Rolling for Shoes and Quantum Gaming

I greatly enjoy "quantum" game mechanics. In this context, all that means is some aspect of the game that would typically be predefined is left undefined until its definition is specifically required by the events of the game. Various games use quantum mechanics without naming them, but one of my favorite articulations is this one by Luka Rejec. 

In a pinch, I would probably use Roll For Shoes by Ben Wray, or freeD6 down the line by Liche’s Libram for a quantum chassis. I particularly like the idea that basically anything can be a character skill (allowing for quantum character construction and a negotiated understanding of the game scenario), but that the randomness of the dice ensures that characters have choices and risk/reward calculations; they can’t just add skills indiscriminately, or they’ll end up with low ones that the GM can force them to test. These games also require nomic negotiation between the players to decide how to interrupt unclear overlaps and edge cases.

I do want to try running Roll For Shoes as-is, but I have also put some thought into a slight variation on it that makes it less of a d6 die pool system and lets it tack closer to D&D abilities and d20 resolution. All you need are 3d6 and 2d20, as well as a way to take notes. So you can run this game entirely from your phone, if needed. The game requires at least one GM and at least one player, although it could be played solo with an "oracle" replacing the GM.

The procedure is as follows:

1. The group chooses a genre. The GM should be at least as familiar with the genre as the player or players are. 
2. Choose a goal. It should be very general, but within the confines of the genre. Don’t think too much about who the characters are yet. A goal could be “defeat the evil overlord” or “win the reality TV show” or “steal the huge diamond from the gallery.”
3. Each player chooses a very minimal character concept. This should be as bare-bones as possible. It could be an occupation, a background, or something else. Basically a one-sentence premise, just enough to explain why this person is present in the opening scene.
4. The GM begins the game. Play starts with an opening scene, usually something that will bring the characters together (if there is more than one) and either establish how they know each other or allow them to meet for the first time.
5. When a PC has to do something uncertain, they roll 3d6. This becomes their permanent ability stat (or skill, or whatever term you prefer) for that action.
6. Whenever a player needs to test that stat (including immediately after that first 3d6 roll), they roll d20. A result equal to or lower than their stat is a success. The GM may give them advantage or disadvantage on the roll.
7. If a player rolls something really low on 3d6, they can choose not to test it and can try to approach the situation in a different way. But the result of that 3d6 roll stays on their character sheet.
8. Failed d20 rolls create new antagonists, hazards, obstacles, complications, or other threats. This could be anything in the story that the GM can use to trip up the players. The GM writes it down, along with the number that the player rolled that resulted in the failure. So if the player has an Argue stat of 13, and then rolls a 16 on a test when trying to convince the studio boss to greenlight their movie, the GM notes “Studio Boss: 16.” 
9. Whenever a number associated with a threat is rolled by anyone, that threat can reappear. It doesn’t matter if a different player rolls the number, or if the PC whose failure led to the creation of the threat is present or not, or even if the roll in this instance was a success (because it is rolling against a higher stat). If the GM thinks it makes sense for the threat to appear, it can happen.
10. The story ends whenever everyone thinks it has reached a natural ending. Or…
11. Alternately, the story can end when the game reaches a predetermined number of one or more of the following criteria:
1. Successes. X successful checks against stats are enough to complete the goal.
2. Failures. X failed rolls on stats are enough for the goal to fail.
3. Threats. X threats created are enough to ensure the PCs will fail to complete the goal.
4. Stats. Each character can have only X stats, maximum. Once they’ve reached this maximum, their next failure will knock them out of the story in some fashion or another. If all the PCs are knocked out, they fail to complete the goal.

I'm keeping this in my back pocket in case I need a quick, improvised RPG. If I have an opportunity to try this, I will report back.

Using Boring Meetings to Design Dungeons

The modern world is filled with a certain number of boring, pointless meetings. Maybe the meeting itself is pointless. Or maybe you are simply an ancillary attendee who should have been left off the invitation. For whatever reason, you are stuck here until the meeting ends. With nothing else to keep it busy, your mind wanders back to the dungeon. 

