Myst series and/or Infinite Worlds GURPS

[PTTG]

It struck me that Myst is a fantastically well-constructed universe for a GURPS-style adventure. Ages are much like worldlines in a IW campaign, and unlike many computer games it can transition smoothly to a slower-paced, deeply interactive experience such as tabletop gaming.

There are a few big problems with GURPS: Myst as a pure IW setting, of course. Players will want to write books which solve problems, and that's totally reasonable. GMs will probably have to come up with a lot of worlds, especially if PCs work with any D'ni or post-D'ni writers. These are most likely part of the charm.

I am not totally up to date with Myst lore, but from what I understand I think we can get to the main parts. Everything here is a proposal, so feel free to make suggestions.

Books and Ages:

Age: An alternate universe. There remains some controversy as to if these worlds are created in the "writing" process, or if they all exist initially in all possible states. This "many worlds" paradigm is assumed to be correct. This strictly means that all worlds that can be described (if not more) exist and can be easily accessed. If that is the case, presumably most of them are on distant quanta. Others believe that the act of writing creates the age. Though currently discredited, some experiments (such as Stoneship) dispute a purely "many worlds" universe. Among other things, it is possible to cause small physical changes to a world by modifying the descriptive book after visiting. Additionally, no "near parallels" have been conclusively discovered.

Classically, Ages consist of a vast ocean with a single isle or small continent; however, this is by no means a requirement. Nor must Ages match Homeline physics (although most do, simply because it is hard to make such fundamental changes safely).

Ages are given names as are any other region or worldline. Ghen used numbers; Atrus used meaningful conjunctions.

Descriptive Book: The primary means of traveling to an Age. This takes the form of a large codex, varying in size complexity depending on the complexity of the age, but Riven (an older Age with a native population and unusual physical modifications, created by a master) was approximately 4 in. x 8 in. x 12 in. These books either define the Age or create a specific link; if it is destroyed or even simply lost, it is practically impossible to return to the world so linked.

These books are full of D'ni writing. An unskilled person could not make any sense of it, and even a highly talented Age-Writer given substantial time can only make vague guesses about the condition of the Age it links to from the contents of the book.

More immediately apparent, however, will be the Linking Panel. This is a clear visual window into the age (unless something is wrong), almost always placed on the top of the first page of the book. Simply touching the panel instantly transports one to the age described in the book. Importantly, though the transportation includes everything you are carrying up to maximum load, it does not include the book itself (Occasionally excepted when using unusual new technologies). The user appears in a fixed, key location within the age, as does anyone else who uses the book. This spot is accurate enough so that a one-yard-wide "prison" could be constructed to trap new arrivals.

Linking Book: A specialized book for safer linking. They also allow direct linking to some place other than the target of the Descriptive Book, allow someone to store the descriptive book within that age itself, and provide an emergency teleport out of an age when in a situation that might destroy a more valuable Descriptive Book. Physically, they can be much smaller, perhaps only a few dozen pages.

Linking Books and Descriptive Books require very precise resources. The ink, the paper, the binding, any physical part of the book must be of the highest quality and must possess specific qualities known only to highly skilled D'ni writers. Earth apparently possesses these resources, but some ages either lack the D'ni infrastructure or raw materials needed to make working books. If so, there are two tools that can power a well-written and mostly sufficient book: Little is known of either, but one involves geode frames for the linking panels, and one involves vast quantities of beamed geothermal energy. Presumably other means exist.

Neither Linking Books nor Descriptive books will function as teleporters when within their respective age.

D'ni: A race of humanlike people who invented or perfected the art of creating Descriptive Books. This is, again, contested; for some time it was believed that only D'ni could write ages at all, however Earth humans (conceivably the same as Homeline humans) have written functioning Books, as have more distant intelligent creatures. D'ni are either extremely productive or have drastically slowed lifespans; Atrus constructed brick buildings, entire ships, complex mechanisms, an elaborate "spaceship," spent months and years traveling and exploring ages, all with no industrial support and only two young sons for help. His father wrote at least 255 counted Ages, possibly hundreds more, and each one took a substantial amount of time. I personally don't know how to make note of the difference, perhaps someone has a better idea of what a D'ni template looks like.

EDIT: Yeesha, Atrus' Daughter, is only 1/8th D'ni, and yet was still a young woman at the age of 199! D'ni do age, but most likely do so at no less than 10 times slower than humans.

Writing Ages:
The Art is an IQ/VH skill which requires native proficiency in written D'ni language. It may be impossible to gain any skill in the Art without D'ni anyway, since all existent texts are in that language. D'ni might not be essential, but the Art as it stands is built on D'ni precepts, many of which simply do not translate to other languages.

