>>17077014
>Non-Euclidean Geometry.

Here.

>>17077024
uhh I am pretty sure euclid had circles licked....

>>17077024

wut

Circles are Euclidean. Hell, they're so Euclidean, the fucking Euclid himself describes them in the same work as his axioms.

Good way to make a non-euclidian part is to make parallel lines that converge - the room that gets smaller, or bigger, as you walk further into it.
You can have gravity twist on a relatively straight floor - walking along a hallway, gravity twists about 360 degrees, but as far as the players can tell, the hallway is completely straight.
An M.C. Esher type room, where the players enter it later but with gravity pointing in a different direction, is always a staple for dungeon exploration. Hopefully you've played enough gravity-screwing video games to design a maze based on the players having to muck with their direction of gravity.
Oh, and no symmetry anywhere. Ever.

>>17077014
Describe something that doesn't make sense.

"The room forms a prism of a right-angled triangle, the hypotenuse on your right. From bottom to top it measures 3 meters in height; the floor across is 4 meters in length. Over your head, the third side of the triangle is 12 meters long."

When they question this, give them -10 SAN points.

Ok. This is gonna be kinda hard to explain. Maybe. Maybe youll get it right away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_disc_model
This is a model of a hyperbolic plane. You can see that there are tiled regular heptagons (7 sided figure) in the picture. This CANNOT happen in euclidean geometry. If you put them in a cave structure, and let them map out rooms and stuff, but you take that image from wikipedia and map out your rooms as if the picture i have was tiled flat, (so each room thats the same size would be one of those red circles), then as they map out the rooms theyre in, theyll find that they cant link things the way you describe them on their paper.
(continuing this in the next post)

The design of the building has a logic, but it is more like an escher sketch.

Some halls do not end, others cannot be retraced without ending up somewhere else..... make up a system and stick to it. The gamers can pick up what clues they can.

Perhaps several house designs depending on how aware the players are of the inconsistencies.

So to start with it only has the smallest inconsistencies, but as you focus on them you move into a new house design with large flaws.

Eventually leading to a design that has major rifts and energy/monster intersections with other realities

>>17077050
Sorry, meant to post this.

Something simple. A room has two tunnels connecting it with another room, both tunnels are straight, leave from the same wall, and reach the same wall.
However, due to Elliptic geometry, entering the left tunnel entrance will take you out the right tunnel exit, and vice versa.

>>17077050
Euclidian geometry is what you learned in school - it basically worked with idealized shapes and rules.

Non-Euclidian geometry deals with reality and also theorems that are not applicable in the geometry you learned in school.

For instant, Perpendicular lines in Euclidean geometry meet at one point in 90 degree angle to one another. However, if you use a sphere instead of a flat surface, thus stepping out of Euclid's realm, not only do perpendicular lines not obey the 90 degree angle, but they MUST meet at two differing points. There is no such thing as a 90 degree angle in real life - all angles are in reality either unattached planes, or incredibly tight hyperbolas, two more situations Euclid's geometry cannot abide.

>>17077014
You have to turn a given object over three times to get back to the orientation you started looking at it, instead of two.

You can do the same with routes that seem circular, but only repeat once you go around twice.

toroid spaces, meaning areas that loop back on themselves and join in weird ways, and lots of what >>17077085 describes.

>>17077113
Protip: All of the noneuclidean geometries are "wrong" too.

continued from
>>17077089

The hyperbolic plane is only one surface. You could make all kinds of crazy surfaces that looped and knotted on itself, in sketches or on a 3d modeler or whatever, and basically draw rooms on it. Take any weird shape, like a torus (donut shape) and draw your dungeon on it. If that's too in depth for you (it probably is) of a commitment, an easier way would be to just make rooms go to ones their not supposed to. Just draw your rooms with lines connecting doors, not paths, and make those rooms open into each other. (Essentially, making little teleporters between rooms that dont have to be next to each other).

Also, you might have some luck asking /sci/ about some of this stuff.

Don't make a map of the facility. Use random tables.
List the rooms, list connecting tunnels. They leave one room from *roll a dice* the stone hallway and reach the *roll again* torture chamber.

OP, try looking up tesseracts.

I'll try to cut and paste the pages from Dragon #17 that had them.

OP, what you need to do is look up some M. C. Escher.

This is a pic that plays around with conflicting perspectives.

The thing to do is not to overthink it and not over-describe it. What you want to do is come up with a relative few elements that are truly out of place or alien, and stick to them. Especially in a D&D/Pathfinder game, less is more, ESPECIALLY when you have knowledgeable players at the table who will tend to try to figure out whatever you're throwing at them. "Oh, that must be a Marilith." "Oh, that's a portal to the Astral Plane."