Every time a new participant in the boring meeting talks, try to write down the first remotely interesting word you hear them say that is either a noun, an adjective, or a verb. If they’re talking fast, you might only catch one or two of those words. That’s OK. These are loose guidelines, not strict rules. Keep writing down words until you have at least one verb, one noun, and one adjective. Cluster these in groups until you have a handful of them.

Nouns Are Rooms

Each noun defines the purpose or status of a room in the dungeon that you are creating. Sometimes this will be very literal, like the word “store” suggesting a storehouse. Other times the room you create will only have the vaguest trace of the origin word. Some words will not work at all, but try doing some free association before you give up on a noun that doesn’t have any dungeon energy. You may find it takes you to some unexpected places.

Adjectives Are Contents

Adjectives elaborate on what is in the room. This can take many forms, but the following are good places to start.

Aesthetics: What does the room look like? Smell like? Sound like? 

Purpose: The noun may imply what the room is for, but an adjective that pushes back against that implication may suggest a change in purpose. Integral to many classic dungeons is the idea that a room’s purpose has changed over time.

Occupants: Adjectives can strongly suggest who or what uses a room or has been there recently.

Verbs Are Current Events 

Verbs can suggest monsters, NPCs, and other dungeon activity. They can also suggest hazards, environmental effects, and weather. The random encounters table is a good place to start thinking about verbs. What is happening right now? What happened recently? What will happen soon? If the room is not an empty room, the verb may be the best clue toward what a monster is doing, how a trap threatens interlopers, or how a trick or special feature presents itself to the explorer.

An Example: The Questioning Device

I listened and wrote down the noun "question," the adjective "technological," and the verb "counting."

“Question” could mean many things, from a scrying pool to a riddle. I will make our “question” room an interrogation room. This is a pretty literal interpretation and gives us a grounded place to start.

“Technological” could go in a few directions. The torture machine from The Princess Bride, for example. Perhaps there is a techno-magical machine in this space. Whatever its original purpose, the current dungeon occupants use it to interrogate prisoners.

“Counting” is a great verb because it suggests both subject and object – someone is counting and someone or something is being counted. Perhaps one of a number of prisoners has escaped? A headcount is happening, or has just happened, and the captors have discovered that someone ins missing. They are now using the Questioning Device to try to force the remaining prisoners to tell them where the escapee went.

And so we have a fully formed room. 

Pay Attention, Class

Am I suggesting you be lazy? Rude? Disrespectful to the organizer of your boring meeting? Well, yes and no.

Yes, it is true that I am suggesting you slack off a bit. But I did preface it by saying I was talking about meetings that were unimportant, unnecessary, or overly broad in terms of invitees.

And for what it’s worth, I think this game is a way of genuinely paying attention. The worst sort of inattention is the full-on daydream, where you are thinking about a dungeon that has nothing to do with the meeting. At least in this model, you are paying a minimum level of attention in order to catch those prompt words. Your brain may subconsciously catch more detail than you expect, just because you have given it an ulterior (and more interesting) reason to care.

Asking for Directions in an RPG

"Five Turns Sixwards of Five’ is a pretty simple instruction for someone around Saint Five; just turn ‘Sixwards’ (people nearby will probably have a good general idea of which direction ‘Five’ is), and then take five major turns in that direction." 

This from a post regarding Patrick Stuart's upcoming book, Queen Mab's Palace. I’m looking forward to reading it, as his Deep Carbon Observatory was one of the very first OSR products I ever read, and Patrick’s work continues to be appointment reading.

The above excerpt reminded me of an interesting question to consider when running RPG sessions; how do people give directions in the fictional world? This is worthwhile to think about both in the sense of NPCs giving PCs literal directions, and in the sense of how the DM describes imagined spaces to the PCs so they can visualize them accurately. So what are some options?

Locally relative. Until recently in human history, most people did not have GPS, compasses, or even detailed maps. Most directions would be given based on a simple view of the sun and some dead reckoning using local landmarks. This is a good baseline assumption for low-tech worlds like most fantasy milieus. Simple questions of elevation and sight lines would greatly affect how well the local area is "known" to inhabitants. 

