The Gaming Outpost

  Five weeks ago we introduced the subject of designing the core concepts of an adventure with Antagonists, building the actions of the enemy and letting the player characters respond to this.  This is not the only approach to building an adventure; there are indeed many that work, and many that work well.

  Immediately upon thinking of the approach discussed there, it also occurred to me that many adventures were built on the concept of the quest, that the player characters are given some objective which has some value to them and so pursue this objective on their own initiative.  Even as I started to consider the concept, I recognized that there were at least three distinct ways to design a quest type of adventure, and that the three which had come to mind were fairly well correlated to three popular games that are often played at camp and by youth groups and community groups in suburban neighborhoods.  Each of these is worth considering individually.

  In case you didn’t catch the reference in the title of this article, the game of choice this time is Capture the Flag.  A simple description of how the game is generally played should help get your mind focused on how this can be used as the framework for a role playing game adventure.

  In Capture the Flag, the McGuffin–that thing that everyone in the story wants, so named by Alfred Hitchcock–is called a flag, and frequently looks more or less like one.  Each team knows what the flag looks like, and maybe even where it is.  Yet to capture their opponent’s flag (the object of the game) they must overcome the obstacles placed by their opponent.  The first team to reach the other flag and bring it back to its side wins.

  Although you could have a two-sided adventure of this sort, forget for a moment that the game normally has two sides.  What matters in this design is that the player characters have to get somewhere (and perhaps get back again), overcoming obstacles along the way, but that they are not locked into any particular way of doing this.

  That last part is important to this design.  The players get to decide which way they’re going to go.  They are not locked in to the referee’s planned course.

  Doctor Who fans will no doubt have seen the classic episode, The Five Doctors, in which several “regenerations” of the Doctor are gathered in one place.  One of them recites the poem:

To Rasilon’s Castle we go,
Above, between, below….

  Each of three Doctors follows a different path to reach the objective.  The first Doctor goes through the front door and finds his way past a wealth of tricks and traps such as stepping stones which must be followed in the correct pattern (as easy as pi).  The second passes a yeti and the illusion of old friends in trouble while coming up through caves and basement dungeons beneath the tower.  The third climbs a mountain past Cybermen and crosses a wire to the roof to come down from above.  Each encounters different obstacles along the way, but each arrives at the destination.  Any one of the paths was acceptable to reach the end, and that is the point of the flag capture design.  The players will never know exactly what they would face; but they need to have at least a rough idea where they have to go, and then the choice of how to get there is in their hands, as they assess what is likely to face them along each path.

  To design such an adventure, the referee needs an objective for the quest.  The obvious objective is that the players need to get something which is there.  I’ve been on such a quest for a Black Rose, which someone hired me to recover for them, and run such a quest in which a princess needed to find proof of her birthright.  However, it is no less a quest if the objective is to deliver something to the other end.  In this, I recall being bound by my character’s honor to escort a princess safely to her father’s kingdom, even though she was a drow princess and that kingdom was deep in the underdark where no one traveled.  There and back again is a valid design, but often it is sufficient to make the quest one direction.  The Poseidon Adventure is a one-way quest, as the trapped passengers attempt to find their way to freedom within the capsized liner.  Adventures in which the characters must accomplish something and reach a pick-up point are also one-way flag captures, perhaps in two stages, that is, reaching a first objective where something is accomplished and then reaching a second objective where the heroes are rescued.  Frodo’s quest to destroy the ring is in essence a flag capture; the objective is to reach Mount Doom, one way or another, so that the fires there will unmake the ring.

  Not all conceivable ways to reach the goal will necessarily succeed.  Dead ends are a genuine possibility in this sort of design.  However, it should not become effectively a maze.  It is inappropriate for the referee to suggest that there are multiple paths through when there is only one that will get through in reality.  The obstacles may vary in magnitude and in nature significantly.  It may be that the characters are prevented from reaching the goal because they failed to anticipate a hazard or obstacle which they could have overcome with forethought.  Part of the challenge of this sort of adventure lies in determining the best route to take given the available resources and abilities.  It should not feel as if this requires them to guess which one path actually reaches the goal; it should truly be that there are multiple possible routes which pose different hazards.

