Alternate/Nested Realities

There's been a lot of thoughts lately about alternate realities. Recently a new event of the Mandala effect has been discovered with the Shazaam conspiracy. I saw a theory on the internet that noticed the majority of the Mandala effect discoveries that have been found after the Large Hadron Collider started up about eight years ago and that this caused some sort of reality shift. I don't really hold to this theory or that there's much/any reality to the Mandala effect in real life, but it does make an interesting story.

In addition to that, just looking at the news some days lately brings up a dissonance from reality. Certainly, people on opposing sides are seeing and reporting events/facts in ways that are so opposed it is as though they are living in different realities.

Since I'll be talking about alternate and nested realities, I figure it'd be good for me to tell you what I mean. These are not necessarily official definitions. By alternate realities, I mean realities that are similar to our reality/based on our/the main character's reality but with differences that make it stand out. By nested realities, I mean realities that are completely different from ours/that of the main character, but are accessed through our world and/or are found as a connected subset to it. I do not simply mean a world that is different from our world, but rather a reality that is in contrast to another that exists within the realm of the story in question.

So, with this, I give you some examples of alternate realities or nested realities that I find interesting.

1. Timelines

One of the popular ways that alternate realities seems to be messing with time to have different results. This usually leads to an alternate history type reality based upon whatever happened differently to have a different timeline. There are two primary ways that I've seen this done.

a. Multiverse of Choices

The theory is that every choice that anyone makes spawns a new reality where they made a different choice. Of course, these new realities will have ripple effects from that choice and branches based on every choice everyone else makes after that. In an alternate reality based on this, characters will find that someone did something differently. The changes can range from being minor/localized to being globally different depending on what choice or choices were made differently in that world.

A popular alternate history choice here is "What if the Nazi's won WWII?," as can be seen in The Man in the High Castle.

Note that once again, alternate histories, while interesting, are not alternate realities unless they are shown in contrast to a reality where things happened differently.

b. Time Traveling Meddlers

Time travel is a dangerous business. Anything you do has a risk of changing something, and any change and ripple outwards. Any person who died before that lives could have children that go on to be movers and shakers in the world that never existed before. Likewise, if someone dies who lived before, then all their descendants suddenly no longer exist.

Time travelers will often return to their present to find that their actions had incredibly unexpected consequences, leading the world to be very different from the one they left, from one they can no longer go back to.

c. The Past Itself

It's been said that the past is a different country. Even though the past of someone's reality is technically the same reality, the vast differences allow it to function much like an alternate or nested reality.

2. Magical Realms

This would be places line Narnia, Oz, Wonderland, Fillory, etc. These places are incredibly different from our own world. Often times, they are fantastical, with great magic and creatures that don't exist in the world that the main characters came from.

This creates an interesting device for storytellers, as it allows them to establish connection to the main characters and the audience, especially if the main characters are from a world similar to our own, as the main characters and audience will be exploring and learning about the world together. The main characters have no advantage having a lot of information that they take for granted that the audience isn't aware of.

This tactic often uses a degree of symbolism, with different parts of the fantastical world representing ideals, lessons, or things that directly relate to the main character's lives in the real world.

3. Digital Realms

Like magical realms, but with a sci fi twist. The characters find themselves transported into some other place-finding that it is all a simulation inside a computer somewhere. The only limitations are the imagination of whoever programed it. And just because it isn't "real" doesn't mean you can't get hurt or killed.

4. Imagination

The "alternate" world isn't real. It's all inside the imagination of the characters. This is particularly common for stories with children, like Rugrats. However, it could also come up with a story about a group of roleplaying gamers, or other ways. Just because it's imaginary, doesn't mean it's not important to the main characters and to the development of their story arcs overall.

What's your take on alternate realities? Do you like them in stories? Do you think they're overplayed? Can you think of other ways in which alternate or nested realities could be used in stories?

I do have to mention an idea I was discussing with my roleplaying group recently. I call it the reality nesting doll. You start with characters in a world not unlike our own. Then they get sent back in time. While back in time, they find a portal to another world. They get sent forward in time within that world (still probably not the same time they started out in, but still a different world anyway). They come across a computer that sucks them into a simulation where they meet with people who insist on playing a roleplaying game. (These could be done in any order, I just like the effect of continually going deeper into the layers of nested realities, especially if it's done in such a way that you can't just skip back to where you started, but have to go back through all the layers. It's an amusing idea, but I imagine audiences could tire of it pretty quick.)

Sidenote

I am now over 100 sales between my two cypher system adventures. I know that this isn't a lot for how long they've been out, but it still feels like a good milestone and I'm happy about it.

Projects Update

Here's a general update on what I'm working on and what stage it's at presently.

