A Different Aging Effect

[Jake Norwood]

For me the real implication of the greylands, as we're calling them, is boredom. Being bored off your rocker for 6 months, only to exit it and not feel better rested or anything. No advantages. Nothing good at all. It just plain sucks.

Jake

[Ingenious]

Ironically Jake, 6 months of sheer boredom is alot like a mirror image of my life for the next 7 or 8... presuming I work at the same seasonal job next year....

So I'm not liking the idea of having to spend months and months in a depraved world, with no entertainment... and nothing to keep a superior mind like a sorceror's occupied. Like others have previously stated, it would drive someone mad.

-Ingenious

[Judd]

Psychological Argument

But it is a magic otherworld.  Real world psychological studies on sensory dep. don't count.  If wounds don't bleed nor heal maybe the mind preceives differently too.  The world keeps you sane, keeps your mind from doing what it normally would do to keep itself whole or reject the horror of the situation.

Otherworld Player Cues

I would take my cues from the players.  How interested are they in the theories behind magic and what the greyworld really is?  If not, the description of the place will be no more than how long it would take to describe the growing of hair and fingernails for Sorcerery's aging.  

If interest is piqued, game time will grow a bit.  It will never eclipse combat or kill combat's flow but it will become more and more fleshed out and a dark, frightening world in its own right, the more the players show interest in poking and prodding about.

No interest, and it is just a pretty pained backdrop on a movie set.

More Flavor

The next TROS game I run will most likely by the Riddle of Twilight, a Fae game.

The altered priority system will allow players to be ancient Fae.  The greyworld will be known affectionately among the Fae as Death's Parlor and was once a shining bastion of magic, a bridge on the way to the Twilight Realms.  Now it is a dingy colorless place, signifying the change in the world since the Seelie and Unseelie left (or were banished).

[Jasper the Mimbo]

I would have percievability in the greylands be dependant on how long something has been in one place in the real world or how old it is in general. People, who have a tendancy to move about, would hardly be able to be percieved, if at all. (thus negating the "i see him in the other room and know he'll jump out at me when I return" problem) Trees and such, which don't move around much, would be hazy reflections of their real world selves. Same with things like the ground, and distant mountains. Graveyards. (cool images there) Maybe a hazy lighter blur across the sky where the sun travels every day. If a wizard was in a house when he cast a spell, if it was a newer house it might not exist yet in the greylands. Or it might be translucent, not quite having built a ethereal reflection yet.

Magic and magicalal creatures, by contrast could be sharply outlined and almost Hyper-real. (in the grey-blue dismal fog that masks everything, the only color or life that exists at all is coming from that Dragon. What do you do?) One of the cool things about this aproach is that anything using magic to hide itself would be starkly visable from the greylands, not the creature themselves but the magical residue of the still active spell would be quite obvious to another caster in the area. I fugure, as long as a spell is active (and even for a little while after it fades) the magic would be visable from the greylands. Maybe pool refresh time is how long it takes the magic to fade and be reabsorbed by the mage who cast it.

This aproach makes for a very barren, bleak world, exept in the incredably rare event of two magic creatures both using magic at aprox. the same time and one of them failing their resist roll.

Like anything else in a game, players (the crafty little devils that they are) are going to want to use it to their advantage. That's fine. I say let them, Try assigning differant colors to vagerys so that a mage miight be able to decipher what that fading spell residue is, or let them try to track the evil mage by the trail leading to him from his spell as his pool refreshes. Sure. The one thing that must be kept in mind is the cost of these advantages. The greylands are not a place players should ever want to go. It is the embodyment of failure and death. If the percieved results are worth that price to them than let them have it. and remember, anything the players come up with can be used against them. Perhaps a group of greylands fae tracking a PC mage who's been frivilous with his power's residue trail, with the intent of syphoning off magic to try to save their dying ruler or some such. And all the PC knows is that his pool isn't refreshing....

It's the first rule of gaming. Players will try to turn everything to their advantage. Dont let them. A player of mine in a DnD game wanted a mercurial greatsword. Without the argument about how stupid and broken they are, I said yes and introduced an overpowered weapon into the hands of a 2nd level fighter. For a while he felt like he was god. Then the party ran into the race of Elves from the frozen north who left no tracks in the snow, could teleport through snowdrifts, summon blizzards and who wielded Mercurial greatswords as cultural weapons. heh heh. Mercury doesn't freeze easy, and it's poisonous. The players all wanted to kill him by the end of the session.

[Jasper the Mimbo]

wow.

What a rant. I sure am a long winded bastard aren't I.

[Krammer]

The idea I had to counter the boredom of was have them deal with whatever foul creatures live in the greylands. If there are none around, or the spell wasn't big enough to attract any, then the time spent in the Greyland will get little description and then back to the realworld.

     if there are creatures around, then the game will focus on it for a while more. The way I plan on running it in my games, is have it so that the creatures within the greyland cannot be killed, but the sorceror can. that way, it is more of a fight for survival, where you can only keep the beast back, and not get rid of it. Of course, I wouldn't focus on them battling this creature for the whole time, that would take forever, rather, I would have them deal with it for a short while, no more than a few minutes, then, depending on how they do there, they will either be dead, or survive til the aging is past.

     I have not yet run a session since this stuff has come up, but when I do, I hope to have this work.

[Judd]

Today, hopefully, I will run a former d20 Midnight game in TROS.  If the player who is a Sorcerer shows I will describe aging as if he were giving those months to the Shadow in the North...their Sauron-clone who won the Final Battle, 99 years ago.

It will feel like sa dark god ripped away those years and took an icy dump on your soul.

Not as complicated as a grey otheworld but still...it has its charm.

[Jasper the Mimbo]

It will feel like sa dark god ripped away those years and took an icy dump on your soul.

Not as complicated as a grey otheworld but still...it has its charm.

Wow. Sorry, having an icy dump taken on my soul sounds in no way charming. And I don't care how complicated it is, I'd be cold and smelly and want a shower.