Architectural Marvel
I’ve recently decided to immerse myself in nonsense fantasy. The magical portal worlds of Every Heart a Doorway are populating my Audible. The metaphorical morass of a Changeling campaign is cresting my RPG horizon. And just this evening, my illustrator and I enjoyed a merry un-Valentine’s date in Wonderland. It may be the tea and gin swamping my system at the moment of this writing, but I feel confident in saying that there’s value in uninhibited imagination.
So often as fantasists, we are told to explain ourselves. Where are the toilets in this dungeon? How does the dragon stay aloft with all that weight? What horticultural secrets does the underground dwarf kingdom employ to feed itself sans sunlight?
No doubt you are mentally drafting your reply to this comic: If you can create a flying tower you can cast create food and water. They take on hardtack and jerky and barrels of drinking water when they land. Here, let me link you to the Tippyverse. This is obviously a post-scarcity flying tower!
You can get a lot of mileage from that style of fantasy. Coming up with practical, rational explanations is part of the worldbuilding craft: a skill that comes hand in hand with the drive to verisimilitude. But do you know what my favorite flying tower is? It’s the bizarre chicken-footed deus ex machina from Mirrormask. If you’ve never seen it, the film is a Wonderland par excellence. The plot is a journey through a literal dreamscape, and the story neither asks nor expects you to justify its CGI shenanigans. When that tower comes down, questioning its provenance is beside the point. The moment is magic, and the “marvel” is more important than the “architecture.”
My point here is this. When it comes to TRPG worldbuilding, you’re allowed to let go of the rational. Present your players with the flying tower. Show them the ancient engine. Let them catch of glimpse of the interplanar behemoth swimming beneath the oceans of your world. If there is an explanation, it will fire within the imaginations of your players. Stirring that sense of wonder is the point, and showing them the blueprints is tantamount to explaining your magic trick.
Question of the day then! When have your presented a mysterious wonder to your players, and left them to come up with an explanation? Is there a brooding mystery that underlies your setting? A mythical beast that probably doesn’t exist? Or does it make you uncomfortable when a Nat 20 lore check fails to produce a detailed block of bestiary text? Sound off with all your least-logical wonders and most explanation-defying enigmas down in the comments!
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Finally, we meet Cleric’s brother-in-beard!
I am certainly guilty of rationalizing and poking fun at the physically impossible or the practical sensibilities of places. The lack of toilets or bathing areas in D&D is staggering!
And unless they brought a hygiene kit, grooming kit, or a bar of soap in their starter gear, most adventurers do not have any concept of personal hygiene or grooming until they take a dip in the local lake.
And the tower in this strip! Those wings could never support such a non-aerodynamic structure! How has it not tipped over, letting both the Dwarves fall to their doom down below?
Hygeine: the reason to always have a party member with Prestidigitation!
As we’ve learned from the recent Rings of Power controversy, that could easily be a sister-in-beard.
Also, I’m now self-conscious about my lack of adventuring soap.
Soap is like a copper. Most of my characters buy it. My Dwarf would occasionally huck it at the Elves because they “Smelf”.
Mystery is a big theme for one of my homebrew settings I’m working on, with vast swathes of knowledge having been permanantly lost in the recent cataclysm. One such mystery is “why there is a mortal warrior who can fight an army single-handedly?” And my real reason is: The setting is based on the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and I wanted a Lu Bu style figure to cause some mayhem.
That just sounds like a high-level PC to me.
So I assume you’re not playing D&D, because they the answer would be “Because it’s D&D”
Any invention in paranoia. I think I listed few a while back. Personal favourite is eject seats launching you upwards on helicopter.
Most inventions in Paranoia are just traps you willingly trigger. Like the Mutant-detecting helmet (which immediately fries you for being a mutant).
Ever heard the story of traitor finder? Upon activating it it kills the user as only a traitor would be eager to test it as thta way they are safe from it as theybare behind it’s detector.
