Playing with Scale

RPGs have a tool available to almost no other form of expression. They can play with scale.

Literature struggles with this concept. Gargantua and Pantagruel seem to change size to suit the scene, without ever visibly growing or shrinking, but they are still giants. The reader can refer back to previous sections, or consult illustrations, and see the incongruity, fixed on the page in black and white. 

Animated films can approach the fluid scale shifts of oral storytelling, but it’s a pale reflection of the powers available in the theater of the mind. Some video games play with scale, but it’s usually more about perspective and not about a sense of reality.

But the spoken word flows without hesitation. It does not paint a fixed picture in the minds of listeners. It suggests outlines and details. The listener doesn’t have time to engage with the story in a fully rational way. It just “makes sense” in the moment. Unless incongruities of scale are used for comic effect – more on that later – the audience simply accepts them as true.

RPGs usually try to avoid scale ambiguity. Distances are given in conventional measures. Maps are pretty close to the territory. Clarity is useful. An RPG has to create a shared imaginary vision. If everyone around the table is imagining different things, chaos and frustration are inevitable. “Can I hit it from here?” “Wait, I thought you said the corridor was wide enough for both of us to walk next to each other?” “The fireball hits all of us for how much damage!?” Etc.

OneD&D Virtual Tabletop development preview.

In extreme cases, battlemaps with miniatures (either in real life or virtually) represent the scene itself. The GM’s descriptions take a backseat. What a wonderful opportunity for monetization! What a convenient flattening of the imagination!

But consider an RPG that deliberately plays with scale. Not just nonstandard scales, like Mouseguard, my Flame Pomerium concept, or Arnold K's fractal complexity, but the very heart of what things are and how they are related to each other.

Scale Ambiguity in Classical Haida Myths

If we're going to learn to play with scale, we should learn from the best.

Consider this a sneak preview of a potential project. There's so much I'd like to write about that I'm not sure where to begin. Here's a compressed and oversimplified summary.

Haida Gwaii is an island chain off the west coast of Canada. Like Tasmania, it exists in a blind spot in people's mental maps of the world. If you've heard of it at all, it's probably in relation to totem poles and other art, or for the potlatch.

Through a combination of chance and quiet determination we have "approximately forty thousand lines of written text"[1] from dozens of Haida storytellers, transcribed phonetically, line by line, in 1900-1901 by a 27-year-old linguist named John Reed Swanton. Before European contact in 1774, the population of Haida Gwaii was approximately 30,000, inhabiting villages all over the islands. By 1900, between 350 and 800 Haida remained, largely in two missionary-dominated towns. That anything at all was recorded is remarkable. That what was recorded includes some of the finest myths ever told - and I do mean ever - is extraordinary.   

The tales are so interesting that, aside from looking into and comparing all avaiable English translations of Swanton's transcriptions, and reading a stack of other books, I'm trying to learn Haida.[2] It's worth it.

[1]. Bringhurst, A Story As Sharp as a Knife, pg. 13. For reference, we have thirty thousand lines of Old English. 

[2] It's... not going well.

Shifting Scales: Mouse Woman

This is not a full story. It’s one story within a larger story, in a cycle of stories. Think of it as a musical theme, like La Folia. You’re seeing a few bars of music.

Again he set off.
After walking awhile,
he saw a small mouse in front of him.
There was a cranberry in her mouth.

Then she came to a fallen tree,
and she looked for a way to go over it.
He let her step onto his open hand
and put her across.

She laid her tail up between her ears
and ran ahead.
Not far away, she went under some ferns.

He rested there,
and something said,
« A headwoman asks if you wish to come in.»
Then he parted the fronds of the ferns.

He was standing in front of a large house.
He walked through the door.
There was the headwoman dishing up cranberries. [1]
She spoke with grace.
Her voice had big round eyes.

After she’d offered him something to eat,
Mouse Woman said to him,
« When I was bringing a bit of a cranberry
back from my berry patch,
you helped me.
I intend to lend you something that I wore
for stalking prey when I was younger.» [2]

She brought out a box.
She pulled out four more boxes within boxes. [3]
In the innermost box was the skin of a mouse
with small bent claws.
She said to him,
« Put this on.»

