Reality breaking down

[Silus]

Please pardon any spelling mistakes, I'm using a terrible Bluetooth keyboard for an iPad.

So I have this setting I've been working on with a friend and we've opted to make the inevitable Underdark expy a bit stranger than normal. Specifically, reality starts to break down the deeper you go (thanks to a slapdash job off welding the setting's pocket reality together by Gods that only know sort of what they're doing). Not necessarily hostile, but when gravity is more of a suggestion than a law and darkness can eat organic material, things tend to happen.

So I've a few questions to ask:

1. Should there be a blatant reason behind reality breaking down the deeper you go? Or should it just be a natural phenomenon that can only be dealt with (or exploited)?
2. Should there be a way to negate the reality confusion? The current idea I had was the Fallen London/Sunless Sea idea where Sun = Law of reality and, as the sun cannot reach the underground, said laws do not apply. Daylight type spells however revert reality back to "normal" (make it obey laws of reality).
3. Any suggestions on interesting ideas for HOW reality could break down? Specifically in this setting, the outer planes (Heaven, Hell, etc.) are locked off and inaccessable.

[halfeye]

and darkness can eat organic material, things tend to happen.

That brings to mind Cordwainer Smith's short story "The game of rat and dragon". It's set in space, the rat/dragon is something that hides in dusty darkness and disappears if illuminated, but will kill if not illuminated quickly enough. The story is in the book "The rediscovery of Man".

[Friv]

1. Should there be a blatant reason behind reality breaking down the deeper you go? Or should it just be a natural phenomenon that can only be dealt with (or exploited)?

The gods started their work on the surface, and never quite finished, perhaps? Or it turns out that the sun is the source of all reality, and the farther from its influence you go, the weaker that influence becomes? Which you touched on below, so...

2. Should there be a way to negate the reality confusion? The current idea I had was the Fallen London/Sunless Sea idea where Sun = Law of reality and, as the sun cannot reach the underground, said laws do not apply. Daylight type spells however revert reality back to "normal" (make it obey laws of reality).

That is pretty sweet, I would go with it. Do players know this ahead of time?

3. Any suggestions on interesting ideas for HOW reality could break down? Specifically in this setting, the outer planes (Heaven, Hell, etc.) are locked off and inaccessable.

Well, I'm going to reference a much better writer than myself, from another RPG. For the following, feel free to substitute "The Darkness" for "the Outside"

The world becomes more stressful as the Outside presses in. It becomes harder to distinguish between things and experiences — when you’re not looking at things, and sometimes even when you are, they fade into a welter of sensation or bits of abstract form. Your ship can remain entirely real while riding a wave that’s nothing more than a wash of blue watercolor. You can spend an hour talking to or running from a man before you really notice that he had a metal sink instead of a face. The low Outside begins to slip from the surreal into the lyrically abstract, and you’d think you’d be able to laugh at that or play around with it but underneath it all is this pulsebeat of fear and distress.

It’s not a magical Toontown or fairy tale land. It doesn’t feel like a magical Toontown or a cool abstract painting. It
feels like you’re being starved of reality. It feels like you’re in a desert of sense, where the world itself is so desperate to hang on to form and meaning that it’s using abstraction and bizarreness to paper over its terrible lack.

[Vitruviansquid]

1. Have a reason prepared, but don't feel like you have to tell your players all the time. Make learning why reality breaks down a reward for some kind of exploration or quest.

2. Only have a way to negate the reality breaks if you want it to dominate those adventures that take place in your reality breaking places. If you rule that sun power can prevent reality breaking down, then your players are probably not going to enter those places without a source of sun power, and would probably be fairly obsessed with keeping it while they were in those places. So whatever negation you incorporate, make it mechanically interesting. Here are some ideas:

- Light negates reality breaks: Light obviously needs fuel (or if not in your setting, rule that it must be a special kind of light made with a special kind of fuel), which you should limit for your players by cost, weight, or access somehow. Contrive to send your players into the deep parts of your Underdark expy with an opportunity to prepare before entering, and then stick to your rules regarding fuel source. They should feel time pressured to enter and exit before they are out of fuel.

- Magical power/mana/fate/phlebotinum negates reality breaks: This works less well in systems like DnD where not everybody has magical power, but you could do something like tax players' spell uses for hanging around.