Map-level view. The opposite is people who primarily have a “map-level” view, rather than an egocentric sense of direction. This is generally better for PCs trying to ask for directions, as the players themselves are to some degree viewing the action “top-down” (literally or figuratively) when trying to get from place to place. So an NPC who can tell them to go west is probably more helpful than one who gives locally relative directions. 

But it can get tricky for the PCs in other circumstances. If a PC deep in a dungeon asks an NPC “which door should I use, the one on the right or the one on the left?” and the answer they get is “the westernmost one,” that PC may wish they had those locally relative directions. 

Intuitive directions. The direction-giver knows how they would get there, using subtle clues from the weather, the disposition of local flora and fauna, or even something like the planet’s magnetic field. But that can’t be relayed in a way the PCs will realistically understand. This is a good way to prompt the PCs to hire a guide who can navigate for them. And to stress that they need to keep that guide alive. 

Different units of measurement. The locals know how far it is to where you want to go, but they don’t use the same units of measurement and don’t know how to convert to units the PCs understand. This can create a bit of a puzzle, where the PCs are rewarded for figuring out something that must have been a challenge for real-world explorers as well.

Different or differently emphasized sensory organs. What happens when a PC uses Speak with Animals to ask a bat about the interior of a cave? The bat knows the cave in great detail, but not in the way a person would know it. Imagine the poor bat trying to explain how echolocation feels to someone who cannot echolocate. 

Weird environment. If PCs are exploring a strange space like the astral sea, and they meet a resident of that place, how does that creature explain how to get where they want to go? Light? Gravity? Something else?

Be Kind to Your Players

It is fun to bake your crazy ideas into your game, but please keep in mind that TTRPGs are a matter of mediating a highly fluid and unstable imagined environment through mostly just... words. Be careful when throwing in advanced concepts like tricky or hard-to-understand directions. Err in favor of the players when they’re struggling with confusion that is more about the distance between player and character than any intentionally crafted game challenge.

The Rival Taxonomies of D&D Magic

D&D’s origins were full of contradictions. The game was defined by strict rules, but open to liberal interpretation. Top-down design versus a strong DIY ethos; high fantasy versus science fantasy; Appendix N versus Hammer horror. It shows up in so many aspects of the game. 

Consider for example how spells are named in D&D. They can be grouped into two broad categories. 

Detect Magic, Locate Object, Comprehend Languages, and similar spell names have a technical nomenclature. The spell names quite literally explain what the spells do, in plain language. This is magic as technology. This is one of the two taxonomies of the game that goes all the way back to the beginning, appearing in the context of magic items as well. 

Now consider names like Hellish Rebuke, Crown of Madness, Eyebite, and almost all of the spells that include proper names, like Tasha's Hideous Laughter. These have a mythic nomenclature. The name still relates to what the spell does, but in a much more evocative, figurative, or culturally mediated way.

Now imagine that these rival naming conventions aren’t just an oddity of the game’s development. What if we infer there is an in-universe reason behind this distinction? Perhaps the technical nomenclature came from magic-as-science aliens, while the mythic nomenclature descended from primordial progenitors at the dawn of the world.

You could even group the spells accordingly and associate them with a new alignment axis, to replace the good-evil axis. Is your character lawful-technical, neutral-technical, chaotic technical, lawful-neutral, true neutral, chaotic neutral, lawful-mythic, neutral-mythic, or chaotic-mythic? Replacing good-evil with a different alignment axis to complement law-chaos can make for a much interesting milieu. 

Want to go even further? You live in a world of rationalist wizards and faithful priests. Wizards get all the technical language spells. Priests get all the mythic ones. That’s right, Regenerate and Remove Curse are technical names. Those are wizard spells now. Burning Hands and Cloudkill go in the other direction. These more embellished or ornate names are now cleric spells.

An Even Closer Look at the Medusa: Seven More Variant Gorgons

Several years ago I wrote a post with variant versions of the classic gorgon. As noted in that post, we’re talking gorgons as in "people who have serpentine features and can turn things to stone by looking at them," not gorgons as in "big metal bulls that fart petrifying gas." 