  The design can be up front about this.  There could be open strategy planning sessions in which information is given to the players (such as through non-player characters) indicating for example that one path would take a mere three days, but is extremely difficult, while another path has only minor hazards from bandits and stray creatures but will take three weeks.  Players should be able to suggest alternate routes and means, such as sailing around part of the land or flying over the mountains, if these are possibilities in the game world.

  This approach requires a great deal of general planning.  That is, before the adventure can even be discussed, the referee has to know the lay of the land between the starting point and the flag, how much is actually known about that by the people involved, and what the major hazards are likely to be.  It is not necessary, however, to plan all of these in detail.  As long as the referee has enough material to start the characters on whatever path they take and sufficient knowledge of what lies ahead to give them an idea of the situation, the details can be created after the quest begins.  Duplication of information is also quite acceptable.  The basic stats on the one hundred fifty spear-wielding orcs who live in the mountains can be identical to those of half of the three hundred sword-wielding orcs who live in the valley, particularly if the characters are going to take either the valley or the pass and so only ever encounter one of those tribes.  Obviously the various routes should not pose identical problems; but given that the player characters are only going to follow one of the available routes, they will be unaware that any particular problem they encounter, such as that bandit group that ambushes them somewhere along the way, would have struck no matter which way they chose.

  There are several ways to design an adventure as a quest.  This is a rather simple one structurally that offers plenty of opportunity for excitement along the way while giving the players meaningful choices in terms of their direction, their approach, and the kinds of obstacles they would prefer to face.  It is never entirely linear, but does tend to reduce the prep time the referee must do in that each directional choice made by the players tends to limit future directional choices; they ultimately will choose one path, so the others need not be so detailed.  (The most creative players may decide to increase their odds of success by splitting up and trying multiple paths; but as each path will entail game time investment, this should give the referee sufficient time to develop the multiple routes as needed.)  We’ll come back to other ways to design quests, and other approaches to adventure design, in the weeks ahead.  However, we won’t do that next week.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  As many of you know, I maintain a web site devoted to the discussion of time travel, Temporal Anomalies in Popular Time Travel Movies.  Because Multiverser allows time travel and provides brief theoretical structures for resolving the issues it raises within play, and because a lot of those theories were originally developed in response to the various time travel films that we had seen, it seemed a reasonable notion that science fiction fans might take an interest in the game if they were introduced to the concepts through discussion of the time travel ideas.

  That’s all by way of background.  In writing analyses of these movies, I came upon 12 Monkeys, and it has been a fascinating film to discuss.  It brings me more web-page-related e-mail than most of my pages.  Not all of it is about the time travel elements.

  Of great interest in discussions of the movie is the recurring dream sequence.  At least three times during the movie, the main character, James Cole, dreams of a man in a trench coat rushing through a crowd while waving a gun, and being shot to death by security.  In each replay of the dream, there is a different man in that trench coat.  Ultimately we learn that this dream is a memory.  When he was eight years old, he was at the airport, and he saw a man in a trench coat waving a gun shot to death by airport security.  He doesn’t remember seeing it; he remembers dreaming about it.

  I’ve had several discussions about those dreams over the years, and how dreams are sometimes related to memories; and in those discussions I have related a recurring dream of my own which was also related to a lost memory, and so has helped me to understand something about the movie 12 Monkeys, but also something about dreams and memories.

  I’ll relate the dream in a moment.  First, we’re going to prod our memories with a recap of the dozen articles which comprise the history of this column over the past quarter.  I’ll also note that the last time we did this was in Memory, three months ago.

