Portal Fantasy

This post has been dragged out of the oblivion of 'Drafts', for reasons that will probably become clearer in the not-so-distant future. It's is a continuation of my thinking about how to make D&D more like the literature that inspired it and also the literature that people who might be interested in playing could be reading. 

However, I may be a bit off base here as I don't really belong to the age-bracket or cultural context that didn't read LotR and Howard and Morcock as a youngster... because I did. So I'm not the best judge of what exactly would be high on the reading/watching list of the people who aren't playing but might be... I'm not so familiar with that literature, so in some ways I'm going into this a bit blind.

Anyway, one of the things that is part of a lot of the fantasy literature I do know about is portals, which I mentioned in the linked post. The idea that people from our world venture (often by accident) into another is a mainstay of fantasy literature, TV and film from Alice in Wonderland and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant to The D&D Cartoon and Stranger Things.

So I'm kicking around some aspects of this question of using portals. I'm looking at the notion of bringing people from our world to the fantasy world to start with.

How does someone from the modern world survive? Classing modern people in D&D terms is tricky.

People from our world will generally be human - unless they have also been transformed while being transported, in which case anything is up for grabs. I can't think of a work where someone's body changed by going through the portal, perhaps there are. More likely that the journey releases unknown abilities (you can't do magic in our world but maybe you can by travelling to 'Fabulosa'? Can't think of any works where that specifically happens but it seems like there would be some. Certainly in the Fionavar Tapestry there is a certain amount of 'magic acquisition' but I'd have to re-read them to work out the particular causes). That might have  a bearing on what class you could be in the new world.

I can't think of a single portal fantasy where the transportee(s) did not speak the language. Red Moon Black Mountain, the Fionavar Tapestry, Chronicles of Narnia, Labyrinth, Magic Kingdom for Sale - SOLD! and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (which to my chagrin I've never even read... though in my understanding the film doesn't depart massively from the book) wouldn't work if Mr Tumnus, Oliver, Loren, Dorothy and so on couldn't communicate. So for starters, the transportees speak 'Common'. Any other languages one might speak in the real world are superfluous. So what if you know English, French, German and a bit of Spanish? Only one of those equates to Common, the others don't exist. Dwarves don't speak Icelandic, Elves don't speak Gaelic. Probably. Though as they're both pretty conservative languages perhaps if the portal takes you back to 10th-century Norway or 5th-century Ireland, maybe the Dvergar and Tuatha de Danaan do speak a recognisable language. But, if you're in 10th-century Norway or 5th-century Ireland, you probably still speak 'Common' - which therefore would probably be Old Norse or Old Irish anyway.

What about skills? Most things modern humans know would be utterly useless. However, we have a much better understanding of stuff like communicable diseases and infection than people living in our own past and that might be a useful survival skill if transported somewhere Earth-like. Most of us I guess know a few things that might be considered somewhat arcane in a different world, like how to make steel by adding carbon to iron, or how to distil vodka. In general terms we might know more about meteorology, astronomy and such like (especially as regards Earth - portals to completely different world would render such knowledge more problematic) but in practical terms we would know less. 

Generally, non-physical skills are a bit more problematic than physical skills. Things like Mixed Martial Arts, archery, and various types of sword-fighting might equate fairly well (though if you're trained with an epee and then get a broadsword maybe not), and some things like being able to chop down a tree with an axe or hunting in the forest would be good for many 'fantasy' settings but otherwise, the sorts of skills that it would actually be beneficial to have are often going to be non-gaming ones. Woodworking and such like, though very practical in a real-world setting, are not exactly skills that feature high in character classes for D&D.

Thief skills are not really a problem. Picking pockets is picking pockets (and sleight-of-hand and misdirection play a part here too I think). The Thief skills seem to be among those that it might be reasonable to directly import.

Unless (see above) the transportation process sets of latent magical talents, Magic Users and Clerics will not be applicable here. Could a devout religious person from our world, whether through faith as an internal mechanism, or from an external source (some god), derive power that enabled them to be a Cleric? Maybe. But I can't see how a Magic User could exist.

Many of us are going to be less fit than people in the past, but conversely - perhaps - more healthy. We often do not lead such active lifestyles as people even 30 years ago, let alone 300 or 3,000. But we don't have anything like the prevalence of rickets, scurvy, polio, leprosy, smallpox or numerous other diseases or other complaints. A year into a global pandemic it seems odd to claim that we're healthier than previous populations but if you went back to Europe in 1349 and talked about a plague that killed 1/1000 of the population, the 60% of the population that survived the Black Death would think you were very, very lucky.

But perhaps some of this is not so relevant. Sarah only stays in the Labyrinth for 13 hours (actually less as Jareth keeps advancing the clock so maybe it's more like 9 hours). Yes, language is pretty fundamental to interact with the inhabitants, but perhaps disease resistance is not so important. The Fionavar Tapestry is perhaps the most 'realistic' attempt at the portal fantasy I can think of, but even then the 'party' (for want of a better term) don't all come down with cholera from drinking polluted water.

So there are problems to say the least with using D&D as a baseline for how you could do this kind of thing in a game, in terms of character generation and classing. Probably not a problem to establish basic stats: STR, INT etc are fairly generic categories, but if you've ever tried to convert D&D to be a space-game engine, for example, it's maybe a bit limited. However, 'how to do magic' is a problem that needs addressing for those classes.

There are a lot of other considerations around portals. I'm sure I haven't even considered a bunch of important factors.

A fundamental question - Who or what has brought the PCs to this world?

a Good Deity
an Evil Deity
a powerful Good Wizard
a powerful Evil Wizard
an accident
an ancient spell
a book or scroll
an ancient magical device
a secret portal (mirror, pool, wardrobe etc)

Not sure if this list is particularly exhaustive. Sometimes there can be more than one answer. An accident, for example, may involve an ancient magical device or spell gone awry. The PCs might be the unintended passengers of a spell meant for someone else, either from a good or evil entity. An Evil Wizard may use a spell or device to trap a questor, etc. Alternatively, an ancient magical device may have been created by an Evil Wizard. So the point of this list is more a 'first cause' than a set of exclusive possibilities. It's probably worth delving into deeper levels of answer that depend on the initial one.

I've just acquired a copy of the game Blue Rose which has a section on using portals in games - I'm going to be reading that section with some interest (along with the rest, of course - I didn't want it just for that section!). I hope, as it's actually part of the fabric of the game, that it might be easier to sort some of this stuff out

So, yeah... portals... they're a thing. Not a huge part of what I'm thinking about right now but I guess connected. It's sometimes difficult to know exactly where to put all the speculation.