- A person or McGuffin negates reality breaks: This works well when the object can be put into danger. It could be lost or stolen or something. You could even have a situation where the party needs to go into the deep parts of your Underdark very badly, but the required item has been lost and needs to be recovered first. Using a person works less well if your party is dogmatically anti-DMPC, but the worst faults of having a DMPC might be avoided if you know what you're doing.

3. I enjoy areas that warp time and space and multi-verses. To steal a page from Demon's Souls, the game takes place in a world where time and space are sometimes confused. When you're playing through and your character receives help or harm from another player, they are considered to be phantoms from another timeline. Some phantoms come from the past, some from the future, others from alternate timelines. There's a lot of weirdness you can pull with this, such as having your players meet alternate versions of NPCs they're familiar with, or NPCs connected to their backstories.

You may otherwise choose to warp reality in a way that is thematically appropriate to your setting. If light is considered good and darkness evil, then having darkness literally devour people is a good way to truly get your players to fear the dark. If you want a more Lovecraftian bent, being in the depths of the Underdark expy could cause people to go insane, see visions or hear things that aren't actually real, and such.

[Silus]

1. Have a reason prepared, but don't feel like you have to tell your players all the time. Make learning why reality breaks down a reward for some kind of exploration or quest.

2. Only have a way to negate the reality breaks if you want it to dominate those adventures that take place in your reality breaking places. If you rule that sun power can prevent reality breaking down, then your players are probably not going to enter those places without a source of sun power, and would probably be fairly obsessed with keeping it while they were in those places. So whatever negation you incorporate, make it mechanically interesting. Here are some ideas:

- Light negates reality breaks: Light obviously needs fuel (or if not in your setting, rule that it must be a special kind of light made with a special kind of fuel), which you should limit for your players by cost, weight, or access somehow. Contrive to send your players into the deep parts of your Underdark expy with an opportunity to prepare before entering, and then stick to your rules regarding fuel source. They should feel time pressured to enter and exit before they are out of fuel.

- Magical power/mana/fate/phlebotinum negates reality breaks: This works less well in systems like DnD where not everybody has magical power, but you could do something like tax players' spell uses for hanging around.

You may otherwise choose to warp reality in a way that is thematically appropriate to your setting. If light is considered good and darkness evil, then having darkness literally devour people is a good way to truly get your players to fear the dark. If you want a more Lovecraftian bent, being in the depths of the Underdark expy could cause people to go insane, see visions or hear things that aren't actually real, and such.

The idea I had was that simple light (via a Light spell or equal such methods) might be able to hold off SOME instances of anti-reality, but when you get to the weird stuff (A gravity defying river of water that exists in all three states of matter simultaneously for example) then you're going to need to bring a Daylight spell. Might make the dispelling caster level dependant based on the level of weird.

That is pretty sweet, I would go with it. Do players know this ahead of time?

Honestly, no. I'm kind of a fan of the notion that there are things That Are Known, and things That Are. Like things that are known would be "The underground is super weird because of magic and stuff" whereas what is is that the underground is weird because the Sun is a sort of reality anchor and cannot govern what it can't "see". One of the sticking points a friend of mine has with this is that the how or the why are not important and that the reality breaks and the Sun governing reality and such won't take center stage unless the players expressly investigate it.

Also it gives us an opportunity to add in some really weird stuff. Got an idea for a location called like "The Hall of Glass" that is a long cavern imbedded with semi-natural mirrors (or framed mirrors that seem to grow from the rocks) that show what was, what is, what will be, what could be, and what might have been. Also possibly mirror dopplegangers and such.

[Khedrac]

I think an early sign of reality breaking down could be mapping failing. For example the paths split then each path then turns through where the other should be, or a corridor having more than three 90 degree left turns in quick succession.
Slightly worse is when retracing one's route does not work.

Time becoming confused was mentioned above - torches burning backwards is a nice touch.

[Frozen_Feet]

Stalker and Praedor play with similar ideas as well. Changing gravity is a classic, so are bodiless sounds, shadows without apparent cause, floating images, water turning to poison, nameless beings which violate known biology, sudden and inexlicable silence or loud sounds, changes in smell and taste of air, warping of colors, lack of ontological inertia, magnetic anomalies, shifting corridors, buildings made of flesh, sudden and extreme changes in temperature etc.

