The Lume

I am having trouble with light.

 

You see people type the word ‘sigh’, as if the sigh they made in real life was gusted onto the page and you think ‘that will never be me’ then one day it is you.

‘Sigh’.

Sometimes ideas leap into you and you go and sometimes its like grinding and grinding and nothing happens and that’s what it is like now.

The means of carrying and projecting light are central. Darkness is assumed, rather than rare so you always need to have light. This is pretty much a basic idea tht has persisted right from first conception until now.

This makes a problem because it’s another thing to count and keep track of. And these are the things that people always hate counting and keeping track of. Encumbrance and ‘who’s got the lantern’, and I have based a whole world idea around focusing very carefully on the most boring parts that everyone ignores.

As well as that, light is so many things. 

Light is firstly something you have to carry in the form of fuel, secondly your only means of finding your way and securing more life, thirdly a valuable thing which you can trade for, exchange to seek out and fourthly a resource that is always being eaten away.

Not to mention that in the darkness it literally connects you to the imagined world and enables you to play in an interesting way. (Though I have given some thought to what happens when the light goes out.)

In addition to all this, other problems are looming into my vision. I had some time ago considered the problem of time underground. The sun is gone and in real life people who like in the deep away from the suns cycle for a long period of time have their body cycles change. Time bends for them a bit. They stay away longer, sleep longer. The total balance of sleep and wakefulness remains about the same but stretched and deformed.

I wanted to include this in the game (I liked the idea of players slowly becoming aware that their own body clocks had changed and that they were becoming different) but if time shifts it raises the problem of measuring it. 

Distance relates to time. The main point about distance is how long it takes to get somewhere.

So time, distance, light, money, weight and everything are all bound together really.

I didn’t want to add a whole new thing to the sheet, on top of everything that’s already on there. So I made a list of the number we already have available to see which light is most like. So that I could use those numbers or that system in my simulation.

HD – Players already track this obsessively. It’s the number that goes up and down more than any other. Its literally vital. My first idea was to have ‘Light Dice’ or ‘Lamp Dice’ that you counted. There are the different shapes of dice to add depth so different sources could be divided up by number of dice and type. One kind of lamp is 5d4, another is 2d6. Somehow these interact with the darkness. 

But that would be another minigame and I don’t want that.

AC – Light is a little like armour, it can be said to surround and protect you. You also ‘wear’ it to some degree. This is not what I need. The stat type lacks variability.

Weapons – Lamps are very much like weapons. They are carried and useful, they have different qualities. People like tracking what weapons they have. You don’t have to bully them into remembering them.

Saves – No.

Stats – No.

Treasure – Very much like treasure for the reasons given above. Must be carried, a resource, always running out.

Anyway I pretty much ended up making light a currency. The Lume. A Lume is a measure of light over time. It is also worth one GP (Or silver piece in LOTFP). 

I tried several measures of time. A Turn per Lume, A Day per Lume. I settled on an hour.

1 Hour of Light =  1 Lume = 1 Gold Piece.

And that’s essentially it.

Oil becomes light. Light gets you more time. Time gets you more money. Money gets you more oil. Oil, money, light and time all in one.

The Lume is most perfectly expressed in Oil. If you have oil, you can always trade it underground as if it were gold. If you have other means of making light than you can trade that as well. But other things are also measured in Lumes.

There are a bunch of problems. This cost for oil is a shitload more than the OD&D standard. That would be like this;

Candles radius 10 lasts 12 turns/2hrs (Costs 1cp) 0.5cp per Lume

Lantern oil flask radius 30 lasts 24 turns/4hrs (Costs 5cp) 1.25cp per Lume

Torch  radius 30 lasts 6 turns/1hr (Costs 1cp) 1cp per Lume

That’s in copper pieces so I think my version is about ten times as expensive. It kind-of makes sense as light is much more valuable down there than in, for instance, a dungeon.

Here are a few kinds of light I have scraped together so far.