Author

Heroism and Other Lies

I honestly expected Episode 101 to be out by now. However, my editor has been held up due to unforeseen circumstances. I am hoping to have the edits before the end of the month, and then with my edits in hand it shouldn't be long before I can release the final product.

I have Episodes 2-4 written. Two will be sent to editing soon, but I'm still going to work to make some more revisions on 3 and 4 before sending them.

I have begun working on Episode 5.

Short Stories

I am working on two different short stories. The first is for an anthology that is being published in honor of Carrie Fisher. The proceeds of the sales will go to a charity supporting those with bipolar disorder.

Game Master

Toybox

By far my biggest creative focus right now is gearing up for my upcoming Toybox campaign. This campaign utilizes a tabletop game system of my own design and takes place in a setting heavily inspired by/based on Monte Cook Games' Numenera. While the setting is not directly the same as the Ninth World, it does have many of the same creatures and essential elements of it.

I'm hoping to post session summaries up here in story-form as the campaign progresses, but we'll see how that goes.

The first Toybox session will be January 26th-a little more than a week away-and I'm very much looking forward to it.

Looking Glass Moon

My surreal sci-fi setting for Cypher System isn't getting much attention at the moment. I've dropped the ball on this while focusing on other projects. I'm considering dropping this project altogether. However, if I do continue with it, I will probably roll out the setting incrementally, with various smaller books focusing on specific elements or parts of the setting rather than all at once in a huge volume. This way people can pick and choose the parts of Looking Glass Moon that they want to use, while choosing to overlook the rest.

Islands of Peril

I have recently been thinking about the Instant Adventures provided in Monte Cook Games' Weird Discoveries (Numenera) and Strange Revelations (The Strange), and I have to say that I like the format.

My first instinct was that the format of having the ability to pick up and play a session of Numenera (or really any RPG that I enjoy) without any prep seemed like an awesome idea with a lot of potential. Looking at some of the adventures, they seemed to flow nicely and have a format that played in with Node-based design, which I've mentioned in the past as something that makes interesting game sessions.

My second thought, after running one or two of these, was that these adventures are very short in comparison to what I normally think of when I think of running an RPG adventure. Not to mention that the ones I ran seemed pretty "easy" too.

This was disappointing to me, until I really thought about it. The intro to the adventures is pretty clear. They aren't trying to take the place of full RPG adventures. They're trying to fit, instead, into the slot that might be held by board games. To a degree, they're designed to be quicker and simpler. They're designed with the idea that the players may not be familiar with the system in mind.

This intrigued me as a way of introducing people who aren't familiar with tabletop RPGs to the hobby, which is something I think these sorts of adventures would do very well.

In my thinking about these sorts of adventures, I began to consider making one myself (and what that adventure might look like). One turned into more than one, and thus Islands of Peril was born.

Another thing that interested me was that the adventures in Weird Discoveries mention links to other adventures in the book, in a way that one story can lead to others. In this way, if you're playing with the same (or an overlapping) group of players, they can experience some interesting connections between their adventures. The problem that I had with it is that these adventures assume that the PCs never advance. They never gain new abilities (which sort of makes sense for the pick-up-and-play nature of the game.) In fact, in general it seems to me that there are very few cypher system adventures geared towards characters beyond Tier 1.

It is my hope to unveil 8 adventures in the Islands of Peril series which can be played stand-alone or as a linked campaign which takes the characters from Tier 1 all the way to Tier 6.

I have the skeleton of the first adventure completed, and look forward to working on the next seven.

Black Mirror, Individuals, Society, and the Future

I've been watching Black Mirror lately (and by lately, I mean slowly over the course of several months.) I can't comment on how "good" it is, since that's hard to define. I will say that it is very smart and very well put together, but it's also very depressing. Maybe the most genuinely depressing thing I've ever watched (there are things I've watched that make me feel more depressed, but the feeling is just a fleeting emotional impact as opposed to Black Mirror's depression that is something deeper.)

In case you're not aware of the show, each episode of Black Mirror is self contained and takes some form of technology that is already changing how we interact and dials it up to 11 trying to demonstrate the worst thing that could possibly happen. For example, without being too spoiler-y, there is an episode where there is an online popularity/rating system and people rate other people in almost every interaction they have with them. This spills over into not just social interactions, but also for businesses only offering certain discounts or deals to people whose overall rating is of a particular height.

The main characters in these near-future dystopias always experience absolutely horrific events surrounding these technologies and how they've warped social interaction.

The thing that is so terrifying (and depressing) about the show is that every single episode pulls from technology that we're already familiar with. It pulls from interaction trends that we're already familiar with. It is easy to see how we are creating these terrifying futures.