157. Bands challenged the notion that the best of the best would always be able to work together.  So many character parties, if they were real people, would splinter as each hero started his own group.
158. We gave consideration to the tactics of villains in Resources, recognizing that they must at times improvise in response to situations, but that as referees we must be mindful of their limitations and not exceed them.
159. Catch considered the notion of an enemy that doesn’t intend to kill, or at least not yet, but only wants to capture the characters for some reason.
160. We’ve all been Snubbed at some point in our lives, and we’ve also made the mistake of snubbing others.  This idea suggests that those the characters have mistreated or disrespected in the past might come back to be a problem for them in the future.
161. Stained Glass looked at three songs from about the same time which drew from ostensibly the same inspiration, but came out very different.  It advised going back to that which has inspired in the past and looking at it again with fresh eyes, for there may yet be more inspiration within it.
162. I’ve been Amazed at times at how many people don’t understand the concepts of a maze, but here I gave some fresh suggestions for using mazes and labyrinths and similar problems within a game world.
163. Looking at a dream, it occurred to me that many of the places I’ve been in my life have by now been Relocated, and that it was probably important to keep in mind that the places on my game maps should change with time, even without any interference from the players.
164. That same dream suggested that there are several Types of people, or characters, within our dreams, and that these different kinds of characters can be useful in structuring our games.
165. There is a way of structuring an adventure for players which focuses entirely on the identities, plans, and actions of the Antagonists, and we looked at the critical questions that had to be answered to design such an adventure.
166. Conflicts finished our miniseries on alignment by looking at the balancing act that falls in the four corners of the old grid, where a character must make decisions which pit his values against each other.
167. I saw Sparkles on the ground in the woods, and knew there was something wrong.  This reminded me that sometimes it is beauty that tells of trouble, and also that sometimes we know something is wrong without being able to identify why.
168. Last week we considered the problem that Darkness poses to the common gamer task of mapmaking, and some of the more unusual solutions that address this.

  I mentioned a dream that was a memory.  Let me begin with the dream.

  In my dream, I was sitting in a wheelchair.  I was young, not an old man in a wheelchair but a child; but I had this dream when I was young, and I perceived myself as being about the age that I was when I dreamed.  Someone wheeled me into a living room, appointed with various tables and upholstered chairs, a rug covering the floor, and lamps here and there to provide light.  There was a large free-standing console television set along one wall, and perhaps a dozen other kids, most of them watching the black-and-white television (which was still common at that time), some playing with the various games, toys, and puzzles that were also here.

  This was one of those dream situations.  I in reality did not recognize the place nor the people, and could not put names to any of them; but in the dream I knew exactly where I was and who these people were.  I think at one point I referred to one of them by name.

  As the dream continued, a boy walked into the living room from the hall outside the door, eating an apple.  I immediately wanted an apple.  I stood up out of my wheelchair and walked out the door and down the school-like hall to the kitchen, where the kitchen workers, dressed in white, scolded me for getting out of my wheelchair, but said that indeed I could have an apple if I wanted one.  They removed an apple from the refrigerator, gave it to me, and one of them escorted me back to my wheelchair in the living room.

  Dream ends.

  That is the dream I had; that is how I described this dream after I had it, and some of those details were understood exactly that way for decades.  Yet I learned fairly early what it was that I was dreaming, and over time and with greater understanding of how things were done then I have filled in the pieces.  Here is what really happened.

  When I was perhaps three or four I was stricken with acute nephritis, a not uncommon secondary effect of an untreated strep infection.  They say I was fortunate to have survived.  I was hospitalized for some time; hospitalizations of a couple weeks were not uncommon in the late nineteen fifties, and were probably easier and cheaper ultimately than the house calls our pediatrician sometimes made.  After being bedridden for part of the time, I was moved to a wheel chair.  I don’t remember any of that.

