Dwarves and Weather

It makes sense that a civilized underground race like the Dwarves would treat things we take for granted like the sun, moon and weather as we treat arcane astronomical phenomena. This means:

• Advanced dwarven settlements often have an above-ground observatory with wind gauge, rain meter, mercury column, smoked glass for observing the Sun, and other such equipment.
• Ouranology is the civilization advance responsible for maintaining an objective, sun-based standard of timekeeping, because dwarven settlements with a sleep-cycle-based calendar diverge greatly over long periods of time. But timekeeping by the moon? Weird, occult, something humans and elves do.



Very advanced ouranologists observe the clouds up close

• Superstitions spring up about fate and basic personality depending on the state of the sun and moon at  time of birth (So you're an Afternoon Waning? Far out, so am I)
• Dwarves who venture above ground are seen as cosmonauts of sorts, and there is fussing about the optimal weather conditions and possible catastrophes that seems baffling and neurotic to humans.
• Continuing the analogy, dwarves with lots of above-ground experience have physiological adaptations (no longer blinded by sunlight, losing their agoraphobia) akin to the effects of zero-gravity, that make them a little strange to those in their native habitation.
• When dwarves name things after the "Day" and "Night" (like the Day and Night Kings in Monte Cook's Ptolus, which brought this whole topic to mind) it's a lot more arcane and cosmic to them than when humans do.
• Dwarves sneer at any science or magic that gives importance to the stars or planets. Size matters, and the biggest things in the sky are clearly the sun, moon and clouds.

Fantasy Science

For the past six or so sessions I have been DM'ing the Band of Iron in an adventure set in an ancient compound on a remote, mountainous island, built by the lost race of Golden Men. It's fair to say that the adventure, while light on treasure, has opened up unknown vistas, revelations about cosmic and human history,and encounters with wonders unknown to our heroes so far.

Now, a classic conceit of Science Fantasy is to have the "wonders of the ancients" be the products of a technological civilization, even ours ...

YOU BASTARDS

Not so, the World of Mittellus. It's inevitable that a game of exploration eventually reveals deep secrets of the far past, but in doing so I consciously tried to avoid that particular cliche. My reasoning (Band of Iron players may read on, as you have already figured out what I'm going to say about the Golden Race):

The kind of adventure scenarios that D&D-type games support best involve medieval-level technology people journeying to a lost, mysterious labyrinth, there to confront monsters and perils, and haul back wondrous artifacts and treasures. As some have noted, this encourages a background assumption of a fallen world, consistent with many of the source inspirations for D&D. In particular, Jack Vance's Dying Earth gives a well-reasoned background for magic, in which the "basic science" that allowed generation of new spells has been lost, leaving only an "applied science" of spells learned by rote - literally crammed into the brain!

Specifically, let's think of any technique or technology as having four elements:

Research:  theoretical knowledge of the underlying phenomena generates new ideas;
Development: experimentation and testing creates new applications;
Engineering: specialist knowledge keeps the techniques running in a stable state; and
User Interface: the techniques are adapted for use by non-specialists.

In D&D, as in Vance, the Research stage has been lost - otherwise, the magic would look more like Ars Magica's theoretically coherent system. Wizardry in Vance is essentially Engineering, learning set spells at a great cost in training, and only rare and costly magic items present an easy User Interface. And D&D allows for spell research, but only by trial and error, typical of the Development layer cut off from Research.

Golden Race: so old they used Myspace.

The era of the Golden Race, I thought, would be one in which the Research and UI aspects of the color magic system had been fully developed, unlike the present Vancian age of the world Mittellus. Magical forces had been harnessed beyond the single spell; forget "Continual Light streetlights" when power, heat and illumination were provided by raw Red magic, force fields and matter creation by Blue, alteration by Yellow and so on. Additionally, the reversed colors of magic were understood; anti-Red gave stasis, anti-Blue gave utter destruction (great for garbage disposal), anti-Yellow preservation and so on.

On the user level, the most simple magical powers were coded into site-specific patches of color, as well as items, most of which are now lost or destroyed. More complicated procedures like medical regeneration required some degree of specialist knowledge and mental training.

For other people's games, the above analysis of technology provides an easy rebuttal to those who wonder why magic doesn't automatically lead to sorcerous streetcars and demonic dishwashers. If magic is confined to a guild where specialized knowledge is needed to wield it, then individual wizards may conjure up invisible butlers for themselves or for the masters they serve, but the lack of an large Engineering class means that magic never becomes an institution. Without the engineers of magic, its phenomena are confined to the lab and testing grounds.

Think of the analogy in technological fiction; it's no coincidence that the typical pulp techno-villain is someone who has hatched an advanced technique of mass control or destruction in isolation. The only thing distinguishing the D&D wizard from the Bond villain is the flavor of handwavium needed to explain their wondrous deeds.

Famous Teleportation Mishaps

How does teleportation work, exactly? That is, you are in one place, and then another; presumably, the air rushes in to fill the space after you are gone; but what happens to the stuff in the space you now enter?

Two possibilities. One, you somehow mingle with what you teleport into; the basis of both versions of The Fly, and of the nightmare scenario where you end up immediately dead after teleporting into a wall.

The other, which I prefer, is that you displace whatever you are teleporting into. Still leads to a sad and lonely death if you teleport into solid matter, but much more forgiving otherwise.

Of course, nothing says fantasy has to be consistent. Indeed, I'd think our intuitive approach to magical

teleportation is a mix of the two ideas. We like the gruesome consequences of teleporting halfway into a floor or ending up as a Brundlefly, but don't consider the consequences of mingling for normal teleportation, where your whole system would be pumped with a nitrogen - oxygen - CO2 mixture that probably would give rise to some version of the bends.