The freakiest thing I managed to throw at my players involved them passing through a fog bank, and emerging into a black-and-white, shadowy version of the place they were expecting to go to. Inky, ice-cold rivulets of fluid here and there, random spikes and chains of similar, completely black matter protruding at odd places. That's pretty much it. It messed with the players because they weren't sure where they were, or what the "rules" of the place would be.

So don't go on and on about how the building they're in is some sort of "non-Euclidian" thing of whatzits full of angles that go nowhere and monstrous unimaginable faces in the stone and inscriptions that make you go mad from reading them and blah de blah. Just add a single detail every now and then. The party walks into a room and the first guy in sees the last couple people in the group leaving--from the opposite side of the room, on the ceiling. Shit like that. Describe, but never explain.

>>17077145
That's implying that there is a 'right' or 'wrong' in mathematics.

If you want reality, deal in engineering, not math.

"If you have a boy and a girl on two sides of a stadium, and they close the distance between them in half measures, how long will it take them to reach the middle?"
Mathemetician: Infionite time, becuase half of a half of a half extends to infinity."
Engineer: "About 3.7 seconds, depending on how horny they are."

>>17077134
Ooh i like the ideas in this one. You can do a sort of mobius strip to the building. Make them take a route through a hallway that leads back to a part of the room that theyve already been in, but walking through that hallway mirrors the rooms (It doesn't have to be left/right mirror either. It could make things upside down too!)

>>17077185
No. I'm talking about comparison to reality, just like
>>17077113
I fully agree that there is objectively "correct" math. It's all about the axioms you choose to accept.

He implies that euclidean is nonrealistic and that noneuclidean is realistic. I'm saying that no simple geometry described reality.

>>17077192

First, let them pass through the rooms a couple times, let them get the "lol, we're going in a circle" response out of their systems.

Then have them realize little things are different every time they come into the room. Maybe it's smaller each time. Or there are more statues. Something like that. Again, the important part is to let them think they know how the place works, then change it on them. Keep them off-balance.

A tunnel between two rooms takes different lengths of time to travel through depending on which way you're going.

>>17077177
A good way to bugger with people is to make a Box-and-switch puzzle, but the Switch is on a wall. You need to take the box out of the switch room, take it to the MC Escher room and leave it there, then backtrack and enter the MC Escher room by a different side - where the box's gravity points in a different direction to the players'.
Then the players drag the Box-that-falls-into-the-wall to the switch puzzle and open the door.

The next room they're in, they see cube with windows (maybe it's a cage?) rotating on its own, made out of parts with different gravity to give it torque out of nowhere.
When your players point out that even wacky gravity won't give perpetual motion (there's a finite kinetic energy in each part), tell them the cube spins anyway.

>>17077219
>I fully agree that there is NO objectively "correct" math.
Dammit, missing critical negations is a bitch.

>>17077258

If you want a puzzle, do this. If you want horror, for fuck's sake don't do this.

A predictable system where players figure out the rules and the solution is the complete opposite of horror. Once it becomes a gadget, once the players know how to work the system, there's nothing to be afraid of.

You know why the puzzle box from Hellraiser is so freaky? Because they don't explain what it does, or why it exists, or what you're supposed to do with it. All the viewer knows is that someone picks it up, and if they fuck with it the wrong way, bad things from Hell come to ruin their life. If it became functional and understandable--if it became the TARDIS--it's not horrible any more. It's just a gadget.

Make moebius strips. Tape them together. Draw or glue rooms on the surfaces.

op here

I remember some old old book I had to read in highschool where a lady was locked in a room with some ugly yellow wallpaper with a weird pattern and she started seeing things moving "behind" the pattern. It was mostly her going insane but I figured something like that might fit here. Your thoughts?

Also, not just non-euclidean, but very alien stuff in general (the mansion for example will be bigger on the inside, though I suppose that would be non-euclidean as well)

This seems as good a thread as any to post this. It's an idea for a small adventure I've had kicking around for a while.

The PCs enter an old mansion. Now, all seems normal at first.
Then, they start hearing spooky noises. Sounds of footsteps behind them. A glimpse out of the corner of their eye of some shadowy figure.
Then they enter the basement.
They find a torture room; some instruments even have gore still on them. Screams come from behind a door.
Behind that door is a body, recently dead. There is a lever on the wall. Pulling it reveals yet another passage down.
When the players get down there, they find an old study, covered in books with demonic names and skulls with melted candles on them, the whole bit. There is a note on the desk that reads:
"Congratulations! You have braved my best! Come back upstairs and we'll celebrate over a drink!
Signed- (Name of person here)
Now, at this point, everyone will relax and go "oh, it was just a prank, how nice."
When they re-enter the room with the body, it is gone. A bloody trail leads into the torture room, where several zombie/ghoul/other creatures are eating a man. The man appears to have been well-dressed, and there is a broken bottle of wine on the ground.
For CoC, I'd alter it so it's just him, dead on the floor, and his hair and eyes are blank white.
Proceed with scary/undead adventure from here.
Thoughts?