  In the dream, I was in that wheelchair.  I was younger at that time than I appeared in the dream; but then I obviously did not see myself at the time, so this placement of myself at my then-current age was my mind’s way of letting me know that this was me.  I had been wheeled into not a living room but what was called until fairly recently a day room, a place where pediatric patients who are ambulatory and not contagious are permitted to play together.  Of course there were no televisions in the rooms; Marty McFly’s grandmother was right that nobody had two televisions in that decade, and if you wanted to watch television in the hospital, you had to get the nurse to take you to the room with the television.  This room was carpeted, because sick children played on the floor; it had games and puzzles to entertain them.

  Another patient entered eating an apple and I, wanting an apple, got out of my wheelchair and headed for the source of apples.  Of course, it’s absolute madness to think that even in a small hospital a child my age could have found his way to the kitchens, or even that he would have recognized such a vast and terrifying place as a kitchen if he’d found it.  I went to the nurse’s station, where there were women wearing white uniforms (all nurses uniforms were white then; you rarely see them in white now) which to me weren’t any different from cafeteria uniforms.  There was a refrigerator there in which drinks and snacks for the patients were kept, as there usually is on every hospital ward I’ve seen since.  I was given an apple, and taken back to my wheelchair.

  You can see the several discrepancies; yet some of those I did not realize for decades, despite having been in and out of hospitals quite a bit more than the average laymen, delivering needed items to my wife when she was working.  Realizing who those people were, that the living room was actually a day room, that the kitchen was the nurses station, all took time.

  You see, my understanding of the dream, and even the dream itself, was locked into the worldview of a six year old child.  He knew nothing of how hospitals were set up.  In his mind, that forgotten image of a day room that popped up looked like a living room, so he made it look more like a living room.  The people who gave him food from a refrigerator must have been in a kitchen, because that’s where refrigerators are, so they must have been kitchen workers, and that was a kitchen counter, and it was all a kitchen.  The images in the dream were partially what was remembered, but partially, and particularly around the edges where I, in the dream, was not focused, invented to fit my understanding of such things.

  So, too, when James Cole dreamt of the man being shot, his mind filled in that man with people he had met, because he didn’t know who was shot, and he couldn’t really remember it.  He could only remember the dream, and the dream was subject to his mind’s efforts to fill in the pieces he didn’t know.

  In response to the claim people make that they have “precognitive” dreams, James “the Amazing” Randi observes something very like this.  We all have dreams; it is said that we dream hundreds of dreams every night, and forget most of them.  Dreams are comprised of random images which spring from our subconscious into our sleeping mind, but our mind doesn’t realize that we’re asleep.  Thus the mind takes those images and attempts to treat them as if they were sensory information, and then to make sense of them.  It thinks it’s seeing and hearing what is popping into it, so it fills in the missing edges, and we remember it as if it had continuity, because our brain created the continuity.  It should not surprise us if sometimes things happen in our lives which seem for a moment to match something that we think happened in a dream.  The very act of recognition causes us to remember the dream as consistent with the reality.

  If that’s so, then there could be some very interesting ways to use dreams in your games, particularly dreams that are connected to memories, but also dreams that foretell future events.  What you remember in a dream is not what happened; it’s what your mind reconstructed of the fragments it recalled, filtered through whatever you did and did not understand about it at the time of the event and at the time of the dream.  A dream that recalled or foretold real events wouldn’t necessarily be fanciful in the sense that things within it were unrealistic; but it would not necessarily be fully accurate, and might have bits in it that we don’t understand at all, places or objects which have been substituted for the real ones because the real ones don’t correlate to anything we can understand.

  It would be a bit tricky creating and describing such a dream, but it might well be worth the effort.

  Incidentally, for anyone who does not know, the man whom James Cole saw shot to death in the airport was James Cole.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  I’ve generally avoided such topics as magic spells and magic devices, technological gadgets and solutions, and other items that might be considered system specific, because they’re, well, system specific, and not easily translated from one game to another.  Despite having tackled alignment, which is so specifically a Dungeons & Dragons™ element, I still tend to stay away from system specific matters.  Perhaps there’s something self-serving about that.  After all, if I did system-specific articles for Multiverser they would have a more limited audience, while if I did system-specific pieces for other games I would be working against my personal interests to a significant degree.  So I just steer away from anything that isn’t pretty generally applicable to many games.