Summoning sickness, anyone?

Displacement, likewise, has some interesting side effects if applied consistently. For example, any wizard's district or magical academy where teleporting is practiced constantly would probably have an abundance of the hallmarks of slightly off teleports: footprints in the floor where a teleport went slightly too low, or in some cases craters where a wizard had to be dug out of solid rock.

One of the better dead ends in a dungeon might be one where, using detect magic, somebody dug their way to the entombed corpse of a way-off wizard to rob him for his enchanted loot. All that's left is the indentation of his body, maybe a skeleton, and a cursed item for the unwary ....

Call it pedantry if you like - but it's the good kind of pedantry, where working out the details of a consistent world leads not to "this can't happen" or "this is more boring" but "wow, really, that happens?"

Finally, for some reason, fantasy teleportation doesn't seem to arouse the same worries about scrambling matter that sci-fi* teleportation does, at least if game rules are anything to go on.  Maybe it's because we have an implicit model of magic as working off some idea of Platonic forms - a kind of object-oriented programming, if you will. Thus, the danger in a spell that changes the "location" attribute of "you" is not that you will be changed, but that you will end up where you don't want to be. By contrast, sci-fi teleportation works in a molecular physics of reality where it's much more clear that you will have to be disassembled and reassembled, monad by monad, giving rise to all sorts of philosophical dilemmas and wacky mishaps.

* Is the last person who viscerally hates this term finally dead?

Mundus Subterraneus

You're going to regret not putting your campaign in historical Europe when you hear about the Mundus Subterraneus of Athanasius Kircher. You may even want to put that book in your campaign regardless - a tome of strange lore containing dizzying hints and tidbits about the world below..

Like the Utriusque Cosmi of Robert Fludd, Kircher's two-volume work from 1664 hurls together a vast array of topics that today sit in very different buildings on campus. He tells us of geometry, physics, geology, astronomy, alchemy, even the reputed magical properties of gems...

Alabaster for stomachache ... Amethyst to resist drunkenness ...

but the emphasis keeps coming back to the "subterranean world" of the title, with how-to on mining and metallurgy, and a section explaining fossils as forms spontaneously generated by the earth - a precursor, perhaps, of Richard Shaver's strange ideas. There is a particularly rich section in the middle where Kircher describes his adventures in the craters of active volcanoes, and then indulges in sober speculation about the networks of fire, airy caves and water spanning the center of the earth, leading eventually to Hell and possibly Purgatory ...

and lays the seeds for generations of hollow-earth fictions and crackpots to come with lengthy passages about the underground ocean that creates the tides, and the creatures that lurk within the underworld - races of subterranean men, giants, demons, and several species of dragon and basilisk.

The possibilities for pseudo-historical adventure campaigning under the assumption that Kircher's ideas were mostly true cannot be underestimated.  Fantasy writers from Verne to Burroughs to Lovecraft have resonated with Kircher's "underdark." Even early on in the D&D universe, the existence of a vast network of tunnels and dwellings deep underground provided a logical continuation for players who had exhausted the depths of their local dungeon. What makes the better endgame, I ask: becoming lord of a castle and hearing the grievances of peasants all day, or equipping for the ultimate delve down rivers of flame and straight through the gates of Hell itself?

Articles and posts on the Mundus:

OU History of Science Collections
Public Domain Review 
Original text, e-book format

Eye Tyrants and Eye Trackers

It's always heartwarming to see my hobby world and research world (experimental psychology) inform each other. Such was the case with the talented Julian Levy, who used monsters and characters from D&D to test whether people's tendency to fixate on eyes is due to the attention-drawing powers of the eye no matter where it appears, or just a tendency to fixate on the head. A first-authored scientific paper at age 14? Not bad! (free access to paper until 30 November 2012)

I have my doubts, though, about whether the eyes are really the most attention-grabbing part of the body (pdf). Perhaps fantasy game art can come to the rescue again? Clearly further research is needed.

"Do I have to cast this GLOWING OWL FACE to get you to look up here?"

Ontogeny Recapitulates Monstrosity

Watch how this video montage of our embryonic development goes through all your favorite humanoids ... fish-people at 0:08 ... lizard-people at 0:18 ... then dog- and pig-faced people around 0:21 to 0:23.

Is it too much to imagine that a strange science or wizardry could create such full-grown monsters by arresting the morphological development of the embryo at any one of these stages while continuing its growth?

Or that - building on a teleological folk-conception of evolution where human form and intelligence are the obvious goal of the whole process - an even more devious procedure would prolong the gestation of animals to the point where they take on human morphology?

The monsters, they are us.

We Have Fuligin

Fans of Gene Wolfe's magnificent Book of the New Sun far-future novels will recall that the traditional color of the Guild of Torturers was fuligin - a fictional light-absorbing hue blacker than black.

It now exists.

I think that almost makes up for the now shaky scientific basis of Wolfe's technology for transferring memories from person to person.

If you want fuligin cloaks or garments in a D&D game, you will have to visit one of the Underdark's disreputable bazaars, bringing with you at least 1000 gold pieces worth of treasure; or take them from those few underground elves who have learned to weave elemental darkness into spider silk. Covering your body near-completely with fuligin, with black masks or veils over one's face, black gloves, and all equipment painted black, gives a +4 on d20/+20%/+1 on d6 for hiding in shadows. Wearing fuligin in public will attract awe, fear and no small amount of attention.