Welcome to the final part of Campaign Mastery’s major contribution to the November 2015 Blog Carnival. The theme this time around is the Unexpected, and this series is all about taking something that is usually assumed to be basic and reliable – portals and gates – and throwing some unexpected surprises into the mix…

To recap: Most GMs (and certainly, most players) assume that a portal is nothing more than an express train running from point A to point B in the celestial firmament, a shortcut across planar boundaries that connects two points in localized space that might otherwise be barely in the same cosmos. So convenient do portals make transit from one plane to another that the portal connection is seriously the defining attribute of the the two planes, assuming it is at least semi-permanent. They inherently rearrange the cosmology of existence to suit whoever’s doing the casting – and can do so in different ways at something close to a moment’s notice, if you know how to make them!

That notion got me thinking about all the nasty surprises that GMs can pull using portals. This series of four articles is the result.

It’s not unreasonable to think that it takes a lot of power to create a portal, energy that is locked up inside the connection. Breaking the portal could then release that energy – explosively.

Consider the possibilities. Tiny micro-portals as a means of arcane-based combustion in a simple reciprocating engine? Bigger portals as anti-ship weapons? Still larger portals as a means of threatening an entire city with mutually assured destruction – your wasteland, their prime real estate, both will go up in one release of acrid smoke. And the only thing that can be done about it is to trigger the mayhem – or live with the knife at your throat, knowing that an invading army is just twenty paces away!

Under such circumstances, you can’t not belly up to the negotiating table and bargain as thought your life depended on it. But that puts whichever party is the least stable in the driver’s seat! Which will cave first: your principles, or your certainty of continued existence?

But the fun doesn’t stop there! All that energy has to come from somewhere; whoever created it may have planted the initial “seed” but something has maintained the portal since then. Let’s assume it to be ambient magical energy. Now contemplate what happens when a party, well-equipped with magical items, chooses to go through the portal, perhaps in an attempt to get their homes out from under this sword of Damocles. Isn’t it reasonable that a Portal would simply seize upon the most accessible power supply? Instead of weak, diffuse, ambient magical energy, there’s all this concentrated power in the form of magic items that have just entered it’s maw….

There are two or three choices that the GM has available. First, he can permanently strip magic items passing through a portal of all magic. That’s a great way of ‘resetting the clock’ after giving out too much of the good stuff, a mistake that we all make from time to time. Or maybe there’s a priority order in which only the most powerful three items get permanently drained. And the third option is to have anything that isn’t permanently drained temporarily stripped of its power, to gradually restore over a period of hours, days, weeks, or months.

Personally, I think that stripping everything is going too far, and so is a regeneration period in months. But anything less is fair game – and means that PCs will arrive with lower-than-usual cover fire into a situation that is (usually) more dangerous than those they ordinarily face. The first time they encounter this (especially if they don’t have any forewarning) it will be a very unpleasant shock; every subsequent occasion will be cause for angst and “there has to be another way, any other choice would be preferable”.

Not only does this notion help protect the campaign against excessively powerful goodies and other potential campaign-wrecking mistakes, not only does it up the stakes of high-level adventuring (while providing a mechanism which eventually confers an advantage to the PCs, making it likely that they will overcome the obstacles in the long run), but it prevents abuse of Gates and Teleports themselves. A win all round – though the players may not see it that way…

And, now that you’ve absorbed that little blow to the gut, let’s make some more PC jaws drop…

Parameters

There are a couple of key parameters that readers should bear in mind through the fun and games that follow. I’ve listed six, but there may be others that haven’t come to mind.

Direction
Portals and gates can be Mono-directional, Bi-directional, or Unidirectional.

• Mono-directional: Objects can only pass from one specific end of the portal or gate to the other end, and not vice-versa.
• Bi-directional: Objects can pass from either end to the other, but travel can only be in one direction at a time. Attempts to travel in the other direction when something is already in transit can be blocked or can result in a collision of some kind.
• Unidirectional: Objects can pass from either end to the other at the same time.

Permanence
What’s the behavior of the portal over time?

• Temporary: Portal lasts for a finite amount of time, and then it’s gone, or changes.
• Enduring: Portal appears permanent and stable – and then isn’t.
• Recurring, Reliable: Portal appears on a predictable basis. More complex versions may follow a pattern.
• Recurring, Anarchic: The portal is in existence at unpredictable times for unpredictable durations. It may be consistent in other parameters, or unpredictable, or cyclic.
• Permanent: Portals connect A to B permanently until disrupted or destroyed. Other parameters may change randomly or according to some pattern.

Size
While the values for this parameter described below suggest consistency, that’s not necessarily the case.

• Small: One person at a time can pass through the portal. Others may have to wait to enter until that traveler arrives, or they may be able to follow like links of sausages. That first variation also introduces the variable of travel time.
• Medium: A small group of up to four or five can pass through the portal together. Anyone more has to wait. Travel time is significant.
• Large: A wagon or large group can pass through the portal together in squads or units, up to fifty or so people at a time. More have to wait.
• Immense: An army, or a fully-crewed ship, can pass through the portal at the same time. Travel time can be tactically significant.

Travel
This parameter can be independently assessed for each end of the portal.

