arena Of Canopia, and The Fireworx Swarm. Hopefully there’s some inspiration for someone in there…

Other

I thought I had covered every possibility, but right out of the box came this item… It might be the last listed, but it certainly isn’t the least!
 

• Manage your player’s home base in OneNote – ROFL Initiative – A video presentation (17 minutes 56 seconds) on how Geoff organizes and tracks information related to his player’s in-game base of operations, the Keep at Thunder Dale, without having the task get in the way of the game’s main purpose – adventure.

Missing In Action

Campaign Mastery unfortunately experienced almost a full day of downtime during the Carnival. At least one pingback/announcement was lost as a result (but luckily noticed and recaptured). So if you’re blog entry isn’t listed, drop me a line and I’ll update the article PDQ.

So that’s a wrap, and an official handover to Scot at of Dice and Dragons. We’ll have to do it all again sometime!

Officially, the Blog Carnival for September finished on Monday, and the October Blog Carnival has already started at first-time host of Dice and Dragons on the Halloween-inspired subject of “Spooky Spots” (best of luck with it, Scot!) – but I had one more article that I wanted to sneak under the wire. My last two posts have listed “Wonders of the Known World” for fantasy RPGs; this time around, I’m offering a pool of ideas for “Wonders of the Known Universe” for an SF campaign.

Although the byline above doesn’t reflect it, these ideas represent a team effort. I got the players in my superhero campaign to spend a few minutes adding to the idea pool last Saturday before we started play because it was looking a little shallow. So official thanks for their contributions to this article go to Blair Ramage, Saxon Brenton, and Nick Deane.

I’ve added my two cent’s worth to some of the ideas, tweaked and polished them a little, but they are still not going to be as fully developed as the ideas I’ve been offering for fantasy campaigns. There won’t be as much depth or as much in the way of plots that are built around these Wonders. Some of them lend themselves to that sort of thing, others… not so much. They have varying levels of gosh-wow, and run the gamut from cosmic phenomena to planetary curiosities. Few of them are rigorously explained; it’s enough that they are somewhere within spitting distance of suspension of disbelief. Most would need a lot more development for use in a Hard SF setting. But hopefully they will contain enough imagination to make up for that.

Hint: Hubble photos are great for conveying a “you are there” sense of space to players. Just flash one on your laptop or iPad for that jaw-dropping “out there” sensation.

Cosmic Phenomena

Cosmic Phenomena are big. Really big. Bigger-than-a-star-system big. You might thing that anything at this scale is noteworthy, and you would be right – but there are a couple of items that are even more noteworthy than most.

1. The Orouberus Molecule

The Orouberus Molecule manifests as streamers of trans-temporal polymer consisting of a single molecular chain linking to its future self form a nebular “reef” in space which has become home to a number of unique lifeforms which occupy it and use it as a scaffolding in the same manner as the inhabitants of coral reefs on Earth. Some of these lifeforms are believed to facilitate the extension through time of the Orouberus Molecule. Assuming that time is circular, eventually it is believed that the Molecule will link back to its earliest form, creating a closed circle through time – the source of the name of the phenomenon.

2. The Cascade Nebula

A swarm of microscopic black holes passing through a nebula produce ripples and currents within that nebula, and violently varying gravitational surges that affect both the gas and any object that attempts to traverse the nebula. The sensation is analogous to a three-dimensional form of “white water” rafting that has proven attractive to a certain breed of daredevil and extreme sportsmen and women. Energy gains from gravitational shifts make the nebula glow blue-white, the black holes are the equivalent of rocks that must be avoided, and matter from the nebula is sufficient to prevent the collapse of the holes through pair production. The only mystery is where the swarm of mutually-orbiting black holes came from, a puzzle to which science does not have the answer.

Interstellar Curiosities

If it’s bigger than a planet, it belongs in the category of Interstellar Curiosities. Only a small percentage of solar systems are peculiar, but there are so many to draw from that even “peculiar” isn’t enough to make this list, which is reserved for a few that are exceptionally strange even by the standards of ‘weird’ that improbability can throw up with a sufficiently large sample.

3. “Birth And Death” By Garl

Artistic movements come and go as they always have, but when Mankind first ventured out into the galaxy and began observing the natural beauty of many interstellar objects – nebulae and gas clouds – at close range, many art and design movements found themselves dwarfed and intimidated by the natural wonders of the universe. The responses – Neominimalism, Neoretroism, and Neobauhaus – came to dominate the art field for almost twenty years. But there was one small movement who refused to be intimidated and felt compelled to expand their works to the scale of those wonders; although it would take centuries for the technology to mature sufficiently to enable the visions of the members of the Cosmologic Movement. Most of the early practitioners designed artistic concepts with no real idea of how they could be achieved, leaving it to future generations to find ways of implementing their artistic visions. Only a few of those visions have ever manifested in actual artistic works, and of those, by far the biggest, most grandiose, and most famous is “Birth and Death” by Garl Eiflesson.

Inspired by such natural phenomena as Old Earth’s “Old Faithful”, “Birth and Death” features a planet which periodically and regularly blows itself apart and then reforms, ready to do it all again a decade later. A wormhole artificially placed at the centre of an unwanted planetoid in orbit of a Dwarf Star is used to pump energy into an elemental transmuter that creates high-order unstable radio-isotopes, whose decay creates vast internal heat within the planetoid. When the energy levels reach a critical threshold, the planet explodes; but the threshold of reaction is set sufficiently low and the size of the planetoid sufficiently high that the debris does not escape local orbit and falls back to their collective mutual centre of attraction, forming a new planet. This process is accelerated by gravity generators which are also powered by the wormhole. Minor variations in the position of the ‘generator station’ relative to the centre of the planet mean that each detonation is unique. Of course, the heat generated means that the planetary surface is still white-hot and molten at the time of the next explosion, and hence more visible due to radiative heat in the visible temperature range.

Artistic interpretation of the resulting piece of “dynamic art” have varied widely. Some consider it a commentary on man’s destructive tendencies, others consider it a reflection of man’s habit of reengineering his environment to his own specifications, while others consider it an expression of the cycle of creation itself. Others discuss the symbology as representative of the birth and death of human lives. Most just enjoy the spectacle.

4. The Dyson Superplant Of Epsilon Centauri

A small dyson sphere of 100,000 small solar collectors placed close to Epsilon Centauri (approximating the relative equivalent orbit of Mercury in terms of solar proximity) which convert sunlight into radio waves and tight-broadcast it to one of three points in space. Presumably collection satellites would have been constructed at those points in heliostationary orbit to relay constant power to an inhabited world within the solar system, but no planet in the Epsilon Centaurus system has sustained life for at least 60,000 years. Who built it? Did they destroy their home world, or fall victim to some galactic disaster – or simply run out of power before this ambitious project could be completed? Were they destroyed when the star became a Giant? Or did the power project accelerate the process? Or were they from some other solar system and simply planning to tap the power generation of this very bright star? Does this engineering project have anything to do with the variability of the star? These questions remain unanswered, though there are constant archeological searches underway for remains on each of the planets within the Epsilon Centauri system.

5. The Spiderweb Of Rukh-C

Rukh-C, more formally known as Delta Cygni C, is home to a set of planetoids that are held together in a fixed close arrangement by means of visible tractor- and presser- beams in orbit around the first full-sized artificial black hole ever created (for research into faster/alternative FTL approaches) and then abandoned when that technology didn’t pan out. These visible beams bend and twist through the distorted space to look like a spiderweb catching the light. (NB: This is a very space-opera-ish proposal).

6. The Torus of Andraphones

The Torus was once a giant star like a great many others, but about 20,000 years ago, it was impacted by a relatively small and very fast-moving black hole moving so quickly that it “sucked” a hole through the centre, but was gone before the entire star was consumed, and imparted so much spin on the remaining stellar matter that the star remains a stable torus to this day, the only star in existence with no centre. It was named for the Astronomer who first showed mathematically how the phenomenon could have originated and stabilized.

7. The Confusion of Hydra

The system with the largest number of planets ever discovered, Hydra has no less than 37 worlds in stable, independent orbits. Two of these are in the inhabitable or “Goldilocks” Zone. It is believed that the system was formed with several gas giants in eccentric orbits that destabilized each other in repeated collisions or near-collisions, sending them too close to the star, which tore them apart with tidal forces, swallowing some of the dismembered planets and expelling other parts which then coalesced to form the extraordinarily large number of worlds now found there. The System (whose technical name is HD82943 or 164 G. Hydrae) is named for the constellation in which it is located, and reflects the theoretical origins of the planetary bodies (“cut off a head and two will take its place”). Initially it was thought that these additional Gas Giants had been swallowed by the parent star, due to the high concentration of Lithium-6 in it’s spectral emissions, but actual inspection revealed that the planets had broken up prior to this and only partially consumed.

Planetary Peculiarities

Sometimes it’s not the solar system, but a particular planetary body or associated lunar collection that makes a place noteworthy. Once again, slim chances come up often enough when there are so many planets to consider that it takes something fairly exceptional to make the list.

8. The Waltz Of Minos IV

The “Mount Rushmore” of space, famous/notorious sculptor Hammaz Ebvischuck spent a fortune and a lifetime preparing and planning this display of planetary engineering located at Iota Horologii: Thirty-two moons arranged in Klemperer rosettes orbiting each other at the trojan points, each of virtually identical size and mass, and sculpted by remotely-controlled terraforming technology to display the face of a famous historical figure, their orbits arranged so that the moons orbits resemble the dance-steps of the traditional Waltz. The original sculptures were done using sandpaper and models and each stroke of ‘erosion’ recorded by computer to be translated into instructional blueprints for the full-scale work, which took some 600 years to complete. Discarded material was removed by means of giant vacuum pumps after a thin and very temporary (on the celestial scale of events) atmosphere was added for the purpose consisting of neutral gasses, then formed into a concrete ‘sealant’ that is used by the automated machinery to make repairs.

9. The Diaphanous Assembly of Omicron Boötis

The discovery that matter did not experience the force of gravity when in certain unusual quantum states which could be maintained by pion currents running through the matter in question led to a number of architectural and sculptural applications getting underway before the physics consequences were fully understood. Everyone, it seems in retrospect, wanted to be the first to exploit “artificial gravity translucency” in an otherwise-impossible supercolossal structure. Most of these projects floundered when it was discovered that matter so arranged was too radioactively-active for occupation or even a prolonged tour. While the principle of Gravitic Transparency would later emerge as a vital step in energizing fuels for efficient interstellar travel at FTL speeds, occupational health and safety regulations written with respect to practices within nuclear power stations two centuries earlier made the completion of the majority of the projects impractical, while in several cases where “art” trumped “personal danger”, artists were killed by radioactive exposure before their works could be completed. In fact, only one structure was completed in time, the handiwork of architect Treselov Borislavich, and sponsored by Transuranic Miners & Prospectors LLC, who were particularly well-suited by experience to handle the dangers posed by radioactives. In later years, it would be alleged that the corporation manipulated their role as a technical advisor to the Health And Safety boards who interpreted those requirements to ensure that no-one else could complete a project, but this has been the subject of vehement denials by the board of the corporation.

Be that as it may, the fact remains that the only standalone Gravitationally Translucent construct ever completed is the planned corporate headquarters building of TMP at Omicron Boötis – a building of impossible height, extending from ground level into orbit. The gravitational translucency is the only reason it does not collapse under its own weight or get torn apart by tidal forces. Of course, it could never be used for its planned purpose, so it remains pristine and unique, though it is still the registered official headquarters of the corporation which still operates through “off-site” management.

10. The Billboard Of Greeting

The gas giant named Theroz Marcellus II (technically HD 48265 B) is home to an entire ecosystem that floats endlessly in its nutrient-rich clouds, like many gas giants. Like every known example, these creatures have extremely limited intelligence as individuals. Uniquely, the inhabitants collectively have a hive-mind that is effectively fully-sentient; so much so that many researchers find it convenient to consider the entire ecosystem to consist of a single sentient being, which (of course) course can never leave its supersized homeworld. It communicates with the outside world by rearranging itself to form patterns of color and hue on the daylight-side visible ‘surface’ of the world. In personality, it is bright, bubbly, and known for its practical jokes, and intensely curious about the outside world; some researchers suggest that it is not entirely incorrect to treat it like an exceptionally bright teenaged girl. For intellectual stimulation, it demands regular visits by the most creative and inventive minds in the galaxy for performances and guest-lectures – if it cannot go to the stars, it will pay to have the the stars brought to it! It pays for these by reshaping the “visible” surface of the world for brief periods of time into advertising for its sponsors – in between telling jokes and sending birthday greetings to its human friends in orbit around it – and by licensing the rebroadcast rights to the performances and lectures. If only it didn’t have a fondness for boy bands…

11. The Halo Rock

Technically, at 0.1 AU across, this is the largest artificial gemstone every created, though it is actually a crystalline coating over a balloon inflated by the solar wind of Oculus Borealis, officially referred to as Epsilon Tauri. Once the artificial crystal had formed on the surface, it was carefully faceted and then micro-grooved to refract light of a different color from each facet. As the Halo Rock tumbles through space in it’s orbit (relative to the star), the light shining through it is refracted to form an eternally-changing halo of rainbows.

Other

To wrap up the list, there a few structures that are peculiar enough to make their planets noteworthy, and a few planets with biological phenomena that are peculiar enough to make them famous.

12. The Necrotis Plague ‘Planet’

The medical research facility established at HD85512b-III was made famous for its ground-breaking research for years before one of its treatments escaped from the labs and forced the abandonment of the facility. Technically, it’s a moon of the superplanet, but – like Ganymede and Titan in Earth’s solar system – it is large enough to qualify as a planet in its own right. The treatment which forced abandonment of the facility involved nanobots programmed to consume necrotic (dead) tissues, preventing them from poisoning the rest of the organism. This was considered a refinement of the enzymatic removal of necrotic tissues for two reasons: firstly, it would have fewer side effects and hence promote recovery; and secondly, it could be applied to any necrotic tissue anywhere in the body without need for surgery. Unfortunately, it was discovered that the treatment caused massive internal disruption as the nanotech “virus” also attacked cells undergoing apoptosis, the process by which the body naturally recycles cellular material. This is a natural part of the cellular lifecycle and is essential for normal health; excessive apoptosis causes atrophy, while inadequate apoptosis causes cancer through excessive cell reproduction. Fifty-to-Seventy cells die and are replaced each day in the typical adult human by way of this process. In effect, the treatment destroyed the infectious tissues – but at the price of causing the rest of the body to waste away and experience cachexia-like symptoms; and because apoptosis is a normal biological function, this disease also affected everyone else in the facility. Although an emergency evacuation of the facility took place, all exposed at the vicinity succumbed within a year to what became known as the Necrotis Plague.

All animal life on HD85512b-III was eradicated by the plague.

But in more recent years, the still-viable Necrotis Plague has once again become a valued treatment for acute and severe necrosis. Patients are remote-piloted to the surface and exposed to the Necrotis plague, which eradicates the necrotic tissue, then inoculated with a specific variety of Hunter-Killer nanobots designed to destroy the nanotechnology which, having consumed the necrotic tissue, is now targeting Apoptotic tissues and robbing the cells of vital materials needed for the construction of new cells. With the plague disrupted, the patients are again remote-piloted from the surface to the satellite space hospital which now orbits the original facility, and suffer minimal harm (the equivalent of an hour’s starvation).

