I Got Sent to Prison, It Was A Magical Realm

Alright. 

In the prior rambling post I was making I mentioned having an experience with The Magical Realm (a nice little term for when the DM sends you on a vacation to the land of his fetishes and neuroses) that involved the rising days of Third Edition. So in this rambling post. I’ll go into details about it.

As some backstory, when Third Edition came out, I was in college. And at my college, there was an excellent game store, my first, and thus far only, Friendly Local Game Shop. Well, third edition was coming out and some of the folk around the shop were like 'lets have a game of this new edition,' but the question came down to who would run it. 

Now, I have a fully realized campaign setting. I had one at that time dating back to 2e, which had already enjoyed numerous campaigns, players and the like, but (as I will state in another post), I really, really, really wanted to not be the DM for a change, so I said nothing. 

So a daring young literature student who I shall give the false name of Karl steps up. Karl tells us he is going to run a somewhat odd setting, because he finds the typical setting 'too limiting' and 'too trite.' My hackles immediately raise into a defensive position, but being relatively young, and with my friends wanting this game, I go along with it. He even uses the magic word to me and says it will 'be like planescape.' That assuaged my trepidation, and like an Arkham researcher, emboldened by this, I pushed on.

Karl also states that he doesn't like alignment. The 'too limiting' canard rises up. None of us really see a problem with this. We just basically conclude our characters will behave semi-reasonably and in accordance with whatever philosophy we give them. 

I end up with a rough and tumble pole-arm wielding gang member. Another guy is a wizard. Someone else's a monk, and so on. 

Our first encounter is a monster attacking a marketplace. We dispatch it, and find out we're riding the railroad because the monster was a trap for us, fight it and be sent to the flying prison for disrupting the peace, don't fight it and be sent to the flying prison for failing to assist the city. So, stripped of our equipment, we're sent off to prison. 

And it’s not just a prison, it’s a prison where we're apparently forced to fight random terrible monsters who appear from the mist. Now, all of us have a problem with this because well, we're basically naked and our DM decided that the monsters 'have as many hp as I think they need.' Again, we really wanted this game.  More fools, we.

One of our players, the wizard sees a starving man and decides to split his bread with him. He gets the stink eye from Karl for ‘playing a good alignment.’ We just kind of shrug it off.

This goes on for three sessions. Prison routine. Fight monsters. Prison routine. I find out that our sentence is only like 2 more months, so I just suggest we hunker down. I mean heck, we did break the law after all. Karl responds to this by telling us that our sentences have been increased exponentially due to a recent intensification in attacks. It’s a tyranny, and one being assaulted by mist monsters (who apparently only attack flying fortress-prison things) so, it makes sense we guess, and we go along with it. But now we start plotting an escape.

Can we make bedsheets down to the earth? No, too high and..no bedsheets? What about laundry? The clothes cease to exist when they're taken off. Oh...ohkay... We ask if there’s a way we can secure some weapons. We get told that we ‘really don’t like the idea of personal property.’ We all disagree with him on that, but get told that the weapon’s ‘only exist when we’re being attacked’ or when a guard holds them. We conclude this is magical bullshit.

One of my fellow players starts thinking that Karl is trying his version of the Stanford Prison experiment on us. As the fourth session of boring prison and overpowered mist monster punching begins, I start to agree with him.

Session Five rolls around and up appears an Illithid. He offers us freedom, in exchange for us owing him service into perpetuity. He apparently was just able to get onto the prison fortress thing. We’re more ok with that because, he’s a freaking mind flayer, they do stuff like that. Some of the players latch onto this, as being a way to do something different. My character however decides that the crap the illithid will want us to get up to is going to be super dodgy. And despite Karl siccing the thing on my now fourth level fighter, managed to beat the illithid to death with a broken bottle thanks to 20s on the die and nobody understanding how grappling works (it was about a month after 3e came out.) When I attempt to take the broken bottle back, it disappears into mist because we’re not allowed personal property. Ah ha, we reason, that’s how the stupid nonsensical disappearance field works. We decide that we’ll try to capture some resources but not actually ‘claim’ them.

One of us exclaims, ‘Ah of course, communism, a criminal’s greatest friend.” Karl gets incensed, and tells us that won’t work either. The player replies with a sigh and shake of his head, “Communism, it just doesn’t work.” Karl gets angry again and tells us to stop obsessing with equipment and that he’ll ‘give us what we need when we need it.’

Session six, we miraculously discover that the warden has a device that allows for teleportation, but it’s in his office, and requires some magic shenanigans to make it work. Well, we have a wizard, but he's kept under strict observation. So we concoct a plan, for some of us to sneak in there at night and steal the device and get it to the wizard during the next attack. Misadventure occurs, as it will, and the end result is my guy heading into the warden's office while others make a distraction. 