This kills the mutant commie traitor.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/this-kills-the-crab
In terms of history specifying commie traitor is unneccesary as commies are traitors, no need to specify as there is no such thing as non-treasonous commie… suck it reds your side lost that means treason is your sin. Even founding fathers of USA understood that only way to avoid traitors pay was to win, and you lost (1918 Finnish civil war).
A player in my game was once travelling by sea when beneath him, through the clear blue water, he saw a glowing worm-like thing that he estimated at a mile long turning over and over, making beautiful patterns in the water a hundred or more feet below. Upon making telepathic contact, he received nothing but an impression of immense age and a set of images of thousands of the things swimming through infinite seas in bygone days
His eyes lit up. “Oh, I get it! It’s a huge aboleth!”
I smiled. “Aboleths don’t exist in my world.”
It remains one of my favourite explorationstories of all time.
Reminds me of the game Sunless Sea and its infamous “giant eye on the bottom of the ocean.”
There’s a great moment in one of The Magicians books where it’s implied that whale are keeping eldritch abominations at bay through some subtle form of non-human wizardry. It’s a throwaway line, but I loved the implications.
As someone who’s worked on archaeological dig sites, my first instinct is to reach for plausible, grounded architectural design in my campaigns. That said, there are always times and places where rational construction needs to be thrown out the window and pure whimsy embraced.
In our next campaign, where we’re trading off DMs, we have collectively agreed that everything and ANYTHING goes, because a beholder demigod is slumbering beneath the campaign setting. As it dreams, reality reshapes. Tuesday those were mountains, Wednesday comes and now it’s a desert. Or a carnival. Or a really touchy horde of rabbits. The only constant whatsoever are the PCs.
It’s going to be a wild ride!
Funny how we grownups require “chaos magic” or “it’s a dream” to excuse our flights of fancy.
I’d forgotten that 5e gave the beholders the loumaras’ old schtick
> What horticultural secrets does the underground dwarf kingdom employ to feed itself sans sunlight?
Mushrooms in the mountain, and Inca-style terrace-farming on the mountain.
For meat they eat Rust Monsters that they fatten up with discarded surplus.
Also most of their alcohol is made from fermented mushrooms.
They also get fish from underground rivers.
I have never seen an illustration of a dwarven mountain terrace. Kind of sad, really.
That’s just on account of ’em being hidden valleys deep in the mountains far from the pryin eyes of the flatlanders.
My dwarves in my latest campaign are underground farmers using heat instead of sunlight and hot vent hydroponics. But mushrooms of all shapes and sizes feature heavily in their diets. There is even a plot point that will come up where the party will meet a group of “barbarian” dwarves living in distant (fromt he campaing’s seat of governance) mountians that still have a lost version of “cave wheat” so their bread taste different and it will give the dwarf PC an opportunity to set up trade or try to obtain some seeds or cuttings to take back home.
Not exactly the same, but when I ran the AP book “In Search of Sanity” (Strange Aeons 1) as a solo campaign, I replaced the overarching enemy, the Great Old One Hastur, with a creation of my own called Nyogetha. I did this because one of my players is a big Lovecraft fan, and while that sometimes lets him notice and enjoy the book’s many obscure references, I thought it would be better for tone if he didn’t have foreknowledge that the characters would not.
Nyogetha, known as “the Prism” and “the Refractor of Reality”, is Chaotic Neutral, because I find Lovecraft entities most interesting when they are alien and strange but more uncaring than malicious – lean too much into cults and sacrifices and actual plans issued by the entity and you’ve just got a demon lord with a different subtype. Nyogetha’s thing is that she swims through the Dimension of Dreams, shifting between the appearance of a giant sea creature and a vaguely humanoid shape. As thoughts, dreams and minds pass through her intangible body, they are refracted, scattered and then reassembled – but never quite in the order they were originally. This means she causes madness and mutation by her mere presence, without necessarily noticing. She does occasionally interact with humanoids, but only the already-mad can understand her – her attempts at sentences are otherwise gibberish word salad, as she doesn’t process language and ideas the way we do. Under very rare circumstances, she may absorb someone mad enough to communicate into herself, in what she (and often the subject) perceives as a symbiotic relationship. Again, she’s not really attempting to harm anyone (to the extent she can even perceive them), but her presence in any inhabited area is intrinsically harmful, especially if a hole to the Dimension of Dreams has been opened up allowing dream-madness to alter reality. In fact, an ancient civilization interpreted her as a hostile bringer of disease and attempted to kill her, but instead brought ruin on themselves and set up the events of the book by sealing her away instead of letting her drift naturally onward. The Tatterman is not a direct servant of Hastur in my version, but an independent entity composed of the fears and urban legends of the asylum patients chopped up and mindlessly reassembled by Nyogetha. He still considers her his “mother”, though, even if she is effectively unaware of his existence.