Calling gorgons “medusas” is like if aliens made first contact with a human named Glen, then insisted on calling all other humans “glens.”

Although... now the idea of aliens who call humans "glens" is growing on me.

Anyway, gorgon variants. Here we go.

The Deep Time Enthusiast

Medusa was not a vain fool. She was not jealous of her immortal sisters because they would be forever young and beautiful. She was jealous of them because they would live long enough to see the world transformed in ways that even the gods couldn’t predict. Medusa was a deep time enthusiast, and immortality was a path to seeing the future.

Immortality allowed Medusa to study changes in the world, from the rise and fall of kingdoms to the evolution of species to the geologic development of the world itself. The petrifying gaze, nominally a “curse” associated with the condition, also proved useful in her studies. Petrifying a living thing ensured a level of preservation that archeologists can only dream of. 

Building wealth is trivially easy for the immortal, who can rely on compounding passive gains over long periods. Medusa invested her wealth broadly, and used the proceeds to build the world’s greatest museum and biological storehouse. Because petrification can be (relatively) easily reversed, it is an ideal way of preserving organic life.

Random table: What long-gone creatures has Medusa stored in stone in her archive of deep time?

1. Ravenous meglopedes. Nearly wiped out by humans because of their ruinous consumption of crops. A petrified weapon of mass destruction that fits in your hand.
2. Party of neanderthal adventurers. Recognizably a fighter, wizard, cleric, and thief, but with exaggerated caveman aesthetics. 
3. Polonium elemental. Inert in stone form, but highly radioactive if de-petrified. 
4. Corewurm. Massive interstellar wurm that seeks volcanically active planets, burrows to their core, and consumes them, destroying the planet in the process. Sticky note reading “do NOT reanimate” attached to its stone snout.
5. Genesis Seed. A single seed, turned to stone. If revitalized and planted, it will produce a rampant explosion of new life, evolving at a greatly intensified speed; and likely displacing existing life.
6. Doppleooze. Protoplasmic ooze that takes on the form of what it touches. Petrified before its kind drove themselves to extinction via excessively successful doppling. If de-stoned, will turn into the first living thing it can touch.

Credit to Epochrypha by Skerples for inspiration.

The Graft Surgeon

There are various options available to adventurers who have lost limbs, ranging from simple prosthetics up through the powerful Regenerate spell. Somewhere in between those extremes is the exotic procedure known as petrigrafting.

The gorgon known as the graft surgeon practices a craft somewhere between doctor and sculptor (the distinction is… not fixed among gorgonkind). After carefully examining a patient who has lost a limb and taking various measurements, they will search through their storehouse of statuary, looking for a limb that is as close as possible to the missing one. They’ll then petrify the (willing) patient.

The next step is most critical. They must carefully chisel both the patient’s stump and the donor limb so they fit together as exactly as possible. The stump and then limb must then be bonded with adhesive made entirely from organic components. The closer the ingredients are to human physiology, the better.

Finally, the surgeon applies restorative magic to reverse the petrification. As with any graft, there is no guarantee that the body will accept the new addition. Sometimes, the graft fails, and the surgeon will need to re-petrfiy and remove the failed graft. 

But in many cases, the process is a success, and the patient walks out of the operating theater with a newly functional limb. The arm is always conspicuously different; the surgeon cares little for aesthetics, and skin color, musculature, and even biological origin may vary.

The surgeon is always seeking donations for their statuary collection. A common way of defraying the surgeon's bill is for a patient to agree to donate their body after death, so that their limbs may one day be donated to others. For patients fortunate enough to die of natural causes, the graft surgeon is often the last to visit them at their bedside, to call in that debt from years before. 

Random table: What ingredient does the surgeon need you to find in order to create a stone-to-flesh graft adhesive?

1. Basilisk tears.
2. The heart of a galeb-duhr.
3. Saliva from a mimic that has feasted on human flesh.
4. A branch from a tree in a petrified forest. 
5. A flagstone from the hall of the king of Urgos, located deep within the elemental plane of earth.
6. A fang from the snake-hair of a gorgon (no, the surgeon is not interested in donating one of his).