Small though it was, he got into it.
It was easy.
He went up the wall and into the roof of the house.
And Mouse Woman said to him,
« You know what to do when you wear it.
Be on your way.»

-Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas of Qaysun, Someone About to Go Out Hunting Birds, trans. Robert Bringhurst. Ch. 4.2

[1] Bringhurst writes that "It is understood that creatures of the sea, forest, and sky take the form of human beings anytime they enter a domesticated space - that is, a house or a canoe, - and that they dress in animal hides when they enter the wild." (Bringhurst, Being in Being, pg. 272). This seems to be only partially true. Storytellers play with the rules. Is Kuugan Jaad, Mouse Woman, a woman/spirit being who wears the skin of a mouse, a mouse-like woman, a woman-sized mouse, a mouse-sized woman, a spirit, or something else entirely? The answer appears to be whatever is in your mind when you listen to the story.

[2] The irony here is probably deliberate. The setup might lead the listener to expect the skin of a mighty predator, but the result is obviously what it should be; the skin of a mouse that Kuugan Jaad was just wearing.

[3] The dreamlike quality of this sentence is superb. It’s used by multiple storytellers, in multiple contexts, so it’s clearly a good one. See: The Qquuana Cycle, Ch. 1.3.5.3.

We can compare this to the same story told by Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay.

He took an overgrown trail. [1]
After walking for a time,
he saw a shrew.
stopped in her tracks by a fallen tree. 

He lifted her across,
and then he watched her.
She went beneath a clump of ferns some distance off. 

He went there.
He spread the fronds aside. 

There was – yes! – the sewn and painted front of a house.
Then that one said to him,
« Come in and see me, grandson.
The birds have been singing
That you would be borrowing something from me.» 

She hunted through her storage box
And bit off part of something for him. [2]
« Yes, grandson, here it is. »

-Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, The Qquuna Cycle, trans. Robert Bringhurst, Ch. 3.1.2.1. See also Ch. 4.2.1.

[1] Different “he”, in this story. Different conception of Mouse Woman too. First, she appears as a shrew, which is a whole separate discussion I’m not going to get into here, and second, she’s appeared before in the cycle, where she definitely decapitates someone.

[2]. We don’t find out what she bit off for another 100 lines, give or take. This is part of Skaay’s style, possibly an element of what Bringhurst calls his “hunterly reserve”. He uses the ambiguities of Haida to their best possible effect. 

In the sensible, sanitized, and catalogued book of tales, these stories resemble ATU 75 or maybe 554 (I'm not an expert), where the mouse remains a mouse. Admittedly, a more than usually perspicacious mouse, but still a mouse-sized mouse helped by, and later helping, a human-sized human or a lion-sized lion.

Scale-Dancing: Raven

Raven, the trickster, is the master of scale. “In Nisgha, Tsimshian and Haida oral literature alike, he is forever using peapods for canoes, or carving riverboats from elderberry twigs, or giving other proofs that he has no regard for measurement or scale, whether physical or moral.” (Bringhurst, A Story As Sharp as a Knife, pg. 623).

Before they had even started eating,
he headed toward the woods, they say.
He made ten canoes from hunks of punkwood
and filled them with spruce cones for crewmen.
He put flowerstalks of dunegrass
in the crewmens’ hands for lances.

The fleet rounded the point,
and he walked by the tideline, pointing, they say.
« Iixyaaaaay ! How can it be ?
Canoes rounding the point !
And they bristle with crewmen !»

They dropped their food and flew away, they say.
Then he entered the house
and gorged himself on the bark cakes.
Down on the beach, the canoes kept arriving.
They washed up on shore in a heap.

-Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, Raven Travelling, trans. Robert Bringhurst. Ch. 5.2 

In some stories, Raven is a meta-storyteller, unable to tell stories but able to influence the story he's in.

The one who hooked him hauled him in
and came ashore
and gave him to his child,
and they skewered him for roasting.

When his backside started cooking,
he could hear himself thinking, they say.
« Why don’t they run to the edge of the village for something ?»

They ran outside right after that, they say.
They left the child sitting there alone.
At that moment, he put on his skin
and flew through the smokehole.