[Cernor]

Something else that might be fun to play with is the senses going haywire: The world may in fact be working perfectly as intended, but the sun is what allows the characters to perceive it properly. Allowing an adjustment period of a few weeks, the party can get trapped and acclimatize to the weirdness... Only to find that when they get home there are subtle wrongnesses in the world - building corners at slightly off angles and moments where colour loses all meaning.

For example of the senses going wrong, consider the following normal scenario. "You stumble across a dying beast, shrieking in pain as its blood stains the stone floor."
Now let's consider the alternate: "You see barbed tendrils of pain flowing from the body of this dying beast. Its blood writhes as it tries to pull its way back into the dying form, while its shrieks stagger you with the sound of magenta."

[Quertus]

Honestly, no. I'm kind of a fan of the notion that there are things That Are Known, and things That Are. Like things that are known would be "The underground is super weird because of magic and stuff" whereas what is is that the underground is weird because the Sun is a sort of reality anchor and cannot govern what it can't "see".

Having unknowns to explore - especially cool unknowns like this - is a big plus for players like me.

However, given that light is absolutely the most common and reasonable spell to cast in the dark, you'd probably have to make the world feel pretty contrived for "light fixes things" to be an unknown.

One of the sticking points a friend of mine has with this is that the how or the why are not important and that the reality breaks and the Sun governing reality and such won't take center stage unless the players expressly investigate it.

I'm very confused by your friend's stance, unless they are simply saying describe the Known, the perceived (the effects), and not the Unknown (the cause). In which case, I agree with them.

However, the how and why are very important, so that, if the players do investigate, you can provide meaningful answers (or, at least, answers as meaningful as their questions and investigative techniques merit). And so that the experience is consistent.

Now, admittedly, we're talking about reality breaking down, so how much consistency is really required? Well, here's some things to consider: Why doesn't reality break down inside buildings (or, heck, inside living beings), where the light can't reach? How about inside a coffin, buried beneath the surface? Are the laws of reality weaker at night? Would star metal (adamandite) have a similar calming effect on reality?

The idea I had was that simple light (via a Light spell or equal such methods) might be able to hold off SOME instances of anti-reality, but when you get to the weird stuff (A gravity defying river of water that exists in all three states of matter simultaneously for example) then you're going to need to bring a Daylight spell. Might make the dispelling caster level dependant based on the level of weird.

Also it gives us an opportunity to add in some really weird stuff. Got an idea for a location called like "The Hall of Glass" that is a long cavern imbedded with semi-natural mirrors (or framed mirrors that seem to grow from the rocks) that show what was, what is, what will be, what could be, and what might have been. Also possibly mirror dopplegangers and such.

Sounds like a lot of fun. Is your party likely to complain that (un)reality is one more thing that is solvable as a caster only, complain that it is taxing the casters' resources, or just enjoy it for what it is?

[Telonius]

Some ideas of what a total reality breakdown might start to look like:

- Portions of the visible wavelength become invisible, or inverted along the color wheel (red becomes green, orange becomes blue, yellow becomes purple, etc)
- Sounds travel farther (or not as far) than usual. You might hear you party member's hair growing, or not be able to hear anything farther than 10 feet.
- Time progressing oddly.
- Breakdown between imagination and reality. In one area, your surface thoughts (or deeper thoughts, memories, or emotions) become projected as images around you, or possibly real solid things (as though made by a Killer Gnome)
- Magic behaving unusually; spells getting strange effects (automatic metamagic, randomly raised or lowered CL, opposite effects as intended)
- Distance doing weird things. You might take a five foot step and end up 50 feet away, or 5 feet, randomly. Or, you go the desired distance but in a random direction.

[Pronounceable]

If laws of reality are breaking down the deeper underground you go and there's no known afterlife place, it'll be considered to be down there. Some will say it's heaven deep enough where rules and laws are no more in the land of absolute freedom, others will say it's hell once everything breaks down and all is lost among infinite chaos, other others will claim both, and other other others will scoff at the notion of that stuff not being up in the sky. Occasionally expeditions will go deep and not return, which will clearly be the concrete proof that your opinion is right and others' is not.