I think combining the idea of crystals refracting light and giant sea creatures swimming in the dark has made something much more interesting than “bad thing with tentacles that you lose SAN if you look at.” Because of the book’s focus on dreams, I get to show a lot of this through trippy dream sequences that I write out and give to the players. The central image is looking out a window of the building they are in and seeing it at the bottom of a dark ocean, with Nyogetha swimming around, ripples from her movement occasionally buffeting the building.
Interesting contrast to the Glass Cannon version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UAqWotIAUw
They hear “Hastur” and “Carcosa” and immediately go to town with the literary references. I’m always nervous that I’ll make extra work for myself in later books when I stray too far from an AP’s lore, so I ran the un-changed version as well.
Props to you for adapting to the player though. Achieving a “cosmic horror” feel is tough when you’re dealing with super-powered Pathfinders PCs, so good luck in your attempt!
It’s worked pretty well. I probably wouldn’t have done such a dramatic overhaul if I was planning to do the entire AP instead of just this one book. That also makes the cosmic horror tone a lot easier, in that the PCs only ever reach 4th level.
I also have my final twist – the PCs are, like the Tatterman, dream matter made flesh, but they don’t know it yet. They don’t have amnesia because their minds were wiped, but because they never had that many memories in the first place. They’ve learned a lot about events they were supposedly involved in before their amnesia, but haven’t yet realized that they aren’t those people, but rather Ulver Zandalus’s memories of those people, brought to life by his subconscious to try and stop the Tatterman and end the crisis. There have been some fun twists built off of that (like documents claiming that one PC died several years ago, or that another one is currently institutionalized at another asylum), but I haven’t yet seen if the final revelation will stick the landing. I’m hopeful, though.
Very cool! My players moved cross-country towards the end of book 1, so I had to scramble to end book 1 (and the campaign) in a satisfying way. I wound up making vague gestures towards the witch, ultimately leaving the plot mysterious. If I’d known that we were only doing book 1, I’d have much rather gone for your ending. Sounds satisfying to me.
There’s a scene from the Invader Zim Christmas ep where the storyteller bot is asked an inconvenient question about some plot hole or another in the story. He smiles at the child tumor bot thing, pats it on the head, picks it up, and slides it under the couch.
I kid thee not, I consider this one of the most practical lessons in storytelling for writing and GMing.
There is a child tumor bot in all of us, and they all deserve to be slid under the couch.
Many times i got explanations in case they are needed. If they come with something i let them go with it, if it’s relevant that they were wrong so will they be. Yet, also i like to use that kind of moments to add small hints. Like if the tower didn’t got baths, why? Who made a tower without baths? Strange things that don’t make sense, even plot holes are to be filled with even better things 🙂
“When have your presented a mysterious wonder to your players, and left them to come up with an explanation?”
Most of the time. It’s something one of my long time Players hates (kinda, he’s come to ‘accept it’ begrudgingly), but I very rarely bother to explain things in advance. In other words, unless it’s plot relevant, I (as GM) don’t care how the castle flies/walks/howls, how the rift got there, what the dwarves eat, or what Wizards do with their poo.
Until a PC asks. Until a //Player// cares enough to go looking for answers, I just don’t care. But once they go looking for answers? Sometimes the PC generated ideas are the right ones, sometimes they aren’t. Let them be right too often and they’ll start to run roughshod over the game, explaining things in ways to better themselves or make the way easier… got to keep things just unexpected enough that they think the answer might be different everytime.