Type	Range	Lumes	Type	Complications
Plankton	10	200	Bio
Squid	20	120	Bio	Escapes
Dragonfish	15	160	Bio	Cannibalises
Cancer Fulgens	10	150	Bio
Fungal	05	200	Bio
Quartz	5	-	Piezo	Maracas
Uranium Nitrate	7	-	Piezo	Maracas
Oil	30	4	Comb	Refillable/Psychic Whales
Candle	10	2	Comb
Atomic Candle	100+	1	Nuke	Radioactive
X-Ray tube	90	20	Elect	Needs diamonds

Some explanations. Bioluminescent things are living things in jars. You need to feed them and they have a lifespan. These Lumes will burn whether you want them to or not. Some may have a reaction factor (certain organisms turn their lights off when scared). You can also poison phosphorescent plankton with ammonia and they will burn brighter as they die. I may extend this rule to all bio lights.

You can make lights by shaking or disturbing crystals of different kinds. The Ute Indians did this with quartz in instruments that they shook as they danced at night. The only bad thing about these is that you are basically shaking maracas underground.

Diamonds fluoresce under UV and X Rays. Duergar or Archeans will have X ray emitters, you just need disposable diamonds to make them work.

(Chemiluminescence is complex, hopefully more of that later.)

a brilliant scintillation in the eyes of man himself

Phosphorescence, or, the emission of light by minerals, plants and animals.

Phipson, T.L.

1862

“The un-named daughter of Linnaeus in 1766 observed of the garden Nasturtium to 'emit sparks or flashes in the morning before sunrise during the minutes of June and July and also during the twilight and eventually, but not after, total darkness came on.

….

It is well known that when the Pistil of a flower is impregnated, the pollen bursts away by the elasticity of the Anthers, and may be to a certain extent electrified.

…..

The flowers were throwing out flames, flickerings or sparks, which were shot out of the corolla, and resembled somewhat those given by an electric machine.

Best observed by observing without fixing the eyes upon any one flower in particular.”

"I have observed a brilliant scintillation in the eyes of man himself but only once. The light was of a metallic-pink colour, resembling, in general aspect, the green light emitted from dogs eyes. I only saw this in one individual though I have examined many, but a friend of mine lately witnessed it in the eyes of a little girl. Both subjects alluded to were remarkable delicate."

The Nature of Animal Light

Harvey, E Newton

1920

“The eye of any animal is quite invisible in absolute darkness.”

" The flashing of flowers, especially those of a red or orange color, like the poppy, which many observers have noticed during twilight hours, is a purely subjective phenomenon due to the formation of after images in eyes partially adapted to the dark. This flashing, first observed by the daughter of Linnæus, is never observed in total darkness or in the direct field of vision, but only in the indirect field as during a sidelong glance at the plant.

There are some cases of luminosity on record in connection with man himself. (See Heller, 1854). Before the days of aseptic and antiseptic surgery, wounds frequently became infected with luminous bacteria and glowed at night. The older surgeons even supposed that luminous wounds were more apt to heal properly than non-luminous ones. We know that luminous bacteria are non-pathogenic, harmless organisms and the presence of these forms even on dead fish or flesh never accompanies but always precedes putrefaction. As recorded by Robert Boyle, no harm has come from eating luminous meat, unless it may also have become infected with pathogenic forms.”

Range In RPG’s

There is a kind of ‘natural’ imagined space around an imagined body. It’s the spatial area we work most often with in RPG’s. It ranges from roughly the size of a room to a large hall.

I noticed this when thinking about range and snipers in RPG’s. It’s always a little difficult to be a sniper or to use the full potential of ranged weapons in RPG’s. I wouldn’t say it’s hard enough to stop you doing it, clearly people do it all the time. But the mind must be forced to imagine the space whereas the space around, for instance, a sword fight, springs into being quite naturally in the minds of the participants.

Almost no-one uses the full potential range of bows to their maximum effect in RPGs. Even for a shortbow in LOTFP its 450 feet. Of a lightly encumbered opponent moves 60t per round, that’s 7 rounds of shooting before they get you.