• Stable: The location of the portal entrance/exit is fixed in geographic location relative to something.
• Proximate: The location is defined within a locus of probability surrounding some surface feature; the exact location at any given time within that locus may differ either predictably or randomly.
• Defined: The portal is in one of a set number of locations, usually but not necessarily in close proximity, and is prone to change from one to another periodically or randomly, or perhaps after each use.
• Wandering: The portal moves, either randomly or in a predictable manner, and is not bound to any particular geographic locus. Unless it recurs with great rapidity or doesn’t move very far at a time, this can confuse people as to whether or not it is the same portal each time.

Disruption
Why should everything always leave a portal in the same condition as it left? Effects can be physical, or mental, or spiritual; and temporary or permanent. There may or may not be ways of shielding against, or mitigating, the effects. There may be patterns to the disruptive effects. A fixed degree of disruption vs. a percentage disruption can also be very significant.

• Safe: Portal travel inflicts little or no damage.
• Demanding: Portal travel inflicts minor damage that can be managed but may require planned recovery protocols. Mitigating capabilities begin to become significant.
• Difficult: Portal travel causes temporary near-incapacitation, or more significant long-term damage. Mitigating capabilities are very significant.
• Dangerous: The effects of Portal travel are temporarily incapacitating or debilitating for a significant period. Portals are only safe to use when the destination is protected by friendly forces.

Repeatability
There should be some way of disrupting or destroying a portal, though it may be dangerous. What happens then? Will a/the portal reform of it’s own accord, or must a new one be intentionally created? And will it connect with the old destination, or go somewhere new, or something in between?

• Precise: The same origin point leads to the same destination point.
• Self-Locking: The same origin point leads somewhere close to the old destination point and will eventually lock back onto the old departure point.
• Resistant: The old destination point resists the formation of a new portal connection. This resistance may be overcome in some manner.
• Vague: A new portal from the same origin may be directable to some point near where the old one was, but the exact same destination is unreachable.
• Unpredictable: A new portal from the same origin will connect with another point completely at random, uncontrollably, within the destination plane of existence, perhaps restricted to a significant region.

I’ll be repeating the essential contents of this panel at the head of each of the articles. For full discussion of these parameters and their possible effects, refer to

part 1

of the series. Keep these parameters and variables in mind because I’m liable to switch gears between them without notice!

Image based on ‘Ruined Arches 2’
by FreeImages.com/Ruth Harris
Click on the image to view a large version (749 x 1024)
Click to see Ruth’s original (708 x 1024)
Frame Image by FreeImages.com/Andrew C.

Idea #16 – Gaining Energy In Transit

You can think of the concept of energy differentials as forcing the Portal/Gate system to comply with the laws of Thermodynamics, or the conservation laws in general. Or you can get less technical about it all, and simply have fun with the idea while implying that you are tipping your hat in that direction. Either way, this idea, and the converse that follows, serves to enhance and increase the verisimilitude of the campaign, which naturally takes a small hit every time you bring in something “fantastic”. It implies that there are rules and game physics in place – and so long as those remain consistently applied but unexplored, that’s a real asset for a campaign.

Inconsistent application undoes all that goodness, and should be avoided on general principle, but the real prize – and danger – is that the players will want to understand those game physics and utilize them to their benefit.

The net result of this is a subgenre of Fantasy that I’ve rarely seen, and which I call “Hard” Fantasy, in the same way that there is a subgenre of Science Fiction called “Hard” Sci-Fi. If that’s where you want your campaign to go, and are comfortable doing so, that’s fine – but if neither of those things are true, a little more anarchy in the system might be a preferable choice.

That’s what’s achieved by a limited, willful, inconsistency that is randomly driven, as opposed to the more scientific hard “natural” laws that consistency mandates. This takes you back into the realm of implying that there are natural laws at work, but that there are unknown and unidentified factors that prevent formulating any rational description of those laws – in other words, we’re back to tipping the hat in the direction of verisimilitude, but not actually walking down that path.

I suspect that most GMs will be more comfortable adopting this approach, though there will be exceptions (NEVER try to GM a bunch of Engineering and Science professors unless you’re adequately prepared for the experience! And Lawyers, don’t forget to be wary of them, too…)

Ahem. Getting back on point, so you’ve decided that it might be fun to think about the possibility of Gaining Energy In Transit. Right away, there are two possibilities: Balanced and Unbalanced energy gains. After that, we get to think about the different types of energy to be gained (warning: some of these ideas take ‘game physics’ and smash it in the face with a two-by-four)!

Balanced

‘Balance’ implies that sometimes you get a snake and sometimes a ladder. This can be on a transit-by-transit basis (no consistency whatsoever), a Portal-by-Portal basis (this portal consistently causes travelers to gain energy, that one to consistently lose energy), a Tit-for-Tat basis (this time, you gain energy, next time you lose it), Directional (you always gain energy going this way, but lose energy going the other), or something more sophisticated relating to relative destination and the game cosmology.

Whichever option you choose, the bottom line is this: gains and losses always balance out (after taking into account any energy utilized by the Portal/Gate/Teleport/Rift itself).