The Stonework Stablemaster

Nomenclature mixups aside, gorgons (the petrifying people) are sometimes found in the company of “gorgons” (the metal bulls). The bull-like creature that many humans call a “gorgon” is actually a close cousin of the catoblepas; a more correct taxonomic name would be petroblepas. Both the former’s stench and the latter’s petrifying gas comes from their specialized stomachs; like cows, they are ruminants.

In isolated areas, gorgons are known to raise basilisks and petroblepases. While gorgons are not immune to their petrifaction, they do understand its dangers better than most creatures, and have some inherent resistance to it. 

Gorgon stablemasters can provide a stable supply of food in the form of petrified stone, which allows them to domesticate both of these petrified flesh-eating creatures. Basilisks are useful because gorgons know how to use the oil from their digestive system to create the alchemical combination that cures petrification, which is very helpful for any gorgon that wishes to maintain peaceful relations with their neighbors.

Random table: What useful things are available for sale or trade at the gorgon’s farm?

1. Cockatrice egg-grenade. Reproduces the effect of the cockatrice’s bite, in grenade form. Fragile.
2. Cockatrice-feather cloak. AC as scale, at half the weight. Stylish. 
3. Basilisk oil. A single vial can restore one petrified creature.
4. Basilisk kidney. Filters out trace rare metals in stone that the basilisk can’t digest. Highly sought after by alchemists.
5. Basilisk cornea. Expertly removed intact and preserved in oil. Can be placed over the wearer’s eye like a contact lens. Allows a one-time use of the basilisk's petrification gaze.
6. Petroblepas oil. The oil that naturally lubricates their armored plating. Functions as oil of slipperiness. Can also be used to restore even seriously rusted metal.
7. Petroblepas haggis. Pudding made from the organs. Eating it causes petrification, but only gradually over a period of about 48 hours, as most creatures can only digest it very slowly.
8. Petroblepas armor. AC as full plate, but half again heavier. Advantage on saves versus petrification.

The Surveillance Assassin

The idea of meeting a gorgon’s gaze is terrifying, but most people can take comfort in the knowledge that gorgons usually dwell in remote ruins and dungeons. Surely, here in the world’s greatest city, there is no reason to fear that a gorgon's glance could turn one into stone.

Don’t be so sure. With the proper application of spells like Scrying and Project Image, a gorgon with magical powers can instantiate its petrifying visage far from its own lair. This method of remote petrification is particularly useful for targeting wizards, as their crystal balls and scrying pools can be magically hacked by the gorgon. 

Adventure hook: Just one more thing… The PCs are investigating the mysterious fate of an aristocratic leader who was turned to stone. No one is fessing up to hiring the gorgon who conducted the remote-stoning, but someone certainly bought up all the basilisk oil in the region over the past few years to prevent an easy cure. If the PCs can figure out who, they will have a strong lead on the responsible party. 

The Mirror-Maze Prisoner

Gorgons are famously vulnerable to their own gaze. Many gorgons end their immortal lives amidst their own statue gardens, after letting their guard down for just a moment. And for some, the double-edged danger of that gaze becomes a prison.

King Calviano's pursuit of immortality may have driven him half-mad, but he found it. The forbidden magics that transformed him into a gorgon ensured he would live forever. Queen Calviano recognized the danger he presented to the people of the land, but could not bring herself to kill him. Instead, she trapped him in a prison of unbreakable mirrors.

The maze is not so difficult to navigate for someone with normal vision. Ordinary techniques for escaping a mirrored carnival funhouse will work, including looking at the ceiling and floor, or finding smudges and marks that give away the glass. 

The maze is more difficult for someone who cannot risk looking at their reflection. The glass is unusually tough so that the king cannot easily break it. And the maze includes loops and gaps that make it difficult to navigate by touch alone. Doors include strange handles and locks that are relatively easy to open when looking at them, but impossible to manage blind. While the king has tried to escape by blindly wandering the halls, the maze’s construction has been enough to keep him trapped at the heart of the maze. 