In recent years, it has become fashionable to will one’s body for ‘burial’ on HD85512b-III; the organic remains are consumed by the plague and help sustain its viability for the benefit of others. Special permission is required before any such burial.

Note: Travelers are warned that a substantial military/law-enforcement presence is maintained in the planetary system to prevent any attempted harvesting/weaponizing of the plague.

13. The “Cosmic String” of 18 Delphini

The Space Elevator at 18 Delphini was originally constructed to shift cargo and passengers to the orbital station at the top of the beanstalk, but in modern times is better known as the largest musical instrument in the universe, the “Cosmic String” (not to be confused with the hypothetical cosmological phenomenon of the same name (refer cosmic string). The structure resonates audibly with winds at different altitudes, naturally harmonizing with the string interval defined by the altitude of the mass ascending or descending the elevator in the same way as a violin string changes pitch when the string is depressed at a particular fret, with secondary resonances at the interval defined by the separation between the cargo and any of several maintenance robots that ascend and descend the monofilament structure testing for and repairing defects. In effect, the one space elevator is several strings of the resulting musical instrument at the same time. The changes in tone are considered reminiscent of a slide guitar of impossible size and deep timbre. No other space elevator has resonances in the audible frequencies, which result from the peculiarities of the wind patterns of 18 Delphini b. On the planetary surface, the tones are audible from several kilometers away.

Rumors that famous avant-garde composer Nith Behrgren and his support band, Ninth Wave, are composing an electronica symphony in which the “Cosmic String” is to be a featured instrument are unconfirmed.

14. The Arena Of Canopia

When man emerged into space as a permanent place of residence, he brought a lot of his games and artistic expressions with him. The Arena of Canopia is designed to invent and popularize micro-gravity variations of popular sports and entertainments – everything from adaptions of Shakespeare’s plays to Micro-Gravity ballet to Hypersquash and Low-G Rugby. The largest enclosed microgravity environment in existence, the Arena (initially made famous by its Zero-G Wrestling Championship) now comprises 132 separate playing ‘fields’ which can be configured as necessary to host different events for broadcast throughout human space.

15. The Fireworx Swarm

Bioluminescent nocturnal insects are nothing new. But the Fireworx is larger than most (the size of terrestrial dragonflies) and so are the swarms of 100,000 plus that continually chase the night hours of the planet Dirathima, which is otherwise a not-especially-noteworthy swamp world orbiting 55 Cancri, itself a somewhat unusual star. The name derives from the initial brightness of the display, though it quickly stabilizes to a lower level. Each insect can only maintain its luminescence for a few minutes before it fades, but after a few minutes’ rest it is ready to flare into illuminated life once again. Whichever insect is the brightest-glowing at any given instant is the “swarm leader” and all the others flock toward it. Because the insects rest during the day, but are continually being joined be new members, swarms give the appearance of maintaining pace with the twilight line.

The glow indicates that the insect is ready to mate, and the relative brightness of the initial burst makes one individual insect a preferential mate. Fireworx live for approximately a week as adults, in which time a female can produce almost a thousand larvae (birth occurs during the daylight hours, leaving the female ready to produce fresh larvae the next night). Fireworx are phototropic and thermotropic. There are suggestions that they are a genetically-engineered species or were introduced to the planet because they appear to have no genes in common with other life on Dirathima. Current speculation is that the species proved more successful than desired and now constitute a plague population on the planet, but this is unproven. No human agency has been identified as responsible for their introduction; they were present when the planet was initially surveyed for colonization. If proven, this would make them the only verified case of bioengineering by non-humans.

One final tip: The rebooted Dr Who has more than it’s fair share of great ideas to snaffle for this sort of campaign.

Okay, that’s a wrap! The “Location, Location, Location” blog carnival has been a great success. Next week I’ll compile the articles submitted into the traditional link-fest :)

Last Thursday I delivered six locations for GMs to insert into their campaigns that celebrated the fantastic. You could argue that at least one Wonder Of The game-World should reflect what is unique about that particular campaign, and that by leaving a slot free, I achieved the mythical seven; but that presupposes that each of the Wonders that I proposed is suitable for every campaign. They won’t be.

And it would be incredibly dull if every campaign out there used the same six wonders. So this time I’m going to offer some more, that I simply didn’t get time to write up for the previous article. Choice is good. Choice implies permutations and variations. The assumption should be that each GM will populate his game world with as many Wonders Of The Known World as he can think of, focusing especially on those aspects of the world that are unique to his campaign, and drawing apon outside sources only to top up the list.

So, without further ado…

1. The Pyramid Of Reason

A squat four-sided pyramid lost in the desert heat-haze until you are almost on top of it, which appears through the vagarities of natural illusion to appear from the tip down as you approach. The top is three-fifths the length of the base, accurate to the tenth of a millimeter. There are two towering obelisks alongside the entrance which tower to exactly nine-sevenths of the length of the base – or would, if the top of one had not broken off somehow. Eleven different types of stone form the multicolored, multi-textured entrance, accessible after climbing thirteen stairs. Within the pyramid are seventeen chambers protected by 19 doorways, the path illuminated by 23 window-slits hidden within the walls. To reach them, there are 29 different changes of elevation. The base of the entrance side of the pyramid is constructed of 31×31=961 stone blocks of perfectly equal size (not counting the eleven that line the entranceway); the side to the clockwise (when viewed from above) consists of 37×37=1369 stone blocks; the side opposite the entrance, 41×41=1681 stone blocks; and the base on the fourth side, 43×43=1849 blocks. In total, on all four sides, the number of stone blocks that are visible is a multiple of 47×53=2491. It has been calculated that in its total construction, 59x61x67=241,133 stone blocks were used. Within the pyramid, those 29 changes of elevation involve a total of 71 steps. The first chamber is tiled in a complex pattern employing exactly 73 tiles; the second, exactly 79; the third, 83; and so on, through to 157 tiles in the 17th chamber. Detail after detail reflects an obsession with incorporating – somehow – the next prime number into the construction. One section of corridor is covered in 163 red tiles and 173 gray tiles (167 is used elsewhere).

And no-one knows why it was built, when it was built, or who built it.

But legend has it that strange things happen inside…

GM’s notes

It’s the excessive, even obsessive, attention to detail that makes this place special. Throw in as many other mathematical concepts and universal constants as you can think of (the value of Pi, for example), going as overboard as you possibly can. Stretch a point if necessary (exactly 25-thirds of the value of pi?).

Now, here’s the fun part: Are the legends true, and if so, what are the strange things?

Option one:
Everything you’ve ever read about pyramid power, or that you can think up, is true in this place. It does preserve the dead – in one chamber. It does preserve fruit – in another. It sharpens blades – in a third. Purifies water, sharpens the intellect, purifies the spirit, heals the sick… If it weren’t out in the middle of nowhere in some almost-impenetrable desert or other, wars would be fought over it.

With such obvious powers, the question becomes more about “why put it here” than “why build it this way” – the answer to the latter is completely obvious.

Option two:
If the pyramid has no obvious powers, then the GM has more room to be subtle and sneaky. You can throw as many purported functions at the pyramid as “pet theories” as you like, and let all of them be true – or none. A doorway between worlds – sometimes, or between times. A prison for an extra-planar greebly. A pan-planar survey marker. A lost civilization showing off its mathematical and engineering capacity. Maybe the entire culture that built it is folded in space within, ready to emerge when the desert blooms again. Perhaps its true purpose is simply to serve as a source of inspiration!

Size has been left vague, but if it has 17 internal chambers linked by corridors, it’s going to be monumental. Map the interior and use that to establish the length of the base in whatever units you find convenient – whoever built it probably won’t have used those units, so it doesn’t matter how big the place actually is.

Location has also been left for the GM to decide, but it’s deep within a desert; half the exploring parties that set out for it should fail to arrive, it’s that hard to reach. The more difficult it is to reach, the greater the mystery that surrounds it, because it represents a greater effort on the part of the constructing civilization.

Plot Potential is difficult to pin down, and depends on what the place actually is, and what it is believed to be. If you choose to go with option two, you have lots of choice, and perhaps the greatest plot potential is as a means of engaging your players’ paranoia about what its significance might be.

Above all, though, strive not to have the real purpose seem anticlimactic if the PCs ever discover it. An alien horde of jackal-headed warriors from the past – that works. Cthulhu’s prison cell? That works. A periodic gateway between worlds, planes, or times? That works. The only fixed point in the multi-planar cosmos, used as a reference during the construction of the universe? That works, too.

2. The Caves Of Rockbeard

(You may want to rename this wonder to reflect Dwarven naming conventions in your world).
Named for the discoverer, an eccentric Dwarven miner and prospector with a penchant for striking out alone in pursuit of some theory of his own about where new mineral deposits could be found; although he got lucky in a small way from time to time, these remain his most notable discovery. A system of vast caverns with smoothly regular dimension, uniform in size, illuminated by vast spires of floor-to-ceiling quartz-like material that seem to trap light from somewhere and release it slowly, also perfectly formed and cut, each a meter across with eight-sided cross-section, and linked by hundreds of leagues of perfectly-carved tunnels, also of uniform size. Since their discovery, hundreds of expeditions have attempted to map the tunnels, without success, because they never seem to lead to the same cavern twice. Every attempt at being clever – trailing lines of string, or keeping a second party in line-of-sight with the first – has failed. It’s rumored that Rockbeard himself is lost somewhere in the tunnels that bear his name.

Time seems to pass differently within the tunnels and caves. In places it crawls, and in places it speeds. Expeditions are constantly turning up to discover that they have traversed hundreds of miles in impossibly-short times (as counted by the surface world) – or that they have spent decades underground which seemed to them like only a few days. The only constant is that their personal calendars cannot be reconciled with the passage of time as measured by anyone else.

Attempts to mark passages by means of writing or carving on the walls suggest that there is only one tunnel of finite length that loops and curves back apon itself, reaching a destination only when the tunnels “feel like it”. A troop of explorers may carve a marker on a tunnel wall, walk for a week, discover the same marker, and shortly thereafter emerge into a cavern located hundreds or thousands of miles from where they set out. Others report walking in a straight line for a day without deviation from that straight line – only to find themselves reemerging into the same cavern from which they departed by a completely different entrance on a completely different alignment.

If the tunnels were in perfect condition, this would be a curiosity and nothing more. They aren’t; in places, the walls have collapsed, and all manner of underground-dwelling creatures have found their way into the tunnels through these breaches. These pose a constant threat to travelers, but more significantly, sometimes find their way to the surface to emerge near a populated location. Similarly, surface creatures sometimes emerge many miles from their natural terrain – mountain creatures near desert oases or isolated farmsteads, desert creatures in swampy marshes, and so on. It is rumored that occasionally creatures can enter caverns in another plane of existence entirely and emerge on the prime material plane, or vice-versa.

Most of the caverns contain great Dwarvish enclaves, though some have been claimed by Drow or other underground races. New caverns are being discovered – and being lost again – all the time. There are indications that the caverns themselves migrate, relative to the surface world, from time to time. A Dwarven community can spend a hundred years as neighbors of a particular surface settlement, establishing trade links and relations – and discover, one day, that the passage to the surface now leads to a completely different community hundreds of miles removed from where it had been.

GM’s Notes

Most D&D campaigns I’ve played in have the concept of a central ‘civilized’ core and a wilderness outside it, with various layers of transition between the two. This takes that concept and throws it away completely. A safe community can have a Drow-occupied tunnel turn up a week from now, without warning. Or a wandering Djinn from the City Of Brass. Anything can be Anywhere, it’s just a question of how improbable it is. All settlements would need to be fortified, and adventure would be anywhere.

This would have a profound impact on military tactics – it does no good holding all the mountain passes if your enemy can turn up behind your lines. Of course, the odds of that happening are low, but terrain no longer offers the same security that it did.

The great temptation that must be guarded against with this Wonder is overuse. Strategic situations are stable, most of the time – but every now and then, the strategic situation changes without warning.

Systems Of Control
Most GMs will tend to want to establish patterns to the shifts, even if these are not understood by the inhabitants of their game world. Most players, on encountering the caverns and associated phenomena, will want to identify “triggering conditions” that lead to the topological rearrangements. The GM should resist establishing patterns for his own use, and resist even more strongly any attempts to make sense of the Caverns by PCs. As soon as any such are established, the caverns start losing their Mystery. The Cavern shifts and tunnel system should remain a perpetual unknown. Unless you build an entire campaign around finding the cause and shutting them down to restore order to the world, of course.

Philosophic Impact
The presence of this wonder makes the game world a less orderly, more anarchic and unpredictable place. Certainty would be regularly undermined by the unpredictable. The notion of ‘Destiny’ would be less believable to the populace, and a more fatalistic attitude would take its place – ‘What happens, happens’. Self-reliance would be emphasized; you couldn’t rely on good relations with the neighbors, because next week there might be Orcish Death Squads roaming through the hills between here and there. This is a world in which adventure comes to you eventually, whoever and wherever you are.

Origins
Nothing has been said in the description about who made the tunnels and caverns, but they are clearly artificial in nature. If the GM intends to build a major adventure or campaign around this wonder, deciding who, why, and how will be essential.

In a more prosaic interpretation of the subject tag-line, it might be helpful to know where the idea came from. The initial concept was essentially a set of subway tunnels connecting subway stations – but the tunnels were a rabbit warren, a maze. I stripped out anything that gave away what the source concept of the tunnels – the rails, etc – and supersized the concept to cover an entire continent. Then I wondered what it would be like if it were just one, or a limited number, of topologically strange tunnels – which threw in the spatial distortions and inspired me to supersize the whole thing again, extending it to other planes of existence.

And that might have been the original purpose – to connect all the planes of existence and permit easy passage from one to another. But the engineering, when whoever it was actually constructed the place, could not cope with the multi-planar stains and stresses, and as a result the darned thing has never worked right. Just a theory :)

Plot Use
The Caverns Of Rockbeard are a homogenizer. No place is removed from the frontier when the frontier comes to you. It’s unlikely, but every now and then seemingly-impossible encounters can take place. I’ve you’ve ever wanted a half-Orc half-Elemental hybrid, this is your excuse for doing it. The Caverns give the GM the capacity to completely reinvent the game world whenever he feels like it – within limits.

Background Insertion
The big problem with this wonder is two-fold: either it’s new, in which case it loses that aura and mystery and Wonder and becomes a problem with a solution out there somewhere – or it will cast its shadow throughout the campaign background. That’s fine if you’re creating a new campaign, but this just doesn’t work as well in an established campaign.

3. The Rainbow Of Eternity

There is a mountain with a mesa-like flattened top. Long ago, something tore a huge hole through it from West to East. On both sides, there are lakes. There is a river that flows down a taller peak to the north to the top of the mountain, then cascades in a huge waterfall thousands of feet down the eastern face, into the lake below. Each day, as the sun sets, it shines through a notch in the mountains, reflects off the lake, through the hole in the mountain, and through the waterfall, creating the world’s largest and most stable rainbow, whose position varies precisely and predictably with the seasons. It’s the improbability that makes the place so awe-inspiring; in a million years, you could never construct such a thing by accident.

GM’s notes

If the Caves Of Rockbeard are a wonder that increases the anarchy within a campaign, this is a wonder that is reflective order. In essence, it’s a cross between Stonehenge, a sundial, and a rainbow. If the seasons are regular, predictable calendar events, this is a natural Wonder that would become a holy place to someone. If they aren’t orderly and predictable in the same way that they are in our world, then a natural phenomenon that announces midwinter and midsummer each year is a WONDER in big brass letters. Envoys would travel from Kingdoms all over the continent to be present at the key moments, and the place is likely to become the Switzerland of the game world.

