Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Underdark Part 1 - Moods and Tones, Light Mechanics.

LIGHT IS THE CORE RESOURCE from which all others spring.
 If you only measure one thing, if you only remember one thing, remember light. Not ropes or food or even time, but light. The key difference between this and other imagined underground spaces is the totality and necessity of the enfolding dark When most games describe a place, they do so with a series of assumptions. They use a kind of shorthand. It’s the same shorthand we use in our daily lives to arrange the spaces through which we move.

“You walk into a room.”
 OK, so how do you know it’s a room at all?
Because you can see the walls and edges from beginning to end
Because you have seen thousands of rooms before and they all follow the same logic
Because this room is arranged in a grid pattern with other rooms in the same area.
That’s what ‘room’ means.
A thing like the other things you have already seen.



In a natural cave system this is not the case. You may not be able to see the roof or opposing wall. You may never have seen a place like this before. You will not understand the logic of their arrangement. When someone enters a new underground space, never say “you enter a cave”. Because they don’t know that.



And they can only see so far.

For this campaign I'm going to always assume darkness over vision. I like to imagine the darkness as alive within the Underdark. Instead of being a simple, black absence, I regard it as a kind of active liquid. It does not meekly disappear on the lighting of a candle. It follows the players like a stalking predator.  It backs away reluctantly before the light, it follows carefully and relentlessly, creeping as close as it can. It leaves chew marks in the corners of your sight. It should be almost embodied. Not a general awareness or a set of laws but an actual person. Like someone standing silently in the corner of the room, watching you as you read this.

 The darkness is a character. It only wants one thing....






L U M E N S 

The means of carrying and projecting light are central to the Underdark Adventurer Economy. 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 and seek out, and fourthly a resource that is always being eaten away.

In addition, distance relates to time. Solar cycles have no meaning in the Underdark.  The main measurement of travel is how long it takes to get somewhere. This is measured by a loss of resources.
So time, distance, light, money, life, everything are all bound together.

Light is a currency and the currency is The Lumen.

A Lumen is a measure of light over time. It is also worth one silver piece, or SP
1 Hour of Light = 1 Lumen = 1 Silver Piece.

The Lumen is most perfectly expressed in oil. If you have oil, you can always trade it underground as if it were silver. If you have other means of making light then you can trade that as well.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.


But other things are also measured in Lumens. This makes light about ten times as expensive as that in standard gaming. It kind-of makes sense as light is much more valuable down here, and much harder to get. Lumens are how you measure wealth in the Underdark. It replaces the gold and silver coins of the surface world. Of course not everyone carries the same kinds of light production. Of course not everyone carries oil. It can be assumed that the necessary exchanges and conversions are being done in the background. This is irritating and unrealistic; the means to create and sustain bio-luminescence are not those used to create and light candles.

But we have pushed all that complexity into a simple number that tells you everything you need to know about how rich, and how safe, you are, how far you can go and how long you can see. 
Like hit points, Lumens may not make much sense on an individual basis, but they do make sense as a game object. And like hit points you can assume Lumens lost or found to be whatever you need them to be.


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