Dr. Azkur
2014-02-22, 08:40 PM
Welcome! Welcome to my bouncy castle sterilized OC. Today- ...Yes? Yes, that is in fact a chainsaw-scalpel, and yes you may use it; in fact, you are encouraged to. Let's get to it.
Today your assistance will be required in the field of game mechanics.
Some backstory:
As some of you may know, I'm running a campaign set in an alternate material plane named Moroder (Yes, as in Giorgio). Moroder is the largest of all material planes by far, with all others in pseudo-orbit around it, while at the center and bottom of the plane (Studies of Moroder give better results if one asumes it is a Flamm Paraboloid (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Flamm.jpg)) is an inconceivably large metropolis.
Both city and plane used to be closed to outsiders. Or rather than closed, there simply was no way in, in fact, nobody even knew it was there. However, some time ago a huge release of energy happened at the center of Moroder, which sent ripples all over the fabric of it's surface, making irregularities, allowing it to be noticed, and some could grasp those ripples, tinker with it, and eventually make cuts to be able to enter.
Long has past since the first cut was made permanent into a gate, and all over the planes people are finding ways to make their way through.
The castle city can be seen from almost everywhere once inside, and heading there are 8 major known roads, each with its own peculiarity, going outside the path means heading away from "drawn" reality, to the point where you eventually reach a form so raw and abstract of reality that notions such as, time, space, matter and energy are not fully if at all developed, this sort of places are called The Mists of Weird or The Unspawn Ocean, and heading there is no good.
Make no mistake, these paths are of amazing size, both in length and sometimes in stretch. One is The Road of War and it's an entire raging battleground, another is The Road of Resignation, where people have stopped trying to get to the citadel and took the seemingly empty path as their home, and it's the only place people seem to be able to establish settlements and hold them for long.
The one I want to talk about today is the Path of Mirrors
A man and a woman walk the road down a mountain to head to a castle which can be seen even from high above, their words are few. He notices a drop of water splashing on the rock floor and mentions it to his friend, they both look up, hoping for rain as their supply is running low... what they see is a ceiling. It is quite high but it is also quite there. Everywhere. They both stare, she's dizzy, he's baffled. A roof? A drop of water splashes in his face. That drop came from a stalagmite. They look down the road they're walking, searching for their best reference: the castle. They find the castle in the same direction it was before, but to reach it they have a steep treck... up the road, almost a climb. It is not a mountainside, it's a cave.
You might be asking yourself "What?" or "Eh?", or even "Wuh?". Well that's what my players said. Then they got that the road they're walking is an absolute mess, and that they will never begin to comprehend it. They got they're walking a path drawn and animated by Escher.
After the scene described above things got way weirder. They got lost on various axises, there was some wall-waking (although they didn't actually get to know that), and apparently they decided to stray from the path, because when a mirror-crazed NPC ran trying to catch a construct further down the road, they followed, one trying to rescue and the other kind of like tagging along (Not even I am sure what happened there). Point is that now they're lost as ****.
What I wanted to ask for, was some help in regards with the mechanics of the path of the mirrors.
Things we know:
You get lost.
The more you spend there, the more it gets to you
You'll be rolling will saves
Having company is good for not getting lost, it makes it harder for the mirrors to influence you (there is a caravan the size of an average town, travelling together to avoid getting lost)
There are no actual mirrors, but the effect is as if the whole road was a broken mirror. You might even encounter reflections of yourself, which could be just an optical illusion, a sentient double/triple/cuadruple, a magical illusion, etc.
They say "the mirrors get to you"
Straying from the path is BAD. As in, things get worse.
The whole thing is not magical per se, but it is magic in nature. The part of the plane itself works like that, so it's not like. Treat it as both (Ex) and (Su) if you need to.
The effect is not Mind-Affecting, it's quite real.
I thank all of you who respond in advance. Ideas, suggestions, comments, questions and constructive criticisms are all welcome.
Today your assistance will be required in the field of game mechanics.
Some backstory:
As some of you may know, I'm running a campaign set in an alternate material plane named Moroder (Yes, as in Giorgio). Moroder is the largest of all material planes by far, with all others in pseudo-orbit around it, while at the center and bottom of the plane (Studies of Moroder give better results if one asumes it is a Flamm Paraboloid (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b4/Flamm.jpg)) is an inconceivably large metropolis.
Both city and plane used to be closed to outsiders. Or rather than closed, there simply was no way in, in fact, nobody even knew it was there. However, some time ago a huge release of energy happened at the center of Moroder, which sent ripples all over the fabric of it's surface, making irregularities, allowing it to be noticed, and some could grasp those ripples, tinker with it, and eventually make cuts to be able to enter.
Long has past since the first cut was made permanent into a gate, and all over the planes people are finding ways to make their way through.
The castle city can be seen from almost everywhere once inside, and heading there are 8 major known roads, each with its own peculiarity, going outside the path means heading away from "drawn" reality, to the point where you eventually reach a form so raw and abstract of reality that notions such as, time, space, matter and energy are not fully if at all developed, this sort of places are called The Mists of Weird or The Unspawn Ocean, and heading there is no good.
Make no mistake, these paths are of amazing size, both in length and sometimes in stretch. One is The Road of War and it's an entire raging battleground, another is The Road of Resignation, where people have stopped trying to get to the citadel and took the seemingly empty path as their home, and it's the only place people seem to be able to establish settlements and hold them for long.
The one I want to talk about today is the Path of Mirrors
A man and a woman walk the road down a mountain to head to a castle which can be seen even from high above, their words are few. He notices a drop of water splashing on the rock floor and mentions it to his friend, they both look up, hoping for rain as their supply is running low... what they see is a ceiling. It is quite high but it is also quite there. Everywhere. They both stare, she's dizzy, he's baffled. A roof? A drop of water splashes in his face. That drop came from a stalagmite. They look down the road they're walking, searching for their best reference: the castle. They find the castle in the same direction it was before, but to reach it they have a steep treck... up the road, almost a climb. It is not a mountainside, it's a cave.
You might be asking yourself "What?" or "Eh?", or even "Wuh?". Well that's what my players said. Then they got that the road they're walking is an absolute mess, and that they will never begin to comprehend it. They got they're walking a path drawn and animated by Escher.
After the scene described above things got way weirder. They got lost on various axises, there was some wall-waking (although they didn't actually get to know that), and apparently they decided to stray from the path, because when a mirror-crazed NPC ran trying to catch a construct further down the road, they followed, one trying to rescue and the other kind of like tagging along (Not even I am sure what happened there). Point is that now they're lost as ****.
What I wanted to ask for, was some help in regards with the mechanics of the path of the mirrors.
Things we know:
You get lost.
The more you spend there, the more it gets to you
You'll be rolling will saves
Having company is good for not getting lost, it makes it harder for the mirrors to influence you (there is a caravan the size of an average town, travelling together to avoid getting lost)
There are no actual mirrors, but the effect is as if the whole road was a broken mirror. You might even encounter reflections of yourself, which could be just an optical illusion, a sentient double/triple/cuadruple, a magical illusion, etc.
They say "the mirrors get to you"
Straying from the path is BAD. As in, things get worse.
The whole thing is not magical per se, but it is magic in nature. The part of the plane itself works like that, so it's not like. Treat it as both (Ex) and (Su) if you need to.
The effect is not Mind-Affecting, it's quite real.
I thank all of you who respond in advance. Ideas, suggestions, comments, questions and constructive criticisms are all welcome.