Strange Land/Plane Generator

There is Therefore a Strange Land continues, alongside New Troy (more on that in a future post). I keep describing TTSL as "Planescape meets The Magician's Nephew meets William Blake". The gist is as follows: at the start of play, one of the PCs inherits the home of a deceased uncle, which contains a study; inside the study is a portal to a liminal "vestibule" which in turn contains portals to other universes. Also inside the study is a series of clues and information about what the other universes are like and what they contain - and how to get into them. In addition to this, the game assumes an early-19th Century real world in which a vast network of secret societies of aristocrats, collectors, priests, devil-worshippers, thieves, royals, artists and poets know about the existence of other portals and universes and are busily engaged in trying to exploit them. So as well as adventuring in the "Strange Lands", the PCs also explore the (to me equally interesting) question of what happens in the real world when they bring things back...

Like Yoon-Suin it is mostly formed from random tables. I'm currently working on the "Strange Land" generator itself. This is what I'm fooling around with; there's a lot to be fleshed out (including all the subtables), but this will give an idea of the kind of thing I'm aiming for.

Strange Land Generator

Dice	Base Type (refer to subtables)	Psyche	Special Conditions*	Inhabitants**
1	Single element (subtable 1)	Neutral	Gunpowder/chemistry does not function	One species only
2	Mix of elements (blend) (subtable 1)	Pleasure	Unstable – has a 1% chance of collapse and regeneration as a new Strange Land after each visit	Appropriate inhabitants for base type
3	Mix of elements (distinct) (subtable 1)	Optimism	Very small – only a matter of miles or even metres
4	Maze/Construct (subtable 2)	Beginning	One human sense does not function
5	Tunnels (artificial) (subtable 3)	Light	Air is not breathable; special equipment, alchemy or magic required
6	Tunnels (natural) (subtable 3)	Pain	Many layers of different base types
7	Tunnels (mix) (subtable 4)	Barren	Gravity is very strong	Random distribution of intelligent races (2d6)
8	Single natural terrain type (subtable 5)	Ending	Gravity is very weak
9	Single climate type (subtable 6)	Dark	Gravity is sideways	Many gargantuan beasts
10	Mix of terrains (subtable 5)	Order	Gravity is reversed	Many demigods
11	Mix of climates (subtable 6)	Chaos	Bytopia type	Every individual is an amalgam of many species
12	Unusual***	Neutral	Many spheres separated by vaccuum	Every individual is a separate species

*Only roll if desired

**Think of your own, choose appropriately, or randomly determine from Monstrous Manual

***Inside the belly of a leviathan, an infinite lake’s surface covered in giant lilypads, a vast graveyard, a world of toadstools, etc.

Subtable 1 – Elements

Roll d3+3 times where the result indicates a blend or mix.

Dice	Element	Dice	Element
1	Earth	11	Mist
2	Air	12	Mineral
3	Fire	13	Radiance
4	Water	14	Storm
5	Void	15	Ice
6	Wood	16	Ooze
7	Metal	17	Magma
8	Salt	18	Smoke
9	Dust	19	Plasma
10	Ash	20	Nexus

  

Sutable 2 – Maze/Construct

Dice	Type
1	An infinite maze of traditional type – hedgerows and gardens
2	An infinitely large art gallery and/or museum
3	An infinitely large library
4	An infinite cabinet of outlandishly sized curiosities
5	A universe of gears, cogs, pistons, and/or clockwork
6	A vast metallic geometric solid, or a universe of them
7	An endless hall of mirrors
8	An infinite staircase with rooms leading off

Subtable 3 – Tunnels

Roll d3 times. For a mix, roll a d3 in each column.

Dice	Artificial	Natural
1	Wood-panelled corridors	The veins or digestive tract of a vast beast
2	Primitive stone	Volcanic caves
3	Advanced masonry	Solutional caves
4	Mines and construction works	Glacier caves
5	Giant worm, mole, ant tunnels	Infinitely deep sinkhole with caves leading off
6	Metallic corridors	Crystal caves

And so forth. 

