Looking for some concrete ideas on "Illumination", "Time Travel" and "Dreamscapes"

[Florian]

Hey guys.

Beginning prep work on a mini-sandbox-campaign and I´m fooling around with the three things mentioned in the title.
I´m Looping for some ideas and also some food for thoughts in regards to the technical/rules aspects.

Illumination:
That´s something I have used when necessary ("The Hall lies in total darkness", "The Drow casts Deeper Darkness"..) but never tried to actively incorporate as active elements into encounter design. Anyone done anything spectacular with that so far? Good results or something that can be neglected? Something that can be used with higher levels and that can actively work with magic?

Time Travel:
Insofar as you should be able to visit the same location(s) in three different periods and change certain interlocking parts. I´m also looking into things that could help prevent a Paradox. Anyone tried anything like this? What were the results?

Dreamscapes:
I reale like the flavor of Oneiromancy and think that is fun. Right now, I´ve got a bad case of writers block on this, not coming up with anything more than elaborate set-piece battles. Help?

[Mehangel]

Have you taken a look at Spheres of Power? The particular spheres that I would recommend would be:

Light & Dark for Illumination

Time Sphere for Time Travel (I think the Time Sphere Handbook (which expands this sphere) is also available for playtesting)

For Dreamscapes, I would recommend Pathfinder Occult Adventures (which has a whole section on Dreamscapes).

[Zaq]

I'll leave time travel and dreams alone for now, but as far as illumination goes, how much it matters really depends both on how finicky you want to get and on how much effort the PCs choose to spend overcoming it (which, if you make it really annoying, might be a fair bit of effort).

In the groups I play with, we generally assume that adventurers are fairly glowy people, and we assume that they carry around enough light with them (in the form of cheap everburning torches, actual fire like lanterns or torches, glowing magic weapons, cheap sunrods, necklaces made from Liquid Sunlight, Continual Flame cast on various pieces of gear, and so on) that they generally don't have to worry about illumination unless something has gone out of its way to make things magically dark (or if the party is trying to be unusually stealthy, but it's rare for the entire party to be stealthy enough to bother with trying not to glow, so that doesn't come up often in my actual play experience). It's also worth mentioning that many player characters have low-light vision or darkvision or both; it's not universal, of course, but it does mean that there's usually at least a couple characters who aren't really bothered by nonmagical darkness. As a result of that, we usually don't bother to worry about illumination unless there's some kind of unusual circumstances in play. If the dungeon (or cave or forest or whatever) is unusually large and the PCs can't light up the entire area with their typical amount of glowiness, then they'll have to do something about lighting up the far corners of the room, but it's generally easier for us to gloss over it.

Now, maybe that isn't the case in your game. Maybe your players don't like to walk around as beacons of light even in deep dark dungeons. Maybe you're doing an Underdark campaign and carrying big obvious light sources will make you targets of unwanted attention. Or maybe you like putting magical darkness around here and there. If that's the case, then yeah, you'll have to keep track of illumination levels in different areas. The benefit to that is that it adds an extra level of strategic and tactical complexity, so different areas will feel different and will have to be tackled in different ways.

Unfortunately, there are a few downsides. First, darkness doesn't affect every PC in the same way. A PC who relies on area blasting basically doesn't give a damn about darkness—as long as they can get a rough idea of where some targets are, they can function at full power. A PC who relies on targeted magical effects needs to be able to pinpoint a target (so total concealment is annoying unless they have a method of pinpointing which square something is in, but partial concealment doesn't really matter), but once they can do that, they don't suffer any additional penalties from the darkness. A PC who relies on making attack rolls is definitely at a disadvantage, since partial concealment gives them a 20% miss chance and total concealment gives them a 50% miss chance even if they can find the correct square to attack, so that's going to be bad news for anyone who relies on attacking (even attacking magically, like with rays or Eldritch Blast). But a PC who relies on precision damage has it worst of all, because any concealment ruins a Sneak Attack (or a Sudden Strike or a Skirmish or whatever), so not only are they taking the same miss chance as the regular attacker, but they're also banned from using their primary damage source against anything in darkness they can't pierce. Now, it's okay that different PCs deal with challenges in different ways, but if I knew that the GM were planning on making illumination a big deal, there's no way in hell I'd be playing a Rogue unless I knew I had a foolproof way of piercing magical darkness. (PCs also are affected differently depending on what special vision modes, if any, they possess.)

