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| Bosch |
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| Berkeley |
Preamble: I doubt that my players care about the metaphysics of my D&D world, but thinking about how it all fits together, makes imagining a world more fun for me. In order to keep it straight in my own head and perhaps provide an overview if anyone happens to be interested, I've started formulating my ideas on the page.
You think therefore you exist.
Your thoughts exist because you think them.
In the world of your imagination, you have full control. Everything is fully malleable to your whims and changes as you will it. When you forget or get distracted, it all disappears.
You are not the only consciousness, not the only will. There are others. We'll call them "souls."
How do you interact with other souls? There must be some shared space, an environment of interaction where your ideas and theirs coexist and where concepts are held in common. We call this "reality"
Reality is very different than your imaginary world. Its objects are not dependent on you for existence. It operates on rules external to you. You cannot rearrange everything merely by wishing it so. Instead you are limited by your position, limited by the force of your will, limited by the wills and perceptions of others. Fortunately, you have a vehicle for interaction, this is your "body."
A body is an intellectual tool, used for navigating shared reality. It compiles the compounding structures, rules and limitations that you encounter and organizes your perceptions into something comprehensible. This processed experience appears to you as the physical world. Matter and energy represent shared ideas. Physical space corresponds to conceptual positioning.
Your perceptive facilities manifest as bodily organs (eyes, ears etc.) and you affect the shared reality through the actions of your body. When your hand moves an object, it moves for everyone. You can communicate with other souls via manipulation of physical reality (like the air vibrations produced with your voice).
"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes"
- Ulysses, James Joyce
Participation in reality is non-elective. You are anchored to your body and through it, perceptions pour into your consciousness. All external information comes in through your body and is processed through the frame of physicality. Other souls perceive you and you are accessible to their wills. In a significant way, you are stuck in the material world.
This is your situation.
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This could describe "real" reality. I'll get into fantasy below.
Demons are perhaps the foremost antagonist in my D&D setting. I conceptualize them as a blend of traditional chaotic-evil D&D demons, Warhammer's chaos daemons and Lovecraft's malevolent Outer Gods.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
- The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
The expanse between worlds is not empty. Compressed into the spaces around coherent realities, demons fill the non-places in infinite numbers. They thrash and batter at the boundaries of existence, pressing in greedily, eager to corporealize and burn the world.
Demons are the incarnate manifestations of chaos. They hate structure and constraint above all else. The only thing saving the multiverse from overwhelming annihilation is their inability to organize.
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| DM notebook sketch |
When a wizard is tired or her message is mundane, she'll send a courier or put it on the clacks, just like us regular folks, but when a message is really important and secrecy is imperative she'll probably send it via fire.
Really, it's not that hard if you have an appropriately prepared brazier on each end and know the right semantic coordinates. A few minutes of concentration and poof, your face appears bobbing and flickering in your correspondent's flame, and their's in yours. It's a skill nearly every professional wizard knows.
Cunning wizards of particularly deft power don't even need a special preparation on the other end. They can speak or spy from any mundane fire. This has created a bustling trade in herbs and hearth additives to prevent this sort of intrusion.
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| Praman Nand on Hell 71 |
This is a concept that's been omnipresent in folklore and fantasy fiction but the above panel from Kill 6 Billion Demons has really stuck in my head.
When an archmage, demonlord, or other major, campaign-arc defining bad guy needs to communicate with his lieutenants, cultists or assorted party-level appropriate mooks, he can give them a call via a furnace level inferno. It'll project him super huge and scary and with a thunderous booming voice.
It makes him feel important. Better yet, it gives scrappy adventures a chance to interrupt a bad-guy teleconference and meet the Big Bad while they're still low level without getting squashed.
This week I ran another Gus L mini adventure, the Star Spire which features glass spiders as the primary antagonists.
Gus describes transparent spiders with venom visibly sloshing around inside their bodies. A very cool image! It started me thinking and I came up with a slightly different take that I really like:
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| I should have drawn eight legs |
# Appearing: 3-12
HP: 1
Size: Like a biggish dog.
Attacks: 1x per round. 1d4 damage + special.
Special: On a hit, roll a d6.
1: Head - 2x damage, face paralyzed, speech is impossible.
2: Body - 2x damage
3 - 6: Limb paralyzed and unusable.
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| Each player draws a little figure and marks paralysis |
I have been a big fan of Gus' dungeons & adventure modules for a long time. I introduced my little brother to old fashioned D&D with Hel's Crow's Final Rest. I've run Red Demon in the Swamp and Prison of the Hated Pretender 3+ times each (most recently using Mork Borg last May).
I was pre-disposed to love this dungeon.
