http://zip.4chan.org/tg/res/2454977.html



It takes a sick mentality to put players through something like that.

Forget the players, what about the GM?! That would twist my brain into a cheeto.

...I must be evil and cruel.  I've used tesseracts many times.

That whole Jareth's Escher-maze Palace in Labyrinth trick is much easier to pull off if you understand tesseracts.  They make for interesting dungeons, though they should be used sparingly, as they are quite maddening.

I think Madeleine l'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time was the inspiration for that Dragon article. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it.

Holy crap, I remember that article.  My friend Jeff used it as the focal point for one of his adventures.  That and Githyanki.  That was some pretty badass business as I recall.

!i!

At about 14, I used this trick in a dungeon without knowing of the article or what a "tesseract" was, and the players, mostly veterans of Bard's Tale, SSI's Gold Box Games and also of Wizardry VII: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (The Isle of Crypts, City of the Sky, Tower of the Dane), figured it out in ca. ten minutes.

Funny enough this is quite similar to the system used to the Lost Isle of Castanimir.

One of my favorites for its fun, oddness (But in the end, I always downplayed the in game threats--first level Pc's and Iron Golems? Even SMALL ones? Unfair.)

I'm am so going to use that in the next game I run.

I've used limited space dungeons with teleporting doors before, but the cleanliness of this one is beautiful.

An early dungeon adventure featured non-Euclidian geometry. Arrows would see to curve. Seemingingly going around a square would bring some place other than where you started.  It also had a series of interconnected spheres where "down" was toward the edge of the sphere.

I used a giant tesseract in my Cup of Sky AD&D campaign back some twenty years ago. It may have been this article that prompted it, but I can't remember. Cup of Sky was sort of a hard-core Olympics for heros from all over the world, with teams sponsored by the various gods, and with death being a not-uncommon consequence of failure. The tesseract was truly huge, with a key that was some two and a half inches thick. I tossed the key and the maps some years ago as being of no more interest. This was only maybe the fifth real dungeon I'd created in the twenty years I ran this campaign, so it was a real novelty for my players. It was a peculiarly airy dungeon, being magically suspended high above a valley - the Cup of Sky - surrounded by impassible mountains. Massive windows and skylights let in light  on every level. I would never, ever put that much work into a campaign again!

-clash

Quote from: Nicephorus;241595An early dungeon adventure featured non-Euclidian geometry. Arrows would see to curve. Seemingingly going around a square would bring some place other than where you started.  It also had a series of interconnected spheres where "down" was toward the edge of the sphere.

Was it a Moebius strip?


or maybe a Moebius oblong of some kind? They can be 2,1-sided, 3,1-sided, anything you like.

I remember an old Dungeon adventure - Ex Libris - which sounds a lot like the description of the dungeon in the OP.

Regards,
David R

Pretty sure I've seen that article, probably in Best of Dragon.

If I'm not mistaken, the upper and lower rooms should also be directly "above" and "below" all the other rooms--but possibly reversed relative to room F.

You could really join rooms in any arbitrary manner. In fact there's a boardgame called Wiz-War where a player can create magical connections between doors that can only be explained through non-planar (if not 4-dimensional) geometry. In fact in the standard "square" starting configuration of the board, the doors on the left edge connect to the right, and top to bottom, which suggests topologically that the board is really the surface of a torus, or ring. (The same thing applies to the old Asteroids video game.)

Math makes Baby Jesus weep. Don't post math shit here. Last time Baby Jesus wept his Dad fucked up the people of Canaan. The dude got no sleep from the kid's crying and well, going to work in a bad mood... y'know.

-=Grim=-

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;241694Pretty sure I've seen that article, probably in Best of Dragon.

That's where I remember it from.

There's an adventure in Goodman Games's The Adventure Begins called "The Mage Maze" that features a tesseract.