“Is there a brooding mystery that underlies your setting?”
Yes. No I won’t tell you what it is, just in case a Player wanders through here. But ti’s one that will be revealed in dribs and drabs and teased out a little at a time.
“A mythical beast that probably doesn’t exist?”
Often. I like to randomly through in rumors of things that are truly myths, not “mythical” in that it’s from myth but exists int eh world, but that some guy made up a story and it’s a shaggy-dog story.
“Or does it make you uncomfortable when a Nat 20 lore check fails to produce a detailed block of bestiary text?”
I run by the seat of my pants so that can’t happen. I’ll just spool off a few paragraphs of Lore for the Player and make sure I note it all down. That’s how most things get done in my game anyway.
Good call about keeping things balanced. Your setting will feel unmoored if you fail to explain *anything.*
Okay, so! While I’m telling every stranger everywhere, lemme add you guys, I finished the first full draft of my novel last week, and Inquisitor and Magus cameo in the middle of it, and I’ve been bursting with pride for this whole week. Tomorrow I start the interesting process of going back to Chapter 1 and saying “Oh *god* how did I convince myself to write that rubbish?” That’s how second drafts begin 😀
The marvel being more important than the architecture to keep magical things magical is a concept that I got to touch on in the novel, and I anticipate getting to do a lot more of it in the second one. That’s really just the best baseline, though, the most important thing about magic is that it’s magical and not mundane, and all of it is not yet discovered.
While I’m thinking about my book, though, that was one of the hugest pieces of writing advice I got at a critique meet-up that I may have spoken about before. I was giving all these huge blocks of exposition, two characters talking to each other, and every three sentences was a two paragraph explanation for what they were talking about. The least interesting thing to say when you’re talking about something you made up is “Oh, and it works perfectly for a lot of reasons, here’s why.” I’m looking forward to this rereading experience with something that approaches morbid fascination.
I’m also reading Overgeared again, and your conversation plays a big part in the story where I’m currently at, so it gets an honorable mention as being worth a read if you’re so inclined.
Grats on finishing! My biggest piece of advice is to limit your beta readers to a small number. I had half a dozen, half of whom liked half, half disliked the other half, and couldn’t decide which half was right. All those opinions made the rewrite a muddle.
Thanks for the advice! It sounds like a handy rule of thumb to go by.
I’m a big fan of magical (or at least very improbable) terrain. Like mid-air rivers, floating islands, crystal archipelagos, fleshy earth, wax tree forests, lavafalls, arctic jungles (in either way you want to take the meaning of that), ash deserts, etc.
(All of the above are things I have or at least planned to include in game settings.)
I’ve also had a character concept kicking around in my head for a while of a traveling merchant that sells bottle weather-type stuff, like “dawn’s light”, “autumn eastward wind”, or “forest after rain vapors”. Just y’know, little natural sensory delights…. put into a bottle. How? Why? Who cares!?
I dig those fairytale elements. Reminds me of the stuff you trade away to the fae for safe passage.
I once had the PCs investigate an “uncanny valley” that was a flat meadow where walking to the center felt like walking downhill.
There were other signs and portents (coins whose metal and minting matched no known kingdom from history, found only in very old hoards; mile markers in strange languages, that, when translated, have impossibly incorrect distances; etc.). I knew what the answer was and what I was building to, but very few parties even came close to the final mission (Dimensional Travel!). Every group, however, pondered and made up their own guesses as to what it all meant.
Now I have yet another group and I’m seeding their adventures with hints and possible plot hooks. We’ll see if anyone bites.
Did something similar to your uncanny valley recently. It was a mythos fight, and I had great fun describing the players peering up at the monster… then walking down to meet it.
You know, on a flat world walking towards the center would feel like walking downhill
Oh man, the Tippyverse. I kind of have to pay homage to that entire field of study for influencing my own setting design. On the topic, I say just develop anything you have, but always let the players have authority in whatever they encounter or make.
*the influence wasn’t that great though.