Only in Dreams

Nobody is ever interested in hearing about other people's dreams. It's an instant conversation killer. Nevertheless, I'm going to tell you about one I had today. So fuck you.

I was driving with my missus in the dark in the city of Chester - though obviously, a dream-world version of Chester which wasn't really it. Somewhere along the way we got hopelessly lost; I was driving around hairpin bends, ending up in poorly-lit multistory car parks inhabited only by shadows, heading down cul-de-sacs and having to do sixteen-point turns to get out, etc. Eventually we ended up on a residential street of large, prosperous-looking houses in a leafy suburb. We drove for what seemed like an age before I decided to turn around and head back into the city; just as I was turning the car around the engine gave out and the car refused to start.

Annoyed, I got out of the car to call a breakdown service, only to realise neither of us had our phones with us. I was going to have to ask somebody to use theirs. For some reason, rather than ask somebody in one of the houses nearby, I decided to walk along the road, away from town, to see if I ran into a passerby. Ultimately I did - a moustachioed, smiling, rather too-nice middle-aged man carrying a small Christmas tree in each hand. He said he didn't have a phone, but if I walked back in the other direction I would eventually come across a house with the lights on, and if I asked there, I they would have a phone I could use.

I doubled back on myself and kept walking, looking for the house with lights on. But I didn't find it. Eventually I thought I'd been walking so far that I must surely have come across my car where my wife was waiting for me - but I didn't. It was nowhere to be seen and all the houses looked the same. With a growing sense of panic, I kept walking, half angry ("Bloody women! Where's she gone?" etc.) and half worried what had happened.

Somehow or other, without quite noticing it, I found myself walking not down that residential street, but down a well-lit corridor in a house, with a thick red carpet and magnolia walls. It was as if the street had morphed into some upper-middle-class family home; I don't know how I knew, but I knew that it was one of the houses on the street I had been walking down.

Outwardly, it was a friendly family home. The corridor went up and down small flights of stairs and landings, and there were pleasant-looking paintings on the walls, side cabinets with knick-knacks on, etc. But I felt uneasy there. I had a growing sense of dread. I knew that there was something wrong about it. I knew that I shouldn't be there, and that I hated the place. Even writing about it now gives me the willies - just walking down that corridor was oddly terrifying to me.

Every so often I would come across a door, either on the left or the right, and open it. And there would be something inside. One was a horrible young girl, much taller than me, with glassy staring eyes and this truly sinister, benign smile. One was a kind of giant centipede or worm constructed from cubes of wood connected with string; the head was that of a jack-in-the-box style clown. In another room I ventured inside and discovered a closet which I opened - inside it was a big ceramic doll without a head, wearing a blue Disney Alice-in-Wonderland style dress. Another contained a figure like an Inca mummy inside a sarcophagus, which I knew was still alive even though it didn't move. This went on and on - each time I opened the door I would find something horrendous and/or weird, and flee to the next one.

The final room I remember entering I walked in and found an empty room with an alcove in the corner, about the height of a person. It was closed off by a screen of silk or cotton; behind this screen I discovered a tall, wicker door. On opening it I was confronted by an old, withered man with wild hair, who looked at me and screamed in abject horror: I felt as though he had been there for years and years, held captive and now completely and utterly mad. With his scream echoing in my ears I woke up.

Now, there is a purpose to this entry: it's not just an opportunity to unburden myself of a particularly vivid and detailed nightmare. The second half of my dream, when it started to get genuinely scary, made me think a lot (after waking) about D&D. Walking down corridors, opening doors, discovering weird and horrible things behind them - the whole thing superficially resembled a dungeoncrawl, except one with a dream logic rather than Gygaxian naturalism underpinning it.