There's also the problem with needing to dynamically track lighting effects. Light sources often move. If you have a PC in a big dark room, and the PC has a light effect that goes out a certain number of feet, you have to be aware of when that PC can see things as they move, and the portion of the map that is illuminated might change from round to round, which can be really annoying to keep track of, especially if you wanted anything to try to use the darkness to hide. Even magical darkness is subject to this if there's a mobile source of magical light that's of a high enough level to override the magical darkness (and vice versa). You'll also have to familiarize yourself with the rules for attacking into and out of darkness.

If different characters can see through different levels of darkness, not only does the amount of information the general encounter has change with changes in illumination, but the amount of information each individual character has also changes (and not necessarily in the same way), which again can be annoying to keep track of.

And then you have to think about how the enemies are going to be affected by the illumination. There's two big parts to this: you have to consider how the monsters deal with this in general, and you have to think about if you want for this to give a large-scale advantage to the monsters in kind of a metagame sense. First, you have to think about whether the monsters are going to have darkvision, darkvision that pierces magical darkness, a different method of getting the information we usually get visually (tremorsense/blindsense/blindsight/etc.), or none of these. If a monster doesn't have a way of ignoring darkness, they're going to be just as bad off as the PCs are. This can be a good thing (if everyone needs to pay attention to the ambient light levels, then you've introduced complexity that can be either beneficial or detrimental to the party depending on their tactics, which is good), but it can also be a bad thing (not only do you have to keep track of which monsters can see what, but you also have to deal with the verisimilitude of why something that can't see in the dark is choosing to live in a dark space without lighting it up). And then there's the metagame aspect: if the majority of monsters just don't care about darkness and the majority of PCs are strongly affected by darkness, then it can look like you're just tilting the scales against the party. This isn't always bad (I mean, the whole point is to have challenges), but you still don't necessarily want to make it so obvious that you're imposing disadvantages on the PCs that the monsters get to ignore (again, speaking on a broad scale; one or two encounters is one thing, but when this is a clear pattern, the players will notice). But of course, if the players feel like they need to spend a lot of effort overcoming darkness, then that's exactly what they'll do, and then you either end up with a situation where the PCs have a big advantage (if THEY ignore most darkness and most monsters don't) or a situation where things basically end up neutral (no one cares about darkness) BUT at the cost of PC resources. Whether your group will find that fun or not depends on a lot of things, but it's something to be aware of.

And while we're talking about PC responses to darkness, let's consider what kind of options they have. PCs do have ways of dealing with darkness, and if they become aware that darkness is going to be an issue in this campaign, they'd actually have to be pretty stupid not to deal with it in one way or another. For dealing with nonmagical darkness, they can load up on more and bigger light sources (maybe they didn't carry a ton of everburning torches before, but they could absolutely start doing just that), they can find ways of getting darkvision (through items or spells or class features or turning into a dragonborn or just choosing to roll a dwarf if their character dies or retires), and so on. Against magical darkness, they can start trying to get access to magical light that's of a high enough level to counteract the darkness, they can start investing in spells that let them see through magical darkness (Ebon Eyes and similar effects), they can try to get access to high-level enhanced senses (blindsight and the like), or they could even just dip Warlock for the Devil's Sight invocation. The party isn't likely to use ALL of these options, but it would take a lot of GM fiat to prevent them from accessing ANY of these options, and like I said, a party would have to be downright stupid to not try to prepare to deal with darkness once it is established that darkness is going to be a problem. (Even Zork knew that he needed to take steps to not be eaten by a grue, and there's a nonzero chance that that's older than your players!) So the question isn't whether the party will eventually be able to deal with illumination; the question is what form you want that to take and how much you want the PCs to have to invest.