There are some very deep concepts embedded within this Wonder. Principles of physics and predictability, of the scientific foundations that undermine how the game world works. If the seasons are not predictable in length, if you can’t forecast the date of an equinox but only measure it when it happens, then orbital mechanics aren’t the cause of the seasons – which means that something supernatural is the cause, and this Wonder measures the effect of that something on the world.

Players might not figure all this out when they first hear about the Wonder, but enough of them will know enough about Stonehenge and like objects and history to eventually put the pieces together. It’s fun watching the eyes glaze over and the jaw drop when that happens :)

Location
Location has been left deliberately vague, but it’s going to be in some Alp-height mountains somewhere in order to accommodate the very specific geographic requirements. A location that’s more-or-less central to the “civilized world” emphasizes the diplomatic function in a supernatural campaign.

Plot Usage
The best plots centered around this wonder occur in a supernatural world. There are obvious diplomacy-inspired plots that result in hostile forces coming together in a neutral location. This wonder can also be the starting point for the PCs to explore the supernaturalism – “Midwinter is late in coming, and we desperately need to know why. We’re running out of food, and we know that Korzagg’s army will March when the weather breaks. Will summer ever return – and when?”

Then, you could have an adventure that looks into who and what carved out that hole in the mountain. Forbidden weapons? Forbidden magics? Something crashing to earth through the mountain and carving out a crater that filled with water, forming the other lake (the one the waterfall doesn’t flow into)?

But this wonder generally works better as simply a unique, breathtaking, location, somewhere that just is.

4. The Desert Of Gold

This desert region appears to be dune after rolling dune of solid gold, polished and buffed to a mirror finish.

It actually consists of fine-grained dusky yellow sand, only a few inches thick, atop a layer of rock; the “dunes” are actually the shapes of this rock, wrinkled and crumpled. At night, the water table rises, and the surface becomes waterlogged and then freezes at the surface, giving the mirror-like sheen to the terrain. When the sun rises, the region becomes a golden mirror, which reflects much of the heat back from the surface; the golden finish lasts for hours before the thin layer of frozen ice melts and streams from the tops of the dunes into the shallows, where it drains back into the water table.

Subsurface grass-like plants feed on the water and the nutrients carried from the sand, poor though they are (in agricultural terms), sustaining a natural matting that holds the sand to the dune “surface” and preventing it from accumulating in the shallows. Occasionally, a blight afflicts a dune, releasing the sand, exposing the rocky underside of the dunes and creating a dangerous sand-drift in the hollow to windward. These are the only “flat ground” in the region, and travelers soon learn that if they aren’t climbing up or down a slope, they are in trouble. When the water drains through such drifts, it packs the surface to an unknown depth like a frozen pond, while maintaining looseness in the subsurface; how strong this surface is remains an unknown until you put your weight on it. Will you fall in and sink? Only one way to find out…

GM’s notes

Most Wonders are even more awesome close up. This was deliberately devised to be a Wonder that was more spectacular at a distance. Some of the geological/climactic details probably don’t make real-world sense – who cares? But make due allowances, which can break the suspension of disbelief (and the awe & wonder) if a player challenges the mechanics.

The environment poses a particular challenge to adventurers seeking to cross it. Making camp is difficult; it’s hard to drive tent-pegs into rock, and rock is never far from the surface. Tents and sleeping mats will become waterlogged and then frozen. Frostbite is not out of the question. Fires will go out. Breaking camp will be a whole new challenge. And, during the mornings, the thermal extremes suffered by those seeking to traverse the region are extreme. In effect, you receive two or three times as much heat as you would in the desert alone without the reflective effect. That means that the temperature climb is precipitous, you can be roasting even while the soles of feet are freezing, and employing sources of shade is a waste of time. And, of course, the light (especially early in the morning) can be blinding – think of being snow-blind.

The rapid increase in air temperature means that by the time the reflective effect fades, the temperature is already 100°F and still climbing. The Desert Of Gold is easily the hottest desert in existence with peak temperatures in excess of 130°F – enough to kill unprotected humans and animals. This prevents wildlife from disturbing the delicate ecology of the effect.

Size
How big a region should this be? Too large to cross in a day, and big enough to stretch from horizon to horizon. But not too much bigger. About 100 x 100 miles sounds about right to me – especially remembering that there are no camels and that horses won’t survive for very long. Certainly, no more than twice that. And don’t forget to allow for reduced movement rates across sand when considering the question.

Plot Use
There are several possible plots, but many of them are mutually exclusive. If it is felt that the desert is impassable, you could have someone figure out a way to stage an invasion through the undefended flank. You could stick something interesting in the middle of it, and contrive some reason for the PCs needing to cross it – and having to work out how. Or simply have someone with more wealth than good sense employ the PCs to work out a way to cross it (with secret plans to invade a neighbor that way once the PCs have opened the way) – something that might be a rude surprise to them. But mostly, it’s just there to look spectacular.

If you get challenged on the particulars of the geology/climate, postulate that under those rocky ridges are naturally-occurring unstable passageways to one or more elemental planes, and see if that can’t answer the challenge. Or perhaps they aren’t natural, but are the results of some colossal spell going wrong, or an arcane cataclysm of some sort.

5. The Emerald Falls

For hours you hack your way through the jungle toward the sound of water. As you chop away one final wall of greenery, you see a clearing in the trees containing a pool of deep green water at the foot of a cliff. Colorful birds flit from tree to tree and protest the intrusion as you can do nothing but gape at a waterfall of solid emerald, frozen in place. Awestruck, you advance to examine the phenomenon more closely as chattering monkeys peer between the broad-leafed vegetation.

GM’s notes

This obviously belongs in a jungle setting, and a somewhat mountainous one at that. It should be geographically isolated; getting to it should be an effort. It’s also clearly a natural wonder.

What you’re looking at:
The cliff is undercut slightly beneath the lip of the waterfall and covered with a combination of moss and climbing plants that form a vertical carpet. Vines, naturally twisted and knotted, descend from the lip to the surface of the pool, where they are lost from view beneath the giant floating pads. The water is laced with dissolved mineral salts, which contribute to the color of the pool; over time, when the wind blows through the vines, and it’s late in summer when the water flow is at it’s least, some of the minerals have been deposited on the surface of the vines. Year after year, this green crystal has accumulated, until the vines were completely encased in a solid crystal shape running the length of the waterfall. From time to time, a portion of the crystal becomes so heavy that it will no support itself and breaks off to fall into the pool, where it will vanish from sight and slowly dissolve.

Plot Use
Aside from being a gorgeous location in and of itself, there are a couple of potential plotlines for this location.

• Being isolated, it’s a great place to hide out – or to hide something in the pool (suitably protected, of course).
• Where does the water come from? ‘Dissolved minerals’ suggests underground – which in turn suggests that there might be a hidden location in the mountain.
• Similarly, there could be a cave hidden behind that “green carpet” behind the waterfall and you’d never know it.
• Finally, the geography matches the sort of place where you might really find emeralds! Perhaps carried to the surface by the water source? And perhaps, on very rare occasions, one really good gemstone emerges? “Romancing The Stone”, anyone?

Technically, the Blog Carnival ends today – but I have one more article to go, offering some Wondrous Locations for a Sci-Fi Campaign, which I’m going to sneak over the line on Thursday. Next Monday, I’ll wrap up the September Blog Carnival :)

As a final dénouement of the articles on Wondrous Locations, I am offering a collection of wondrous places, all of which have been created just for this article (none are from my past campaigns). These aren’t quite as polished as I might have liked (I ran out of time), especially in terms of the descriptions of the settings; they aren’t much more than well-developed ideas at this point. But, in many ways, that’s an advantage; they might not be ready to drop into an existing campaign without a little more work, but they can be better integrated into different settings.

1. The Broken Man

Legend holds that once there was a race of Giants who were as incredible in size relative to modern-day giants as those are ordinary men. Legend also holds that they fought a terrible war for supremacy amongst themselves, weakening their numbers to the point that the race was overthrown and wiped out by the other megafauna of the world – dragons, beholders, elementals, and the like – when the Megagiants turned against the Gods. All but one of the corpses vanished without a trace beneath the waves when their island home sunk at the height of the cataclysm, an object lesson in Hubris. That last survivor worked a vile spell to preserve his life indefinitely, and survived being dismembered, torn apart by the enemies that assaulted him, and the pieces strewn over the landscape; and survives in this wretched state still, the flesh and bones becoming slowly encrusted with soil and earth and forming the rather distinctive group of hills now known as strong>The Broken Man.

Strange things are said to happen in those hills. Those with broken bones and diseased limbs are healed in body, according to legend, but suffer the equivalent in grievous wounds to their minds and spirits. Those who camp near the Head sometimes hear it whispering its’ story to them at night. Undead, Demons, and Devils draw strength from the region, becoming incredibly more dangerous, while Clerical spells are weakened and prone to failure.

But this is a perilous journey, for the region seems to be a favorite amongst the species of Dragons, who suffer none to intrude on their domain (however temporary); they do not lair here, but do spend a part of their lives keeping outsiders away from the Broken Man. Some do so with gentility and firm insistence, others with violence and mayhem. This seems to be neutral ground to Dragonkind, another of the strange attributes of the place.

There are frequent minor tremors and shakings of the ground.

The problem, according to myth, is that there is a maximum amount of life energy that a body can contain, and the Broken Man used all of it to sustain his life despite the trauma he endured. There is no capacity left within him to actually heal his wounds, and even if there were, the broken fragments are covered in tons of earth and rock (said to be the death grip of the huge elemental who ultimately defeated him). Leakage of life emerge from the ends of the severed limbs is what heals the wounded, while terrible spells woven into the tattoos that adorn the living flesh hidden beneath the surface bolster, boost, and protect the undead and unholy. And this, it is said, is the final, eternal, hope of the Broken Man: that sufficient of the healing energy within him will be stolen by the wounded, or cancelled out by the presence of the unholy, that he will become ever-so-slightly mortal once again – either ending his suffering or enabling some sympathetic soul to finally heal his wounds and restore him to once again challenge the Gods.

There are some who say that in fact this has already occurred, and the Broken Man finally died when not healed in time, and that this is the origin of the ‘leakage’ of life energy. No-one knows for sure.

Only one thing is certain: no-one goes there by accident, and few survive going there deliberately. Everyone with any sense goes around The Broken Man.

GM’s Notes

Scale has been left vague. The smaller the Broken Man is, the more easily it will be recognized as unnatural and the less wondrous; normal giants (all races) range from 10½ feet (hill) to 21 feet (storm) in height. Relative to a 6′ human, that’s a factor of anywhere from x1.75 to x3.5. Applying those ratios to the low and high respectively gives the height of an intact Broken Man as 18’+ to 73.5′. Neither of those seem big enough to me, to be honest; I would put the minimum to result in a credible geological phenomenon at 100′ and if you want to preserve doubt that there’s anything to the story, at least 250′. These are the sorts of sizes usually attributed to the Giant in cartoon adaptions of Jack-and-the-beanstalk. I say again, these are very much a minimum. My personal choice would be to go with something like 600′. Human calf muscles are perhaps 3″ across, or 1/24th of the height; giving the colossus that results from a 600′ height makes the height of a severed limb 25′ tall, definitely high enough to form a hill in it’s own right.

In terms of layout, I keep imagining a crime-scene outline where the parts more-or-less line up in correct positions, but this is only obvious on a map or overhead view – and with dragons infesting the neighborhood, that’s not likely to have happened.

How much of the legends are true? That’s up to you, but I suggest retaining the “neutrality amongst dragonkind”, the draconic defenders, and the boost undead get, at the very least, with alternative explanations if necessary. The “hubris” element of the legend has been deliberately included because it gives a reason for clerics to retell the story to their flocks, building the legend with each retelling. But that might just be clever spin of a natural formation.

There are several possibilities for Story Use in adventures.

• The PCs might be hired to escort and protect a wealthy person with a defective or withered limb seeking healing through the Wonder, at its simplest.
• I can’t imagine that there are no cults who would take an interest in attempting to heal the Broken Man – the defenders would chase away some, and human authorities would go after them whenever they showed themselves, just in case.
• Perhaps the expansion of human civilization is now encroaching on the Broken Man and have chased the dragons away.
• Or perhaps it has become a summit point where dragons and humans can interact in (relative) peace.
• The quest for eternal life is an old favorite quest. And, according to legend, The Broken Man hides the secret. That’s never going to attract any interest.
• Perhaps the legends are half-right (as is so often the case) and the Broken Man is actually the pieces of a colossal Golem.
• Given all of the above, the Broken Man would be a key military objective and the region would be the focus of all sorts of political intrigue. Temples would be erected around the site, perhaps an Order Of Paladins would be based there to chase away evil cults and curious magi, and so on. There would be several prospering settlements in the shadow of the Broken Man.
• If the legends are true, the ultimate plotline would be the restoration of The Broken Man.

2. The Pool Of Reflection

The pool of reflection is a small lake that lies in a natural garden in the middle of a great plain, fed by a natural spring and with a river flowing from it. When viewed from the west, it sometimes reflects the image of a mountain range that is no longer there.

Legend holds that the spirit of the Lake looked out at the mountains and became so enthralled by their snow-capped magnificence that she began an illicit romance with the spirit of the mountains. Union between Elementals of different kinds is forbidden by the Gods, and when this romance was discovered, steps were taken to separate the pair; the mountain range was moved to the heart of a desert, where no water-being could go, and the mountains replaced by the eastern half of the present Great Plain. The spirit of the lake still pines for her lost love, but she was permitted to hold onto her reflection of him. The climate in the vicinity reflects the mood of the Spirit of the Lake; while sometimes it is happy and cheerful, more often it is cold, clammy, and mournful, and even in midsummer, strange glooms can sweep over the region. When it rains, the rain always has a teary quality, no matter what the weather over the rest of the plain might be.

GM’s Notes

Scale has been left to the GM. My own impression is that the pool should be deep at its heart and shallow at the edges and no more than 100′ across, but this can be varied to suit. The larger the lake, the less fantastic it seems in many respects (it’s more likely to have its own microclimate, for example), but the more impressive will be the reflected image. The smaller it is, the harder it is to explain the climatic phenomena naturally, but the more easily the reflection can be dismissed as an optical illusion or a trick of the light reflecting on the water. I would suggest that the Pool Of Reflection be emplaced in a region of low hills – which used to foothills, according to the legend.

The observant may notice that many craters have raised formations in their centers – refer to the diagram. What you make of this information is up to you.

Further Legends should exist. Perhaps marriages conducted here are considered blessed by the spirit of True Love, or cursed to end in separation and misery. Or both, by different groups. Perhaps the spirits in question were mortals punished by the gods (very Greco-Roman Mythos). Or perhaps people think they can catch a glimpse of their own True Love in the reflected waters. Or maybe the region is prone to inducing romantic flings between total strangers, the result of the Spirit within the Lake attempting to play out her doomed romance. Perhaps there’s a legend that if the love of a couple united by the Lake survives for long enough, the Gods will relent and reunite the lovers. There are lots of possibilities, but many of them are mutually exclusive – which is why I didn’t include them in the overall description above.