Combining with all these options are the other possibilities already suggested – consistency vs randomness (one applies more naturally to some of these than others, and vice-versa), the concept of thresholds before any effect is felt, which may or may not be in play, and the concept of restricted maximum effects (useful in terms of keeping the game playable but not necessary). Nor do you have to be consistent across all forms of interdimensional transit – this is a great opportunity to infuse some distinction between Portals, Gates, Teleports, and Rifts.

Unbalanced

The converse is unbalanced. From a physics point of view, this means that the transit itself doesn’t take place within a closed system – the external “reality” can have an impact on travelers, and vice-versa. A portal draining energy from the Positive Energy Plane either sucks Positive Energy from travelers (an energy loss, dealt with in the next major section) or suffuses the “transit environment” with Positive Energy that travelers are exposed to as a result. Inefficiencies and leakages and the imperfection of human creations all lend themselves to the latter notion.

With any of these possibilities, one thought that the GM will have to confront is what effect passage of air/water from one side of the Portal to the other will have when the energy gain (or loss) is taken into account. That’s why the concept of “thresholds” appeals to my evil-GM side – it eliminates one source of warning for PCs of what is about to happen to them!

There are many variations on the “unbalanced” option, because “unbalanced” does not imply “inconsistent”. If every gate or portal results in an energy gain or loss, that’s not balanced – but it is consistent. Rolling randomly for the amount and direction of energy flow is inconsistent (sometimes a loss, sometimes a gain), and may be unbalanced if there is a bias one way or the other. Perhaps the potential for gain or loss increases with length of passage, or frequency of passage within a time interval? There are lots of ways to play with the ‘reality’ that you are offering.

Not the least of which is the type of energy that we’re dealing with…

Light

Probably the safest and tamest option is Light. Anytime someone exits a gate, or maybe on entry, or both, there’s a blinding flash of light visible for miles around. And maybe for the next hour or whatever, the travelers glow like candles. Kind of makes stealth and surprise difficult to achieve – but that can be a good thing for the GM.

I’m not going to get into the different spectra of light, I’m assuming that what is meant here is “visible” light.

Sound

Almost as obvious and relatively safe is sound – ignoring burst eardrums and deafness. Again, it’s an attention-getter. Instead of a glow, temporary deafness might result.

Heat

Probably the most obvious one is that things go up in temperature. This can be a very dangerous choice; humans have a very limited tolerance for increased internal temperatures, as is shown by the effects of rising fevers. There’s no agreement as to the upper limit for ‘normal’ internal temperatures, with sources ranging between values of 37.5 and 38.3 °C (99.5 and 100.9 °F).

38 °C (100.4 °F)

This is classed as hyperthermia if not caused by a fever. Effects: Feeling hot, sweating, feeling thirsty, feeling very uncomfortable, slightly hungry. Chills are not normally experienced unless this is caused by fever.

One of the first effects to be noticed is the body attempting to regulate it’s internal temperature with sweating. Humidity is a huge factor, because in high humidity, the body’s ability to regulate its internal temperature is compromised. If you have high temperatures and humidity, a person will be sweating but the sweat won’t be drying on the skin, and that’s the mechanism by which sweat provides cooling.

39 °C (102.2 °F)

Severe sweating, flushed and red appearance. Fast heart rate and breathlessness. There may be exhaustion accompanying this. Children and people with epilepsy are thought very likely to experience convulsions.

An increase in body temperature increases heart rate; the blood vessels near the skin dilate (get bigger) to release heat. This reduces blood pressure, so the heart must beat faster to compensate, and ensure blood still goes to the vital organs. So your heart would start to race. This demands more oxygen, so breaths tend to grow shorter and shallower until we start to pant. Heat rash and muscle cramps are early signs of being overwhelmed by heat.

Heat exhaustion is a relatively common reaction to severe environmental heat and seems likely to occur with increased internal temperature and exertion – the degree/duration of exertion declining with greater temperature. It causes symptoms such as dizziness, headache and fainting. It can usually be treated with rest, a cool environment and hydration (including refueling of electrolytes, which are necessary for muscle and other body functions).

40 °C (104.0 °F)

Fainting, dehydration, weakness, vomiting, headache and dizziness may occur as well as profuse sweating. Starts to be life-threatening.

Studies have shown that up to this point, there is no effect on the ability to reason or on memory, at least in low levels, but that there was a 10-11% slowing in the rate at which these tasks can be performed. There was also a significant decrease in alertness and an increase in irritability. Elevating core body temperature has been shown to reduce force generation during “prolonged maximal voluntary contractions” – so strength and load-bearing capacity are reduced, as is the ability to sprint or run long distances. People more frequently suffer disturbed sleep and awaken at night more often when overheated even slightly, and in fact a slight cooling of the skin has been found to be the single most effective treatment for insomnia by some researchers.

When a person is exposed to heat for a sustained period, the first thing that shuts down is the ability to sweat. Once a person stops perspiring, a person can move from heat exhaustion to heat stroke very quickly. Heat stroke is more severe and requires medical attention; it is often accompanied by dry skin, confusion and sometimes unconsciousness.

41 °C (105.8 °F)

When people experience body temperatures this high, it is considered to constitute a Medical emergency. Symptoms include Fainting, vomiting, severe headache, dizziness, confusion, hallucinations, delirium and drowsiness. There may also be palpitations and breathlessness.