Adventure hook: Not a place of honor. That all happened over a thousand years ago, and despite the queen’s best efforts to ward intruders away from the mirror maze, people have forgotten the place’s purpose. Adventurers have recently begun to enter it in search of treasure. The king stirs, sensing an opportunity to escape and return to the outside world.

Stone-Cold Counsel 

It’s a quandary that many mortal rulers face. They’ve accomplished great things in their life. But time comes for everyone, and the leader of a hereditary monarchy must ask: can the next generation be relied on to rule effectively? Well, maybe. If only there was a better way.

There is! In stately palanquin, surrounded by lead-lined screens, the gorgon Gravieska travels from court to court, offering aged rulers a tempting bargain; meet her gaze and become a statue. Their heir will receive a dose of petrification-reversing basilisk oil as part of the deal. The statue and oil are passed down from generation to generation. At times of great danger or opportunity, when the wise ancestor's counsel would be most valuable, the current ruler can de-petrify them to seek their aid.

Adventure hook: Succession crisis. The emperor, diagnosed with an incurable disease, was thought to only have a few weeks of life left to them. They underwent the petrification process so that they could save those precious weeks to provide advice to future generations. Several decades later, a cure has been found for the disease. The new emperor’s reign has been controversial, reversing many of the previous emperor’s signature accomplishments. Amidst the old guard in the imperial court, there is more and more talk of bringing back the old emperor; not to provide counsel to the current emperor, but to overthrow their own heir and rule once again.

The Mother of Flesh and Stone

In the beginning, the world was nothing but a writhing mass of organic matter. 

Life, microscopic and thoughtless, was caught in a constant cycle of mad consumption and thoughtless reproduction. This went on for a really long time. 

Into this primordial chaos came the first gorgon. Was it an alien? A monster? A god? There was no observer there to make such distinctions. But it was able to transform the other denizens of this world into non-organic material. For the first time, there was stone. The core of a world. 

Gorgons gradually transformed more and more life into stone, and that stone provided a stable core for the life of this world. For the first time, living things were not in constant contact with other living things. There was room for water to settle, habitats to form, and creatures to specialize. 

Random table: What weird creatures flourished in this gorgon-influenced world? 

1. Giant shipworms. Kinda like nautical purple worms. Harbormasters will lay stone pilings well outside the harbor, laced with tasty minerals, to keep these creatures away from the piers.
2. Mage-bane lichen. Lichen colonies that specifically grow on sapient creatures that have been petrified. Acidically eroding this particular type of stone seems to supercharge their growth. The lichen is a serious threat to any gorgons (like the Deep Time Enthusiast) who use petrification to preserve samples of living things. 
3. Piddock-folk. These molluskular creatures bore into soft rock in search of locations to form new colonies. They appear to be intelligent, but are incapable of verbal communication, or just very rude (scholars disagree).
4. Dire parrotfish. Particularly common around colonies of coral gorgons. As they scrape statues, they can sometimes ingest intelligence or magic from petrified persons. 

Dungeon Rooms are Nouns, Dungeon Corridors are Verbs

I sometimes think about dungeon design like this: Rooms are for nouns, corridors are for verbs. 

Explaining what is going on there requires some background.

Why are corridors important at all? Many modern dungeons eschew them. I think part of the challenge is that writers publishing dungeons often want to fit an entire map floor on a single page of a book or PDF. Many otherwise very good dungeons feature cramped, close-together rooms because of product design, not dungeon design. 

But those corridors serve important purposes, many of which are covered well here. So dungeons should have more corridors. How should we design them differently from rooms? 

Dungeon Rooms Are Nouns

The room is defined first and foremost by its contents. The classic dungeon stocking options of “empty/monster/treasure/trap/special” are essentially noun-focused. Something may be happening in the room, but any action is derived from the contents. If you are GMing a minimally keyed dungeon, and the PCs approach a room that simply says “guard post: barricade, 3 goblins” you are going to intuit the action downstream of those nouns. Are the goblins alertly watching out for intruders? Or arguing with each other? Asleep? You may infer the answer, you may roll for it, but it is downstream of the contents. Rooms are noun-forward.