Well, there's the warden's office. Furnished nicely, booze, meat, and the warden himself, snoozing. I look around, see the device, tell the DM I want to pick it up and leave. What follows is a brief recollection of the exchange...

Spook: Ok, I don't want to stay here any longer then I have to. I'm going to pick it up, and sneak out.

Karl: You want to eat the food and drink the wine.

Spook: No I don't. This is a freaking mission to get us out of this place. His guards will be back any moment.

Karl: I'm not a fan of gamist thought processes. When I see a person doing something his character wouldn't do, I make them make will saves. Make a will save.

Spook: Can’t I just stash it in my pants for later or something?

Karl: No, you’re overcome and worried it might disappear. Roll.

Spook: Really? *rolls* Blegh, 11.

Karl: You can't resist drinking the wine and eating the food, you haven't had anything this good in the weeks since you got incarcerated.

Spook: Alright, whatever, I leave with the device and...

Karl: You want to kill the warden.

Spook: What?

Karl: He is your oppressor. 

Spook: My 'oppressor?' We did a crime, we're doing the time. He's just doing his job like everybody else up here. We fought those mist ogre things last week with him. 

Karl: He's the symbol of systemic oppression. You are the put down upon person who has been dehumanized by the machine, and he is the personification of that. You wish to kill him.

Spook: Bull.  

Karl: Make a will save.

Spook: *rolls* nineteen, so..26. 

Karl: What? How is your will save a +7?

Spook: Iron Will Feat and I didn't dump wisdom. I leave. We've got a freaking job to do here.

Karl: I guess I'll let you get away with it, but you still want to destroy him.

Spook: No I don't. Let's get on with this.

We escaped, and then got wiped out by some sort of terrible sea monster a session after that. The DM informed us haughtily that we just weren't 'advanced' enough for his vision. We bid him a happy farewell, and I once again donned the Amulet of Inescapable DMing for the my first time in 3e.

Now, there was no sex there, no desire, but it’s kind of evident that Karl wanted us to dare to enter his magical realm.  

His realm though was one based around some strange desire for us to play the part of the put upon individuals fighting the system, and other stuff.

It was just as awkward, just as irksome, and just as weird as something more boudoir related.

In a way it’s basically the DM not understanding why the players don’t enjoy exploring some theme, or element as much as he does.

It’s a tone deafness thing.

Maybe somewhere out there, there’s a group that likes Karl’s nonsense, but I kind of doubt it.  

The Magical Realm

There is a comic out there, called Gunshow.

One of its more memorable comics involved a party of adventurers having to go through a situation that is, let us say, untoward because of the particular disordered desires of the DM running the game. The catch phrase from the comic is 'Dare You Enter My Magical Realm.'

This has become a bit of a go-to phrase for when DMs pull in their bizarre fetishes and inflict them on the party, or rather, inflict a bizarre and unwanted look into the mind of their friend onto the players.

The Magical Realm though isn't just evident in one's bedroom activities, it is also representative I'd argue in terms of a variety of situations where the desires of the guy running the game are inflicted on the players.

I bring this up, because The Magical Realm also can occasionally show up even in your world building.

Forays into the realm of magic are inevitable, mostly because people by their very nature tend to put across their desires, thoughts and world-views into everything they create. This is natural, the problem occurs when they become onerous, disturbing, or inescapable.

When world building, a world builder should pay attention to make sure that elements in his setting are semi-reasonable, consistent and "realistic." Yes, yes, I know, purple dragons and all that. But realism is important when you take it from the approach of how people act. We may play in fantasy sessions with alien creatures, but your players are probably humans, and if the humans in your campaign setting are acting like weirdoes, they'll notice it.

The Magical Realm also affects people differently, so noting its borders is difficult. Some notice they've crossed through the elf gates very early on, while for others they are practically at the center before they detect that things are..off.

A world designer can try to mitigate the issue a bit by making sure that there isn't too much of it to journey into, and this is primarily accomplished by making a campaign setting who's primary focus is to provide an entertaining stage for the PCs, and not a theater of education or titillation for the world developer.

Forgotten Realms has a reputation for being its designer's magical realm, but because of the 'limits' imposed when it was made commercial, we've been spared the screwy free-love, rumpy-pumpy elf plots that its developer (apparently, if the rumors are true) thought were so important. This is why Forgotten Realms, despite having Volo going around rating every whorehouse in Faerun, isn't considered on the same tier as say FATAL.

Its compartmentalized.

Its a part of the world, and not the principle focus. That being said, I would not want said developer to be a DM of a session I had to play in.