This skill allows the character to examine ages to forecast what they might be like from the contents of the Descriptive Book, create Linking Books to places within Ages, and work upon Descriptive books. Additionally, any experiments regarding the nature of Ages and Linking suggests this skill.

Using this skill to create Linking books or read Descriptive books is straightforward. Creating new Ages requires a number of other skills to do so safely and consistently. Simply creating an age successfully requires a roll against The Art. Such an age will be crude and barren. To achieve interesting terrain, roll against other relevant skills: Astrophysics for unusual moons or stars, Biology for unusual creatures, Geology for strange terrain. Almost every age should involve a roll against Physics simply to ensure that gross physical laws aren't violated. Sociology as well as Anthropology and any number of other skills can be called for in other circumstances. Textbooks on the Art can provide information about these skills, and presumably those who don't know the Art can advise the writer about their own fields, but it seems that most writers were able to get the basic idea they set out to achieve but never anything too specific.

Writing is a very long-term task, equivalent to writing a novel of similar physical size.

[ericthered]

Questions:

How does one return home from a world one is visiting?
Can an author create a specific person? For instance, a copy of his deceased wife? What about a spectacularly intelligent scholar or a fabulously wealthy king?
Can the author write themselves into a world? For instance, build a religion in which he is recognizably the head deity?
I'm going to guess attempts to write magic into an age usually fail. Is this covered by 'alternative physics'?
What happens when you bring things back? can you write a world where golden pebbles are common, go to the world, and return a rich man? do unusual creatures come back safely ?

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Questions:
How does one return home from a world one is visiting?

You've spotted one of the subtler hazards of Age travel: One always needs a Linking Book to return. Any self-respecting D'ni traveler keeps a linking book to his home on his person at all times. That said, if you're going to a well-traveled place, it's reasonable to expect a way back out, such as a prominently-placed and suitably protected book to the D'ni city (within an enormous cavern in the American Southwest on what appears to be Homeline).

There are other methods. For instance, an unusual phenomenon discovered only on an unstable world in the process of falling apart was something called a "star fissure," which was a fault in the terrain which appeared to open into deep space. Items which fell into this fissure tended to end up on Earth, not far from the entrance to D'ni.

What this means about Earth or the nature of linking, I cannot say. Perhaps there are Star Fissures to Centrum?

Originally Posted by ericthered

Can an author create a specific person? For instance, a copy of his deceased wife? What about a spectacularly intelligent scholar or a fabulously wealthy king?

Creating a specific person through the Art would be like trying to construct a nation such that your wife lives there. Demographics are easier to manipulate, although hubritical. Outlier societies may be extremely unstable, as one might expect for societies created solely to prove philosphical points or that rely on delecate social/natural balance. D'ni writers loved these kinds of societies, they seem to get mentioned a lot...

Returning from that tangient, you can create a society which tends to create great scholars or wealthy kings (if you have some idea how such a society functions), but you can't whip them up out of nowhere.

Originally Posted by ericthered

Can the author write themselves into a world? For instance, build a religion in which he is recognizably the head deity?

Atrus' father Ghen would like a word with you. Indeed, that was a major cause of the fall of the D'ni; they enslaved others with their godlike powers, and to mistake the Art for omnipotence is forgivable. That said, unless you find some clever way of introducing your face and name to a society through natural laws and physical conditions, you'd have to do some conversions (and burning of heritics, etc., etc.) in order to get the locals to see the light.

Originally Posted by ericthered

I'm going to guess attempts to write magic into an age usually fail. Is this covered by 'alternative physics'?

To be frank, the Art is basically magic. Highly restricted magic, as it is virtually useless once inside a world, but closer to magic than to any modern theory of nature. (Again I go on a tangent, but it is also fair to say that even the most hubritical D'ni used the scientific process much more than magical thinking when writing Ages...)

Writing magic is difficult. Writing an age where the mantle is superconductive and the crust is highly magnetic is much easier. As a result, small scientifically-described changes with specific effects are more common than ages with explicitly magical phenomenon... but if we're joining this to IW, that may simply be because one must understand the physical laws behind the ages you link to, and you can only learn these laws by visiting ages with them. D'ni Art simply hasn't discovered magic magic yet.

Originally Posted by ericthered

What happens when you bring things back? can you write a world where golden pebbles are common, go to the world, and return a rich man? do unusual creatures come back safely ?