  However, a couple of magical ideas came to my mind, possibly when I was thinking about those fireflies I encountered in last week’s Sparkles, which were solutions to a problem in a specific game.  Since the problem is fairly common across a wide variety of games, it may be useful to discuss some of the solutions here.

  The problem, in a word, is darkness.  Many popular adventure settings, from dungeons to space stations to castles to factories, are dark, sometimes completely without light.  The obvious solution, provide your own light, has a terribly obvious flaw:  the light announces your presence, pinpointing your location from a far greater distance than it illumines, such that anything capable of sight and movement is alerted to your approach and, being so alerted, has the opportunity to hide–either to escape detection entirely, or more ominously to lie in ambush for your approach.  Carrying a light may give any potential opponent the benefit of surprise, if it can move through the darkness, and almost certainly takes that benefit from you–and let’s face it, most of those creatures who live in the darkness can move through it quite capably, by one means or another.

  Thus the logical answer to the dilemma of light in the darkness is to find a way that you, too, can see in the dark well enough to get along without lights.  Mercifully, many games provide ways to do this.  Infravision and ultravision, the abilities to see in the infrared and ultraviolet ranges respectively, are known throughout our hobby from their introduction years ago, and since then we have seen many other options from infrared goggles to echolocation.

  Ah, but despite these solutions to the primary problem (how do you find your way in the dark and not get ambushed by something you didn’t see), they rarely if ever address an oft-overlooked secondary problem.  Do you see that map you’re drawing?  You do?  How?

  I refereed for one game in which for years the player character party never allowed any humans to join them.  Everyone in the group had infravision.  They accepted the little problems–the occasional undead and reptilian encounters that caught them by surprise because these monsters radiated no heat and therefore were effectively invisible to them, the objects and features of the walls and floors that would have reflected light but were unnoticed in the darkness.  In the main, they were very happy traveling through the darkness, seeing without being seen, or at least on generally equal terms with most of those they encountered there.

  It took me a while to realize the problem myself.  They would precisely map rooms, carefully place doors along corridors, make notes on locations and directions, all presumably on a sheet of parchment with a charcoal pencil in total darkness.  When I recognized this, I put a stop to it.  Put the map away; if you want to look at it or add to it, you must officially light a light of some sort.

  Eventually they shifted their strategy, and began using lights and allowing humans to join them; but in the interim a lot of thought was given to how to make the map visible in the dark without making the entire party visible to some unseen danger.

  I particularly liked one solution (admittedly perhaps because it was my own):  make the ink glow.  Of course, this is an easy enough idea in the modern world, as we do have luminescent paints and dies, and it should be simple enough to periodically “charge up” both the ink in the pen and that on the paper by exposing them to light for a few minutes, so that you can see what you’re drawing.  It’s not the perfect solution overall, as the light on the map might be visible from some distance.  However, it’s significantly better than illuminating the entire party just for the sake of a map.  Also, if you’re in a fantasy world, there may be other solutions based on the same idea.

  If you’re using magic to make the ink glow because you don’t need light to see where you’re going, then why make it glow in the visible spectrum?  If you travel by infravision, create an ink that becomes warm when you hold the paper, so that those who see heat can read the map.  You might want it also to have a visible color, so that you can read it when the lights are on; but if not, such an ink would be particularly useful for secret messages and secret maps.  Only someone who thought to look at it in the dark and knew the secret of making it appear and could see in the required spectrum would be able to read it.  Similarly, you could create ink that was visible in the ultraviolet spectrum, whether or not also visible in what humans arrogantly call visible light, for use by characters who can see in that light.

