a matrix of interconnected rooms

 In the essay "Figures, Doors and Passages," Robin Evans contrasts the Classical and Renaissance approach to dividing rooms into spaces with the Modern (post-19th century) ideas about the same. As the main example of the former, he discusses the Villa Madama:

The first difference he points out from modern plans is that:

...the rooms have more than one door - some have two doors, many have three, others four - a feature which, since the early years of the nineteenth century, has been regarded as a fault in domestic buildings of whatever kind or size. Why? the answer was given at great length by Robert Kerr. In a characteristic warning he reminded readers of The Gentleman's House (1864) of the wretched inconvenience of thoroughfare rooms, which made domesticity and retirement unobtainable. The favored alternative was the terminal room, with only one strategically placed door into the rest of the house.

Yet exactly the opposite advice had been furnished by the Italian theorists who, following ancient precedent, thought that more doors in a room were preferable to fewer. Alberti, for instance, after drawing attention to the great variety and number of doors in Roman buildings, said, 'It is is also convenient to place the doors in such a Manner that they may lead to as many parts of the edifice as possible.' This was specifically recommended for public buildings, but applied also to domestic arrangements. It generally meant that there was a door wherever there was an adjoining room, making the house a matrix of discrete but thoroughly interconnected chambers. Raphael's plan [of the Villa Madama] exemplifies this, though it was in fact no more than ordinary practice at the time.

In modern design, enclosed spaces are distinguished between access spaces to be moved through but not occupied (elevators, passages, stairs) and those that are meant to be occupied but not moved through (rooms). However in earlier eras, even buildings large enough to be subdivided into many rooms (it is worth remembering that most buildings would contain few rooms; even a king might have no more than a hall, a private chamber for his family and a kitchen in his castle) would generally favor what Evans calls the "matrix of interconnected rooms."

This contrasts markedly with the kind of dungeon plan perhaps best exemplified by Castle Geryhawk, in which mostly-empty passages serve isolated terminal rooms to be stocked with various monsters or treasures:

The Greyhawk map is quite interesting because it demonstrates an extremely modern layout sensibility in an ostensibly medieval complex. The language Evans applies to William Morris's plan for the Red House at Bexley Heath applies perhaps more directly this dungeon than the house itself:

Yet his commitment to past practice only went so far. The morality of craft and beauty might transform the procedures of building and the appearance of the finished work, but medievalism did not percolat into the plan, which was categorically Victorian and utterly unlike anything built in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Indeed the Red House illustrates the principles laid down by the bourgeois Robert Kerr better than Kerr's own plans: rooms never interconnect, never have more than one door and circulation is unified and distinct.

That may have been said to Morris's shame, but I don't mean it to shame the Castle or its designer. If anything, its plan is less typical of modern dungeons than the kind of dungeon plan perhaps best exemplified by (my beloved) Nethack, wherein corridors lead from specific rooms to specific other rooms, rather than forming a network of circulation for the whole level:

However, I think embracing the matrix of interconnected rooms is a useful tool to keep in mind when designing dungeons or other structures because it naturally introduces a high degree of interconnectivity and makes chance encounters with the inhabitants of the dungeon likely throughout, not simply in their designated areas or when they take to wandering the halls. Here are a last few thoughts in the form of suggestions when drawing a dungeon plan:

• When possible, place rooms that connect next to one another without an adjoining corridor.
• Don't put an isolated room at the end of a corridor unless there's a particular reason for it to be separated from the others.
• If many rooms lie on a single passage, consider making it a courtyard or loggia (above ground) or an atrium or other vertical space, perhaps with access to other levels (if below).

de modulii magicii

This is a thinky post and modest proposal about modularity in TTRPG design.

Since modularity can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, I'll be specific. I am not talking (at least not directly) about the role that discrete packages play in character customization; I am talking about the more general organizational principle of giving a unique name to a particular rule and referring to it at need elsewhere in the text.

When a rulebook describes a number of statuses that can affect a character's combat options: blinded, dazed, deafened, prone, surprised, stunned and so on, and then elsewhere gives players and enemies the option to blind, daze, deafen, knock prone, surprise and stun one another, that's an example of modularity. Modularity is a strategy for sacrificing some amount of clarity (the consequences of stunning a foe may not be explained in the same place in the text as the source of the condition) for to make the rules more consistent (all abilities that stun foes achieve the same effect) and concise (it is not necessary to quote a modular rule everywhere it is referenced). The cost in clarity can be offset by choosing descriptive names for the modular rules so that readers' expectations about what applies to stunned characters map well onto what the actual rules provide for those situations.

A place where modularity is particularly useful is in magical effects. By nature, magical affects are at least somewhat contrary to the readers' expectations and, if precise boundaries of the effect are needed, a lot of text may be the result. Delta has a whole series of posts analyzing the rules texts of spells from Chainmail through 3E; it's evident at a glance that spells have accumulated more and more text as time goes on and the attempt is made to nail down exactly what such and such a piece of magic can do.

