From At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson:
Tallow [candles], made from rendered animal fat, had the great advantage that they could be made at home from the fat of any slaughtered animal. […] Because it melted so swiftly, the candle was constantly guttering and therefore needed trimming up to forty times an hour. Tallow also burned with an uneven light, and stank. And because tallow was really just a shaft of decomposing organic matter, the older a tallow got, the more malodorous it grew.
First thought: I need to do a better job of emphasizing quality of light when I’m describing scenes.
Second thought: Could tallow rendered from magical beasts be possessed of special properties? For example, dragon candles could counter darkness spells due to the potency of the light created. Would the tallow from a basilisk counter petrification, aid it, or even cause it?
For those who could afford it, oil lamps were the most efficient option, but oil was expensive and oil lamps were dirty and needed cleaning daily. Even over the course of an evening, a lamp might lose 40 percent of its illuminating power as its chimney accumulated soot. If not properly attended to, they could be terribly filthy. In At Home: The American Family, 1750-1870, Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett records how one girl who had attended a party in New England where the lamps smoked reported afterward, “Our noses were all black, & our clothes were perfectly gray and … quite ruined.”
In running an urban campaign, I make it a point to keep track of when the heroes have been trekking through sewers and getting sprayed with ichor. But it sounds like even their lamps can give them a rather thorough smirching.
Of course, eventually they start using continual light or continual flame spells, and these have every indication of being even cleaner and safer than a modern light bulb. After all, they don’t actually consume anything, so they can’t giving off great quantities of smoke, right?
But here’s another possibility: Perhaps continual flame spells operate by drawing their fuel from the Ethereal Plane — they are literally burning ether (pun intended). A sheen of scintillant silver marks the greasy reside they leave behind on nearby objects, but this is quite harmless (unless it is allowed to accumulate in great quantities, in which case the nearby casting of spells may cause the residue to ignite and produce unexpected wild magic effects). In addition, the small vortexes produced by continual flame spells on the Ethereal Plane (as they draw raw ether from one plane to the next) are quite easy to detect. Continual flames, therefore, are sometimes used to form navigational beacons on the Ethereal Plane, but they may also attract the attention of the ethereal marauders and the like.
you know what else is made of smokeless flame? Jinn. What if “continual light” is actually “summon and bind genie,” and somewhere out there lurks a “release binding” spell…?
Lamp oil might be naphtha, some kind of vegetable oil, spermaceti… each one with a different flashpoint and other properties. Oils could have inclusions to make them smell different when burned, to change the brightness or colour of the flame, to induce particular feelings or visions in the people breathing the smoke…
What about exotic fuels in general? I like the idea of everybody’s favourite liquid magic, Azoth, really having a “spirit” that animates it in some way, but just dealing with physical properties, what if it’s difficult to find an appropriate container for some magical ingredient – what if it’ll seep through leather or earthenware or glass, leaving an ectoplasmic drip trail behind the party? Or if potion-imbibers give off fumes?
Two ideas to dovetail with this:
* Continuous Slick – Mages who actually read up on magical theory (instead of just copying down whatever spells they can find without a second thought) can’t help but notice the common elements between Light and Grease spells: With a Light spell ethereal lux is released into the mundane world rapidly loses it’s energy to become completely innert pyle, whereas with Grease spell ethereal pyle is released to form the slick and loses it’s energy eventually evaporating completely.
The catch is that the inert pyle produced by light spells may accumulate more slowly but it doesn’t go away. It condenses on normal matter but doesn’t react with it, producing the ultimate slippery substance which only makes an area more slippery as time goes by. After a thousand years a continual light spell will fill a 10’x10′ room with a 1″ deep layer of goo.
* The Light of Other Worlds – This seems like the sort of thing someone would have dreamed up before, but I can’t recall any particular source:
The Light of Other Worlds is an oil lamp. When the lamp is lit in a perfectly dark room, the light it sheds allows those present to see and physically interact with another plane of existence as if actually present there, until the lamp is turned off or the fuel is used up. To contact a particular plane the lamp must be burning fuel derived from some plant, animal or substance of that plane.
With regards to candles and oil lamps being dirty by our modern standards and thus needing description, I’d say that probably D&D characters are used to being dirty, and thus an extra description emphasizing something that makes them dirty is really only necessary if they are actually dirty by the standards of characters living in that world.
No doubt people 500 years from now reading about our living conditions today will find us positively filthy in 100 ways that pass unnoticed by our standards.
Maybe so, but some folks really get off on that kind of descriptive detail.
I know it warmed my heart listening to RPPR actual plays of Ross Payton and co., to hear exchanges along the lines of:
(dice roll)
Ross: “Alright. And with that you finally succeed in killing him.”
Group: “Come on, immerse us Ross!”
Ross: “Ok…”
I dunno. Bryson is quoting contemporary accounts of people complaining about how filthy the smoke could make them and their clothes. It sounds like they were aware of the situation, even if they didn’t always have a way to avoid it or fix it.
Yes, that’s very true. But on the other hand I think a quick browsing of facebook or twitter should prove that some people will complain about anything, no matter how mundane or trivial =p
Then again, my group gets severely impatient with description 20 beers in. I wanted them to spend a little time figuring out the best way to open a potentially trapped chest and they spent about 20 minutes vociferously arguing different plans of action until it turned into a (good natured) shouting match with 3 people left shaking their heads.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that sometimes my (inexperienced) group tends to treat extremely mundane events as major epic encounters if I throw in a smidgen too much description.