Dungeon Corridors Are Verbs

Corridors are typically not defined by their contents. I’m excluding a “great hall” or “foyer” here. We are talking about corridors that are exclusively transitional spaces between rooms. They are not defined by their contents but instead by action, by what is going on within them.

Wandering monster or random event tables are the classic way of adding verbs to corridors. I strongly agree with Fae Errant's linked post above that there’s typically no need to roll for wandering monsters in rooms; those rolls are doing the most work in corridors. Corridors ensure that there is always a cost to exploring. 

Corridors ask: 

• What are the players doing? Searching, sneaking, pursuing, fleeing? Consider the party's pace.
• What are the monsters doing? Consider using the nested table style of Hot Springs Island, or the supplemental tables in The Monster Overhaul.
• What is the dungeon doing? Depending on the degree of motive agency we assign to the space itself, hazards and obstacles can be thought of as verbs the dungeon itself apples to corridors.
• Has time passed? Have torches guttered out? Spells expired? Corridors ask these questions.
• What has already happened during the delve? Is anything recurring? Is it time for any consequences of prior action to make themselves known?
• What has changed since the PCs last traversed a corridor? What is changing right now?

Touch Grass

The same ideas can apply outside the dungeon. For example, I usually use pointcrawls for outdoor exploration. Each location is very noun-heavy, but the paths between points are the places for verbs. 

Dungeon Thresholds Are Adjectives

This is less essential than the noun/verb distinction, but if you want to take it a step further, consider adjectives as thresholds. Adjectives are relayed to the PCs when they first enter a room, then give way to the nouns as the room is explored in earnest. The adjectives serve to mark the transitional space. How is this room distinct from the corridor you are exiting? The adjectives are often most prominent when the PCs are still deciding whether or not to enter a space.

Adjectives can answer questions like the following: 

• What hidden thing in the room should the PCs be looking for?
• What was the room recently used for? 
• What was the room’s original purpose? 
• What is most immediately noticeable sight, sound, and scent?

Imagining the Far-Future Year of 2025

It’s always an event when the real world catches up to the putative timeframe of a famous science fiction work. If you’re on any form of social media, you have probably seen this in action. Blade Runner, released in 1982, was set in 2019, and when the real 2019 arrived, people had a fun time posting about it. Soylent Green, released in 1973, is presented as taking place in 2022, so in real-life 2022, the Soylent Green posts duly appeared. It’s easy to pick some tentpole speculative fiction, particularly of the dystopian variety, and joke on social media about how the fiction does or does not reflect the real world.

But whatever you thought of the state of society in 2019, it bore only a faint resemblance to the rain-soaked, neon-drenched vision of Blade Runner. And while I saw posts comparing the pandemic-stricken world of 2022 to Soylent Green, I think that’s even more of a stretch. Soylent Green was primarily concerned with overpopulation, a pertinent topic in the 1970s that didn’t figure in real-world 2022’s problems. Different dystopia.

But I want to credit two* works of fiction that correctly predicted some interesting things about our real-life present year of 2025: the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, and the 2006 Vernor Vinge** novel Rainbow’s End. I have endeavored to keep this post spoiler-free, but feel free to check out one or both works and come back afterward, if you are conservative on hearing plot details.

Her

Her is the story of a lonely man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence on his computer. It is hardly the first piece of science fiction to explore the idea of a person falling in love with a robot or other artificially created person. But most other works were about robots, and were set further in the distant future. The titular character in Her is decidedly non-physical, and much of the story involves the two main characters navigating what that means for their developing relationship.

Life imitates art, and in real-life 2025, there are now many stories of people interacting with AIs as if they were real people. The movie was so influential on artificial intelligence that OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, tried to get Scarlett Johansson (who portrayed the AI in Her) to lend her voice to their products. After she refused, they went with an allegedly similar voice, which got them into legal trouble.

Her is not a precise picture of 2025. The setting almost feels like a utopia, apart from what seems like a widespread epidemic of loneliness. The technology around AI is decidedly well ahead of our real-world tech. But its vision of how AI would affect relationships, and how people would try to find genuine connections with AIs – is seriously prescient.