42 °C (107.6 °F)

Subject may turn pale or remain flushed and red. They may become comatose, be in severe delirium, vomiting, and convulsions can occur. Blood pressure may be high or low and heart rate will be very fast.

43 °C (109.4 °F)

The result is normally death, or serious brain damage, continuous convulsions and shock. Cardio-respiratory collapse will likely occur. Extreme heat is only blamed for an average of 688 deaths each year in the U.S., according to the CDC, but when affected by sustained heat, the health ramifications can be serious, including major organ damage. Kidney failure, liver failure, etc, are also common.

44 °C (111.2 °F) or more

Almost certainly death will occur; however, people have been known to survive up to 46.5 °C (115.7 °F) – with massive levels of medical support and potentially permanent aftereffects.

Human Exothermia

The basic reason for all this is that the human organism is a complex interweaving of biological and biochemical processes, and these are highly temperature-sensitive in some degree. We derive our energy from food, and this process releases waste heat – which is why our body temperatures are normally quite a bit hotter than the outside environment. While some of these biological processes fail above a certain body temperature, many of them cannot take place below certain temperatures – so there is actually a relatively narrow range of body temperatures that we consider normal. In other words, the human body is exothermic (generates heat) and has evolved to the best compromise for maximum overall efficiency.

There are, in fact, several variations in body temperature; anything and everything from smoking, drinking alcohol, sleeping, or even mild exercise can have an effect.

All this means that you can forget about swords becoming red hot or melting – the PCs would be long dead before they could experience it.

Or would they?

Thermal responsiveness

There are all sorts of ways in which flesh is different to metal. If you need any convincing, go ahead, poke yourself with a finger – then do the same thing to the back of a spoon. So why should the amount of heat energy gained be the same for both?

Let’s assume that a temperature gain in the body just short of inducing delirium also brings about metal reaching it’s melting point. I’ll use centigrade as it’s what I’m used to: that’s an increase in living biological tissues of 4°C, and an increase of about 1330°C – let’s call it 1332°C for convenience – for steel. That means that for every 1°C of body temperature increase, metal increases in temperature by 333°. That would produce life-threatening burns at about the same time as you started sweating if you were wearing metal armor – assuming a simple linear correlation. So that’s out. Instead, I suggest “mapping” the melting/ignition point of various substances onto the human temperature increase and forgetting any scientific rigidity.

Kinetic Energy

Why not add Kinetic Energy, i.e. Energy of movement? This implies that there would be an acceleration effect, and that passage would feel like a roller-coaster, getting worse as the amount of increase rose.

A linear scale is fairly dull and tame, or probably instantly lethal. “Roll a d12 and multiply by 10 for the number of feet/round that you are moving when you exit” – or hexes per round, or whatever. 120′ per round, a round is 6 seconds, that’s 20’/second, or about 13.6 miles per hour. Tame. Multiply by 20 instead, and you can get up to 27.2 mph increase. Wow – painful, capable of causing injury, but unlikely to be lethal unless you ram straight into something, and even then you might make it if it wasn’t sharp. But the average is only about half that – 14.733 mph. To make things interesting, we need to increase the multiplier again, but not by so much as another doubling – we don’t want death or injury to be the ‘average’ result, but we do want it to be a threat. Even a x30 factor seems a little high. So let’s call it x25. That gives an average of about +18.4 mph, and a maximum result of about 34 mph. Any increase beyond this point only makes the effect more lethal. But I don’t like this; it doesn’t let the PCs do anything about it.

“Roll d12 and that’s how many times your speed doubles” is more appropriate for an acceleration effect, far more devastating at the extremes, and yet tamer at low levels. Let’s assume that you enter the gate at a slow walk (5’/round, the slowest the D&D system lets you move without actually standing still): Roll a 0, that’s x1, so you emerge at 0.568182 mph, the same as you went in. Roll a 1, you get x2, for about 1.13mph. A two, and you get 2.27mph; a 3, 4.54mph; a 4 gives 9.09mph; a 5 yields 18.17mph, about the same as our average on the linear scale; a 6 gives 36.3mph, a shade worse than our worst-case result; a 7 produces a very dangerous 72.7 mph; and it only gets worse from there. 8=145mph; 9=291mph; 10=582mph; 11=1164mph; and a worst-possible result is an eye-stretching 2329mph. The speed of sound at ground level is approx 761mph, for comparison purposes. So that’s maybe a little too dangerous for us; why not permit entry at 1′ per round, and divide all those speeds by 5? A 12 result wouldn’t be enough to break the sound barrier – but a speed of 465.6mph will break many other things, starting with bones and working up.

Assessing the effects is relatively simple if you know basic physics: momentum is mass times acceleration, or mass times velocity divided by time. We don’t know what the momentum or acceleration actually is, and we don’t need to; the time is going to be the same, either way, so all we need is the relative masses of what we are talking about, and the effect on speed will be proportionate. So lets compare a typical car and the human body: Google reports that “the average new car weighed 3,221 pounds in 1987 but 4,009 pounds in 2010”. Call it 4000 pounds. The average human weight, world-wide is 136lb. So our person moving at speed X has the same effect on things that it hits as a car moving at about 136/4000=3.4% of speed X – and suffers the same effects as being hit by a car traveling at 3.4% of speed X.

