Tuesday Toot – G+ is closing. When it was alive things happened. Things unexpected. Great things. Whilst my creative output is only modest, I thought I’d hold something up into the living light, something that came about purely because G+ existed … This is a toot to G+.

Background:

Illusions are funny things in RPGs. Back in the day they were quite prolific and led to a ‘I disbelieve’ culture. Players (or rather their PCS) would alternate from swapping every square foot of the dungeon with a 10 foot pole to disbelieving everything that came before them (when not ‘targeting the darkness’ with magic missiles).

On G+ I saw a post by Shane Ward of the 3toadstools blog fame who was recruiting to make a collaborative dungeon. So, I thought I’d do a room.

I thought it would be nice to have a throwback ‘illusionary’ type encounter.

But since we’re all too ‘street’ these days, and with the foregoing remarks in mind, I thought about making a ‘illusory encounter’ that was more in keeping with the OSR sensibilities.

Idea:

The genesis of the idea was “What if the players didn’t disbelieve the illusion” (after all it was a player not PC driven phenomena). Which led in turn to the idea of the players creating the illusion themselves. It’s hard to disbelieve that which you create, surely?

So, the premise of the room was to ‘source the table’ invite the players to describe what was in the room. AND THAT would be the illusion. The players had already chosen not to disbelieve. Disbelieve that suckers (… errr … would say a 15 year old DM in 1987) !!!!

Implementation:

There’s a whole mechanic involving a blood sucking vine that generates illusions to drink the PC’s blood and what not.

For more on this, please check out Room 20 (Phantasmal Blood Vine) of the ‘An Invitation from the Blue Baron’ (It’s free on DriveThru).

There’s also a sequel: The Return Of The Blue Baron.

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Me on DriveThruDriveThru; at the moment I’m mainly pimping my procedural adventure ‘Carapace‘ about a giant ant colony and my ‘1998 Dungeon‘.