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.
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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.