Our worst-case speeds were 1164mph and 465.6mph, respectively – 3.4% of which is 39.576mph and 7.9mph. I don’t know what that sheds more light and perspective on: the dangers posed by auto impacts, the resilience of the human body, or the dangers posed by a human moving faster than the speed of sound! Call it a tie….

Of course, you could always enter a portal at a dead run. Boots of speed, anyone?

This information (provided by Katzenmami69 to Yahoo Answers) should also be taken into consideration:

“Big aeroplanes have emergency slides to evacuate passengers in emergency cases. These are always very hard-calculated to get the passengers out at maximum speed without actually killing them. At rescue trainings they always get a fair few broken bones and other minor injuries, and those trainings are mostly with trained aircraft staff… A typical speed to rush down such a rescue slide is 7 meters per second, that is only about 25 km/h!

“We survive car crashes at much higher speeds only because we don’t crash into the obstacle with the same speed as our car. Every crash at higher speed than about 50 km/h is lethal to any human.”

Potential Energy: Gravity?

Potential Energy is energy of position relative to a zero point. Hold a ball up in the air, and you give it potential energy; when you let it go, that energy is transformed into kinetic energy (speed) by the force of gravity. Even lifting your foot to take a step gives it Potential Energy.

So what happens if you suddenly have ten times as much Potential Energy as you did? Well, effectively, you (and your foot) is effectively ten times as high as it was. Instead of being maybe 6 inches off the ground, your foot is suddenly 5′ off the ground, and hits the ground as hard as it would from that height.

So what just happened?

Potential Energy is Mass times Acceleration due to Gravity times Height. Obviously, your foot is no higher off the ground. So the increase in Potential Energy can either manifest as increased mass (your foot weighs ten times what it did, just long enough for it to fall), or increased force of gravity – for the fraction of a second it takes to land.

Quite obviously, neither makes much sense in terms of conventional physics. Set that aside for a moment; I’m interested in what happens to the rest of you, the part that (hopefully) isn’t falling.

An instantaneous increase of weight of both yourself and everything you’re carrying is simple to work out and appreciate; an instantaneous increase in the force of gravity you are experiencing can also be useful in terms of the effects of G-forces. Working it both ways: Your 200 pound backpack suddenly weighs two THOUSAND pounds (1 ton). Or maybe you’re one of those STR 25 freaks with a backpack weighing 800 pounds (a heavy load for STR 25 in Pathfinder) – which suddenly weighs 8,000 pounds (4 tons, or two cars). I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but even if you weren’t, you’re falling – hard.

So x10 potential energy is a very big deal. Fortunately, you would probably wouldn’t see it coming. x10 potential energy is effectively the same as your body experiencing a G-force of 10Gs – and we know what that means. Sitting (or, presumably, standing), the human body can take about 5.5Gs for 3-4 seconds. So you would almost certainly black out instantly. To quote GoFlightMedicine:

“At larger +G forces… a larger discrepancy of blood pressures between cranium and the lower body occurs. At some point, intracranial perfusion cannot be maintained and significant cerebral hypoxia (no blood = no oxygen) follows. The end result is unconsciousness.”

Or, if severe enough, death, I would expect.

Throw in burst lung sacs, ruptured capillaries, internal bleeding.., excessive G-forces are no joking matter.

Things are better if you’re on your back – 14Gs for up to 3 minutes is tolerable (and that’s why astronauts lie down for liftoff), and on your stomach, you can cope with 11Gs for up to 3 minutes.

The time factor is crucially important. Crashes in motorsport can result in impacts of over 100Gs – but because the time is measures in milliseconds (or less), these are often so survivable that the driver walks away unharmed. Tragically, that’s not always the case, and even a relatively low-speed impact can be fatal if things go wrong.

There’s a lot more of interest regarding this subject on this Wikipedia page, but it’s beyond the scope of this article to dig any further. Suffice it to say that a tenfold increase in Potential Energy will probably be lethal, a five-fold increase crippling, and even a doubling would cause injury.

The most useful and practical interpretation for game purposes is to ignore the increased-G interpretation and simply go with the “everything weighs X times what it did” – and it’s all still moving at the same speed that it was. So if your walking forwards, you get a massive shove in the back as your pack tries to punch a hole straight through you…

Disintegration

Heat and Kinetic Energy are both aspects of things in motion, and potential energy increases result in motion. What if the directions of motion are random (like heat) but on individual cells or particles (like heat)? Wouldn’t you call that a disintegration effect? Telling your players to “Save vs Disintegration” at the DC of the gate’s construction would surely get their attention in a hurry.

I wouldn’t actually do it that way if I were to invoke this rather more extreme effect. It seems to me that the better-constructed the gate, the less dangerous it would be – so I would use X-minus-DC-of-construction instead. Depending on what you set X to, that can be quite a rare event – but a worrying one, nevertheless.

I generally don’t like instant-kill effects, even with a saving throw. So I wouldn’t do this. Someone else might, though.

