Endless Stone Halls
There is a certain image that has always inspired me with a modest level of intellectual dread. Effectively, it is the labyrinth. Not just any old maze, mind; hedge mazes seem almost homey, and the corn mazes that are popular down here are pretty harmless as well unless you go in deliberately churning images of brutal harvest gods and Children of the Corn through your mind. No, I mean the stone labyrinth.
Part of this dread can be traced to reading a very creepy book about navigating a labyrinth as a child, and running across this one particular path ending where you can be orphaned in eternal blackness by the cruel guide just for taking the wrong turn. (I wish I could remember the exact title!) Another part, oddly enough, can be traced to Bard's Tale 3. One of the lovely touches of that game was the packaging, wherein you saw seven separate "windows" of art into each of the dimensions you'd be visiting. But each window was very abstract, implying far more than it showed. And the art for Tenebrosia stuck with me forever: a large stone gallery, in a soft warmish brown, with shadowy archways leading off to heaven-knows-where. In my mind, that labyrinth went on forever, and it was far more disquieting to think of wandering its halls potentially forever while alone, nothing but echoes around, than to think of the inevitable piles of random encounters that no doubt characterized the game proper. (I never made it past Gelidia, sad to say. How I'd love a re-release of those games...)
I love the labyrinth, and I dread it just a bit. I love how Gormenghast implies it, though even Gormenghast is probably a little on the mappably finite size. I enjoy the Jim Henson/Brian Froud take on it, as a lighter shade.
And I try to game the labyrinth again and again. Sometimes it's just a room or a house that appears, like the nearly city-sized theater of M. de la Masque, occupied only by life-size puppets. (The good M. was a Whispering Vault character I threw together when I found the game, never played, and then later transplanted into a different urban horror game.) In modern times, that usually means a dream, or some sort of place "between." In the WoD, the labyrinth would pop up here and there in the Umbra, or in the Hedge, or in Arcadia itself. In fantasy it may be an entire world or plane unto itself; consider a layer of Hell that is nothing but the labyrinth and solitude, inverting "Hell is other people" to "Hell is yourself." There isn't some sort of cosmological connection that I see when I do this, mind; I don't try and jam in links between games. If you wander into the labyrinth in the Hedge, you're not going to come out in a D&D world or anything. The motif is the connection, nothing more.
I got to do the labyrinth recently, although it was a darker and entirely subterranean version, and that was a fine game. And now one of the new groups I'm putting together has voted for another one. And it's going to look like that window of Tenebrosia, or the illustrations in that book I can't name. Stone halls, galleries, shadows. Some of it roofed, or tunnels through the earth, or open to the sky. There will be characters to interact with, of course, because that's one of the things I love about games. But those characters will be somewhat few compared to the space available to them -- villages' worth, in a space that could house metropoli.
I anticipate the echoes.
Part of this dread can be traced to reading a very creepy book about navigating a labyrinth as a child, and running across this one particular path ending where you can be orphaned in eternal blackness by the cruel guide just for taking the wrong turn. (I wish I could remember the exact title!) Another part, oddly enough, can be traced to Bard's Tale 3. One of the lovely touches of that game was the packaging, wherein you saw seven separate "windows" of art into each of the dimensions you'd be visiting. But each window was very abstract, implying far more than it showed. And the art for Tenebrosia stuck with me forever: a large stone gallery, in a soft warmish brown, with shadowy archways leading off to heaven-knows-where. In my mind, that labyrinth went on forever, and it was far more disquieting to think of wandering its halls potentially forever while alone, nothing but echoes around, than to think of the inevitable piles of random encounters that no doubt characterized the game proper. (I never made it past Gelidia, sad to say. How I'd love a re-release of those games...)
I love the labyrinth, and I dread it just a bit. I love how Gormenghast implies it, though even Gormenghast is probably a little on the mappably finite size. I enjoy the Jim Henson/Brian Froud take on it, as a lighter shade.
And I try to game the labyrinth again and again. Sometimes it's just a room or a house that appears, like the nearly city-sized theater of M. de la Masque, occupied only by life-size puppets. (The good M. was a Whispering Vault character I threw together when I found the game, never played, and then later transplanted into a different urban horror game.) In modern times, that usually means a dream, or some sort of place "between." In the WoD, the labyrinth would pop up here and there in the Umbra, or in the Hedge, or in Arcadia itself. In fantasy it may be an entire world or plane unto itself; consider a layer of Hell that is nothing but the labyrinth and solitude, inverting "Hell is other people" to "Hell is yourself." There isn't some sort of cosmological connection that I see when I do this, mind; I don't try and jam in links between games. If you wander into the labyrinth in the Hedge, you're not going to come out in a D&D world or anything. The motif is the connection, nothing more.
I got to do the labyrinth recently, although it was a darker and entirely subterranean version, and that was a fine game. And now one of the new groups I'm putting together has voted for another one. And it's going to look like that window of Tenebrosia, or the illustrations in that book I can't name. Stone halls, galleries, shadows. Some of it roofed, or tunnels through the earth, or open to the sky. There will be characters to interact with, of course, because that's one of the things I love about games. But those characters will be somewhat few compared to the space available to them -- villages' worth, in a space that could house metropoli.
I anticipate the echoes.