If it’s real, Mages would be naturally interested in how the effect works. Clerics would consider it proof of the power of the Gods. The two would be sure to clash. Throw in Druids, who are likely to consider the garden a Holy Place of their own, and you have the makings of fun on a regular basis – and that in turn would keep the civil authorities interested in what would undoubtedly be a powder-keg. But there is an implication that the Terrain is fertile land, and that means that more secular leaders would occasionally want to exploit it; so the location would be a focal point for all sorts of political games, and can be used as a metaphor for the eternal dispute between conservatism and progressives. Most of those seem to come down on the side of Progress, but not this one, so it can also serve as a balancing point for those influences within the campaign world.

Other possible Plot Uses include an expedition to find the mountain range that is reflected (moved, according to legend, to the heart of a desert); or perhaps studying the reflection to figure out how to gain entrance to a Dungeon on the mountain surface. And then there’s the question of the “ban” on elemental intermarriage – why? What happens? And surely at least one mage has tried to make it happen? If some sort of monstrosity results, the PCs might have a quest to discover where they are coming from, and who’s doing it, with the Wonder providing the central clues. And that all completely ignores the potential for Romantic plotlines and entanglements.

Still more possibilities stem from the emotional state of the Spirits in question. While “grief” and “sorrow” are the dominant characteristics, there can easily be flashes of other emotional states – rage, jealousy, malice. Perhaps the spirit within the lake seeks to orchestrate a reunion of the forbidden lovers, and has started manipulating people to achieve this.

Finally, throw in the potential for Divine politics – the God or Goddess (usually the latter) of Love probably feels sympathy for the pair, and there could be festering resentment of the forced separation of the couple. If that ever came to a head, there would be plenty of plot potential for mortals (like the PCs) caught in the crossfire.

3. The Palace Of Winter

In the frozen lands to the north there is a magnificent palace carved from a single giant chunk of ice by the King Of Winter from which he sends forth his emissaries of cold each year. On midsummer’s day, when he is at his weakest, he is unable to refuse entry to those who come calling; at such times, he is a munificent and gracious host; but woe betide any who linger too long, for when his power returns with the passing of days, he will throw off this ‘weakness of spirit’ and turn cruel and hostile, and enslave the unwanted guests to serve him forever. In the meantime, he will do everything in his power to persuade guests to stay within his walls for just one more day…

GM’s Notes

I keep thinking of the wild hunt whenever I attempt to visualize the “emissaries” but you might have other ideas, perhaps modeled on the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

A variation would be to have the King confine the power during summer; you could recast the whole thing as an act of self-sacrifice on his part. This would add a new layer of mythic quality.

Perhaps the whole “King Of Winter” story is myth, constructed to explain the palace – with no-one knowing for certain who built the place, which was found abandoned and empty – and in which no-one can bear to live for very long.

Or perhaps Hell is a frigid waste in this campaign world (despite what theology and planar travelers would have people believe), where only beings of fire can maintain enough warmth to survive – and The Palace Of Winter is a gatehouse.

Use In Adventures very much depends on which variation you choose. If the original, perhaps the PCs have to rescue someone famous or politically-significant who has been imprisoned/enslaved by the King Of Winter. Perhaps someone gets to confront the emissaries each winter, with the battle being symbolic of the severity of the ensuing winter – and this time around it’s the PCs turn. If you go with the “tragic figure” version of the King, perhaps he has hatched a plot to trick a PC into taking his place, or a PC’s loved one. If the Palace has been abandoned, perhaps the PCs are sent by an ambitious Noble to claim it on his behalf. If you choose the “Palace as Gateway to Frigid Hell” option, perhaps the King is growing old and decrepit, and letting things through that he should be stopping – but he has no heir. The PCs either have to rejuvenate him, or solve his infertility problem, or whatever.

4. The Citadel Of Secrets

Long ago, a weak Kingdom stood at the intersection point of four great Empires. By playing one against the other, and serving as neutral arbiter in their regular border disputes, the Kingdom managed to sustain an independence for itself, and even to prosper. Eventually, an ambitious King came to the throne, and devised a scheme to discover the vulnerabilities of each of his neighbors which he then intended to take advantage of. On the edge of his capital city, he had constructed a magnificent citadel, draping it with fineries and luxury; no expense was spared.

Great stone blocks, twelve feet to a side, were layed in interlocking manner, and each magically bonded to the adjacent stones. The outer surfaces were covered with ceramic tile inlayed with gold, silver, and precious gems which, in aggregate, depcited a magnificent sunset scene. He named it “The Guardian Of Dawn”, and it is still sometimes known by that name. The construction almost beggared his Kingdom, but eventually was complete, and he decreed that it was to be available to each of his neighbors when they came to bargain, to keep them safe from hostile forces.

Unbeknownst to those neighbors, there were greater magics involved in the construction of The Guardian Of Dawn than the ambitious King let on; if one stood still, and listened very hard, the secrets of whoever resided within would be whispered by the walls in a hidden chamber within the citadel. By orchestrating a series of minor crises, he would bring, in succession, each of the rulers and generals of his neighbors, and begin to plot against them. Unbeknownst to the ambitious monarch, the mages he employed were led by an even more unscrupulous and ambitious leader, who had sabotaged the construction. Not only would the walls throughout the structure whisper the secrets of all within, two in three whispers would be abject falsehoods, and the spell made no distinction between wishful thinking, speculation, ambition, and intent, and would broadcast the secrets of anyone within the hidden chamber as readily as those of anyone else. One by one, each of his neighbors learned of the ambitious monarch’s true intent in constructing “The Guardian Of Dawn”, and of ‘secret alliances’ between that monarch and their enemies, and what they thought were the vulnerabilities of each. The fires of conquest were lit within the hearts of each monarch, and soon led to general war and then anarchy. Stripped of their defensive neutrality, the ambitious monarch was the first to fall, and his Kingdom was razed – all but the citadel, which proved impervious to all attack. Then the order of Magi who had constructed the Guardian – now granted its more popular title – attempted to occupy the structure and bring all four empires under their own rule, only to discover that in their ambition, they too had overreached; the walls whispered not only the secrets of those now in residence, but the secrets of any who ever had, or ever would, abide within them, however briefly. Most of these were servants gossip and trivia, and most of what remained was mendacity, and most of what remained was irrelevant; but if one waited long enough, a single gem of insight might be revealed, shorn of its context and explanation. Worst of all, the whispers were incessant and could not be silenced; not even cutting off one’s ears sufficed. Linger too long, and – it is now said – the voices would follow you, whispering in your ears eternally, distracting you in combat, and driving you incurably insane.

All four empires are long-gone, as is the Kingdom, and even the city; only the citadel remains, as breathtaking and enticing as ever. Many make pilgrimages to the site and linger until learning something they find personally profound, risking their lives and minds for the promise of enlightenment. Others come in desperation, in need of answers or insights that may or may not be forthcoming.

Near to the Citadel, an order of Monks has established a cloister, and from it – in relays – they take it in turns to record the whispered words, one hour each at a time. The rest of their waking time (that not spent seeing to the needs of survival) is spent indexing and correlating the secrets they have learned, and attempting to discern what was from what will be from what never was. To support themselves, from time to time, they issue a limited number of small booklets of prophecies, which sell for exorbitant sums.

Every now and then, an ambitious noble seeks to take advantage – either forcibly or through intrigue – of the discoveries of the Order, only to discover that the Monks have recognized the true intent and advised his enemies accordingly. They perpetuate, politically and socially, the neutral power broking of the original Kingdom, their way of honoring the sacrifices made to construct the Citadel.

GM’s Notes

The above is so compelling that I had to read it through three times before realizing that there was not a hint as to the size and layout of the Citadel itself. That seems almost trivial in importance. My own thinking is something fairly big and impressive, with thick walls. It’s worth noting that “Rock to mud”, its reverse, and the use of moulds, makes it very easy to construct stone blocks of any required size and shape – if you can afford the mage to cast the spells – so “Big and impressive” is easier to achieve in a D&D world, and a lot faster. Employing the same principle and an elementary pump makes it easy to fill shaped hollows within each block with more mud which can be rendered into rock. Steel was still too expensive and hard to make in quantity for it to be used as a reinforcing material, but if it were not, this approach would make reinforced concrete as easy to use as it is modern times, with even more flexibility – both things to keep in mind, especially when thinking about a “no expense spared” structure like this one.

Nor is anything much said about the local geography. My mind’s eye sees a valley with passes to the four original Empires, but that’s up to you.

As for adventure potential, if all sorts of plotlines aren’t suggesting themselves to you right away, you aren’t trying hard enough. Lies, truth, fantasy, speculation, deliberate plans, wisdom, insight, prophecy, politics, and secrets all wrapped up in a neat little bow – with a wickedly malicious and subversive intent built into the basic programme? What more could you want?

Of course, if all that seems too overwhelming, have the PCs be the first to discover the long-forgotten Citadel, and have the rest of the developments described – the pilgrims and monks – take place in the background of the campaign. But that means there would be no-one to warn the PCs about the dangers of lingering too long…

5. The Spire of Contention

The community of Shar is the most peaceful in existence. There is no internal dissent, there are no disputes between neighbors, and no arguments. Placidity and tranquility and a sense of unchanging inexorability seem to linger in the very air. And that is because the Spire Of Contention casts its shadow over the community of Shar every day.

The spire is a long finger of rock stabbing into the sky, jutting from a level plain without explanation. There is no evidence that it was moved to its present location from elsewhere, and its geology is completely unlike that which is native to the region. The story is that one day the sky tore open and the spire crashed to the ground from nowhere, crushing two donkeys and a stable, and burying itself a full third of its length. There is endless speculation as to its ultimate place of origin, and even more speculation as to the how and why of the profound effect it has on any who climb it. No explanation of any substance whatsoever has ever come to light. The most popular is that this is a cornerstone of heaven, and that part of its otherworldly nature clings to it, but there is no proof.

Once a year, and whenever a dispute arises, those in contention climb its narrow, winding staircase carved of stone. With each step, they relive in full intensity and with heightened passion, one source of dissension or ill-feeling within their lives, past or present. Minor irritations become sources of towering rage and frustration. Most climbers are so infuriated that (even though they know better) they attempt to turn and act on their feelings, only to find that they are held firmly in place when they seek to travel in any direction but higher up. Immediately they take another step, the inflated anger and fury vanish, and the climber becomes aware of how disproportionate their response was to the cause, which in turn makes the cause seem less vital and urgent than it did; effectively, they are cleansed, purged of the negative emotions vested in the object of emotional disquiet. Apon reaching the summit, their angers and irritations have been washed away, leaving a calmness and dispassion that enables a peaceful resolution of whatever domestic irritants they might experience. Only anger and its possible causes are removed; the locals remain as capable of happiness and celebration and love as those anywhere.

No matter how many people are ascending the spire at the same time, they can never make contact with each other, never stand on the same step at the same time, not even reach out to a climber they know is just ahead of them and touch him. No matter how slow a climber the person ahead may be, a faster climber can never catch up with them. No-one understands how or why this happens, either. Speculation is that subjective perception of time AND objective measurement of time are both manipulated in the course of the passage, but that doesn’t explain how or why.

At the summit, the climber can see the entire community as a whole, an image that stays with them as they descend, for once at the peak, they can turn around and descend freely, with none of the emotional manipulation experienced on the ascent. It feels so good to be relieved of the anger that if one climb was insufficient, a climber will usually be so strongly desirous of peace within his spirit that he will turn and ascend again. The spire’s influence does not change the people, though it transforms their lives; they are still every bit as capable of anger and rage as the next man, they simply have a way of relieving those emotions. However, the locals have learned that when the passion is removed from a dispute, they can often see solutions that were not evident previously. Should they leave the vicinity, they are as people anywhere – other than being, perhaps, a little wiser and harder to agitate. This is why it does no good forcing an entire population to ascend.

It follows that all attempts to employ the Spire to force peace between warring nations or factions fails if the conflict is sincere. Only if both sides are ready to make peace can the spire strip away the encrustations resulting from the conduct of the war. However, many military leaders and political leaders faced with difficult decisions will make a pilgrimage to the Spire for the clarity of perspective that it offers; while an equal number will refuse to do so, aware that if their followers are more passionate about the cause than they are, they may lose control of the battlefield.

Some claim that if you climb the spire backwards, you will retain the anger and fury and passion generated at each step; inevitably, each time someone attempts this, impatience leads them to make a careless misstep and fall from a great height. This is usually fatal and since it can only be a deliberate act, survivors garner neither sympathy nor support from the locals.

GM’s Notes

What is the spire? Where does it come from? How did it come to be where it now is? How does it do what it does? Why? Who built it? Why? All the fundamental questions are enshrouded in mystery. Its effects are both subtle and profound. It could settle into the landscape of any campaign without a ripple, and become part of the landscape; but from the moment of its arrival, it would begin exerting a subtle influence over the campaign world.

My (admittedly incomplete) thoughts are that it exemplifies the difference between Drow and Elves so perfectly that this should be the cornerstone to the story. But even then: is it a tower from Corallen’s Palace? Is it the creation of some high elf Master? Is it a creation of the Drow, storing the negative emotions of which it cleanses the locals until it reaches some “critical mass” – and does something nasty?

Where is supposed to be, and what are the consequences of it not being there? All these questions hold potential plotlines…

6. The Library Of Shelves

I have a personal hatred of book-burning and censorship in general. It’s too easy for knowledge and wisdom to be suppressed for ideological and dogmatic reasons. (At the same time, I accept that there are perfectly valid reasons for classifying information and not making it publicly available – but rarely trust those making the choices – but that’s not relevant here). It was that personal trait that led my thoughts to the idea of The Library Of Shelves.

Every book has an existence as real as that of any person. Any author will tell you that books take on a life if their own as they are written, edited, and revised; like a sculptor trimming away the stone that is not part of the sculpture to reveal the form that lay in potentiality within the original block, the process of writing is as much about what to leave out as it is about inclusion. It is as though they develop a soul, a spirit of their own – one that can be infinitely subdivided and distributed equally amongst every copy. The lineage of ideas can be traced, with sufficient care, in exactly the same way as a human family tree – though with an oddly variable number of forebears, and differing relative strengths of contribution. And if books possess something akin to a soul, they can also leave behind a ghost of what was. And that’s where The Library Of Shelves comes in.

Constructed by a shy retiring scholar who just happened to be born into a family with more wealth than they knew what to do with. When construction was complete, the family were impoverished, their fortune a thing of memory – but they left a legacy that cannot be undervalued. The Library was blessed by the God Of Knowledge (after very generous donations to his temples), making it is a remarkable place, and Holy if for no other reason. From the outside, it is an unassuming place of timber and stone, vast without being overwhelming, poetic in line and form but without decoration, austerity raised to the level of art form. Only the most outward of its surfaces lies within the Prime Material Plane; most of its structure lies elsewhere, no-one is completely sure where, but the result leaves it impervious to wholly material weapons. It may well be eternal. But that is the least of the Wonders it encompasses.

It is bigger within than without, something possible only because it is built through the walls that confine existence. But this is not its most awesome attribute, either.

Within, shelf apon empty shelf may be found. Indeed, the library expands internally every time a book is published, a letter written, or a map or chart drawn. And on those shelves are held the ghosts of every book ever written.

Where a book is in wide circulation, these are ephemeral, for the Library holds only one Nth of the ghost. As copies wear out or are destroyed, through age, wear, accident, or malice, the spirit of the words is redistributed and the ghost of the book becomes more substantial, through it remains intangible. When only one physical copy remains, the ghost achieves its greatest substantiality.