Electrical

As soon as you mention the differences between steel armor and human flesh, electrical properties come to mind. How lethal you wanted this to be is up to you, but it’s rather more nuanced than the all-or-nothing of Disintegration. The basic form would remain the same: “Nd6 electrical, save for half effect UNLESS you’re wearing metal armor”.

10d6 would be lethal to most low-level characters, but from about 4th level on, potentially survivable – by some characters, some of the time. It only gets better from there; above 11th level, most characters would survive.

If N were “4xd6,” that’s a more variable and dangerous event. You might get lucky and roll a 1 or 2, giving 4d6 and 8d6, respectively. Or you could roll a 6 and offer up 24d6.

I would work backwards – determine at what level you want the average character to survive about half the time, how many HP you expect them to have, and then how many d6 rolling an average of 3.5 equals that number. That gives you N. You can even grade it a little more generously by making it survivable at that level on an average result of 4 or 4.5 on the d6, reducing the number of dice required (N), and the threat.

One thing I like about this option is that the characters who are least able to cope with the damage are the ones least likely to be wearing metal armor – rogues and mages.

Of course, another option is to trigger an Epileptic Fit. Epilepsy is, essentially, electrical signals in the brain being misdirected and triggering more misdirected signals in a chain reaction. As this Wikipedia Page makes clear, this would not be considered Epilepsy per se, but the effects would be the same. It’s even possible that real Epilepsy could be triggered by the experience, as pathways in the brain change with experience, a phenomenon called neuroplasticity which is one of the more fascinating discoveries of recent years.

Chemical

When you dig into it, most electrical effects are chemical in origin, involving the motion (there’s that word again!) of electrons. Aligned electron spins make a material magnetic, shifting of electrons from one material to another build up a charge differential, which can be released as static electricity, and so on.

So that implies that the energy might be in the direct form of chemical energy. Chemical energy is defined by Wikipedia as “the potential of a chemical substance to undergo a transformation through a chemical reaction [or] to transform other chemical substances.”

Chemicals which make chemical reactions occur at different rates, or even make them possible in the first place, are called catalysts, so in effect, what this is proposing is that “gate energy” acts as a catalyst.

But a catalyst for what reaction? Messing with the biology of the organism is difficult and complicated – so I’ll come back to that option in a moment.

Combustion

Instead, let’s look at a couple of other possible catalytic reactions. One of the most obvious would be to trigger a combustion reaction in selected substances that don’t normally burn (or don’t normally burn without exposure to great heat). In Iron and steels, this process is also called Rusting (and it usually happens very slowly). Aside from potentially explaining one of the more fun creatures in the AD&D lexicon, the Rust Monster, this offers an evil something else you can do to metal-wearing PCs!

(Some people might think that metal won’t burn. Stuff and nonsense – get some steel wool and tease the fibers apart and you can set it ablaze with a match or by brushing it against a 9-volt battery. See this youTube video.) The more compact the steel, the harder it is to set it alight because the metal tends to conduct the heat away, that’s all.)

Pressures

Pressure inside a vessel is the result of a substance being confined within a smaller space than it would “like” to occupy. If the pressure is too great for the object doing the confining, the object breaks or explodes, liberating the contents in a pressure explosion. One way of causing pressure to increase is to heat the container and substance inside (here’s a link to part of a Mythbusters segment showing what happens – note that they had to disable a number of safety features designed to prevent this from happening!)

But heat isn’t the only way. Some chemical reactions release gasses or create substances that naturally want to occupy more space than the original source did. The result is the same: pressure.

Polymerization

Next option: turning oil (in lamps and lanterns) into a plastic sludge. Doesn’t need much more explanation, does it? For more information (if necessary, just to confirm the validity of the theory), click this link.

Enzymes

Okay, so we’re edging closer to biological reactions. In biology, the equivalent of a catalyst is an Enzyme. But the effects are still too complex for our purposes.

Potions

So let’s get exotic and turn attention to Potions. There are two possibilities to consider under this subheading: that the potions are unaffected (because there’s no biological process to change until the potion is consumed), or that there is a change in the nature of the potion, possibly at random or semi-random.

The first one seems trivial – but it isn’t. I’ll come back to it.

Changing one potion into another seems workable, but there’s a problem – most potions are designed to have a positive benefit, and random changes say that half the time, the consequences should be undesirable. There are two ways of correcting for this – stating that half the time, the potion has the opposite effect, or stating that in most of those half-cases, it simply becomes a poisonous substance. I would actually throw in a small percentage chance of no change, another small percentage chance of diminished or increased effectiveness (halved or doubled), and chance equal to the “no change” of something exotic happening, like the potion becoming a non-cubical Gelatinous Cube (maybe it would become cube-shaped if released from confinement in the vial), or Black Pudding (just to go completely old-school on you).

Potion Miscibility

Finally, we’re in a position to simulate chemical energy being introduced into the body of a traveler in a practical way. The method is to employ another old-school plot device: the potion miscibility table. I’m not sure that this was ever canonical, despite its appearance in 1st edition D&D – but here’s an official WOTC link….

Cold

“Cold” isn’t normally something we think of as an Energy. It’s normally considered to be the absence of heat. But this is fantasy, where strange things can apply, and “Cone Of Cold” (in D&D / Pathfinder) and various cold-based effects (Hero System & general superhero games) are a lot easier to cope with conceptually if you think of cold as being a force that is inimical to heat, just as heat is inimical to cold.