Did I mention the D'ni people lived in an underground metropolis with no source of food, let alone material goods? Gold, food, fuel... it all came from Ages. Of course, Ages became the limited resource, and anyway you could only harvest food as fast as TL5^ allows. Ages, particularly resource-rich ones, require time and expertise to construct. In short, absolutely yes to the first two questions, and the D'ni discovered the consequences of that.

As for unusual creatures, they can definitely cross through if someone can carry it. If they rely on unusual physical laws or environmental conditions, they'll die.


To expand on Linking Books, two small notes: Links appear to remain stationary relative to either the core of the planet or to the bulk of the nearby terrain. Therefore, one could not create a link to a specific train car, but could create a link to a spot high in the air or inside a sealed cave as a trap. Perhaps this is why linking panels have view windows at all (it's apparently possible to communicate two-way through view panels, although it's not clear how).

Secondly, there are two ways to create linking books. From within an age, simply bring a prepared, blank book and describe the location in D'ni language. This is an easy check for the Art. When complete, the book will activate and, once removed from the age, can be used to return to the place it was written. Alternatively, if one has access to the Descriptive book, it is possible to write what is effectively a citation to that book. I would presume this is more difficult than the other form, but still easily within reach of a novice writer.

If the former method can be used to create links to "ages" that don't have known descriptive books (Earth/Homeline, for instance, has one somewhere, but Rhich-5 probably doesn't) is a mystery.

[patchwork]

What happens if a skilled D'ni Writer attempts to copy an existing Descriptive Book exactly? The D'ni may never have done this (or quickly and quietly abandoned the experiment) and chosen to exalt individual creativity, but off the top of my head...that's where close parallels come from. Reich-5 becomes a copy (flawed, or close enough for D'ni purposes?) of Homeline...

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by patchwork

What happens if a skilled D'ni Writer attempts to copy an existing Descriptive Book exactly? The D'ni may never have done this (or quickly and quietly abandoned the experiment) and chosen to exalt individual creativity, but off the top of my head...that's where close parallels come from. Reich-5 becomes a copy (flawed, or close enough for D'ni purposes?) of Homeline...

I've never seen information about this. If you duplicate a Descriptive Book word-for-word, well, I have no idea.

Update: It seems that even practically invisible changes in the brushstrokes of a single ideogram/character can produce subtle changes in the structure of a world. Considering good old chaos theory, two books made even with the most painstaking similarity are going to be notably different. I think close parallels could be described as this similar, but even most close parallels could just as easily have significant written changes.

[Ciergan]

Would Linking Books be a second Secret in Infinite Worlds, or replace the original?

[PTTG]

Originally Posted by Ciergan

Would Linking Books be a second Secret in Infinite Worlds, or replace the original?

I imagine they're just one more part of the Secret. They are more capital-M Magic than they are Technology, but they are rigorous enough that they might be on par with a psionic artifact instead of a mana-based Magic system. They certainly seem to operate on "metaverse" principles, like crosstime physical science; taken all together, I would presume that IU researchers would love to get their hands on a couple Linking Books to try and replicate them.

GURPS: Myst would work best as a standalone campaign set in 201X (after the D'ni restoration in Uru), 186X (Circa Myst and Riven), or generations earlier at the height of D'ni civilization. They would only get involved with IW if the GM decides that a Writer has finally found a world which has been visited by some kind of "mechanical Linking Book," or somebody ports over to a worldline just in time to catch a book falling from the vanishing hands of a man in a robe.

If your players aren't familiar with Myst, then all the better to have it be a magical or psuedo-magical tradition for an unusual sort of crosstime travel.

[Ciergan]

(This thread pulled me out of lurking. Much obliged!)

I think a lot of what makes Myst work is the sense of isolation. The worlds become more inviting and intimidating at the same time.

How big would you make a GURPS Age? I still think the sweet spot is the likes of Stoneship; the largest I would go is Kadish Tolesa. It was such a breath of fresh air to play through these levels that had strong, unique themes, and I think limiting their scopes makes them memorable.

But of course, my actual question is whether anyone here would be interested in playing a GURPS Myst/Uru PBP. Because I'd be all over that.

[Refplace]

I like the concept. If built as Powers it would be a variation on Jumper and possibly borrow from the Pyramid article on Owning your own Dimension. Forget the article name but can dig it up if needed.

[PTTG]

PBP is a great idea. Imagine a large library of old D'ni worlds, crosslinked with books and ruins, with five or six PCs traveling around looking for other each other and/or a D'ni book.

I would be reluctant to make players pay for Ages unless they started out with an age already built. Even then, it's easy to lose access to your age, since all control of it is really tied to the Descriptive book.

As far as sizes, I like the island-age approach, but Ages can be full-sized planets.