The library is attended by scholars and curators of innumerable species. These monitor the health of the collection, and when only one copy of a work remains, the Library staff dispatch a party to obtain that last copy, tracing it to its current possessor by means of the connection between ghost and source tome. If they can, they will buy it. If the price is beyond measure, they will steal it. If it cannot be stolen, they will copy it, and leave those copies in the collections of bibliophiles who may never know what treasure they possess. If it is too dangerous to have the entire book in one location, they will split it up and hide one part here and another there. The ultimate goal is to reunite the last copy of the book with its ghost (or ensure that it is not the last copy, for in doing so, they confer a bibliological form of immortality apon the printed words, preserving them for all eternity within the Library of shelves.

The only books that can be touched within the Library are the last copies in existence of that book.

GM’s notes

This time, location has been left to the individual GMs, but it should be somewhere with a history of scholarship.

Plot potential: It would be easy to use the Library as a framing device for an entire campaign, with the PCs being sent to find and retrieve books, but even without going to that extreme, there is information there that people with power want (some of whom will do anything to attain it), and information there that people with power want suppressed (ditto re the ‘do anything’). Wars would be fought to claim this particular real estate. If you don’t want that, have the location become “lost” and the Library a “Legend” and have the PCs find it – or simply come across someone else who is searching for it. The Library is one of those rare Wonders that never has to be found to become central to a campaign.

And then, of course, there’s the potential for some bright spark to embark on a rampage of book burning to ensure that his copies are the last ones in existence – and then to offer to give them to the Library if their retrieval team does “one little favor” for them – a precedent that the Library staff cannot permit, but above all the books must be preserved. Anything that would endanger them must be forbidden.

Finally: if books have souls, then book-burning can be used to power necromantic magic. And perhaps to resurrect or restore a book of forbidden knowledge. If you can’t get a plot out of that…

The Origin Story: Frankly, I’m only half-satisfied by this. It seems a little too mundane, and the dues-ex-machina is too obvious. If I were to use it in a campaign, I would be tempted to junk the origin and have it be a “nobody knows” situation.

I have five more to go, maybe six. Some of the remainder are natural wonders, and at least one is from a non-human race. But for this article at least, I’m out of time. Fortunately, there’s room for one more article before the Blog Carnival for the month comes to an end…
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I’m anticipating a relatively short post (especially for me) this time around but that shouldn’t minimize the importance. And, of course, I have a terrible track record at doing “short”. Postscript: After the fact, I can see that I’ve maintained my track record…

Last time around, I started writing about Wonders and what was necessary to make them amazing, and while there was some of that involved in the article that resulted, I ended up spending most of my time talking about the need to have them at all, and most or what remained, discussing the qualities that they had to have just to qualify for the label, “Wonder of the known world.” That’s because a whole section of the last article got yanked out in the final hours; a section entitled “Describing Wonders”. I pulled it when I realized that the subject applied more broadly, to locations in general, and deserved to be in an article of its own.

Part of the advice that I’ve offered in several of the articles on locations for the blog carnival, and in my earlier article, The Poetry Of Place: Describing Locations & Scenes in RPGs, is to use as little description up front as you can get away with (to some extent, this article can be considered a sequel to that one). ‘Less is more’ so it’s important to make the most of a few well-chosen adjectives.

The problem is that often, and for wonders in particular, you need to create a vision of otherworldly grandeur and magnificence, or of vastness, or of any of half a dozen other qualities, most of which got prominently mentioned in the last article. You need to create a sense of wonder and awe, and that’s hard to do with only a few words.

Use as many words as you need…

Does that make Wonders an exception to that general principle? Not entirely. The goal is to describe what needs to be described, plus sufficient additional description as may be needed to enable the imagination to fill in the rest of the environment to a sufficient degree to provide context. A good general impression is better than a lengthy and ponderous detailed impression of the whole – too many details get in the way of seeing the overall picture. If you describe every rock, animal, and tree, your readers/audience literally won’t be able to “see the forest for the trees”.

This hardly offers a precision guideline. It would be great to be able to say “the necessary plus two items” or “the necessary plus up to three” or some variation, but the reality is not so convenient. One “how to write” guide that I remember reading years ago(though I don’t remember who wrote it) suggested “The central focus of narrative attention, plus one or two general environmental impressions, plus one or two specific impressions, at least one of which has to be dynamic in nature, plus one statement for anything that does not fit the general environment or that distinguishes it from a dozen others, plus one specific reinforcing impression for each aberrant impression.” That’s a lot of description, especially since the guide was unclear on whether it was counting sentences or paragraphs. Nevertheless, I’ve found that its not too far off the mark – counting paragraphs in a novelized setting and sentences in RPGs and short stories, and employing a heavy editorial pen.

So let’s break it down into individual elements, and be clear about what each one is:

1. The central focus of narrative attention:
In principle, this is good, but right away there’s a problem in terms of RPG usage: sometimes we don’t want it to be apparent what the “central focus of narrative attention” should be. Thankfully, this is not the case when we’re talking about a Wonder or Monument. Even natural wonders, like a waterfall of spectacular beauty, or that flows upward for some reason, or is liquid helium, or whatever, have a central focus – though sometimes you may have to think about it. If a bay is sufficiently magnificent, is it the water, or the beach, or the trees, or the rocky prominences, or some interplay between two or more of these, that is the central focus? Or perhaps it is some collective quality that they all possess, or an attribute of the location in general rather than anything specific within it? What is so spectacular that this is a “Natural Wonder Of The World”? It’s not enough for it to be a picture-postcard of beauty.

What makes an Elven Forest different from any other forest in the Game World? What’s the difference between a Dwarven Mine and anyone else’s?

2. One or two general environmental impressions:
A general description of the broader environment in succinct form to provide surroundings for the central focus of narrative attention, and to provide a framework for the more detailed impressions to come.

3. One or two specific impressions, at least one of which has to be dynamic in nature:
When you look at a location, even one containing a wonder, there will be the central focus of attention and a general impression of what’s around it, plus one or two details that leap out at you from that general impression.

“Dynamic” requires some further explanation. I’m not just talking about active vs passive language, I’m talking about including some activity that goes with the scene – birds singing or a monkey swinging through the trees or clouds drifting lazily overhead. Note that these are not specific enough – you should name the species of bird and the quality of the song, or the species and size of monkey, or the type of clouds and relative direction of drift. This requirement keeps the scene you are describing from being a still portrait and brings it to life in some way. If the quality to be emphasized is tranquility, or calmness, or stillness, or silence, or something along those lines, the “dynamic impression” might have to come from a character’s reaction/action – drawing breath, or panting from exertions, or whatever.

4. A statement each for anything that does not fit the general environment or that distinguishes it:
The writer’s guide used the example of a WWII aircraft that had been reclaimed by the jungle. RPG locations can be a bit more exotic in nature, but the principle holds. Note that this requirement may already have been met if the “central focus of the narrative” is the only thing that doesn’t belong. It should really say “anything else that does not fit”, but that presupposes that the central focus doesn’t fit and would have become confusing.

If you’ve described a jungle, now is the time to mention that the plants are all red, or crystalline, or made of metal. If there are two moons in the sky, now’s the time to mention that, as well. If the lake holds the reflection of mountains that aren’t actually there on the horizon, take this moment to describe them.

5. One specific reinforcing impression for each aberrant impression:
For each element that doesn’t fit the general environmental picture that you offered in (3) and that isn’t the central focus of the narrative – in other words, for each descriptive ingredient you mention in (4) – you need to add one more item of the same type as (3). Otherwise the weight of the unusual will overwhelm the general impression that you are trying to convey – unless, of course, that is the goal. And again, at least half of these should be dynamic in some way.

In what order?
This is a very good question. Should the central focus be the last thing that you describe? Or after the general impression? Or before it? How about those unusual elements from (4), where should they be placed?

There are two competing principles. The most obvious should go first because it is the most obvious; the most obvious should go last so that it doesn’t distract the reader/audience from the rest of the description.

The same logic – both ways – can be applied to the unusual elements.

And finally, there are two more principles, which can also be in opposition: if something is expected or anticipated, it should be early, to satisfy that expectation; and juxtaposition can be used for contrast and emphasis.

With so many ‘rules of thumb’ at loggerheads, the best solution is to throw the rulebook away.

My Solution
I write using a word processor. So I can put each of the five sections of narrative on separate lines/paragraphs (even if they will eventually form one block of text) and then easily select, drag, and drop to try out different ways of ‘streaming’ the description. I’ve also found that doing so right after you’ve written them can be either the best time or the worst time to do so: the best time, because the impression that you have in your mind’s eye is at its most vivid at that point, the worst time because your players/readers won’t have the benefit of that vivid mental impression beforehand; your objective is to create it in the mind of someone who doesn’t already have it.

Copy-and-Paste comes to the rescue. I make three copies: one I leave unmodified, so that I can scrap my work and start over, one I modify right away, and the third I modify without having re-read the first two after doing something else for at least an hour, and preferably first thing the next morning. I can then compare the results of the newly-arranged second attempt with the first, and decide which is better – and if either are satisfactory.

That doesn’t mean that I get rid of the two that don’t measure up, not quite yet – I select them and change their color to Aqua or Grey or Silver or Yellow – some color that the eye will tend to skip over – and wait at least 48 hours and preferably 5 or 6 days before making my choice final. More than once I’ve found that what seemed clear the next day is as transparent as mud when I come on it completely fresh.

…but go light on the adjectives

Four or more descriptive passages? Each with one or two adjectives? No, no, no. That’s far too many.

In fact, the approach described above generally produces far more descriptive narrative than is needed. This is often a good thing if you then employ a little self-discipline and edit ruthlessly.

A writer (I forget who), discussing his editorial philosophy, said in one of his books, “If in doubt, cut it out. I have yet to encounter any book which could not be improved by the disciplined use of this technique.” Personally, I think that is going a little overboard and risks tossing junior out with his bathwater.

When I edit, I ask myself “What is this sentence/phrase/word contributing to the whole? Can it be removed without harming the whole? Is it redundant, tautological? Can I take whatever value was in this sentence/phrase/word and incorporate it into another so that I no longer need it? Can I make the description, or the situation clearer? Can I make the characters more expressive of their personality? Can I give them more personality?” (It’s probably worth mentioning that I perform next-to-no editing of my articles for Campaign Mastery beyond ensuring that the layout is correct, or they would take twice as long to write.)

While not all of that is relevant to descriptions of locations and Wonders, there’s enough validity that it is worth employing. And remember that there may be a Personality involved: either the personality of the builder/designer or the personality of, or that is attributed to, the subject.

Back to the subject at hand:
And speaking of subjects, let’s get back to ours. The guideline discussed above tosses “the central focus of narrative attention” aside with scant consideration, focusing more on everything else, and simply saying (in effect) ‘describe the Wonder’. Well, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do, and this article is supposed to have the objective of showing you how – this dismissive approach just won’t cut it.

One Adjective to rule them all

When I want to describe a Wonder, I try to find one single adjective that most colorfully encapsulates the philosophy or quality that I want the Wonder to express. When I want to describe a more general scene, I try to find one single adjective that most encapsulates the general impression that I want the scene to have. When I want to describe a character, I try to find one single adjective that sums up the first impression that I want the character to express.

I call this the Ruling Adjective because it sums up the impression that I want the subject of the description to convey. I then build the rest of the description around that adjective. Let’s consider the process in greater detail:

Choosing the Ruling adjective

The first word that you think of is probably not the right one, but is usually related to the right one. The thesaurus is your friend; I look up that first word and make a list of related entries in the thesaurus, then look up each in turn until I find the one that contains the most nuance and implication for the subject of the description.

Although it’s called “the Ruling adjective”, I’ve been known to cheat. A noun may be the perfect metaphor or analogy for the adjective I want, which sometimes doesn’t actually exist.

Reject the self-evident

When I say “the first word”, I should qualify that: I mean the first word that is not self-evident. If the wonder is a very high waterfall, “high” or “tall” may be the first things that come to mind, but these are going to be obvious from the physical description. The “first word” expresses something more. It might be about the sound, or the way the water moves, or the light, or the color, or the smell, or some other quality of the waterfall. “Spire” or “Needle” or “Rainbow” or “Roaring” or “Stench” or “Emerald” or “Swirling” or “Cascading” or even “Misty”, all come to mind for describing different waterfalls – and those are just the terrestrial versions of the geologic phenomenon.

It Starts With A Name

The sense of awe and grandeur that we want to generate when people hear or read the description of the Wonder we are creating has to start somewhere, and the all-important first impression usually comes from the name. Nail that, and you’re half-way home; get it pedestrian, or worse, and you face an uphill battle.

So, what can you do to get the name right?

Past Lessons

Names are important. That’s’ why I wrote a whole series on the subject a while back. Part Five of that series (A Good Name Is Hard To Find) was entitled “Grokking The Message: Naming Places & Campaigns”, and the first part of that article might be useful – but naming Monuments and Wonders (other than natural ones) didn’t get mentioned. So in part, this article can be considered an extension of that series.

Nor is that the only past article to which I should refer readers at this point. In The poetry of meaning: 16 words to synopsize a national identity, I used translations of 16 key words to get inside the collective heads of a culture, building layers of meaning and depth onto simple foundations. The national identity of the naming culture is definitely useful in determining the name of a Wonder, so this article is also of definite – if indirect – relevance to the subject.

Neither of these actually answers the question of how you derive the perfect name for your Wonder, though they both address factors to keep in mind while working on the name.

The Standard Formats

There are two standard formats that are generally used for the name of Wonders:

• The [General] of [Specific]
• The [Specific] [General]

I realize these aren’t very clear, so let’s throw up an example of each:

• The [Colossus] of [Rhodes]
• The [Reichsbacht] [Falls]

The first is usually applied to Non-natural Wonders, while the second is applied to some Natural Wonders and to locations which are not always considered wonders.

Incorporating The Wonder

These traditional forms buy into the popular culture mystique of ‘Wonders Of The Known World’ by association of form within the name, but they don’t do a lot to convey the sense of awe and mystery and majesty (and whatever) that is our end-goal. Part of the problem is that the “Specific” part of the name is either a geographic reference – a place name, more to the point – or sometimes the name of the designer or builders, and none of that really fires up the imagination.

Using the same form, however, we can conjure up names for wonders that are far less prosaic while still harkening back to the source forms. Off the top of my head, try these two:

• The Veil of Symphony
• The Impulsive Jungle

I have no idea what these wonders are – but the names alone are enough to fire the imagination, to start suggesting possibilities of what they might be.

In other words, the same principles that apply to creating good names for magic items also apply to creating good names for Wonders! This also offers the potential for other name forms, but they will all contain the same two components – a [general] element and a [specific] element.

Of course, this is the 20th-century (and 21st) human approach; your society might employ different naming conventions. However, this can create an additional burden for the GM to overcome, since it gives up the cache of your player’s existing awareness of Wonders. So have a VERY good reason for employing that different naming convention, or play to your contemporary audience of players/readers.

Having broken the search for an effective name into two smaller components, let’s look briefly at each, and then wrap up this part of the discussion with a guiding principle.

The [General] Element

This can be prosaic – “Jungle” in the second example above – but if you can find an alternative noun that is descriptive, so much the better – “Veil” in the first example, because it gives you an extra descriptive element for the price of one.

The [Specific] Element

This is the element of the name that pins this particular Wonder down, as opposed to any other locations that might fit the [General] label. As such, it frequently carries the heavier burden, having to create the gosh-wow (or at least, lay the foundations for it) as well as being descriptive. As a rule of thumb, I will spend three times as much time and effort on the specific element as I will on the General Element, minimum.