Amusingly, the same things that make armor-wearers more vulnerable to electricity and heat – the conductivity of metal – also leaves armored characters vulnerable to intense cold.

Even more amusingly, unlike external cold, we’re talking about an infusion of energy – so wearing furs and the like won’t protect you, and neither will rings and other magic defenses.

Magical ‘Energy’

So, what happens when you soak up magical energy? When your magic items soak up magical energy? When one or both exceeds it’s capacity? When you cast a spell, or are the subject of a spell, while in this condition?

One of the most obvious possibilities is simply that whatever the effect is, it exceeds your control. A shield spell raises your AC so much that air can’t get in. A fireball spell triples in effect and goes off at your fingertips. There is an obvious correlation that should apply between an effect being as strong as you can cast not because of the strength, but because of control, and that implies that any loss of control should have negative consequences at least most of the time. It’s possible that what might happen is simple leakage so that what was supposed to affect one target instead targets multiples (making no distinction between friend and foe), but that’s about as beneficial as it’s likely to get.

ANY effect can be harmful if taken too far, and if the GM is creative enough.

Spiritual ‘Energy’

This is an obvious corollary to the Arcane Energy option. But (aside from the possibility of replicating the Arcane effects for Clerical spells), I have to admit that I’m coming up dry when it comes to effects. Maybe everything I’ve already put into this article has my brain temporarily fried, but nothing’s happening – so I’ll leave it at that, and move on.

Negative Energy

This is a fairly self-evident option, if a nasty one. It could manifest as a loss of hit points, but that seems fairly tame. You could rule that it does so many d6 of negative hit points, and that if this total exceeds HD+HP Bonus, the character loses a level before the remaining negative HP are applied. Or you could make it CON loss, or you could rule that one in three, four, or five level losses are actually CON losses.

This actually brings up a pet bugbear of mine: Negative Energy losses are too easy to overcome in D&D. One spell and they’re done? Pshaw. This stuff should be scary.

So here are some House Rules to nasty it up. A Lot.

A) DC to overcome Negative Energy effects and permit them to be recovered at the normal rate:

1. Multiply the number of levels “lost” to negative energy by the Maximum HD size Less the character’s Con bonus.
2. Add any HP lost in the attack or effect, including any done as ordinary damage.
3. Add five for every point of stat loss.
4. Add ten for each other effect, if any.
5. Halve the total, rounding down.

B) The amount of recovery that is possible after such treatment is the amount by which the spellcaster’s total exceeds this DC. This can be applied to a lost stat (uses 5) or to recovery of a level (uses HD size+CON bonus).

C) A character who successfully “heals” any part of negative energy damage suffered by another cannot make another attempt to do more for as many days as the DC that they had to overcome have passed.

D) A character who attempts to “heal” such negative energy damage and fails cannot make another attempt until they gain a character level in the class whose ability was being used, and no character of lesser character level may make such an attempt.

E) Until the character suffering the effects of Negative Energy recovers ALL lost levels, the number of lost levels multiplied by the spell level of any healing spell or Cure spell used on the character is deducted from the benefits received from such a healing spell, eg, Cure Moderate Wounds (Level 2 for a Cleric) on a character who has lost 4 levels to negative energy, reduces the normal benefit of such spells by 2×4=8 points.

F) A character suffering from the effects of Negative Energy are considered to have an effective maximum hit points equal to their total after the negative energy effects are applied.

G) This also applies to any calculation of consequences for excessive Positive Energy, i.e. Positive Energy doesn’t overcome the effects of Negative Energy, the latter just makes you go boom that much faster.

H) Negative Energy can be left to heal naturally. This occurs at the rate of 1 HP per week, 1 Level per month, OR 1 point of stat loss per year. Characters cannot heal more than HP Dice Size plus CON Bonus in hit point losses in this way without then healing a negative level or stat loss. Recovery is slow and difficult.

I) Negative Energy Levels count for 1/2 a level each for other level-related calculations EXCEPT XP required to advance. So if you lose 4 character levels to Negative Energy, your chance to hit, Feats, etc, are calculated as though you were TWO levels below your actual level and not FOUR.

J) Characters suffering ANY form of negative energy levels cannot advance in level until they have earned XP sufficient to bridge this gap, PLUS what they need to advance. So if were 10th level and you lose (effectively) 2 levels due to negative energy effects, you are effectively 8th level, but before you can gain 11th level (and effectively be 9th level), you have to earn (Pathfinder Medium Advancement) 24,000 + 30,000 + 50,000 = 104,000 XP more than you needed to get to 10th level (105,000). Character development is GLACIAL compared to unaffected characters.

K) Rather than reducing skills or losing skills, negative energy level losses are multiplied by the character’s normal Skill Points per level and the result distributed by the player as negative modifiers to skill checks. The character can choose to apply these at the normal rate for the improvement of a skill and it’s a temporary loss, or can double the number of skill points of “loss” that is represented for a permanent, never-to-be-lifted negative modifier, that’s up to the player.