The child started crying for its mother.
« Mommy ! My dinner is flying awaaaaay !»

-Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, Raven Travelling, trans. Robert Bringhurst. Ch. 5.1

Raven is thinking of himself in his own story, like a dreamer. This is one of Raven's names Nangkilslas, He Whose Voice Is Obeyed (The Haida, Swanton, pg. 28). He speaks/dreams what will happen and it happens. I'm sure something like this has happened in your dreams. See also: Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll, Chapter IV.

UBC Display

Impossible Visuals: Humpback Whale On A Stick Edition

Next day early in the morning, he heard an eagle scream.
He went outside to look, they say.
There was something set up in front of the house.
Eagles were perched on it in a row.
They were calling each other
and sharpening their talons.

Then they went out hunting.
Later in the day, they came back in.
Some of them were carrying spring salmon.
Others were carrying red snapper.
Others had humpback whale.

-Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas of Qaysun, The One Who Got Rid Of His Nine Nephews, trans. Robert Bringhurst. Ch. 3.2.

The 50' long humpback whale is used as a scale-based punchline in a number of Haida stories. You can hear the timing. “Some of them were carrying spring salmon.” Normal. “Others were carrying red snapper.” Again, normal. “Others... had humpback whale.” Uproarious laughter, small children falling over, etc. 

But it's a joke, not a lie. The incongruous whale, in the stories, is transported, carved up, speared on sticks (The Qquna Cycle, 1.1.2.5), etc. It's a mental paradox. It's possible to imagine but difficult to visualize.

Mutable Terrain: The Mallard Stick

She was angry after that.
Swinging something long and thing,
bluegreen for half its length,
she gave the town a whack.

The town of Qquuna lurched and tilted partway over.
Then he walked outside
and stomped it back in place.

-Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, The Qquuna Cycle, trans. Robert Bringhurst, Ch.3.3.3. See also Ch. 1.2.1.3. 

Once again, it's easy to imagine but difficult to visualize a town tipping on its side.

Then he went behind the screen again,
and he pulled up the trap and folded it flat.
The same with the house.
Then he set them by the lakeside
and rolled them up together with the lake
And put the bundle under his arm.

He climbed a tree that used to stand beside the lake,
and halfway up there he sat and waited.

-Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay, Raven Travelling, trans. Robert Bringhurst. Ch. 2.3.4

Raven steals a whole lake. Who steals a lake? See also Isaiah 34:4. It's a bit easier to imagine a lake being rolled up compared to the sky. You can assume grass is below a lake, but what's behind the sky?

Implementing Scale Ambiguity

RPG systems are largely defined by what they consider important and what they consider unimportant.

OSR-type games are probably not the best vehicle for the concept of scale ambiguity. How many Hit Dice does a whale have when it can be stored in your back pocket and also contains a village and it's one whale and it's The Whale and it's your maternal aunt? 

This isn't the anxious pattern-shifting of my Drow posts, where the players are on the outside looking in. For this concept to work, I feel like it has to be available to everyone.

A custom PbtA system? Digging up a copy of How We Came To Live Here? Fate, maybe? Aspects could be a handy dodge for scale issues. A lot of mythology-based RPGs seem to take a superheroes-in-togas approach to mythology, which feels like it wouldn't lead anywhere useful. 

I don't know. I'll keep thinking about it.

For traditional RPG/OSR purposes, item-based problem solving is integral to some Haida stories and I will try cover it at some point. There are also some "spells" and "monsters" (note quotation marks) that are well worth examining. 

And, of course, more jokes.

Sghaagya of the Yaakkw Gitinaay
Haida Texts and Myths: Skidegate Dialect, Swanton, pg. 44

OSR: Behind the Curtain: Session 3 & 4 Examination

Session Reports: 1, 2, 3, 4

Session Examinations: 1, 2,

Spoilers below. In the unlikely event that any of my players see this post, skip it. Trust me.

OSR: Behind the Curtain: Session 2 Examination

I'm trying a new series of posts, where I examine my RPG sessions in detail, trying to show how I GM, what rulings I make, and issues that a narrative writeup can conceal. This post won't make much sense if you haven't read the narrative session report.