  It is also worth considering the possibility of working with the equivalent of Braille directions.  In a complex complex, such written directions would be unwieldy, as you would have to search through them to find the correct information for your current location and direction; but in a simpler setting there is no reason you couldn’t note that you went straight for fifty feet and then down five steps into a room of specified dimensions.  Indeed, such a concept makes an excellent treasure map, as it need not map the area but only provide the directions to reach the goal without becoming lost at a wrong turning.  Someone might have made such a map precisely because they expected they would have to find their way back in the dark, and thought this would direct them.  If you can both make and distinguish such raised characters in the dark, you could use such a guide in lieu of a map to get around without the benefit of sight, at least in relation to the paper.

  Already the introduction of the wearable computer gives us a high-tech solution to the maps in the dark problem, and science fiction movies and video games have pointed this direction:  let the interior of one lens on your vision system double as a computer screen onto which the map is projected.  You would still have to deal with the problem of creating the map as you travel, and the projected image would create a strange glow on that eye, but it has potential.  In some settings, you eventually reach the point at which mind/machine interface solves all such problems, as you create the map in your mind, transfer it to the computer directly, and recall it directly to your mind as desired.

  Long ago we noted that necessity was the mother of Invention, and that included the idea that players will put their minds to solving unusual problems with unusual solutions that utilize the skills of their characters.  Recognizing all the problems that actually do exist within the context of the game world sometimes takes a bit of thought in itself (realizing that infravision did not let you read or draw a map was a step forward in perceiving the situation as it was), but once they’ve been highlighted, as it were, they invite creativity in new forms.

  Next week, something different.

—–

M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.

  As I walked through the dark nighttime woods, the ground seemed to sparkle; it would catch my eye here and there, a gleam of light in the darkness, and it immediately struck me as both odd and beautiful.  The darkness under the canopy of the trees was otherwise so deep that I had little in the way of depth perception.  I could tell that the lights were scattered about, but it took some time to understand where they were and why they were so strange.

  This was not a dream, incidentally.  During July I spent several nights at camp, because the night nurse wanted me in bed with her.  I didn’t argue about whether it was better for me to be in the nurse’s quarters with her or back home with the kids; after all, she was (and is) their mother, my wife.  The nurse’s quarters are really a large prefabricated shed with furniture, electricity powering lights and refrigeration, a couple of curtained windows, oversized medicine closet, and an air conditioner.  However, it is without plumbing.  Whether that’s because the man who arranged for the nurse to have separate quarters as opposed to space in the pantry off the kitchen thought it unnecessary or was uncertain of running the pipes from the cafeteria I never asked.  There is a sink on the outside of the main hall perhaps fifteen yards across from the front door of the shed which suffices for any medical needs for water, which is pretty much limited to washing cuts and swallowing pills, as far as I’m aware.  If you need the bathroom, though, you have to trek out to the gender-appropriate cabin-like dormitory.  The girls’ dorm is visible on the opposite side of the main hall, maybe about forty yards away.  The boys, of course, stay on the opposite end of camp, near nothing but the woods and the remote end of the parking lot and certainly nowhere near the girls.  My personal feeling on the subject is I would rather sleep with the nurse in her air conditioned office and hike the hundred or so yards through dew-soaked grass, mulch, and trees to the boys dorm by the dawn’s early light than sleep in that muggy boy’s dorm with its exhaust fan rattling loudly in the heat and sucking in more hot humid air from all directions, including the boy’s bathroom.  Since I didn’t have a choice, that’s irrelevant, other than underscoring my good fortune in the matter.  I was at that moment (the moment in this story, when I observed the strange sparkling lights–remember that?) finding my way through the darkness to the rear door of the boy’s dormitory, hoping someone remembered to unbolt that door which opened directly on the bathroom and was out of range of the motion detectors which would flood the exterior of the dormitory with light announcing my trek to everyone in camp.

  The strangeness of the scene was forcing me to think, to cast my mind back over the decades.  There was a time when I was intimately familiar with the outdoors.  Through my teens and into my twenties I camped a great deal.  With age, I’ve become less comfortable sleeping on slowly deflating air mattresses, dressing under a three foot canvas ceiling, pulling my body erect from the ground, and otherwise being subjected to the pleasures of camping.  Walking through so many yards of dark woods is about as rough as I’d care to rough it anymore, thank you, despite my years of canoeing and camping and hiking.  Thus the recognition of the oddity in the dark of the woods was more a vague recollection within which something was out of place, and I struggled in my mind to understand what it was.

