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On Temporal Displacement

This Month's Blog Carnival topic is 

It Came From Beyond Time

hosted by Xaosseed on Seed of Worlds.

On Temporal Displacement

Xaosseed points out that typical D&D settings frequently have the chronological displaced of one sort or another: 

  • Ancient artifacts and tools of various sorts
  • Travelers from a different time
  • The remains of ancient civilizations

All of these have come up in my only half-completed D23...24...25(?) mega-dungeon.  I'm sure there are about 8 of you (Hi Sam!) who want to read all about this, but if you do, you'll have to do it the proper way, and roll 3d6 down the line.

What I think would be more beneficial, is to talk about why and how I have intended to use various elements.  

The Elements of my D23

Here are the elements:

  1. An ancient temple and crypt complex of the Hagamido (frilled lizard people) that dominated this world an indeterminate tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago, during an era freakishly similar to our own Jurassic period, but with matriarchy and mega-fauna and magic!  
  2. A population of fire-devil worshiping lava dwarves, enslaved for a few hundred years by Totalitarian Yakmen, who then tried to wipe them out before taking the whole complex into a demiplane to shelter from a short term drop in magical energy.
  3. A primal evil which came as a weak hatchling to this world at its formation.  It has slowly, patiently, and insidiously built its forces despite repeated set backs from the Yakmen, and before them from the frilled lizard men.

The Hagamido and Their Dinosaurs

At first, I was just doing the day-by-day, week-by-week building of a dungeon, D23 style, but within a few weeks, with a pair of randomly generated maps thrown together (Thank you Watabou and GIMP developers), but as I went on, that most dangerous of questions came up: "Why?"

This triggered a bout of pseudo-Gygaxian naturalism, and the lower levels of the first section, the crypts, while built with the same tools, were much more curated, trying to imply a story of the world as it had been, with ancient magic weapons and items, some designed specifically to deal with major threats such as T-rexes, others designed to shore up defenses in a hostile world.  Ancient ghosts and caretaker devotees could share ancient knowledge which is now lost.  Ancient tomes with cryptic writing contain more such knowledge.  

Thematically, I started consciously trying to create something that pulls on the out-of-time feeling of Jurassic Park, mixed with some of the cryptic symbology and imagery that might be vaguely associated with ancient Egypt or Babylon, another creature from an ancient past.  By using recognizable images and skeletons of actual Jurassic period dinosaurs, I'm trying to use that cultural touch point to associate with the temple's age.  By using symbols not based on human alphabets or numerology, I'm hoping to convey an underlying mystery which might unlock secrets lost to modern peoples.  

Combining these two, I try to world build through imagery of rooms and passages, the form of the mummies in the crypt, and the treasures found, whether random loot or specifically placed treasures.

In both ways, these point to experiencing something which is emphatically not of this time, and maybe should be left alone.  Plunder awaiting them includes weapons that harness storms or reptiles, and powerful magics that affect the mind in ways modern magic users have not yet fathomed.

The Lava Dwarves

In a completely different direction, the Lava Dwarves represent an example of a people who have lost their way for hundreds of years while they were tucked away in a demiplane near the caldera of a volcano, and are struggling as a people, either to find their way back to that of their ancestors, or to find a new way.  They represent a feral throwback to the dawn of dwarven civilization.

In the manner of a people adrift, they've evoked paths their parent culture never would have. In game, this is represented by different ancestral classes, each tied to one of three factions.  The factions represent those who rediscover their ancestral deities, and will bring new variations on traditional arts; those who returned to devil worship, developing cruel and oppressive techniques; and those who have taken a dark path, and those who reject both, instead learning to live in better harmony with earth and fire. 

The Primal Evil

I haven't fully fleshed out the final evil, but hints of it will be left in the reminents the Yakmen left behind. 

Implications and Results

Both of the developed groups of temporally displaced peoples already have impacts on their environments, including lore, loot, and possibly even subsequent PCs (I start with "core book only player characters,  with other ancestries only becoming available after discovering populations of them).  The glee for me is in imagining how they will affect the players' decisions, and in how they impact the game world status quo.


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