Session Reports: 1, 2

Session Examinations: 1,

Spoilers below. In the unlikely event that any of my players see this post, skip it. Trust me.

OSR: Behind the Curtain: Session 1 Examination

"Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it."

 - E. B. White

Analyzing an RPG session is a similar process. Judging by the view count, not many people are interested in session reports in the first place, but it might be interesting to see how my mind works (or doesn't work) under pressure. You'll need to read this session report first.

This NGR play example from Zzarchov Kowolski is a great example of a highly detailed procedural examination. It's great because it's totally alien to my usual methods. 

Spoilers below. In the unlikely event that any of my players see this post, skip it. Trust me.

OSR: Rules of Thumb for High-Energy Physics

This post was written while moderately feverish. You've been warned.

It's good to have handy approximations for D&D purposes. You're about 5' tall. If you stick your arms up, you're 10' tall. A story of a building is around 14', so if you fall off a 10 story building that's 140'. Etc, etc. All GMs eventually come up with their own set of unstated mental yardsticks.

Here are a few handy tips for high-energy physics.

Wizards break rules all the time. Fall off a 10 story building? Hah! Try falling from 40,000' in the air thanks to a botched teleport spell. Use a sphere of annihilation to delete half a portable hole. Loot an ancient nuclear battery and cover it with lead. You know, the usual wizarding things.

SMBC

1. Munroe's Third Law

If two objects of approximately equal density collide at high speed, the results will always resemble a ripe tomato thrown very hard at a cake.

We're going to use density a lot, so let's figure out some mental yardsticks.

Humans are approximately as dense as water. In fact, anything that's made of meat or plants is approximately as dense as water. Stone is 3 times as dense as water. Iron is about 8 times as dense as water. Lead (or gold) is about 10 times as dense. We're not going for accuracy, we're going for speed.

So if you fire a tree at a dragon at a bullet-speed? Cake and ripe tomato. Fire a stone cannonball at a stone tower? Cake and ripe tomato. But what happens if you fire an iron dart at a dragon?

2. Newton's Depth Approximation

This is one of those rules that seems really obvious once it's pointed out.

Momentum must be conserved. m1v1 = m2v2. So if you've got an object of mass m and velocity v heading towards a stationary object, and v is very fast, then all the object can push is the stuff directly in front of it. Once it's moved its own mass "out of the way", it'll stop.

An object's impact depth, in a material of equal density, can therefore be approximated as the object's length.

That's super neat! How deep is the impact crater? About as deep as the object.

How far will bullets go through water? Well, lead is 10 times as dense as water, so a bullet will go only ten times its own length. That's not very far.

And of course this ignores a ton of additional considerations, but it's a very handy rule if you start trying to run through walls or explode bunkers.

Wikipedia article

3. When In Doubt, Check The '50s

Air-to-air. Unguided. Nuclear. Weapons.

Look, the past is a different country, but some parts of that country are ludicrously dangerous. I'm sure very sensible papers and sober papers were written at the time on the absolute necessity of unguided air-to-air nuclear weapons... but... really?

Anyway, people (mostly the incomparable Alex Wellerstein) have created tools for visualizing various nuclear scenarios. Playing around with Nukemap will give you a few mental yardsticks for any potential nuclear disasters in your RPGs.

Fallout-style nuclear cars, alien power sources, ghost-busting rayguns, or other high-tech but portable devices can be approximated as the adorably murderous Davy Crockett portable nuclear device. Should said device detonate in the hand of a hapless PC, One large building disappears, a city block is leveled, around 3 blocks are scorched and shattered, and 9 blocks are irradiated to the point of medical consequences.

4. At Sufficiently High Velocities, Everything Behaves Like A Fluid

"Fluid" is a bit like "fish", in that it makes some degree of intuitive sense but falls apart when examined. Still, if you're dealing with velocities faster than the eye can follow, using your intuition towards pudding is probably not a bad idea.
 

5. You Don't Have Time To Un-Fuck Up

High-energy phyiscs, in general, doesn't deal with round-by-round D&D very well. Round 1, you're a sauropod eating plants in a shallow swamp. Round 1.000001, you and everything you've ever seen is plasma. Fast extinction-type asteroids don't go skittering across the sky like meteors. They go from space to ground level between refresh cycles on your monitor. There's less of a shockwave and more of a shockwall. It's a nice sunny day until everything suddenly goes white.