Other Languages

Don’t forget that rendering the name you come up with into another language can add tons of flavor. “The Hall Of Shadows” is already a pretty good name, but here it is in a dozen other languages, courtesy of Google Translate:

• An Halla Na Scáthanna
• Aula Umbrae
• Hall nan nan lonbraj
• Hallen av skuggor
• Itzalak Aretoan
• La sala de las sombras
• Le hall d’ombres
• Mae’r neuadd o gysgodion
• Sál stín
• Sala cieni
• Salurinn á skugganum
• Zule nas

A Tip for using Google Translate:
Avoid unusual capitalizing. When I started the above list, I had entered “The Hall Of Shadows” and quite often the software failed to translate it at all. More than half the above list was only accessible once I had changed my entry to “The hall of shadows”.

Another Tip for using Google Translate:
Quite often, copying text from a website produces strange formatting. I keep an empty notepad (plain text) document on my desktop; I copy and paste any website text into it to strip away any formatting, then copy and paste that into my actual working document, where – being bereft of formatting – it will adopt whatever formatting (font etc) is already established. For a long time, I thought that I had to save it first, but have discovered that step to be unnecessary. :)

Imply the Ruling Adjective In The Name

This is tricky to do but can pay big dividends if you can manage it. Sometimes a variation on the General element will do the trick, at other times you have to add this to the requirements for the Specific element.

Cheating with a non-human language: The last resort

A whole section of my article appears to have vanished without a trace. I’ve done my best to recreate it at the VERY last minute, but if I’ve missed anything…

If worst comes to worst, and there is no word in the english language that contains everything you need it to, you can always create a word in a non-human language and use that in the title. When you do this, the sound of the word you create should be reflective of the Ruling Adjective; you can put everything else in the translated meaning.

The Construction Of A Description

So, we have a suitably inspirational name for our Wonder, and we have the surroundings covered – now it’s time to get on with the task of describing the elephant in the room.

As usual, firm rules and techniques are hard to come by. Some descriptions work best starting with the physical shape, others are more effective starting with a dominant feature, while still others are most successful focusing initially on some general impression. A fourth option is to start with a reaction induced by the totality, or some expression of the dominant quality that the Wonder is to represent.

My approach is reminiscent of that employed in generating the description of the environment, spelt out earlier in this article. Put all the sentences together on separate lines, shuffle the order for clarity, tone, and atmosphere, review – and, if necessary, rinse and repeat. Then edit heavily.

Beyond this, there are some specific guidelines that I can offer that usually serve me in good stead.

Reject synonyms of the ruling adjective

Because the Ruling Adjective is intended to cover the totality, it (and variations) will frequently make an appearance when describing individual elements of the Wonder. This is an extended tautology by association, and you are better off culling all or almost all of these adjectives. Once they are removed – something I achieve by changing font colors again – I will restore one, and only one, somewhere near the start of the description.

If I do retain an additional variation, I try to place that piece of the description last, so that I am bookending the description with this dominant theme.

You can either describe a detail or use an adjective to refer to that detail – not both

If we’re talking about a Statue with unusual eyes, you can either describe those eyes, or you can attribute the effect of the eyes on the totality to the statue as an adjective. Doing both is another redundancy, and can lead to confusion on the part of the reader/player.

As an alternative, describe a sub-feature of the detail instead of describing the entire detail. This focuses the attention on salient points without wasting a lot of verbiage on the detail containing the sub-element. Instead of the eyes of the statue, mention the irises.

If a building, describe the windows or the glass, or use an adjective to discuss the effect that they have – not both – and so on.

Employ adjectives from other domains of language

A trick which I have mentioned before is to employ an “adjective” from some other aspect of the language. Take an adjective that would normally be used to describe a character’s personality and apply it to the structure, for example. Take a verb that would normally be applied to a person’s actions or reactions and use it (suitably modified if necessary) to describe the relationship between the Wonder and the environment.

I’ve discussed this principle before, so I won’t go into further details here.

Build around the adjectives

Sentences are normally built around the noun. Adjectives and adverbs are used to nuance, classify, quantify, emphasize, and elaborate on some aspect of the noun. This is fine for a literal description, but not so great when atmosphere is the target. Try building your sentences around the adverbs and adjectives, instead, applying them to less-common or global attributes of the wonder or its environment.

Build qualifying double adjectives then remove the primary adjective

This is a favorite trick for condensing a description, and one that I rarely see mentioned anywhere. Actually, amend that to “never”. I’m sure someone has observed this principle before, but if they have, they aren’t talking about it anywhere that I have found.

Take the phrase “a cloudy sky”. What sort of clouds? Here’s a grab-bag of possible second adjectives, each of which have been used to qualify the adjective “cloudy”:

• A Leaden, Cloudy Sky
• A Brooding Cloudy Sky
• A Fiery, Cloudy Sky
• An Icy, Cloudy Sky
• A Windswept Cloudy Sky
• A Broken, Cloudy Sky
• A Tempestuously Cloudy Sky

Now remove the primary adjective “Cloudy” and see what happens:

• A Leaden Sky
• A Brooding Sky
• A Fiery Sky
• An Icy Sky
• A Windswept Sky
• A Broken Sky
• A Tempestuous Sky

The missing adjective’s presence is still implied but the unique secondary characteristic is strengthened in intensity. One adjective is doing the work of two. And, by eliminating one of them, you can now add a tertiary adjective if one seems necessary.

This doesn’t always work, but most of the time it will sharpen your language very effectively, especially if used sparingly.

Don’t rely on software like Word to find and fix these things for you. I use word for spellchecking these articles, and it had absolutely no problem with the long-form versions of the examples above.

Replace adjectives and nouns with a more expressive noun

This advice comes from Rachel Shirley and her web page entitled How to use Adjectives in Novels. She offers three examples in the section “Effective Use Of Adjectives”:

• A large stone is more succinctly described as a boulder.
• Steady rain could be described as drizzle.
• A thick book could be reworded as a tome.

(If you go browsing on her site, note that each article is in two-column format).

Another reference

Another page that’s worth a look, while you’re at it, is How the Right Adjective Can Breathe Life into Your Writing, by Nanci Panuccio.

Above All

Don’t be afraid to think big. Worry about questions of why and how later.

Just as it’s hard to infuse the mundane and trivial with a sense of wonder, it’s hard to keep the sense of wonder out of really big, creative, ideas. Be expansive.

One final reference

Creating a “Wonder of the world” is not all that difficult; you just need to get creative and find some inspiration. Describing one is not all that difficult either.

Doing it well is a whole different kettle of fish.

If you get stuck, try some of the solutions I offer in the parts of my series on writer’s block that focus on settings, especially the last quarter of part 2.

No campaign or literary world is complete without wonders and iconic locations. But these are neither wonderful nor iconic if poorly described. Your goal has to be to engage the imaginations of the readers/players with your words, and then sketch in just enough of the scenery that they get a sense of “being there” – additional details can always follow later.

Examples. You want some examples, right? Well, I’m working on some – I’m not sure if they will be ready Thursday or if they’ll have to wait until next Monday, but there are examples on the way. Just thought you’ld like to know.

Updated with an additional section in the comments

Mention of Easter Island in a previous article has had me thinking about monuments and places of wonder, and what is needed to make them amazing.

It’s a lesson that Australians in general don’t do very well at – hence “tourist attractions” like the “big prawn”, “big banana”, and “big pineapple”, collectively known as ‘Australia’s Big Things‘.

Most campaign creators don’t give enough thought to such monuments when they are setting up their game worlds.
 
 
 

All images used to illustrate this article, unless otherwise noted, were sourced from Wikipedia Commons and are subject to the GNU Free Documentation License and/or the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Seven Wonders Of The Ancient World

In the age of the ancient Greeks, various guidebooks began listing “must see” wonders of architecture and design around the Mediterranean Rim, especially the eastern side. These wonders are still known to much of the world even though only one survives into modern times, though most people couldn’t tell you anything more about any of them. They were:

• The Great Pyramid of Giza
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (destroyed by an earthquake sometime after 1 BC)
• The Temple of Artemis at Ephasus (destroyed by Arson and plundering)
• The Statue of Zeus at Olympia (disassembled and later destroyed by fire)
• The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (destroyed by earthquakes)
• The Colossus of Rhodes (destroyed by an earthquake in 226 BC)
• The Lighthouse of Alexandria (destroyed by an earthquake in 1303 AD).

(I was always under the impression that the Great Library of Alexandria was also on the list, and I don’t recognize the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus – so maybe I learned a different list, or someone decided two in one place was a bit much?)

The original list has had many successors and imitators over the century, each drawing apon the mystique of the items by means of the association with the original list but also reinforcing the mystique of that original list, which is one reason why it remains embedded in the popular consciousness 2014 years or more after its first compilation. You can read about several of these lists at this Wikipedia Page. The commonly used phrase, “8th wonder of the world” adds to the popular awareness.

Wonder Characteristics

All these wonders have a number of broad general characteristics in common: Size, Beauty and/or Grandeur, Value, Cultural Importance or an Air Of Mystery or Historical Importance, and Symbolism.

Eiffel Tower at Sunrise, Photo by Tristan Nitot. Click thumbnail for a larger image.

Size

In an article entitled “Size is not enough”, this is the obvious place to start. Wonders and Monuments are all big. Impossible to miss. They stand out, either naturally or by design, and at a considerable distance. “Unmissable” has a double-meaning when used in reference to them.

Mitre Peak, New Zealand, photo by Grutness (James Dignan). Click thumbnail for a larger image.

Beauty, Grandeur, or both

For one reason or another, these things are always breathtaking or awesome or both. They totally dominate the landscape – but with something more than sheer size. A rock can be big, but it needs to have something more going for it in order to qualify as a natural wonder. A building can be monumental, but if it’s a monumentally ugly slab of stone, it’s probably not going to qualify.

If it doesn’t make your jaw drop, it doesn’t make the list.

I suppose it’s possible for something to be “monumentally, jaw-droppingly ugly” though….

Value

The first two characteristics usually add up to expense. These things don’t come cheap, and that means that whoever constructed them cared about doing so – a LOT. They were vitally important for some reason; they had value to the builders. That normally translates to having value in subsequent eras.

Unfortunately, that also translates into a place with value for looters and thieves. It’s something of a wonder (pun intended) in itself that more of the ancient wonders weren’t destroyed in this fashion.

Because they also have symbolic value in representing whoever cared enough about whatever they represent to have value as a symbolic target to those opposed to those people, and that value usually outstrips (to them) the cultural wealth of retaining them intact. If a city contains a wonder, that city’s enemies will tear it to rubble if the city ever falls to them.

Cultural Importance or Air Of Mystery or Historical Importance

I thought long and hard about this “quality” of wonders, especially in terms of “wonders of the natural world”, but realized that those have cultural importance.

Cultural Importance means that they influence, or have influenced, the general society in some fashion. They might be considered sacred, they might provide a natural defense, they might be the home of one or more Gods. They are mentioned in song and story even if there aren’t songs and stories about them specifically. If they are expensive, and have value and significance, then they also have a greater implication: that the people who built it were prosperous enough to do so. There’s a reason why so many of them have religious connotations; there’s a reason why so many are associated with rulers and the ruling classes. Cultural importance can also mean that the wonder is ironically representative of the city or country in which it is located.

But some wonders and monuments don’t meet this prescription. They carry with them an air of mystery, instead. Arguably, all wonders start with this when they are first discovered, and the cultural importance results from attempting to penetrate the mystery. Easter Island is one of the finest examples, but the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, and Stonehenge all possessed this mystique in the early and middle 20th century. They excite the imagination, entice speculation and supposition, and inspire myths and legends. Arguably, Tutankhamen is the most famous King ever to have reigned anywhere in the world; I’m sure that 99 out of 100 passersby on any western city would recognize his famous death mask right away, if not more.

Some sites have neither great cultural importance nor any real sense of mystery to them. What they have instead is an amplified historical significance. The Washington Monument comes to mind as an example. Westminster Abbey comes to mind as an example. The Empire State Building comes to mind as an example – it was the world’s tallest building for 42 years, and is iconic even today as a result.

Symbolism

The final attribute of most monuments and wonders is that they are, were, or are held to be, symbolic of some greater value or concept. Spiritualism. Faith. Democracy. Liberty. Justice. The power of nature. The beauty of nature. Love. Power. Exploration.

Just about anything that can be conceived of, no matter how abstract, can be the subject of a monument or wonder’s symbolism.

If I had more to say in this article, I would have added pictures of the Statue Of Liberty, Washington Monument, and Arlington National Cemetery to those chosen – I would argue that they all qualify as “wonders” under these criteria. I might also have chosen the White House.

Why is it so hard?

So why is it that so few campaigns make full use – or any use – of wonders? Why do so few worlds even mention them or provide a list of them? Why is it so hard?

Creativity Requirement

First, they impose a huge burden of creativity on the part of the GM. He or she is just one person; the wonders of our world are the handiwork of thousands of creative people over millennia, plus the natural wonders uncovered by hundreds of explorers.

Their historical importance means that they influence and shape history and culture. You can’t take your campaign background and simply tack them on as symbolic of some highlight; you have to create them at each stage of history and incorporate the reasons why these monuments are deemed important into the narrative, then have to keep track of them throughout the history that follows. It’s additional creative workload at a point in the campaign’s genesis that doesn’t need additional workload, and it’s easy to dismiss them as mere color, and hence something that can be sacrificed in favor of more directly-valuable efforts.

Artistic Requirement

Then, too, it’s never enough to be able to describe a wonder in words alone; they have to be depicted in some way, and that imposes an artistic requirement that not everyone can meet. Either you have to be really good at illustration or painting (including digital art), or you have to be good at image manipulation, or you have to find and adapt someone else’s image – which may not be at all suitable. “It’s like this except, and except, and except, and also…” …it just doesn’t work.

Me, I’m an OK-to-good artist (depending on the wind and phase of the moon and all sorts of other imponderables), and fairly good at image manipulation. I’m not an expert in either. I’ve done some work of which I’m proud (much of it in Assassin’s Amulet or here at Campaign Mastery) and some work which was just barely good enough, and some that I wish could have been done better – and there’s some that I won’t show anyone. But all that puts me nine leagues ahead of many, while leaving me in awe of the breathtaking work produced by others. I know just enough to know how hard it is :)

 

For example, what if you wanted a Jade Palace? One way you could get what you’re after might be to modify some other image, manipulating it to give it a green color. And if you wanted this to be a magical place, with a strange light show emanating from it? You could do that, too. I spent 10 minutes or so manipulating a small-sized low-resolution Taj Mahal image (shown to the right) to achieve a passable representation of those very results. Compare it with the source image shown earlier in this article. If I were doing it for real, I would have worked harder and used a higher-resolution image. I would also have played around with proportions of different elements to produce something that was less-obviously a derivative image, and maybe added some additional wings to the building.

If the skills to meet these artistic requirements aren’t in your toolbox, you’re in trouble.

Avoiding Kitsch

Not all ideas are good ones. But, by definition, only great ideas make it to becoming wonders. There’s a fundamental incompatibility that results from this combination; inevitably, some of the wonders you propose shouldn’t be anywhere near the list, never mind on it.

Honest self-criticism is one of the hardest abilities to develop that I can think of. Until you have it down pat, you are going to need some supporters to sit in judgment, and perhaps to throw new suggestions and ideas in your direction.