However, I was thinking about it this morning, and something stood out to me:


The main characters experience the bad side of these worlds, but almost everyone else is completely happy with them.


A lot of times, the technology is embraced by a character who is portrayed to the audience as "bad." Maybe not evil, but usually at least a bit of a jerk. It creates this dichotomy in our minds. Even though the main characters aren't necessarily good people, we tend to empathize with them. The jerks embracing the "bad" technologies further restate the evils of these technologies to the minds of the audience.


But what about everyone else? What about the people who created and participate in this world? In general, people are accepting of the *thing*, be it a rating system, or contact lenses that record all their memories.


The point is, the horrific experiences of the protagonists are not the norm in their societies. The protagonists get the worst of it. They are the outliers. This seems like it's either an oversight on the part of the show, or it's an indication that within the rules of the settings, the technologies aren't actually that bad/aren't actually having that negative of an impact on most people's lives.


(Season 1 Episode 2 is sort of an exception to this, but that's also the episode where it seems the most like there are powerful people intentionally utilizing the technology to their advantage/to everyone else's disadvantage as opposed to the other episodes which seem to rely more on the technology gaining power via the people just embracing it on their own.)


Of course, I think that the truth is something simpler, and it doesn't have anything to do with the societies presented in Black Mirror or technology at all. It has to do with how we tell stories.


That is, when we tell stories, we focus on an individual. In Black Mirror, that individual is being used to show us the dark things of their world. We don't tell stories from the standpoint of society as a whole. Apart from not being sure how we would do that, we relate to people, not societies.


I mean, we can't even relate to our own society, how would we be supposed to relate to that of a hypothetical future world?


So, in Black Mirror, the point is driven home not by saying "society is suffering because of this," but rather by saying "this relatable person is suffering because of this." Our minds naturally make the jump to the first conclusion even though it doesn't necessarily hold true for the worlds in which the stories take place.


So, is it still valid to consider the points that the show makes?


Yes, I think so. While the experiences of the protagonists aren't the standard experiences of their societies, I think the warning is that their rate of occurrence might be higher if those same technologies were applied the same way to our society. I.e. if we used those technology, the horrific experiences might be the average experience. Or, at least, they could happen with greater frequency than they seem to in the show.

Of course, some of my question might be: If a significant number of people are/will be having this trouble with these technologies/societal structures, would our society as a whole allow it to get to that point of control? I want to say no, but there are a lot of existing structures that harm a great number of people a good portion of the time, so I could be wrong.

How it concerns me:
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the idea of building a better future is one that is near and dear to my heart. I am very pro-progress and the development of new technologies. My Heroism and Other Lies series tries to look at both the good and the bad sides of it, but it's less optimistic than something else I'd like to write later on.


It seems to me that a lot of futuristic sci fi is very pessimistic. I worry that this creates a society where we are afraid to look forward (instead choosing to fear the future, embracing nothing but nostalgia and present, fleeting, pleasures). I worry that it creates a society where we are afraid of progress. I want the sci fi that shows how cool technological development can be, and how it can and will make our lives better, not worse.


That said, I don't want us to just advance without thinking about the societal impact of things. I don't want us to advance without considering the philosophical and moral implications of what we're developing. I don't want profit-driven businesses to just push out new programs and technologies without considering the ramifications to society. Black Mirror serves a purpose of looking very critically at this angle. I think fiction that tries to prevent the bad futures serves an important role. I just am not sure it's reaching the people who need to hear it, and some of it is pulling down the people who could look upwards with hope.

Running a Mystery Adventure

I've already mentioned having run my mystery adventure, The Web of Wavemeet, and the fact that much of my inspiration in how I laid out the adventure came from the Alexandrian's Node Based Scenario Design. In this way, I was able to lay out the adventure such that each location, or node, had different clues pointing at other locations, or nodes, so that the players always had something to do. Here are some other pieces of advice on running a mystery adventure.


1. Complicated, but Not Too Complicated.
In one of my previous posts, I talked about running Heist Adventures, and I mentioned that players tend to make things more complex than we, as game masters, expect them to. This is true with heists, it's true with mysteries. (It's often even true with straightforward hack and slash dungeons, but that's not what we're talking about right now).


With a mystery, there is a delicate balance. If the characters are solving a crime (which is not the only type of mystery), you want there to be multiple suspects and you don't want it to be immediately obvious who did it. At the same time, you don't want the players to go off the rails looking into the deep details of the lives of people who you planned on being just background NPCs.


2. Clues, Clues, Clues-Give them Clues
Having lots of clues is really useful. Not necessarily clues that point to the direct end, but clues that can lead to places deeper into the mystery. Any place that the players go to should have multiple clues (at least three, based on the Alexandrian's three clue rule which is described in the post linked above). These clues can all lead to the same conclusion, or they can lead to different places to find more clues.


