I really like surreal, sometimes escheresque environments like in this image, Monument Valley, Kill Six Billion Demons (that for the surrealness not really the Escher stuff) and such, as a concept, but I feel like I can't properly convey the bizzareness of them as a GM.
Does anybody have any tips on how to do so? Is it a case of less is more with description? Have you had a GM who pulled off the concept well, and if so how did they do it?
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I share your sentiment fully.
For good examples of surreal environments in fantasy, read Roger Zelazny, in particular The Chronicles of Amber cycle. You're gonna get the hang of it after finishing the books, I guarantee it.
Or else you can take the Lovecraft route and describe how mind-boggling the place is instead of going into detail regarding what makes it so mind-boggling. It works too. Actually, you should combine a little bit of both.
Less is more is probably the golden rule for environment descriptions in general, because your players aren't reading a book and they're not ready to listen to you for hours on end, even if your flavour text is really good.
Cool, I'll check out the Chronicles of Amber.
I guess just hinting at weirdness lets the player fill in the gaps with what they fins weird.
Just saying "it's weird, man, ain't gonna explain shit" lets the player fill the gaps with absolutely nothing. You need to provide some basic descriptive points, so that the image may crystallise around them.
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I've found that the trick is to give just enough detail, one little unsettling piece to help the rest snowball, and to cheat.
I tend to use players aids a lot, and so I'll work things in. Text at a slight slant to the page, small but important details being different on each handouts so that the party misinforms itself, keeping a set of art for an npc/location that are each subtly different and steadily more fucked up.
That and I've had great success in unsettling players with white noise generators and subsonics.
Mechanics wise, it's great to have a whole area mapped out like one of those old school muds, where going through door A from one side leads to B, but going through from the other leads to C, and so on.
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Listen, take heed, and remember.
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Hey OP.....you know the artist that drew that right?
It's Karbo....one of the ultimate fetishists.
Be wary OP, I suspect raiders from /d/ are already headed this way....
Perhaps a little bump? I can't contribute much, but I suspect Cthulu fans can.
hey, that's a great idea about the player aids!
I'd heavily suggest reading the Night Lands for a good sense of building a subtly creepy setting.
It's referenced of one of Lovecrafts inspirations.
It's all in the description. One or two words our of place or a slight phrasing delivered in the exact same tone can cause a literal mental reboot as the listener realizes what they just heard.
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>karbo
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Have you considered the old hypercube dungeon idea?
Super boring. Going through the same cubic rooms with doors on all sides must be torturous, as evidenced in the eponymous movie.
Presumably you put something inside them.
Nothing can save a layout that is so monotonous and uninspired.
I thought this thread was about Escher-esque environments. When I think "Escher" the first thing that comes to mind is patterns, repetition and hyperdimensional geometry.
This thread is about surreal environments, and Escher was good at drawing optical illusions. Thanks to his collaborations with Penrose, whose input is usually forgotten.
Holy shit, this is perfect. You would just do something like this as the map and use it as an "exploring a museum" adventure. You keep going through the same strange rooms, but they all have different art installations in them that are actively trying to kill the part. Maybe a demiplane or something?
But I liked Cube.
The movie is good, the situation the characters find themselves in, not so much.
>Change the hypercube as a universe
>Have intertwine omniverse with different timelines
>4 dementional dungeon
>Uninspired
What hurts more, your head, or your ass?
There is nothing 4-dimensional about this boring copypaste dungeon with teleport doors, and I'm not quite sure why you're asking this question, because they're obviously one and the same to you.
Yerka > Beksinski
Huh?
It's technically 5-dimensional.
>Teleport doors
There's no teleportation, the walls and doors merely obfuscate the completely fuckery that surrounds each cubic room so that non-mathematicians can at least understand the descriptions of what they're experiencing.
Karbo. Draws macro monstergirls who vore people.
She drew the image OP posted.
She is a big figure for the furry community, so that image up there does not bode well if they get ahold of this thread.