That made me wonder whether there isn't some mileage in the idea of a megadungeon in which the conceit is that it is a product of dreams. One of the great stumbling blocks I encounter when mapping and populating dungeons is to try to come up with reasons for things being as they are; why are the halflings living right next door to the red dragon? In some ways this spurs the imagination, but in other ways it constricts it. In the dream megadungeon there is no reason why things have to have an internal consistency or coherence. It is entirely liberating: it is fine for one room containing a clown-centipede to be next to one containing an Inca mummy, as long as, I suppose, there is a kind of thematic sense underlying it.

How People Lived

I'm currently working my way through Bill Bryson's At Home - a kind of popular social history of the Western world. Like a lot of Bill's recent output it's not quite up there with his travel books, which had me doubled over with laughter at their best, but it remains highly interesting - and, of course, there's plenty of grist in there for the RPG mill. Much of the book is a catalogue of how bloody awful life was in olden times; perfect for those running Warhammer, LotFP, or other grim and gritty games. 

On scurvy:

"Typically [scurvy] killed about half the crew on any long voyage. Various desperate expedients were tried. Vasco da Gama on a cruise to India and back encouraged his men to rinse their mouths with urine, which did nothing for their scurvy and can't have done much for their spirits either. Sometimes the toll was truly shocking. On a three-year voyage in the 1740s, a British naval expedition...lost 1,400 men out of 2,000 who sailed. Four were killed by enemy action; virtually all the rest died of scurvy."

On human waste:

"The people who cleaned cesspits were known as nightsoil men, and if there has ever been a less enviable way to make a living I believe it has yet to be described. They worked in teams of three or four. One man - the most junior, we may assume - was lowered into the pit itself to scoop waste into buckets. A second stood by the pit to raise and lower the buckets, and a third and fourth carried the buckets to a waiting cart. Nightsoil work was dangerous as well as disagreeable. Workers ran the risk of asphyxiation and even of explosions since they worked by the light of a lantern in powerfully gaseous environments."

On waste generally:

"At Leeds in the 1830s, a survey of the poorer districts found that many streets were 'floating with sewage'; one street, housing 176 families, had not been cleaned for fifteen years. In Liverpool, as many as one-sixth of the populace lived in dark cellars, where wastes could all too easily seep in. And of course human waste was only a small part of the enormous heaps of filth that were generated in the crowded and rapidly industrialising cities. In London, the Thames absorbed anything that wasn't wanted: condemned meat, offal, dead cats and dogs, food waste, industrial waste, human faeces and much more. Animals were marched daily to Smithfield Market to be turned into beefsteaks and mutton chops; they deposited 40,000 tonnes of dung en route in a typical year. That was, of course, on top of all the waste of dogs, horses, geese, ducks, chickens and rutting pigs that were kept domestically."

On hygiene:

"[T]he spread of plague made people consider more closely their attitude to hygiene...Unfortunately, people everywhere came to exactly the wrong conclusion. All the best minds agreed that bathing opened the epidermal pores and encouraged deathly vapours to invade the body. The best policy was to plug the pores with dirt. For the next six hundred years most people didn't wash, or even get wet, if they could help it - and in consequence they paid an uncomfortable price. Infections became part of everyday life. Boils grew commonplace. Rashes and blotches were routine. Nearly everybody itched all the time. Discomfort was a constant, serious illness accepted with resignation.... 

"Queen Elizabeth, in a much-cited quote, faithfully bathed once a month 'whether she needs it or no'. In 1653, John Evelyn, the diarist, noted a tentative decision to wash his hair annually. Robert Hooke, the scientist, washed his feet often (because he found it soothing) but appears not to have spent much time damp above the ankles. Samuel Pepys mentions his wife's bathing only once in the diary he kept for nine and a half years. In France, King Louis XIII went unbathed until almost his seventh birthday.... Most people grew so unused to being exposed to water in quantity that the very prospect of it left them genuinely fearful. When Henry Drinker, a prominent Philadelphian, installed a shower in his garden as late as 1798, his wife Elizabeth put off trying it out for over a year, 'not having been wett all over at once, for 28 years past', she explained."