Basically, illumination can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be. My group generally doesn't want it to be that complex, so we tend to gloss over it more often than not. And if you make it into a big deal, the players will find ways around it. The question is whether you want to go through that whole process or not.

Edit to add: A while back I GMed a 4e encounter that involved lots of patches of changing illumination (different areas would randomly light up or go dark every turn). 4e handles concealment in a simpler manner than 3.5 does (it's a flat penalty to targeted attack rolls rather than a miss chance), but not so differently that this isn't entirely relevant. About half of the monsters could see through the darkness and about half were affected as strongly as the PCs. My results were that the encounter was fun, but it was still more fiddly than it was really worth (I didn't do any more encounters with that specific mechanic). It was an interesting change of pace, but it didn't totally reinvent our playing style or anything like that. Take that for what it's worth.

[Florian]

@Zaq:

I´m playing with the idea of having a very serious planar overlap with the Plane of Shadow occur, especially in areas of darkness, where planar traits and some fixture of rooms/set-piece battles will have to change according to the actual levels of illumination present. That will, amongst other things, greatly affect how deadly (EL) the appropriate critters really will turn out to be.

[Flickerdart]

If you're going to make light sources A Thing, I can't recommend virtual tabletops enough. You can configure light sources, vision modes, and walls in, for example, Maptool, and then all a player needs to do is click on his token to have his vision restricted to only what his character would see.

[daremetoidareyo]

You need time paradox rules.

Fates and destinies help with this. Fate is a momentous bad thing. Destiny is an achievement. Peg certain events that cannot be changed into the timeline. Because....either fate or destiny.

Fate and destiny are then things that prophecies work around. And therefor you have a link to dreams. You work out the details. As far As I'm concerned, dreams are dumb.

Now, seeing as how one cannot effect fates or destinies by time travelling, they absolutely CAN effect details. Seeing as how you are in a fantasy world, and souls are real quanta in fantasy, you should attach all feats skills and mental attributes to souls. The bodies of the people using those souls are changed depending on what the PCs do to the past. This means that the PCs go back in time, kill the big bad, step on a puppy, burn down a pub, fail to bribe a guard, get locked in jail, and then they leap forward to the present.

The big bad of history is then replaced by a different figure who did basically the same stuff...Because fate. The pub fire is negligible, the guard got a promotion and his great great great great grandson in the future who the PCs met as ______, is now a town noble.

What you need then, is for your results to come from not the individual identities of historical figures, but to be derived from the roles they play. The prophet sees whats coming, the patriarch makes the bad decision, the untouchable slays the angel, etc. By focusing on roles rather than specific people in specific events, you can continue to keep the timeline stable.

Linking the roles in a chain, like I did above, to precipitate unavoidable effects is the only way to go. Say the volcano eruption that kills all the people is anavoidable, and the PCs travel back to evacuate. What occurs is that many of the survivors wind up with unavoidable illnesses.

Then you have to decide if you want a game where the PCs are traveling back in time to stop themselves in the past. If this isn't an option, perhaps have the PCs occupy the same vessel from the same starting point each time they backslide into the past. Anything that they did the last time is erased...

Then, as you mess up, everything gets messed up, just like it should when you have time travelling murder hobos to wrangle

Then, you have the problem of storing all of these differing memories in the same soul as the PCs muck with the timeline. So you need a wisdom, intelligence, charisma damage effect as the PCs change their own identities. The mechanics you can figure out. Maybe this is how you manage retraining?

[Kelb_Panthera]

Dreamscapes; Have you ever read HP Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath? It gave me some ideas when last I thought on this matter. Combined with the info on eberron's dal quor and the MotP's stuff on the dream realm I managed to cobble together something useful. It does have a slight horror motif though.