Whether you like detailed spells descriptions or vague ones, is not practical to quote the full text of a spell description every time it is referenced. As such, the rules are full of effects defined in reference to specific spells. An unscientific survey of a pretty orthodox old school magic item list had 10-40% (depending on category) of magic item listings specifically referencing a spell effect. Excluding scrolls (which are mostly spell scrolls), potions are next most likely to reference spell effects, followed by wands, miscellaneous items and finally rings. Monster abilities in early editions and their imitators seem much less likely to reference spell effects; however 3/3.5E can't get enough of monster abilities directly referencing spell effects, between traditional spellcasting, spell-like abilities and the very confusing situation of "supernatural" (and sometimes "extraordinary") abilities that duplicate spell effects without certain features of spells such as the possibility to be interrupted or dispelled.

Honestly, I think 3/3.5E is pushing in the right design direction there, even if they did it in the messiest possible way. Nevertheless, I'd wager few people have the system mastery to accurately tell you off hand the differences between a spell, spell-like ability, supernatural ability and an extraordinary ability. And even fewer would be able to accurately guess the effects of an unfamiliar spell from its name. In 4E, the designers pulled hard in the opposite direction by removing the modularity from spells (and prayers and maneuvers and psionic powers) entirely: all abilities got siloed to the class or monster type that granted them where they are described in full. In particular, this means that while the information is conveniently organized for the DM running the encounter, the economics of space and how many unique abilities a DM can actually keep in mind while running the encounter suddenly place pretty hard limits on how intricate monsters can be.

Rather than continue talking about the historical vicissitudes of spell modularity, I will instead make a modest proposal:

Modest Proposal

Keep magical causes and magical effects separate:

• A magical effect (wonder) should be listed under a descriptive name and any limitations that are not obvious spelled out (for example, that the wonder of move earth can shift loose earth and its vegetation, but not stone).
• A magical cause could be a spell that can be learned, a consumable preparation, an artifact or a natural ability of a magical creature. The description of a cause should name the wonder should spell out any important limitations on its use (costs, concentration, durations, number of targets, ranges, time to activate and so forth).

Different ways of working the same wonder can be made to feel very different if, for example, different costs are demanded from a holy person and a necromancer to bring about the same healing of a broken body. The details of the wonder equip a ref to rule on its applications and edge cases, while the details of the causes are able to be more diegetic and flavorful without sacrificing modularity for that.

A book of wonders could be used by a referee both as an at-the-table reference for whatever magic is in play but also as a source for describing new wizarding traditions (by selecting a set of wonders and describing that tradition's means of causing each), artifacts or creatures. If the rules texts were sufficiently concise, a deck of cards bearing wonder descriptions could be physically handed out to players when they become able to use them.

infancy among the hidden folk

What can be said of the infant years of a people to whom a year is like a day, and a generation like a watch at night? One thing that can be said is that this time is not passed as the infancy of a mortal: red, screaming and tiny.

Or rather, we should say that their the infancy shall not be like that unless their adult years will be so as well.

Just as a death of long years is a stranger to them, so too the hidden people are strangers to the womb. Like a clap of lightning they are born of the need of a moment. Most are never more than a moment's being, dancing one step of the great dance of creation.

An staying-elf, however, must be nursed. They are nursed not at the edge of a breast but at the edge of consciousness (both their own and that of others). Like a dream or a figment they filter in and out through long years, generations of life. Perhaps they kiss the moors with the morning dew, or perhaps they wax with the young planted oak, or perhaps they reckon the days by the cutting of a persistent stream through hard rock.

In this time, they say the fair folk have no memories; this is a foolish lie. Even as a mortal infant cannot remember one day to the next but learns to distinguish faces, tongues, voices one from the other, bugs, hobs and nickers are have familiarity with the created things. What they lack is history. They cannot tell the story of their own origin (or indeed, follow a story told). They live an undifferentiated now to which a twisting cord loops ever back out of an impersonal never.

Those that know humans in their childhood often take descendants for ancestors or ancestors for descendants. A score or more of parents and children may wander in and out of now of the young nisse, all the same to them. Because they can be confused greatly by this, and because it is said that too much talking makes the hidden folk old before their years, some of fair adults try very much to prevent grown mortals from congress with inchoate fairies.

Mortals cannot remain ever in their infancy: not so the hidden folk. Theirs is an childhood that need never be touched by adolescence or death. Yet some of them do emerge from the liminality of their youth into an adulthood. Personalization can be slow or fast from an outside perspective, like waking from a dream on the one hand or dredging about for a memory deeply buried in the preconscious on the other.

And yet it is rare to find a mortal at the end of their short years with the easy, practiced ease of an immortal at the beginning of their long ones. They come out of their adolescence with the familiarity of two, or a dozen, or a hundred lifetimes of beholding each speck and stone and living thing in the pure immediacy that is granted to most mortals to see but a moment in each busy year if they are lucky.

The baffling patience of an elf at rest comes not from the ambiguity of their end, but the indefiniteness of their beginning.

For the immortal, "adulthood" is a trap, a net they spun out of stories and in which they have caught themselves. Loquacious or mum, you'll not find a fairy who is incautious with words. Perhaps if they find or forget the right word, they'll be able to slip the net.

Then again, perhaps not.