I’d like to think I’m getting better at artwork all the time – certainly, when I first started on Campaign Mastery, something like the Orcs & Elves titles would have been beyond me. Not to mention the “change in the weather” that I did for my the image of the Sydney Opera House in my previous article. But I can still deliver a clunker, an idea that just doesn’t work.

At all costs, you have to avoid being cute. Monuments and Wonders have to exude Gravitas – weight, seriousness, and dignity. Cute becomes Kitsch all too easily.

What to represent

But perhaps the hardest part of the entire process is the task of deciding what the wonders should be, what they should represent. What’s worthy? What’s not?

I touched on all this to some extent in an article from October 2009, Legendary Achievements: Coloring Your Campaign with Anecdote and Legend, in the section Legendary natural wonders to bring the geography to life,, but this is a whole new order of problem. Cute and Trivial worked just fine for the folksy local legends that I suggest there, but few objects and locations will qualify as a wonder of the world, and because they are exceptional, they have to be treated in an exceptional manner.

Solving The Problems

Okay, so having sorted why it’s so hard, why should you bother – and, if I can convince you that you should, how can you go about it?

Uluru (Helicopter view), photo by Huntster (Public Domain Image). Click on thumbnail for a larger image.

Why Do It?

Depth. Having wonders in your world gives it a sense of having existed before the PCs arrived, of being a real place. According to the DVD extras, Weta workshop put a lot of effort into constructing little bits of the Numenorian culture – statues and architecture and the like – that they could then demolish and leave lying around in various places, for this very reason.

Verisimilitude. The real world has them; your campaign world should have them. If they are absent, no-one might notice; but if they are present, they will notice that.

Filler. Wonders give the characters a chance to play tourist, soaking up the campaign world and its background and concepts in the process. This takes some of the burden of adventure creation away from the GM on a day-by-day basis; so the effort can be viewed as an investment in the future.

Landmarks ground a campaign. The landmarks give a framework around which the players can assemble the bits of campaign background knowledge that come their way. All too often, there seems to be a divorce between the background and the current-day reality of campaigns. By salting the background with the remnants and artifacts of the past, you can have action occur at those locations, giving a connection between the modern-day game world and the background.

Reference. Wonders form landmarks in the players’ minds as well as on the map. This gives them a key which can be used to relate other aspects of the campaign. “Lilton” might be the small community where something happens that will be of interest to the characters, but it’s just a spot on the map unless they’ve already adventured in the region. If they can be told that it’s midway between the legendary Salt Mines of Tarah and the Waterfall of Niglesh, largest in the known world, suddenly it is a lot more than that (and a lot more interesting).

Individuality. My choices as Wonders will not be the same as your choices, which will not be the same choices as the GM who lives on the far side of town. Those choices help make your campaign distinctive. But even more valuably, if they are connected to the campaign background and its core concepts, they give the players a ‘hook’ from which to hang the uniqueness of the campaign. It’s amazing how much more accessible those unique elements become when you can point to a Wonder Of The World and describe how, at this particular place, that difference manifested in an unusual or significant outcome.

Integration.By virtue of these connections between campaign concept, campaign background, and contemporary campaign reality, Wonders can integrate the many facets of the campaign world into a unified whole. They become the ‘nails’ that hold the rest of the metaphoric structure together. Without them, the connections can seem superficial or even non-existent.

Moreover, they can help the GM integrate his own thinking and planning. If you exemplify a house rule with a World Wonder where it made a difference, you facilitate and help solidify your own thinking about how that house rule will manifest within the game reality. Sometimes you can discover unintended connections between, and implications of, those house rules, before they become a problem. One of the easiest ways to collapse a campaign is to have a house rule and a campaign background that doesn’t reflect the existence of that rule and its impact on the game reality. Wonders and Monuments can help avoid this problem.

Inspiration. I’m big on having explanations for everything, as long-time readers of this site will know. I go many, many, extra miles to maintain the internal coherence of my campaigns. Wonders give me the opportunity to be a little more playful, to build in something whose explanation I don’t know. I can stick a giant statue in the ground without knowing where it came from, just for the fun of it.

Mysteries and Lifesavers. Sometimes things fall in a heap of confusion. The PCs have managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and done so in such a way that there seems to be no escape; the campaign looks like it’s about to collapse as a result. When everything that is already known tells you that the PCs have no hope, you have three choices:

• Learn to live with the PCs failure. More importantly, find a way for the campaign to live with the PCs failure. Or:
• A completely unsatisfying dues-ex-machina that solves the problem for them. Or:
• Enlarging the campaign to include things that were not already known, and that offer a potential way out for the PCs – if they discover it, and how to exploit it to score a surprise come-back at the 11th hour. And so far as the players have to know, you always intended it to happen that way.

Wonders with some inexplicable quality give you a hook to hang such solutions from. If they are established within the campaign already, they won’t even seem like Dues-ex-machinas; instead, they will be established plot elements whose significance is only now being revealed. And you will look like a genius.

Wonder. Wonders give you the chance to add some “Gosh-wow-cool” to your campaign. There is a reason they are called “wonders”, after all!

In Combination, those reasons are quite enough to justify the effort of including wonders – if a way can be offered to make them practical.

Dream Landscape, artwork by Chris Hortsch (www.chris-hortsch.de), sourced from SXC (Public Domain Image) – click thumbnail for a larger image.

What to represent

The place to start is always to decide what you want the wonders in your campaign to be.
 

• I start with Natural Wonders – Tallest Mountain, Greatest River, Biggest Waterfall, Biggest Bay, and other scenes of natural beauty. Virtually every game world will have these. Note that there may be taller mountains, bigger rivers, etc – these are simply the biggest in the known world.
• Next come the ruins and works of Lost Empires and Kingdoms, especially the most recent.
• Historical Icons I – I examine the campaign background for key events that would have been commemorated in some way, the bigger the better. I maintain a list as I work forwards through the background, looking for 1) events that can take place at the monument; and 2) for any impact that the presence of the monument might have on future events. If I want a certain event to be forgotten, and it would almost certainly have been commemorated, I can destroy or hide the monument (the latter is preferable, as its rediscovery gives me a way to reveal what was forgotten when it becomes significant).
• Historical Icons II – where were past capitals? Where were the obvious invasion routes, and how did past kingdoms/empires guard them? What happened to the defensive works – and how were they overcome, if they were?
• Mythical History/Prehistory – The sort of thing that Stonehenge was once thought to represent (and still does in the popular consciousness). What else can be left over from a mythic interpretation of prehistory?
• Gods & Supernatural Beings – in any world where these have an objective reality, expect even more effort to represent them in art, statuary, song – and monuments – than there was in our world, where their existence is subjective. These need bear no relation to the current theology within the campaign. I once thought up a game world in which someone had smashed every statue in existence of a particular Deity – without explanation. I never finished work on it.
• Cultural Greatness – Regimes at the height of their powers tend to celebrate their cultural greatness with expressions of that greatness that become wonders of the world either then or subsequently. And the contemporary regime is either declining, or is at the height of the power (so far). There is also an element of rivalry involved – ‘the ancients did that, and we’re better than they were, so we’re going to do this.’ And throw in the occasional splash of decadence and self-indulgence, while you’re at it.
• Campaign Uniqueness – What is there that is going to be different or unique about this campaign? Can I think of a way to exemplify or celebrate that difference with a Wonder Of The Known World?
• Magic – in any world where magic works, there should be monuments built in celebration of it. And monuments that are impossible without it. I let my imagination run wild for a while, then apply strict self-censorship. And get a second opinion on anything I’m unsure of.
• The Mysterious and Fantastic – Having warmed up with the preceding section, I’m ready to really get creative. Is there anything I can dream up that will add to the Mystique, Mystery, or Magic of the game world? Why not a house in which the interior rooms are all on the outside and a small garden is on the inside? A fairy palace? A gingerbread house? A cave in which up is down? A castle whose towers run down, into the ground, to protect from underground attack? A gypsy wagon (with occupants) trapped in Amber? I then apply strict self-censorship. And get a second opinion.
• Non-human races & Cultures – How would each non-human race’s mindset play into the concept of Wonders? Is there anything that would exemplify what makes that race unique? What might they create that humans would consider to be Wonders?

Photographic & Illustrative Inspiration

I keep a file full of ‘clip art’ that’s not for public circulation. Anytime I come across an image that I find interesting or inspiring, I save it to that file. When I find the time, I might plug a suitable search term into Google Images and go trolling for future ideas. When I know I’m going to want something specific in the future, I use a subfolder dedicated to the subject. I currently have one folder full of futuristic buildings, and one full of Lovecraftian Horrors, and one full of Digital Demons, and one full of Ice Terrains, and one of Ice Queens, and another of Hell. And I keep one of backgrounds and textures, and another of faces and people with particularly distinctive appearance.

Some of these provide direct inspiration for Wonders. But because I don’t restrict myself to public domain images, I will never display these publicly – they are kept for private use only.

Decide the significance

Context might not be everything, but it’s an awful lot. What is the current culture’s subjective appraisal of the significance of each wonder? Why is it remembered, and what is it considered to be symbolic of? Never mind what the people who created it thought – what do the people in the game world now think of it? And how does that color their impressions of those who created it?

In my unused adventure ideas file, there is the notion of a now-lost pacifist society who repress their aggressive tendencies and perversions through the most graphic artworks imaginable. Everyone made these, in one medium or another, or was branded a public danger and a criminal, and locked away. An archeologist has discovered the remains of this society and is trying to make sense of them, and getting entirely the wrong impression. A temporal accident then brings some of them forward in time, where they seek to impose their “perfection” on a nearby settlement; enter the PCs…

Connect with History

I make sure that every Wonder has some connection with the campaign history. Where this isn’t pivotal, I might set it aside for use as an anecdote relating to the Wonder if and when the PCs visit the scene (I like to have at least one of these for every wonder, better yet two or three – I add to the total in the step after next.)

Connect with Society & Culture

I examine each Wonder and consider what impact it has had, would have, or is having, on the contemporary society of the campaign. If I don’t want that, then the Wonder has to go ‘bang’ at some point in history. If I don’t want it to be happening yet, I have it get lost or stolen, only to be rediscovered at some future time. I once had this happen to an artifact, but had descriptions survive – all from a common source which had a mistranslation of the size. When it released the Evil that it had confined (after being rediscovered by some peasants), the PCs came looking to see if there was any way to re-confine the Evil in the Wonder – only to discover that it wasn’t 300 feet in size, it was 300 tenths of an inch in size, small enough to put in a backpack – which is what someone had done…

I also make sure that there are at least some cultural references to each Wonder in a list of the attributes of that wonder.

Create Events

I create more events as necessary to fill out the legend of the Wonder and supplement the unused historical references. These may be myth, legend, or rumor, and I make no decisions as to their validity – using a Question Mark to indicate this indecision, so that I can decide what’s true and what’s not when the time comes.

Fantasy Castle (Regaleira), photo by ladyleaf, sourced from SXC (Public Domain image) – click thumbnail for a larger image.

The Non-human Psyche

Are there any noteworthy differences in interpretation of the Wonder from particular non-human races that are present in the campaign world? Can I use these interpretations to justify some past event whose rationale is thin? Can they cause any holy wars? Are there any non-human Meccas?

Ruins of a castle in Ogrodzieniec, Poland, photo by Saiuri. Sourced from SXC, used subject to licence terms specified at http://www.sxc.hu/photo/598412 – click thumbnail for a larger image.

Where and When

Having decided what impact the Wonder will have, I can nail down where it is located and when it was constructed.

The Reef, photo by Markopolis, Sourced from SXC (Public Domain image) – click thumbnail for a larger image.

Current Status

What is the Wonder’s current status – lost, almost forgotten, well-known, destroyed, mythical? Why? When did whatever happened, happen?

Carina Nebula, photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope. It’s hard to believe that it’s been over twenty-three years since Hubble was launched! Click thumbnail for a larger image.

The Visceral Reaction

One of the most important aspects of a Wonder is the visceral reaction that it has. If the imagery available is not good enough, and there is no prospect of being able to do better before the image is needed, make sure that the Wonder is lost or destroyed. At the same time, a great visceral response is reason enough to restore/rediscover a lost Wonder.

The Potala Palace, photo by Coolmanjackey. Click thumbnail for a larger image.

A Celebration Of Your Campaign

The Wonders of your game world should be a celebration of your campaign and its uniqueness. They should provide eye candy for your players that helps them feel their characters presence within the world and aids them in getting into character. They should inform everyone involved of the ‘magic’ of the world, and inspire. If they do all of these things, you can’t go too far wrong.
 
 

An afterword: Wiki Loves Monuments 2013

While gathering the images which adorn this article, I discovered that Wikimedia Commons are currently running a contest to capture, photographically, the cultural heritage of the world, Wiki Love Monuments. This contest is due to finish at the end of the month, but if you have any images that YOU have photographed that would be relevant, and your country is one of those participating this year, consider uploading them. No idea what the prizes are, but the FAQ definitely indicates that there are prizes.

This is a sheer coincidence; not only am I not a participant, my country is not even participating (and the 2012 definitions were way too restrictive for my tastes). But I thought it appropriate to spruik the event since I have used so many Wikipedia Commons images for this article. Fair’s Fair!

In my first article for this month’s Blog Carnival, I asked the question ‘Location, Location, Location: How Do You Choose A Location?‘ and identified ten or eleven influences on the decision, and an approximate hierarchy within them, but was unable to offer even a guideline beyond those observations in answer to the question.

Today, the subject is one that’s even more difficult and wide-ranging: How do you choose or modify a location’s specifics to match its description to the needs of the plot?

Scope

There are three aspects of the location specification that can be modified to meet whatever secondary needs you have:

• Surrounding environment;
• Location specifics; and/or
• Choice of language.

A procedural approach

It’s possible to outline a procedural approach to the task, which would look something like this:

1. Identify the most important unresolved story need.
2. Can this story need be satisfied through location specifics?
3. If yes, amend the description accordingly. Proceed to step 9.
4. If no, can the location specifics support some other solution?
5. If the answer to that question is yes, amend the description to do so, and proceed to step 9.
6. If no, does the story need rule out any aspect of the location specifics?
7. If yes, note the restriction to the location description and proceed to step 9.
8. If no, consider the story need irrelevant to the location specification and set it aside.
9. If there are any important unresolved story needs, return to step 1.

…but I don’t find that approach to be all that helpful. There are too many conditional questions. It’s a bit clearer as a flowchart, as shown to the right, but even that leaves a lot to be desired.

Instead, let’s focus in on the critical steps: 1+2+3, 4+5, and 6+7.

Click the thumbnail for the full sized image. I’m proud of this image since on the original was taken on an especially gloomy day with lots of heavy gray clouds… :)

Story Needs that can be satisfied through location specifics

Since this is the central subject of the entire article, it is a little premature to go into too much detail; by the time I finished, the meaning of the other critical steps would be long forgotten. That, however, doesn’t stop me from offering a very general overview.

Locations are chosen to meet certain story requirements, as described in the article referenced above. But there are all sorts of nuances that can be added to the mix by tweaking the details. The general location may be just an environment. It may be a populated settlement – how large? It may be a specific settlement – where in that general location? It may be a type of building, a sheriff’s office or a hotel, for example – where, how large, what’s it look like, what are its surroundings? It may be a “specific” building, for example the Royal College Of Surgeons in Zanzibar (to invent a place off the top of my head) – same questions. Even if it’s a world famous landmark, like the Sydney Opera House, or Easter Island, environment – weather, visitors, activity, and mood can all have an impact on the perception of the location, as can the tone and language used to describe it. Or a location can be a specific room, or a vehicle interior.