Negative energy effects aren’t necessarily crippling to a character, but recovery from them is NOT as simple as casting Restoration.

Life

Life is good, life is sweet, life restores hit points, life makes you explode… literally, if you absorb too much of it. Life is Positive Energy, and there’s only so much of it that you can take.

Note that it’s entirely possible that you get Negative Energy passing one way through a portal and Positive Energy on the return trip…

Idea #17 – Losing Energy In Transit

I don’t have to go too deeply into detail on this one; rereading the relevant “gain” entries should make things fairly clear. Suffice it to say that the only thing worse than gaining energy might be losing it!

Idea #18 – It’s Electrifying: Portals Are A Planar Battery

Only for the engineers out there. If two sides of a portal are at different energy potentials (regardless of the type of energy), that differential can be used to do work – making the portal a source of energy that can be exploited.

I had this be the “solution” that one space-time came up with to imminent heat-death in the Zenith-3 campaign. They quite literally began pumping in energy from a space-time that wasn’t facing heat-death for quite a long time (and in which the PCs happened to be living), or rather their greatest scientist did, and was hailed a hero for his efforts. In effect, this began to reverse the flow of entropy in his space-time while accelerating it in the victimized space-time; in due course, an equilibrium would have been reached in which the work required to pump more energy in would match that which was achieved by the process – at which point, he would have switched to some other victim space-time. In effect, he had expanded the “closed system” of his space-time to suddenly encompass both the space-times that he had connected and energy differential took care of the rest. His process had been operating for a millennium before the consequences were even noticed in the PC’s local space-time, and at first they were mistaken by scientists for a new class of Supernova, the “infrared supernova” – ever since, those scientists have been trying to incorporate the mistake into their cosmology. The PCs discovered the truth and shut down the entropy siphons – and a millennium from now, that will be noticed by earth-bound scientists as well.

But there are lots of lesser applications, suitable for widespread neo-industrial application. Let’s say that we’re talking about Light – that means that you can light a city with a million mini-portals, each of which radiates light constantly. Heat? Cooking, Home warmth, and industry – independent of fuel. And so on; you can see the potentials.

The problem is that these will almost certainly all have been discovered by accident, and not be well-understood – if they are understood at all. The energy is coming from somewhere, not necessarily in the same form, and that somewhere might be overjoyed (if you are bleeding off an excess that could destroy them), outraged (if you are stealing their necessary supplies) or alarmed (if you are undermining a central pillar holding the cosmology together) – depending on who they are and how well they understand what’s going on. If they are only a little better-informed, these might all be strictly theoretical consequences, and there would be a diversity of views – and a diversity of opinions concerning what to do about it.

Oh, and if you think my plotline is unlikely, take a read of

• , and

– both of which were published years after I ran my adventure!

Ideas #19 & 20 – Bad Is Good

In the last part of this series, I offered up Idea #13, Socio-Ethical Morphology through Portal Networks. I’m closing this series by taking the term “energy” as a metaphor for the momentum of events, and giving them a massive twist.

There are two alternatives: Global and Local.

Idea 19: Global

“Global” means that everything that the PCs were/are supposed to do in their normal universe, they have to do the exact opposite of in the newly-accessed universe. If they have to defend the kingdom against a Troll Army in one, they have to join the Troll Army in destroying the Kingdom in the other. Alignments and personalities remain unchanged – but the entire set of priorities is twisted and inverted.

Once you’ve figured out what the circumstances might be to bring about a consistent world in which things are so radically different (and yet the same), this sort of world becomes a cinch to create; every time you end in a contradiction, simply invert something until the contradiction goes away.

This technique can also be invaluable in terms of shedding light on obscure aspects of your original campaign world that you are having trouble figuring out!

Idea 20: Local

My final suggestion is that nothing is different – except the role that the PCs have carved out for themselves in the plotline. The NPC good guys are still good guys, the NPC bad guys are still bad guys, the basic situation is the same – but in one, the PCs are on one side and in the other, they are opposed to it.

For an added twist, keep the PCs alignment and personalities unchanged, and twist the circumstances in which everyone finds themselves. The more black-and-white everyone’s behavior, the harder this is; but if you have shades of gray in your character’s morality, and are willing to completely rewrite the history that brought everyone to this point, the results can be a haunting exploration of the road not taken – in advance. Which can be a great tool for the PCs to decide a number of things, like how far to go, that they may be equivocating about. And, in general, it’s the last thing that the players expect.

Conclusion

Of course, if you implement all of these possibilities, no-one would ever dare go near a portal. Heaven only knows when or where it might lead! Applied in small measure – or perhaps, configurable through flaws in the creation process, or deliberate intent – you can have player’s heads spinning in no time. It might be, though, that without careful planning and expenditure of effort and arcane resources of the most expensive kind, any portal is inherently unstable – and each time someone passes through it, you roll a d20 for which of the effects described in this series will be experienced. It might be a LONG walk home for someone!

So this officially brings Campaign Mastery’s hosting of this particular episode of the Blog Carnival to an end. Just in case there’s a tardy response or two, I won’t do the usual roundup for a week or so, but the carnival now officially moves to jamesintrocaso’s World Builder Blog. The subject: Homebrew Holiday Gifts. Best of luck with it, James!