Time-travel; don't. Just.... don't. It only occasionally turns out well with writing. You've surely heard the expression, "If you want something set on fire, put adventurers near it." You're thinking about applying that to the time-stream. I am firmly against time-travel as a plot-device in general but it can be forgivable as a minor point in an otherwise well handled story. As a central theme, I can't see it as anything but trouble.

Illumination; Aside from its obvious tactical properties it can really be used to build atmosphere. I'm not really sure what you could do with it beyond using it in those capacities.

[Florian]

@Characters/Murderhobos:

Lucky me, these players are more interested in the actual story and are always willing to invest time and resources into interacting with the NPC and "doing good". So no murderhobo-concerns.

OP-level will be a bit above medium, with some good core concepts going but no game-breaking abilities wanted.

We´ll do a revamp of the characters that we used during our OcA-Playtest, so it´ll be an all-human party of Cavalier (Ghost Rider, Order of the Dragon), Investigator (Psychic Detective), Mesmerist (Vexing Daredevil), Occultist and Psychic (Faith), with the Psychic doing the heavy lifting on healing and summoning.

@daremetoidareyo/Time Travel:

Very good points.
So far, I was thinking about doing the TT-part utilizing the Akashic Records for it. Change stuff too much and they resist.

The whole things plays in Numeria before Divinity crashes. So far, I´ve got two fixed things in history that are "too big to change", namely the Age of Darkness after Starfall and the Night of Raining Stars.

[Gnorman]

Bruce Cordell's Hyperconscious is a pretty great source for ideas on at least the last two.

[Bohandas]

Eberron's got a bunch of dream-related material as it has a race of fiends that come from the plane of dreams as a semi-major plot point

[Florian]

Dreamscapes; Have you ever read HP Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath? It gave me some ideas when last I thought on this matter. Combined with the info on eberron's dal quor and the MotP's stuff on the dream realm I managed to cobble together something useful. It does have a slight horror motif though.

Time-travel; don't. Just.... don't. It only occasionally turns out well with writing. You've surely heard the expression, "If you want something set on fire, put adventurers near it." You're thinking about applying that to the time-stream. I am firmly against time-travel as a plot-device in general but it can be forgivable as a minor point in an otherwise well handled story. As a central theme, I can't see it as anything but trouble.

Illumination; Aside from its obvious tactical properties it can really be used to build atmosphere. I'm not really sure what you could do with it beyond using it in those capacities.

Oh, the old Lovecraft stories. Loved them as a kid and still have a somewhat nice collected edition around. Thanks for reminding me of that. Wow, I think the last time I read about Kadath must be well 20 years in the past...

Hm. What have you tried? "Free" time travel or fixed point, like with portals?

Illumination can, amongst other things, also be movement (think Shadowdancer) or in this case be a Plane Shift. You step into Darkness and you could transfer over to the shadow version of the place.
It also means that you could use larger locations (think cathedral) but vision limits the scope and range of actions to a manageable "small" area.


Bruce Cordell's Hyperconscious is a pretty great source for ideas on at least the last two.

Let´s see if I take time to look into it. I was not really a fan of the old psionic material as I really, really disliked the whole flavor of it. But thanks for the tipp.


Eberron's got a bunch of dream-related material as it has a race of fiends that come from the plane of dreams as a semi-major plot point

Not really the stuff I wanted to work with.
My "Shadow Menace" will be a bunch of Dark Folks/Owb, descendants of Humans that got stuck in darkness for too long and will come out en masse when "the shadow in the sky" happens.
My "Dream Menace" will be Night Herald cultists that try to contact the Dominion of the Black this way.
Neutrals will be some Kellid tribes.

The "shadow in the sky" will be the main mystery element of this campaign. It´s foreshadowing the Night of Falling Stars and divinity crashing down. It is, in fact, the shadow that Divinity cast on its way down.
Basic thought so far was that it´s all a glitch in the Akashic Record and people have extremely adequate "recollection" of the future to be and also experience some of the shockwaves of the future disaster.