Rainbows End 

Rainbows End, like Her, is set in the California of 2025. The primary point-of-view character is an elderly man who has been cured of dementia and had his health so thoroughly restored that he looks like a 20-something. But he doesn’t fit in at all in this new world, and his struggles to grapple with change inadvertently embroil him and his family in a conspiracy that threatens world stability.

Rainbows End heavily emphasizes augmented reality, where virtual worlds and interfaces overlay the real one. This technology does exist in real-world 2025, and is getting more widespread by the day, but it is not integral to the fabric of everyday life as it is in Rainbows End, where many people have multiple overlays of projected reality on top of the “real” world. The real world may look a lot more like Rainbows End by the 2040s or 2050s, but it isn’t there yet in 2025.

That said, the Rainbows End is prescient on several other topics. A big chunk of the story hinges on a battle around a university library and the digitization (and subsequent destruction) of its book collection. It also thinks deeply about how education and careers would change in a world so completely saturated with data. The book understands how children become intuitively fluent in new technologies, often in ways that they can’t even explain, and how quickly they lose their connection to cultural experiences that aren’t represented in the virtual worlds and communities they inhabit. Finally, it groks how online fandoms become powerful forces on their own. The height of the Pokemon Go craze, with fandom filtered through augmented reality, would have fit neatly in the world of Rainbows End. 

If the worst thing you can say about a work of speculative fiction is that it predicted changes accurately, but a bit more quickly than they actually happened, that’s a good sign that the work did its job.

Sir, This is a Wendy’s

So what’s the relevance to roleplaying games?

You can create verisimilitude in a game world by thinking deeply about how ordinary people use technology (or magic, or whatever is the "disruptive tech" of your fictional setting). It’s easy to think about high tech or high magic in the ways our PCs will interact with it, especially in a heroic fantasy game or a cyberpunk thriller. But we should also think about how ordinary people use it, and how that would show up in the quotidian fabric of the world.

What is world-changing one day is completely ordinary the next. And the time it takes an idea to go from world-changing to taken for granted is surprisingly short. There’s no shortage of examples in real-world 2025; technology that would baffle the previous generation is completely natural to modern-day young people.

And it is better to take some big swings and big misses than to conservatively aim for what seems most plausible. The example of a conservative approach that always comes to mind for me is the driverless car aesthetic you see in a lot of TV sci-fi, like the third season of Westworld or the futuristic parts of Netflix’s Bodies. The car design there is very believable… a little too believable. I don’t see a vision, a speculative gamble that really makes me curious about this future. Don't play it to safe with speculative fiction; better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right.

*Honorable mention to Futuresport, the 1998 made-for-TV movie starring Dean Cain, Vanessa Williams, and Wesley Snipes. It isn't saying anything that Rollerball or the Running Man or other movies hadn't already said better. But to its credit, Dean Cain’s voice-activated smart home is pretty close to what an Alexa-plus-AI home would provide to a real rich person in 2025.

**Another of Vinge’s novels has one of my favorite examples of a science fiction author predicting the future and getting it almost (but not quite) right. Vinge's novel Marooned in Realtime was published in 1986. The story makes passing reference to a big-budget film adaptation of the Lord of the Rings, released around the turn of the century. Fellowship of the Ring was released in 2001, so Vinge nailed this prediction. 

But Vinge, presumably working on the novel in the early 1980s, guessed that it would be none other than George Lucas helming that LOTR adaptation. In real-life 2001, Lucas was of course doing his own big-budget trilogy; but he was halfway between Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, not working on LOTR.  

It is hard to fault Vinge for this guess, as he was writing when Lucas was at the height of his creative powers, fresh off Star Wars and his Indiana Jones script. And obviously Vinge couldn't predict the strange career path of actual LOTR director Peter Jackson, whose first feature film hadn't even come out yet when Marooned in Realtime was published. But I love these little moments in speculative genre fiction, and the subtle details that separate what is shockingly correct from what is so far off the mark.