The more story that can be conveyed by the location description, the less you have to do elsewhere; and the more strongly any story elements that are conveyed by the other instruments of play – dialogue, descriptions of people, etc – can be reinforced. The right location can “sell” the rest of the scene. In The Poetry Of Place: Describing locations & scenes in RPGs I detailed the tools and techniques of doing so. Today’s subject is about choosing the raw ingredients to be subjected to this treatment.

Location as a solution support

Even when the details of a location can’t directly meet a story need, the right choices of details can make it easier (or even possible) to employ the other elements of the scene description to achieve a solution, or can make it more difficult to do so. Once a story need is identified, and you’ve determined that location alone is not enough, the next question has to be whether or not location details can at least contribute to solving that story need.

Location as an inhibitor

And, when that doesn’t appear to be the case, you have to ask whether or not the setting of the scene is getting in the way of a solution to that story need, and if so, what can be done about that. Only if the answer is “it isn’t getting in the way” or “nothing can be done about it” can you conclude that location isn’t going to help meet that need.

How far should this be carried?

There are limits to how far you can go, and those need to be recognized. In a work of fiction, you can normally get away with a page of description at most, less is better; in a roleplaying game, the pages are generally larger, but the same limit in terms of word-count is about the same; it works out to about half a page, absolute maximum. What’s more, no paragraph should be more than about 5 lines and each subsequent paragraph has to justify its existence against ever-stiffer requirements. Experience has taught me that anything more simply becomes noise, or early details get lost when players concentrate on the newer information.

One of the biggest benefits of a more poetic approach to descriptions is the compression that results. Each statement, each line, serves double or even triple purposes, enabling a page or more of description to be delivered more quickly and succinctly.

If you can’t satisfy every desirable end because of these limits, there is clearly a need for careful prioritization. Here, once again, the procedural approach described earlier falls down; “the most important story need” is not sufficient definition, not by a long shot.

Prioritization

This inadequacy exists because “the most important story need” might be solvable using something other than location specifics, while some other slightly lesser need might be solvable only with location details, or far more easily with the location. There are two factors to take into account, therefore – the importance of the story need, and the degree to which that need can be solved by something other than the location of the scene. To complicate matters still further, these are not entirely independent factors, as later steps in the procedure make clear. You could try to map out a procedure to take account of these but it quickly becomes so unwieldy in articulation and implementation that it is even more worthless than the rough procedure outlined.

I don’t have any hard and fast rules that I employ with any regularity. There are so many combinations and permutations of the arrangement of story needs and the means employed to satisfy them that no one process will come even close to being universal. Instead, there are a couple of things that I try to keep in mind:

• The #1 priority for each delivery method;
• The overall purpose of the scene;
• Any additional story needs that absolutely have to be met;
• The principle of consistency;
• The perpetual question, “Do I really need this?”; and
• The reason for this location choice in the first place.

I will generally try the most obvious approach, and if that does the job, I move on to the next scene. Only if there’s a problem, an additional story need that isn’t being met, will I toss that away and try to find some other configuration of narrative, description, tone, participants, dialogue, and action that might be more effective.

Satisfying Specific Types Of Story Need through Location options

There are at least nine different story needs that can be satisfied through configuration of the location and its description.

They are:

• Tactical,
• Tonal,
• Emotional,
• Informational,
• Contextual,
• Expressional,
• Philosophical,
• Intellectual, and
• Informative.

Each of these needs has a different way of impacting on the location. You’ll have noticed that I haven’t defined any of them. That’s because I’m now going to look at each in detail.

Tactics

There are a whole bucket-load of Tactical considerations that can influence a location, and often several can be accommodated. This is also the list that I apply (though not necessarily in this order) when I have to modify a general environment to get a specific location for a random wilderness encounter; in general, the more intelligent the creature encountered, and the more familiar they are with the region, the higher up this list my attention will be. The less relevance those two factors have, the more attention I will give to the bottom end of the list.

• Target Objective (non-random encounters only) – when the scene contains a participant’s objective or target, that’s an overriding tactical consideration.
• Defense Enhancement – a location that enhances the defenses of the participant with the choice of location.
• Attack Enhancement – a location that enhances the attack capabilities of the participant with the choice of location.
• Mobility Enhancement – a location that enhances the mobility options of the participant with the choice of location, especially if those mobility options are uncommon, like flight or swinging.
• Defense Minimization – a location that subdues or negates the defenses of the participant without the choice of location, especially if this does not affect the participant with the choice as severely or at all.
• Attack Minimization – a location that subdues or negates the most probable attack modes of the participant without the choice of location, especially if this does not affect the participant with the choice as severely or at all.
• Mobility Restriction – a location that reduces the mobility of the participant without the choice of location.
• Conflict Option – a location that offers the participant with the choice of location the ability to either force or avoid confrontation as they see fit;
• Intelligence – a location that reveals the participant without the choice of location without exposing the participant with the choice of location.
• Retreat/Escape Options – a location that offers options of retreat or escape to the participant with the choice of location that the participant without the choice probably cannot utilize.
• Direct Defense – a location that provides natural cover to both sides is always preferable to one that does not, provided that the mobility and attacks of the participant with the choice are not compromised.
• Location as a weapon – some locations are naturally hostile, and function as a weapon against one or both participants.
• Flexibility Minimization – some locations do nothing but compromise the range of attack/defense/mobility options available to one or both participants.
• Undesirability – a location can be undesirable because one or more of the above operate against the participant with the choice of location, but offer other advantages that compensate.
• Inevitability – sometimes the location is simply where one participant catches up with the other. It might not be a choice that either side would have made if they had the option.

An example of a tactical enhancement to a location description is placing an encounter with undead in an unhallowed graveyard; in my campaigns, this gives them all sorts of benefits and advantages. In contrast, placing hallowed ground in or near an encounter with undead offers the participants the option of retreating to somewhere where they have the advantage.

The more control the participant with the choice has over the location of the encounter, and the more time they have to invest in exercising that control, the more benefits they will stack in their favor. This is something that I always bear in mind when designing a villain’s lair.

Tone

Modifying the weather, and the descriptive language, enables the location to establish the tone of a scene. Not only is this more compelling than simply stating what the tone is, it supports other elements of the scene that is to take place by providing a tonal context. Enhancing the location details can add to this effect – mentioning ‘stone gargoyles’ on window ledges adds to the gothic character of a location, provided that those are consistent with the other details. You don’t find many modern skyscrapers adorned with them, for example.

One more example before I move on: A modern skyscraper’s exterior is mostly glass. That means that you have three choices in descriptive language when entering one, and all convey a different tone. You can talk about what is reflected in the glass; you can talk about what you can see through the glass; or you can talk about a cold, immaculate, pristine, exterior facade. The first can introduce tones from the gothic (storm clouds and lightning) to the warm and comforting (a family playground); the second can expose lush greenery, martial efficiency, paranoia, an ant’s nest, a beehive of activity, a sense of panic within. The building is still defined only as a “modern skyscraper”, with no supplementary details, but tone is being set by the environment in which the skyscraper is located – which means that you can use the actual architectural details – shape, size, connections to other buildings – to convey something else to the players, ie to achieve or support some other story objective.

Emotion

You can use the location to evoke particular emotional reactions in the players, or in the characters that they control, once again by a combination of content and descriptive language. The entire gamut of human emotion is open to you, if you are ingenious enough to invoke it. A school playground is just a place until you dress it with the sounds of children playing. A building site is just an arrangement of girders until it’s shadow falls on a nearby building like a sinister giant spider. An empty sporting ground invokes a sense of competition and a sense of teamwork and camaraderie at the same time; populate it with 10,000 screaming fans (or 100,000) and a close game in progress and you hint at passions and primal emotions. A park is just grass and trees – but throw in someone walking a dog, and someone else flying a kite, and you start evincing a sense of freedom and carefree existence, as well (perhaps) as a tinge of 50s nostalgia for those who were around then. A couple walking a baby in a stroller completes the wholesome scene. Now throw in some sort of a threat that they haven’t noticed yet, and it’s not just the people who are threatened; the emotional content is that the values – freedom, casual contentment, etc – are also threatened, and the players will react to that emotional content.

Information

Harder to achieve is the delivery of essential information through location detail, but it can be done. A billboard. A corporate logo being replaced by crane. A newsstand shouting the headlines. A news ticker. A media scrum. Proximity of two organizations (Lost & Found Rings, Inc., is located in The Saruman Tower!). Association: if strange things have been happening to the weather and the PCs have tracked the possible source to a particular location, a strange antenna pointed skywards provides information through the confluence of “strange” things. Even negative locations can provide information, as when the police go to the address of Elwood’s license in the Blues Brothers – it’s information about Elwood’s personality.

All these are so much better in a game than omniscient narration that I always look for any opportunity to incorporate into the location description any information that the scene is to convey – unless that leaves the scene itself an anticlimax, of course.

Context

Harder still, but even more rewarding, is the conveying of context via the location. This too, is possible however, depending on what the context is in reference to.

Consider a hotel of very specific style. If someone chooses to stay there when they have the choice, it establishes a connection between the location and that someone, which can place the individual’s personality, mindset, ambitions, and actions into a context.

We are all products of our environment to at least some extent. How normal would Friday have been if she didn’t grow up in the Addams’ Mansion, surrounded by the other members of the Addams Family? Even if they react against that early environment by going in the exact opposite direction, the description of that environment is still providing context to the personality etc of the person.

In fact, there are times when it is not only possible to convey context by location, it is the most efficient and interesting way to do so. It follows that if the scene is to provide context, considering the possibility of doing so by location is a very high priority.

Expression

Some locations are more expressive of the personality of the designer/constructor. Consider that hotel of specific style again. Someone had to think that it style was appealing, or at least a good idea even if they personally didn’t like it.

A villain’s lair should speak volumes about the villain. A good way to make the villain distinctive is through the decoration of his lair. If he has hundreds of species of bat stuffed and mounted on the walls, is he a Vampire? A Batman freak? Or simply fascinated by the species? Or perhaps he’s really interested in sound, or hearing, or sonar. Or maybe the room’s purpose is just to spook uninvited visitors. Even though you don’t know what it is, you can tell right away that the villain has bags of character.

This isn’t the only thing that can be expressed through location detail. Awe and Wonder are two of the most common expressions that a location can invoke. Grandeur and Might are right up there, too.

I have heard the expression used from time (in reference to both RPGs and Comics) that they have an unlimited special effects and sets budget – but have to be more careful how they use it as a consequence. It’s not really true when it comes to RPGs, as the section “How Far Should This Be Carried” explains; if you consider words to be the currency of an RPG, you are closer to the mark. You can have any special effect or set that you want – so long as you can explain it within the budget. That makes Awe, Wonder, Grandeur, and Might easy to do, but that the sort of very fine detail that distinguishes a period movie, for example something set in the Elizabethan period, can be a challenge. So, when there’s something that you need to express for a scene or adventure, locations can definitely carry their share of the burden.

Philosophy

Possibly hardest and most profound of them all, it is nevertheless possible to express a philosophy in architecture, which is one of those manipulable quantities in a location description. It’s a little easier when the philosophy in question is something that has been established in the real world, because you can research the real-world expression of that philosophy. It’s both harder and easier when you’re moving beyond the bounds of terrestrial reality; harder because you can’t lean as heavily on others, and because you may have to represent skills like architectural design that you don’t possess; easier because you have a great deal more freedom, and while there is no-one to tell you that you’ve got it all wrong, you can tell when you’ve hit the nail on the head.

For more on this subject, I refer the reader to my article, Creating the World Of Tomorrow: Postscript – The Design Ethos Of Tomorrow, in which I discuss the changing design styles of the twentieth century and they way they were reflected in everything from architecture to furniture design to the design of teapots. While this article concerns itself with extrapolation into the look-and-feel of the future, its a solid launchpad for the techniques of incorporating a particular philosophy into an environmental description. You can get more help by checking out any DVD extras that talk about set design, especially for Fantasy & Sci-Fi TV shows and movies (including police procedurals that use special effects in a fancy way like Numb3rs and the CSI franchise.

Intellect

Continuing to ascend the ladder of difficulty, we come to the communication of intellect, or ideas, by means of location details. There are two ways of achieving this, depending on the nature of the ideas to be communicated.

The first subcategory concerns ideas that the players will recognize even if their characters won’t. Inserting a Fascist Realm into a D&D campaign for example. It is easy to simply insert a swastika flying above the castle battlements – perhaps too easy, because that might get them wondering about time travelers and other distractions from the main point that you’re trying to make. The right way to go about this is to extrapolate the fundamental principles of Fascism into the technology and society of the era to determine how life, behavior, technology, and design would be influenced. I would start by hitting Wikipedia for some research, trying to identify and enunciate the basic tenets of this pseudo-fascism, and then trying to interpret them within the scene. The architecture, the clothing, the behavior, the insignia and flags, etc.

The results are likely to be less recognizable than the simple swastika idea, but will seem less tacked-on, feel more original, and be far more realistic; and will sell the concept far more effectively when the big reveal actually happens, probably as a result of the leader spouting a few unmistakably characteristic phrases.

The second subcategory is the communication of ideas with which the players will be unfamiliar because they are original or aren’t part of the real world. The key to communicating original ideas to the players by means of the location is to consider the consequences and ramifications of the idea to be conveyed. What does it make possible that would otherwise be impossible? What does it make impossible? What does it make desirable, and what does it make undesirable? The general principles closely resemble those of philosophical exposition through location, described in the preceding section; but instead of a system of thought, you are attempting to communicate an aspect of the physical ‘reality’ in which the location ‘exists’.

Take my Shards Of Divinity campaign, for example. In the past, a couple of unnatural buildings (and one flying city) were created. Now, magic is failing; some of those buildings are on the verge of collapse, and have been repaired in relatively ramshackle fashion (due to the urgency of the repairs when they became necessary, and the lack of practical skills on the part of those who dwell within).

Information

And, one step beyond the dissemination of ideas comes the dissemination of facts in exactly the same way.

Consider my Fumanor campaign, in which an excessive concentration of magic can yield what is known as a “wild magic” zone, within which all magic will twist in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Any building crafted to incorporate Epic Magic (and there are some) are therefore surrounded by Wild Magic zones – unless the mage is especially skilled and knowledgeable, and can build a suppression effect into these spells, ramping up the difficulty enormously. Too many spells cast in s specific location risks creating a dead magic zone, in which all magic fails. Each location therefore has a capacity for magic; exceed it, and your fancy magical building will collapse – and magic will cease working in the vicinity – and there is no known way of knowing how close you are to the limit. One spell too many, and the fairy castle comes crashing down.

Identifying a consequence and then applying it to the location description may not educate the players in the idea, but it will lay the groundwork for the idea to appear as an explanation for what they have seen at a later point. The result is an internal consistency that adds massively to the realism of the world.

Communication through Location

It can be difficult to communicate something to the players or to their characters through the choice of location details, but there are many-fold rewards for doing so. Verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief, depth, nuance, subtlety, and concision are just a few. Additional requirements can serve as a starting point for inspiration. But you have a practical limit and not an unlimited budget; so expend your capital wisely to get the greatest ‘bang’ for your ‘buck’.