  As I focused in the darkness, I came to see that the many beautiful sparkles of light all around were on the forest floor, and I came to understand that these were what I have come to call lightning bugs, although in my youth I called them fireflies, and they may have other names.  We have them in abundance in this part of the world, blinking slowly as they move through the dusk and early evening fields and forests before vanishing for the night, signaling to each other in high-speed flicker patterns which flash too swiftly for our eyes to perceive them.  I could not recall ever having seen them like this, though, scattered about the forest floor, glowing in pinpricks of light among the leaves.  I marveled at the strange beauty of it, and wondered that I had never previously noticed it.

  Then my mind brought in the missing piece of data.  It was Wednesday night, probably after midnight.  About six hours before the camp had been evacuated, all the campers bussed up to the church some five to ten miles away, because the county was going to spray for mosquitoes.  These beautiful lightning bugs were acting so strangely because they had been poisoned.  I could not say what impact the spraying had had on the mosquito population, but the firefly population was unable to fly, grounded and glowing helplessly on the forest floor.

  The surrealism of the scene was enhanced by this realization.  There was nothing I could do to help the lightning bugs, and now there was a sadness to the beauty that could not be escaped.  I trod carefully among them.

  The next night they were well again; at least, there were as many sparkles of light aloft over the fields and in the forests of the camp as seemed normal for the area, so I believe the majority survived their ordeal.  I suspect that creatures so small lack sufficient consciousness to remember their suffering, or indeed perhaps even to have genuinely suffered (although I hesitate to say that they do not know pain; what they fail to know is the continuity of experience needed either to recognize a condition as having existed before this moment or to anticipate its continuation into the next).  Perhaps the experience for them was more akin to being drugged or drunk, a sensation that I personally have never enjoyed but which apparently appeals to a fair number of humans including some who otherwise seem to have at least normal intelligence, and might have been euphoric and pleasurable to the stricken insects.  Yet the scene and its ennui stayed in my mind.

  What was most fascinating about it was that I knew something was wrong, but that I was made aware of that by the unusual beauty of the scene.  The ground didn’t sparkle like that, that I recalled.  Lightning bugs flew, and landed on tree leaves, and sometimes on blades of grass; but they didn’t scatter themselves about on the forest floor glowing like a reflection of the night sky above the canopy.  There was something seriously wrong, notable because of a new beauty in the world.

  I knew from the moment I realized what I was seeing that there was something here for game worlds.  I did not then know what it was, and even now I am not entirely certain how to express it.  In some ways it is difficult to say it without seeming obvious.  Good and beauty are not always expressed together, nor is evil always ugly nor ugliness always evil.  When Bilbo Baggins wrote, All that is gold does not glitter, he conveyed part of this, turning the original phrase that expressed the other side, Not all that glitters is gold.  There may be great beauty or simple beauty, and yet it may mask something horrible.  There may be something of great good and worth hidden behind the repulsive.

  It may also be within the powers of our characters to recognize intuitively that something is out of place.  I knew that there was something wrong with the scene in the darkness.  In this instance, it did not, I expect, signify any danger to me.  It did tell of the recent release of the poison in the area, which in another context might have been important.  I know little of fireflies or lightning bugs that the average grade school child in the suburbs does not discover by capturing them and looking at them, but I knew that these were not acting right.  It was a bit like that tingle of Spidey sense, that knowing something was wrong without knowing how you know (something I discussed elsewhere, in Intuition and Surprise on another site and in defining intuition as an attribute in Multiverser), because something around you is different, even if you can’t define either what is wrong or how it would be if it were right.  Familiarity does not always mean we understand or can explain, but it does mean we recognize change.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.