Prompted by an aside that the Angry GM made the other day, I've been thinking more about caves. He was speaking about how we're not nearly so perceptive as we think we are, particularly with torches in dark dank caverns. I don't recommend anyone grabbing a torch and heading into the near crack in the ground, but most people in America live only 3-4 hours from a big impressive cave that has tours running regularly. If you've never gone, I can recommend that experience. Most of these caves are good and deep, with multiple chambers providing a vast variety of pretty rock formations, which are the main focus of most tour guides. That's all well and good, but anytime I've gone on a big cave tour, what's struck me the most about these caverns is the stark and hostile environment, utterly alien to me or anyone else accustomed to the surface world. Caveman caves are almost cozy, never so deep as to lose sight of the sun. These deep caverns are completely dark, a dark so enveloping that when the torch flickers out it's instantly heavy, oppressive. Floors of caverns are typically either wet/underwater, or a wild jumble of rocks that would be trying to scramble over even in daylight. Mines are typically graded and a little better to walk in, but the oppressive dark of a preindustrial mine is still total and there you're more likely to run into patches of bad air, cave-ins, and rubble. There's nothing else like it above ground. D&D players, and thus there characters, show a shockingly casual attitude towards the underground. For dungeon-delvers, exploring a new cavern or mine shaft is almost depressingly mundane, mostly a matter of tracking torch use and being annoyed at the game's assumed walking speed...but that's not how it should be. Miners, for whom going underground was their daily grind, were an incredibly superstitious lot, who feared and hated their environment even as it was normal. No matter how well-armed, your game's adventurers are going to be going even deeper than miners, into places known to hold monsters. If you've looked at a the ground in a cavern tour, imagine walking that with a single flickering torch, listening for monsters, trying to keep a formation...it's enough to make an adventurer mad. It's also a reason why dwarves often seem "too normal". The single oddest, weirdest thing about the dwarves isn't body hair, shortness, or a persistence of the Scots dialect...these people should be strange, they actually feel comfortable underground. Delving beneath the earth should feel as mundane for a dwarf as walking in a woodland for a human...dangerous, possibly, but not alien or unnerving just as an environment. Unfortunately, because your human fighter is just as blasé about the caving as Sean Rockhammer the Dwarf, there's not a lot of difference between the two. Functionally, all adventurers these days are dwarves. I don't know if there's a solution to this in all cases, but I do know that there's a pretty simple way to help your own imagination and add a real extra dimension to your games. Just...go under ground.
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Most long-term game masters tend to have their own default setting, or settings. I'm prone to set most of my campaigns in one of two settings...Coldlight, which provides my press label and where I've probably spent the most time, is a reasonably standard fantasy land at least at first blush. I've probably run more campaigns (though shorter) in my other default setting, which is simply Earth, 1452. It's amazing how well that year works for an astonishing variety of adventures. Euro-centric, and in particular Rome-centric, historians will of course recognize the significance of the date...a year before the fall of Constantinople, although the Middle Ages aren't considered to have ended for another half century, it is in the 1450's that you see the world start to change away from D&D's assumed knights-and-bards history. Plate-armored cavaliers still ride mighty warhorses around, swords and bows are still more common than guns, and the kingdoms, while consolidating, are still weak enough for barons to have castles and towns to have thieves' guilds. More importantly for a historical(ish) setting, everyone living still knows that magic is real. Da Vinci's birth in 1452 is a good signpost for the scientific revolutions soon coming, but the average peasant (and most nobles) in this year still go to the nearest cleric for healing. There's always a lot of question for how "alternate" you want to be when playing in an Earth setting. I've defaulted in my 1452 that it's our Earth, just what people knew in folklore and myth are all true. Thus dragons are real, as are witches, just like old Grandpa Hob said he'd seen back when he was on crusade in Poland back in his day. Thus players can play the occasional magic-user, but they can't assume there's a wizarding college somewhere. Likewise, clerics or paladins with divine blessings may indeed miraculously heal their companions, but that's not something you expect to get out of every village priest. It works out to being a low-magic setting, without cutting off the huge magic system known by the game. Although the Wars of the Roses are coming soon in England and France is still in the throes of the Hundred Years' War, there are also vast and interesting realms to explore in 1452 beyond the Tolkien grounds of Western Europe. I've run games in the ahistorical (but plausible) hungry Norse settlement remnants in Greenland, in the sophistically and wealthy Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, in the pagan forests of Lithuania, along the thin and crumbling ruins of the Silk Road, and in the newly-found Azores (where, of course, the remains of Atlantis are still visible). I'm gearing up now for something set in India, which my Bollywood-loving players are sure to take to with wild abandon. The world of the mid-15th century is surprisingly wide, if you care to look for it. Most GMs make their worlds for themselves, creating for the sheer joy of creation. Don't neglect Earth itself, though, when you're thinking about where to set your next game. The past is a strange and foreign country, if you go anywhere on this planet and just go back six hundred years, I promise you'll find a place more exotic and interesting than anything found in the Forgotten Realms. |
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