On a more personal level, me and a few friends took a foray into the magical realm of a DM back around when 3e came out. I'll detail that in another post. This one is running long, and I think the full story will be better in detailing that this stuff isn't always about bedroom matters.

Size (And more importantly height and mass) matters

As stated. I'm terrible when it comes to properly gauging sizes. As a result when a player asks me how tall a room is, I'll usually state that its about 8 or 9 feet (if I don't want people flying around in it) or some outrageously massive number (if I do).

More to the point though, a part of the 'problem' of size I think arises from the grid that 3e and Pathfinder and the like. On a grid, a large creature is 'only' 10' wide. And a huge is only 15' wide. And so on. A colossal only ends up being a few squares on the table.

Now, we can envision colossal pretty easily, but I think the problem goes lower. It goes to large creatures.

Back in 2e, the size system was more vague. No real statistical import was built in besides weapons doing more damage and the like, but in 2e, size was given in terms of the creature's dimensions. So the concept of a barn sized monster felt more like, well, a barn sized monsters. In 3.5 and up, we started thinking smaller, instead of larger.

Similarly, people started losing track of just what it meant to be large.

A large creature ranged, in theory from about 8 to 14 feet tall. I want to restate that. 14 feet tall.

Giants, who I have heard people comment 'aren't that big' are typically at that top end, with hill giants being about 12 feet tall. That's FREAKING BIG.

12 feet is basically two stories tall, meaning a hill giant is about the height of a suburban house.  That, as I stated is what 'large' means. Huge and the others are commensurately much larger.

An underground ruin that can accommodate a retriever, a dragon or a huge spider, needs to be significantly large, like stupidly massive, to account for that thing living in it.

And that is where problems start to come in for people without good gauges of size. Large underground monsters, slithering creatures and the like, need massive space, need enormous space, and finding that sort of enormous space in a dungeon or a cavern system damages credibility if someone can't think of a good reason for a cathedral sized opening carved in the living rock, or why a dungeon-builder would spend all that money for huge 'wasted' space.

Tribes of giants living in caves, need sodding enormous caves to live in, just by being large because again, the height of a two story building. Huge or God help you, Colossal beings even more so. Now the nature of the beast (oozes, snakes, etc) may make this easier, but it needs to be accounted for.

I find its helpful to think in terms of landmarks. Stuff that you can put into your mind as a marker for things of certain sizes. And remember, even in 3.5 and Pathfinder, Colossal being 5X5 is the minimum for colossal.

Size (And more importantly Distance) Matters

More info hopefully soon on the kingdoms and stuff for the ACKs campaign. In the meantime..

Have you ever noticed that some DMs, like myself, have no real sense of scale?

I think this is an endemic problem and contributes to a lot of the goofier and more extreme aspects of bad descriptions. See, a problem I have is gauging distance and grasping it. Like most Americans, I don’t think of travel in terms of miles and feet, I think of it in terms of time.

Half an hour to the mall, an hour and a half to work, ten minutes to a local restaurant, and so on. And all of them are wildly divergent distances as the crow flies because of the difference in speed of my car (I can ride a highway to work, the mall is all back roads, etc).

Grasping distance is important because it /applies/ to the time factor that a game typically encounters. How long does it take for us to race horses to the king’s castle to warn him, what if we air walk, what if we turn ourselves into zephyrs and travel at 60mph?

Distance means different things at different times to different games. In a fantasy game, something two hundred miles away is really, really sodding far. According to Pathfinder, a heavy horse can get you about 28 miles in a day of travel. A day of travel being about eight hours.

Now, let’s unpack that.

Washington D.C., is roughly 146 miles from Philadelphia, Pa.

Per Pathfinder, it takes about five days. Five /days/ for someone to travel from one to the other.

Punching it into google maps, and getting directions and a time estimate, I’m helpfully informed that my car will get me there in about 2 and a half hours.

Now, see, that, that right there is where the trouble for DMs like myself and others, when scale comes in.

An airship is not a fighter jet. A horse is not a car. But, a DM will typically have a capital being a thousand miles away to make it seem further away. At one point I almost considered making a continent three thousand miles wide, until I realized that’s basically the width of the sodding Atlantic. All because I was worried that travel times would be too quick.  We forget how small modern travel has made the world. I can get on a plane and be in England by tomorrow. That used to be a grueling months long affair.

This comes up more frequently in map making. A mile. A mile is sodding big. A mile on a highway doesn’t seem like much, but that’s because they’re tiny little markers zinging by. ACKs gives us the 6-mile hex, which at first seems to be tiny, but in reality, is pretty damn large.

I kind of thank ACKs for making me have to really grasp what a 24 mile hex was (New York metro area) in terms of size.

I’ll be trying to think of how to help deal with the size thing as time goes on.