Take some radioactive material from subcritical to critical? Your reflexes aren't faster than a speeding neutron. Decide to rewire your bathroom while the wires are live? Your reflexes aren't faster than AC. Etc.

The OSR generally supports the notion that you can make one really bad choice, then a whole string of good ones, and still be utterly fucked over when that bad choice hits maturity. So does high-energy physics.

The Poirot Murders - Season 1

I usually write with something playing in the background. Recently, I put on ITV's Poirot series. Agatha Christie's cases are often entertaining. They're like chess puzzles in the newspaper; you can't imagine how the game got to that point without both players forgetting how to play for twenty minutes, but that's not important. Elements are presented. It's up to the reader to solve it, no matter how nonsensical it might be.

And it's good light fun (and great research material for a gilded age Call of Cthulu-type game)... but what if it wasn't?

Midway through the second season, I realized that Hercule Poirot, the genius detective, with his meticulous ways and his perfect moustache, could, potentially, if you squinted, be a murderer. Think about it. Everywhere he goes, people die. He can't take a vacation without corpses falling out of cupboards or poison appearing in martini glasses. He's a dandified harbinger of death.

What if it wasn't a coincidence? The explanations in the series are implausible anyway. Could one go back, rewatch the episode, and figure out how Poirot did it?

Wait I thought this was an RPG blog?

Players get involved in convoluted bullshit all the time. It's great practice to work on convoluted bullshit of your own. Coming up with schemes, excuses, or alternative plans is part of being a good player and a good GM. Reframing Poirot is... brain cardio.

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The Rules

-Poirot can't be in two places at once or do anything that breaks the rules of the genre.
-Poirot's canonical skills include disguise and makeup, housebreaking, sleight of hand, basic chemistry, forensics, and medicine, and a few other talents that crop up as needed.
-Poirot can disguise himself perfectly by removing his false moustache, putting on a flat cap and an old coat, and dropping the accent. Who would recognize him?
-Any confessions at the end of the episode don't count. There's an unreliable narrator at work.

Feel free to watch along or read the linked summaries. Note that many details were changed for the TV series; the general plot is often the same, but clues and circumstances are often significantly altered.

Season 1, Episode 1 – The Adventure of the Clapham Cook

Poirot didn’t commit this murder, but he easily recognized the murderer’s clumsy efforts with spirit gum and false whiskers. All that effort just to obtain an old trunk.

Season 1, Episode 2 – Murder in the Mews

It’s Bonfire Night. Fireworks, crowds, and confusion. “What a good night for a murder,” Hastings says. And it is. Poirot is practically taunting his friends with this one. Hastings idly suggests a method and a place; the next day, Japp calls with “Well someone did it.”

Poirot sneaks into the victim’s house, lures her to her room on some pretext, shoots her, and writes a brief suicide note. The rest of it (Miss Plenderleith’s deception, moving items from the sitting room to the bedroom, etc.) goes exactly as it does in the show. Miss Plenderleith is genuinely confused and thinks her friend really was right handed. When it turns out she wasn’t, she realizes her insistence on the point has made her a suspect, and disposes of any incriminating left-handed items in the house. Poirot is delighted.

The whole Major Eustace/blackmail angle is merely convenient, a thread for Poirot to tug on and divert suspicion. Or perhaps that’s how Poirot selected his victim. He’s not above reading a blackmailer’s files for leads. Or perhaps she wrote to Poirot for help in escaping her blackmailer, giving Poirot a handwriting sample and a convenient way to arrange a late-night utterly secret meeting.

Season 1, Episode 3 – The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly

Poirot is not a kidnapper. He untangles the ludicrous kidnapping plot with ease. Despite creating a massive waste of police time and resources, and Poirot lets the kidnapper off with a stern warning, once again showing he’s not in it for justice or humanity, but for personal prestige.

Season 1, Episode 4 – Four and Twenty Blackbirds

Another episode where Poirot couldn't plausibly be involved. It's a purely domestic entanglement.