I think the reason this is rarely done is that it feel unnatural to keep saying, “what’s four hundred and fifty feet away?” We don’t imagine the interact-able world in quite those terms.

Of course this may be the reason that we build rooms and halls the shape we do. There are engineering constraints, but even forgetting those we do tend to build similar area’s around ourselves.

There are also giant mech fights. But the whole point of those is that you effectively ‘become’ a big giant robot guy for the period of the fight, so while you are shooting long distances, relative to your current body-scale awareness, they are not that far. About the distance of a bowshot.

There is also the drama-factor in close-scale combat. Face-to-face fighting unifies tactical and dramatic conflict while modern long-distance fighting seems to anonymise and atomise the meanings of combat.

Sooo.

Have you ever gamed and commonly used extreme ranges, say 400 yards and above? Anyone have any experience of that?

Do you think there is a ‘naturally-imagined’ scale of things around the human body that pop most easily into mind when we imagine characters?

Do you think working in this ‘naturally-imagined’ space makes it easier for groups of differently minded people to collectively imagine the same space in a useful way?

A method for doing somethingorother in caves.

Lets try making a table for a very common action underground.

“I would like to explore for an hour/find a specific place/path.”

One person is the leader for this action. That player rolls and their stats count.

Roll a d20. Count down the stats, the first failure is true.

Stat	Fail
CON	All further failures are cumulative
STR	Tired. Act as 1 level lower till you rest & eat.
DEX	Group separated by traverse (even) or pitch (odd)
INT	You don’t know how to go forward.
WIS	You can’t find your way back.
CHA	Lowest CHA PC got separated.

(Optional rule; also roll a d100. The result on the d20 is the percentage chance of an encounter. So if the d100 is lower than the d20 then you get an encounter as well as whatever happened on the table.)

The way this would work is that the only way you don’t find the thing you are looking for is if you either fail the INT test and nothing else or fail the CON and INT test.

CON is always more important than anything else. In every table CON comes first and passing CON limits the horrible things that can happen. If you pass CON only one bad thing can happen. You then go to encounter time until they solve the problem. If they don’t fuck up too badly then they find the thing.

This means you generally find the thing. Sometimes you don’t  but usually you do.

This is modular with the weird stat/encumbrance system I created earlier. So you can simply roll straight without even thinking about that. Or if you want to you can take account of your stuff and if you have maxed out a row then you must fail for that stat.

It’s also one roll. Make the roll, look at the table, count down and the DM creates the encounter depending on which things went wrong. This takes time but it is time in which the table is finding stuff out.

Bad things; could get very cryptic if I produce tables for lots of different kinds of terrain or problem.

Although this could give a quick and easy way to differentiate different areas and situations and the problems they can create.

Movement is a group activity and this measures the stats for only one person, the lead. It could lead to people gaming the system, but it might be in an interesting way. Maybe they have to argue over who leads the group, maybe they get to argue about who leads the group.

Let’s try for an alternative situation.

“We want to follow the course of this river.”

Roll a single d20, try to get under the stat. Cont down and apply the first fail.

Stat	Fail
CON	All further results are cumulative
DEX	Fall. You fall in the river.
WIS	Separated. Any who passed WIS are on the other bank.
STR	Swept. You cannot resist the rivers flow.
INT	Tied. Any who failed INT are tied to you by rope.
CHA	You fuck up, lose the respect of the group and cannot lead the next roll.

Ok this one is nowhere near as good. Falling in is a binary state and does not stack naturally with other problems. Could try it another way round. Lets make some alterations.

Stat	Fail
CON	All further results are cumulative
CHA	Lowest CHA PC separated, ignore them on lower rows.
WIS	Separated. Any who passed WIS are on the other bank.
INT	Tangle. Any who failed INT are tangled up with your ropes.
DEX	Fall. You have fallen in. With anyone tied to you.
STR	Swept. You cannot resist the rivers flow.

Hmmm. It might  work.

Dogspot

My Girlfriend has invented a game to beat me at while we walk home from town. If you want to know the rules of the game (and she insists that you should know), read on.

This has nothing to do with RPG's