I have been thinking about this off and on for a while - not just for this game but also because I nurture ambitions of one day running a Mythago Wood campaign. (The eponymous wood looks like an ordinary smallish English wood but is actually vast - potentially infinitely big - once you get inside it.) It would look a bit like this:
The players mosey on down the corridor in the ordinary way. If they move around the walls of the chamber they find its circumference what it appears to be on the map (say, 300 yards-ish, because the chamber looks about 100 yards in diameter on the map's scale) but if they were to move across it they would be in, basically, a hexmap.
I feel as though this ought to be more difficult than it appears. The main thing to keep track of is just what hex the players enter. (The hexes would need to be numbered in reality of course.) They would then move around the hexes as though in a hex map, say on a 1-mile per hex basis. Once they got to the edge of the hex map, they would find the cavern wall wherever they emerged.
FLY, MY PRETTIES. Tell me whether there is anything about this concept that would make things particularly difficult to use in actual play.
I improvised a similar concept during last night's session (although far less thought-out than yours) in which the dimensions of a room were deceptive and seemed at one point to be miles high, and another to be merely 15 feet - which made things a trip during aerial combat. My players were weirded out (in a good way) but it was difficult to keep track of positioning.
ReplyDeleteI think the hardest part about running a hex map in the middle of a room like this would be to make it clear that there was this massive change in the way the room worked. If you describe them walking for miles across a regular-sized chamber, they will be utterly clueless.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that. You wouldn't be able to see across it. So looking at it "on the ground" your lantern would only illuminate a tiny portion of a hex and not the opposite wall. Out there in the dark there would also be all sorts of stuff to explore.
DeleteReminds me of House of Leaves, which is excellent throughout, wherein the central conceit is a house that is (at first) just a teeensy bit bigger on the inside than the outside. As far as lessons to be gleaned, if you're going for an unsettling feel, start the weirdness small instead of "you open the door and BANG you're in the middle of the prairie." (I suspect players would suspect they stepped through some otherwise-boring magical portal rather than realize that it's a time/space weirdness.)
ReplyDeleteYes, you are right. I think it has to be the case that the players move away from the wall into the darkness and gradually discover that they are in some sort of vast space as the ground gently slopes downwards beneath their feet. Maybe an entire ruined city or something. At some point, possibly weeks later, they have been climbing a gentle slope and reach a wall that looks oddly reminiscent of the one they left behind all that time ago.
DeleteReminds me of Imagine a Place, a kids book that my son loves. Each page is reality bending as something merges into something else, in many cases using perspective to screw with relative sizes of things in the way you're describing here. For example:
ReplyDeletehttp://4.bp.blogspot.com/_uv1z3r229os/SrodYcheLmI/AAAAAAAAAN8/d61IGxqMzMI/s400/Gonsalves_SteppingStones.jpg
This is really timely since I've been thinking of how to incorporate that kind of reality bending into an RPG.
Nice!
DeleteI think views of the wall would need to be carefully managed - can you see it when you look back? You might rule that after a few yards of advancement the wall is no longer visible - but is still there if the PCs retrace their steps. I think one thing that might make the concept work really well is if the PCs end up at another section of the wall (rather than a room entrance) through hexcrawling - giving them the opportunity for an "aha" moment and the chance to skirt round the wall. But that would obviously depend on the direction they take. I'd be tempted to throw in a river or something running across the room, to tempt them in that direction (it might turn into a trickle running between the stones of the wall, perhaps).
ReplyDeleteMythago Wood is obviously a great source of inspiration for this sort of thing. If memory serves, Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer has exactly this kind of scene where a room in the botanical garden's hothouse turns out to contain a vast space.
Yeah, that was what I was thinking. As the PCs move away from the wall they can still see it for as long as it is within eye-shot/lantern range. I absolutely agree that having them emerge at other wall sections rather than room entrances is important.
DeleteI had completely forgotten about that botanical hothouse scene. There is so much gameable stuff in The Book of the New Sun it is unreal.
Deleteive thought of mythago wood setting too....
ReplyDeleteThe wall room is mapped with hexes, but each time you come one hex close to the center, the scale doubles or triples so that the hex you arrived in is divided into seven hexes, each one being the size the one you just left. The stuff is thus recursive. The central hex always SEEMS to be the same size as the one you are in yet changes scale when you enter it.
ReplyDeleteI like that idea.
Delete(Shower thought) At the center is said to lie a mythic city beyond reach, that can be seen from pretty far. Although, as you come closer to it, you notice that it is SLIGHTLY off-centre and in the end the center is still unatteignable
DeleteThat sounds very cool. So you can never actually get to it. That reminds me of something from a fantasy novel but I'm not sure which one.
DeleteI tried this, but had troubles finding a solution for the case that the players would travel tangentially; how to tie all the hexes together in a coherent matter?
DeleteWhy won't you discuss something intelligent like the insane pronoun battle in Canada which reflects the Trump rejection of north american PC culture and european insane leftist immigration policy, which will see marxist governments topple in europe in the next five years.
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson
It is not as if you have some other political blog. D&D stuff is childish right?
I would be amazed if you didn't know this guy
https://www.youtube.com/user/SargonofAkkad100/videos
Oh fuck off.
DeleteKent, I can just go back to deleting your comments again. It's no skin off my nose. This isn't a blog for stupid culture wars debates of any stripe.
DeleteI would use an inverted hex map:
ReplyDeleteThe room or cave is in one hex. Once you enter the land, whenever you move towards the center, you move outwards on the map. Thus, you have first 6 hexes to move into (the 6 bordering hexes of the cave-containing hex) and the next ring contains 12 hexes etc. This means that the map (and thus land) gets ever more spacious, the more you travel away from the hex with the room.
The advantage of this approach is that mapping is no issue and you can easily keep track of things and still have the larger-than-available-volume-room effect.
You can do this indefinitely, but if you prefer to have a closed space, then you can use another hex-map of the same size; the outer edges of the two maps border each other, and the center of the second map is the center of the land within the room.
Does this make sense? If not, let me know; I will try to explain it differently.
It does make sense, although I think it would get difficult to map because you would end up having to draw/map out very small hexes quite quickly. It is a nice idea though.
DeleteI am not sure what you mean by small hexes. I would use the same area/size for all the hexes; both on the map an on how the PCs would experience the environment.
DeleteOf course this would physically not fit in the room, but that was the whole point.
Maybe my explanation was too unclear. If I have time, I will make a picture to make it clear.