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.

So it turns out there are aliens. And some of them have visited Earth. Maybe they’ve even been involved in genetically engineering human beings.

… why is this driving me crazy again?

Partly you’re just dealing with cultural dissonance: At the time Lovecraft was writing, these things were not part of pop culture, so it was possible to believe that people would find their existence unsettling to their settled views of the way the world worked. The understanding of how insanity worked was also different in some key ways.

So, to a certain extent, it’s like wondering why women faint all the time in Victorian literature.

On the other hand, there’s a bit more to it in terms of the time when the “Stars Are Right”, which suggests a fundamental reordering of the laws of physical reality. The creatures of the Mythos literally belong to a universe incompatible with the universe we think we live in. To put it another way: We live in a tiny little pocket of abnormality which uniquely makes it possible for human life to exist and/or prosper. The idea that at some point the Earth will leave our zone of grace, the stars will right themselves, and our little epoch of abnormality will come to an end can be rather unsettling in a way that “there are aliens” isn’t.

But more than that: The creatures of the Mythos are a living connection to the way the universe is supposed to work… and the way the universe is supposed to work is inimical to humanity. At extreme levels it can be like trying to run COBOL programming through a C++ compiler. At lower levels it’s more like trying to run a program through a buggy emulator. It’s not just “that monster is kind of creepy”; it’s “that monster has connected my brain to a place where my brain doesn’t work right”. (This idea also works in reverse: Mythos creatures are operating in a semi-insane state within this period of abnormality. That’s why Cthulhu is lying in an induced coma… he’s trying to minimize the damage.)

But even more than that: The damage being done to your mind is actually a direct result of the mind desperately trying to rewrite itself to cope with the true nature of reality. Mythos-induced insanity? That’s not the mind breaking. That’s the mind trying to fix itself. It just looks like insanity to us because we’re all broken.

Thinking about House of Leaves recently made me revisit a train of thought I’ve often engaged in: Specifically, that there are a lot of architectural grandeurs that are avoided by players who use battlemaps because they’re difficult to map on a two-dimensional grid or table. (In fact, even if you don’t use battlemaps I suspect that there remains a subconscious aversion to such forms because most adventure prep still defaults to the presentation of a two-dimensional map.)

A significant example of this, for me, are large helical ramps or stairs:

Small spiral stairs, of course, are easy enough to include. But what I’m talking about are helical structures large enough that you could wage a massive melee on them. Perhaps one could do it with 3D terrain, but it seems far too complicated to render on a 2D battlemap. Which is too bad, because there’s a lot of cool stuff that can happen on a helix:

Awaking from a dream this morning, however, I realized that there was a way that one could map such a structure:

There are two tricks to using this map. First, a square is directly above the identical square two half-circles to the right (and below the identical square two half-circles to the left). Once you grok that, it shouldn’t be too hard to eyeball which sections of the ramp can reasonably see each other. (It will also let you easily calculate distance on the horizontal plane.)

Second, if the ramp has a 1:1 ratio of descent (i.e., it’s descending at a 45-degree angle), then horizontal distance on the map equates to vertical distance in the game world. For example, assuming 1 square = 5′:

The point marked B on this map is 120 feet directly below point A.

Of course, a 1:1 ratio of descent represents a fairly steep ramp. But you can set any ratio of descent you like and then just divide the distance. For example, if you had a more gradual ramp with a 1:4 ratio of descent you could just divide 120 feet by four and calculate that the vertical distance between point A and point B is 30 feet.

Once you’ve got both your vertical and horizontal plane distances, of course, you can use the Aerial Distances table on page 78 of Legends & Labyrinths to figure out the actual point-to-point distance. (Or you could calculate it using the Pythagorean Theorem, of course.)

It should be noted that this method isn’t perfect. Because each “half” of the ramp is horizontally inverted there’s a definite spatial distortion involved. For example, if you follow the outside curve of the ramp you’ll discover that it becomes the inner curve and then switches back to the outer curve. On 10′-wide ramp like this one the distortion is largely irrelevant (it can be corrected by taking a single diagonal move at each inversion point), but as your ramps get wider the distortion will become more pronounced.

But since I’m not modeling racecars seeking the inner track, I’m not too concerned.

More problematic would be creatures flying up or down through the space in the center of the helix.  For this, you’ll want to calculate the vertical drop between each half-circle. (For example, on the map above with a 1:4 ratio of descent it would be 10′. Now you know that if the creature flies up 10′, you can move them into the identical position in the next half-circle.)

(1) Raising the price of your streaming service because Hollywood is ratcheting up the licensing fees for their content by 1,000% (or more) is just the sad reality of doing business. And customers who can’t understand that just aren’t being rational.

(2) With that being said, trying to sell a price hike to your customers as actually being a great thing for them was a pretty stupid thing to do. The better approach would have been to be frank about the realities of what was going on: “Look, we have to raise the price you’re paying because Hollywood is raising the price we’re paying. What we’re going to do, though, is give you more control over how much you’re paying by letting you pay for just the services you want. If the new price Hollywood is demanding for streaming content is too high, then you can cut back to just disc delivery.”

After fumbling the initial delivery, your best bet would have been to offer your customers (including those who recently canceled) a 3- or 6-month discount as an apology while offering a more coherent and honest explanation of what was happening.

(3) What you really, really shouldn’t do is try to somehow “make up” for your previous mistake by splitting your service into two different companies which will not share queues, ratings, recommendations, or billing. That’s a plan which significantly reduces the utility of your service for your customers.

(4) The only thing stupider than that would be if you split the service, reduce the value of the service to your customers, and then pretend that this is all supposed to somehow be a great thing for them.

I mean that would be really, really stupid. That would be making the exact same mistake you just got raked over the coals for just a couple weeks ago.

… oh dear.

I actually look at the price increase and shrugged: It was more expensive (although nobody’s price “doubled” despite the ridiculous rhetoric posted by the math-challenged; and unless you were already in their lowest possible tier of service the hike was not outrageously large), but I was still getting a ton of value for the price they were asking.

But the split in services? It’s almost certainly going to result in me canceling at least one of the services.

Google Reader is telling me that all the hot, hip kids of the RPG blogosphere are currently engaged in a tag team match to determine who can present a complete adventure in the absolute minimal amount of space possible: Customized monster icons, textless adventures, player handouts that that double as adventure outlines, revised old school module maps with “everything” you need annotated onto the page… It’s all amazing stuff.

I’ve decided to join in the fun by devising an alphanumeric coding system: You don’t need a map or any pictorial reference at all. The alphanumeric code in the first row tells you the size of the room, the exits and entrances, and where those exits/entrances lead. The second row codes the contents of the associated room. (A null value indicates an empty chamber.)

ANGK19MW925MMM24101LHLA
00F00AB00000LM8620090000Z

As you can see, this is one heck of rip-roaring dungeon.

(This may sound weird coming from a guy who just released Legends & Labyrinths, but: Minimalism for the sake of minimalism is simply self-defeating at a certain point.)