Season 1, Episode 5 – The Third Floor Flat

Poirot wishes to be rid of his noisy downstairs neighbor and turns to his usual tool: murder. Perhaps Mrs. Grant, the victim, contacted Poirot to ask for assistance in locating her husband, Donovan Bailey. Poirot recognizes Donovan as the husband of Mrs. Matthews, the downstairs neighbor. It’s a petty bigamy case, but he agrees.

Poirot slips into Mrs. Grant’s apartment, shoots her, drops some misleading props, and hides her body behind some packing cases. His plan is to have the maid come home, go to sleep, and find the body in the morning. The maid would be blamed and easily silenced. Poirot could then blackmail Donovan and his wife out of the building. But an accidental break-in changes his plan. After stalling for a bit, Poirot exploits Donovan’s paranoia, turns his friends against him, and pretends to have found evidence (provided by Mrs. Grant or pilfered from her apartment). When Donovan flees, his guilt is all but assumed. Hastings invents a confession for his records.

The light bulb? Pure chance and old wiring.

Season 1, Episode 6 – Triangle at Rhodes

In this episode, Poirot kills at random. A tiresome knot of people is a tempting target. He drifts by a table, poisons a pink gin (the signature drink of several of the annoying people), drops the poison vial in someone’s pocket, and then leaves the hotel. It doesn’t matter who the poison kills. They all have motives. But alas, his escape is delayed by customs officials. Now he has to spend more time around these awful humans. He toys with them a bit, deliberately annoying the local police (who he blames for delaying him at customs) by proving their suspect is innocent, and wrecking relationships left right and centre.

He even brings an impressionable witness with him on his quest to find the “poison-seller”. A few bribes here, some sleight of hand there, and a false narrative is created. The supposed murders, impulsive and tired of being cooped up in their hotel, go for a fatal boat ride. Pursued by what they think are robbers, kidnappers, or paparazzi, they try to flee. The police arrive, Poirot spins a tale, and justice is done. After all, how could a Catholic husband desire a divorce? It’s inconceivable. Officer, take him away.

Season 1, Episode 7 – Problem at Sea

“But really, what would one be if one wasn’t alive, Poirot?”
“Dead, madame.”

Poirot is on a Mediterranean cruise. The most annoying person on the ship dies. This one’s trivial. He’s one of the last to leave the ship. He simply circles back, opens the victim’s door with any number of keys possessed by the staff or his own lockpicking skills, and stabs her. The ship’s dubious and untrained surgeon botches the time of death calculations, no doubt assisted by some gentle hints from the “famous detective”. The victim said goodbye to her husband through a closed door; later, Poirot uses the supposed murderer’s “ventriloquism skills” (which he has never before demonstrated) to pin the murder on him.

Season 1, Episode 8  – The Incredible Theft

Poirot has no interest in a case of mere theft, though it’s interesting to ponder if his delight at the plans being stolen comes from sympathy with the plotters or with the Germans.

Season 1, Episode 9 - The King of Clubs

Poirot didn’t kill anyone, but it’s nice to confirm that he considers punching someone in the face and causing a fatal fall as a happy accent, not a crime. Since the victim "deserved it" and the murderer is very polite, he’s willing to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Blame the gypsies. Hastings tries to object but Poirot overrules him.

Season 1, Episode 10 - The Dream

Could Poirot drive a man to suicide? All we know is that Poirot was called in for a late night consultation. The letter was real (Hastings and the doorman saw it), but the meeting remains a mystery. Poirot alone reported the story of the dream (after the death, so its details could support his story). He alone came up with the convoluted explanation.

Farley's worst fears were confirmed by Poirot. He was a paranoid, unpleasant man. An affair revealed, a scheme uncovered, or some other incident pushed him over the edge. It was suicide, but one that would tarnish Poirot's immaculate reputation. So Poirot pushes the murder angle, against Japp's wishes, until a weak-minded secretary with a guilty secret snaps and catches the blame.

Summary

Episodes Where Poirot Kills: 4/10
Body Count: 4/8
Innocents Incriminated: 5

If this post gets enough interest, I'll do the other seasons (where the plots grow even more ludicrous). If not, well, it was fun to write.