But the important thing is that there are clues, that the clues are obviously clues, and that the players find them. If finding a clue is reliant on players making a perception check or asking the right questions or noticing something minute in your description...there's a decent chance your players will miss it. If that clue is the only way of solving the mystery, then the players will get stuck and you'll either have to change the adventure or have them fail it. You can have clues that are miss-able, but there should be more clues that are easily found and the miss-able ones shouldn't be essential.


3. Different Ways to the Same Conclusion
With a large number of clues, it is good to have different sets of clues or paths that can get to the ending. This way, players feel more clever when the path they chose reaches the right conclusion (even if the other path or paths would have brought them to the same place.)


4. Motivations
A lot of the stereotypical RPG characters would walk away from a situation when they found that there was a mystery about. Unless the team is built around solving mysteries, it's important to make sure they have a motivation to seek out answers.


In The Web of Wavemeet, the players are smugglers whose contact fails to meet them. Many smugglers might then turn around, so when I designed the characters, I made sure that each of them had a reason for wanting to seek more answers. Maybe a character wanted to complete the deal for a sense of honor. Maybe one had personal ties to the contact. Maybe the contact had made an individual deal with one of the PCs that was more important than just the deal at hand...


With pre-made characters, it's easy to design a motive into their backstory/personality layout. For a one-shot adventure, this is recommended. If you're trying to work a mystery into a longer campaign, it can be more complicated. However, in a campaign, players tend to get connected to different characters and things in the game world. Look for motivations in the ongoing connections that the PCs have formed thus far in the campaign.


Conclusion

What are your thoughts? Do you have any other suggestions for people looking to run a mystery adventure? If you have run a mystery adventure, what did you find worked/didn't work?

Theme: Amnesia

Considering that lately two of my projects involve complete amnesia as a major starting plot point, I figured it might be good to talk about amnesia and why I like using it as a device, as well as some of the issues with it.


Toybox
In my upcoming Toybox campaign, using a system of my own design, the player characters will wake up with no knowledge of who they are or how they came to be in the mysterious location where they start.


Looking Glass Moon
In the Looking Glass Moon setting, the default for player characters is that they are humans that have come from another world. These humans arrive with no knowledge of the setting of Looking Glass Moon other than the sense that things are very wrong. The people of the setting are aware of this issue and provide some guidance, but there's much that has to be learned by the characters themselves.


1. Motivation
Some players are very good at finding things to motivate their character. Others are less so. Starting out with amnesia provides an automatic motive for your character: Find out who I am.


In my Toybox campaign, I expect some of this will revolve around discovering the past and putting together the pieces of how the players got to where they are. This mystery is inherent and different clues can lead the players down varying paths to more answers.


In Looking Glass Moon, there's no apparent way for the player characters to return to where they came from, so determining who they are isn't so much about the past. Instead, Looking Glass Moon focuses on how characters will choose to fit into the world where the story is taking place, and who they are as people. Are they kind? Are they selfish? What do they care about? The setting will test all of these things, especially if the players travel on the "Path of Truth", a literal and symbolic journey that teaches the players more about the world and about themselves.


2. Setting Discovery
Tabletop games often focus a lot on exploration. Still, characters are generally a product of their setting and are expected to know certain things about it. Having a player start their character with amnesia allows the player and the character to explore the world together, with everything being new. In this way, a GM can inspire wonder and surprise through things that would be less wondrous to natives to the setting.


3. Simplicity
While some players like writing out long complex backstories for characters, others find the process tedious. Starting a character with amnesia is a way to simplify the process by stopping this requirement.


A warning: there is a danger with this that players will become more focused on the game as a game. If that's the sort of thing you want to encourage, it's fine. However, if it isn't, then it is important to encourage the players (in advance of the game as well as through it) to focus on their character's personality and, as the game develops, their motivations all the more because of their lack of backstory.


4. GM Control/Adaptability
I'm a big supporter of working in player backstories in campaigns. However, it's not always easy to do. Especially if players form their backstories independently and they contain widely disparate events taking place in far separated parts of the setting. When characters have amnesia, the GM has control over their backstories and, therefore, can work in details from them more easily and relevantly as the story progresses.


A warning: One of the advantages of working in backstories is that they help the players feel ownership over the game. By inventing the backstories for the players, you're taking some of this ownership from them. If you are going to do this, it is important to establish a connection between the player and their character's past. This might be done through introducing NPCs the player/character like from their past, or other plotlines that make the player excited when they can learn new things about who their character used to be.


What are your thoughts on amnesia as a storytelling device, either in RPGs or in written fiction?