>>17077328
You have a really important point. Fear requires lack of control.

However, they DO need the chance to accomplish SOMETHING, even if it's followed by "let's the the fuck out before something else happens and Cthulhu eats us".

Or even better, "OHSHITOHSHITOHSHITRUNRUNRUNRUN"

>>17077346
The best kind of mindfucks are the ones that you can describe clearly and simply, but will make your mind explode and/or shit itself if you try to understand it.

http://marathon.bungie.org/spoiler/m2/41.shtml

HOPE
THIS
HELPS

(In case you don't GET IT, the Marathon games had a very exploitable bit in the engine where you could nest rooms inside eachother, and they wouldn't interact. Most of the time, this was just used to make buildings that had multiple floors, or secret passages under or over maps, or even things like skybridges. However, some quirky mappers did things like create "4+ dimensional" space where rooms are nested inside eachother at the same heights, creating environments where you could step outside a room, go down a short twisty hallway, go back into the same room, but it'll be different and populated with different things. It's a perfect example of utterly breaking elucidian geometry to make environments that are maddening to look at, let alone navigate and fight in)

>>17077454
Basically, the tl;dr is

>multiple rooms occupying the same space, but not interacting with eachother
and
>the art of orbital bombardment

Dick with the game system itself. 1s are high and 20s are low, for example. DCs for skill checks are off from what they should be. Modifiers get swapped around between stats. One room has you break out a deck of cards and use poker hands to gauge success or failure, Deadlands-style. Another room has you take your players' charsheets, shuffle them, and then randomly deal them back out.

>>17077454
Ooh! You can use this to really unnerve them. They revisit what they think is a room they already visited, but it unexpectedly contains a mind-shattering horror. They get unsure about what is "foward" and "back", and whether any part of the dungeon is cleared at all.

>>17077360

It's true, they need to accomplish stuff. I just think that if you come up with an elaborate logic puzzle like that, it will pull the players out of the scene. They'll be players trying to figure out a puzzle, rather than characters in a situation.

Making them figure out to use a device or something is a decent idea; just make the solution more arbitrary, and mix new danger in with the success. "Oh, we need to spill blood on the key before putting it into the altar. OH SHIT WHAT'S COMING OUT OF THE FLOOR." Make it a situation where the players are monkeying with something they don't actually understand, rather than figuring out a device that works predictably.

And if they're dealing with something truly otherworldly or Lovecraftian, they shouldn't be able to figure out how things work they way they do. Any devices or puzzles really should be beyond their understanding.

>>17077510
Not even. More like they explore normally, but as you fill in whatever paper/board you're using to draw the map, the dimensions of rooms make it such that they start overlapping and shit. That's how it went down in Marathon. If you didn't look at your AutoMap thing, you'd never notice that something is amiss. And then you go and look and GAH ALL THE ROOMS ARE INSIDE EACHOTHER WHERE THE HELL AM I GOING ;~;

And then I guess that's where the puzzles can come in, like you need to place the two Identical Key Item Objects in the same space, so you do it over the two rooms resident evil style etc etc etc I dunno

combined with things like having rooms loop, or space bending in weird ways such that doors open into upside-down rooms but the floors of each are continuous (yeah try to visualize that shit I bet you cant nigga THATS THE POINT BLAOH SANITY -15 FOR TRYING) , etc etc it could make for a pretty bizarre bunch of setpieces

just keep lots of different colored markers on hand for each room so that things don't get confused ooc

>>17077346
The Yellow Wall-paper
[http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html]

Even scarier when you consider that the author wrote it after having a not-quite-siilar experience with the mental health treatments of her age.


Another good way to mindfuck your players is to have them enter a room and then hve you describe it in grammatically correct but nonsensical ways.

"Gelid mushrooms blither idly in the furiously static wall-space of your inner ear. Turid dumplings of long-dead-dust coagulate into rivers of unseemly grease long best left untouched. She is green. What is your action?"

A recent 'recurring NPCs' thread on suptg (i.e. in the past 2 months) had a guy constantly introduced a non-malicious but fucking strange Yog-Sothoth creature to his group this way whenever they entered a room with it. Delightfully fucked up, IIRC

>>17077739
Word salads are good, but unless you've got a lot of practice they're surprisingly hard to come up with on the fly.

Horrifying details slipped into lists of otherwise innocuous things is always a good one.

>>17077941
Watch the dub of Satoshi Kon's paprika. There's a scene where a en enthusiastic guy infected with a delusional dream shows up for a work meeting, and starts talking business, before his stuff becomes more and more bizarre. The scene ends with leaping from a window joyously cackling. The voice actor does a real good job showing how a subtle thing like a though-virus would take hold, and how frightening it would be to see someone stop making sense but act like it was wholly natural.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnmmykiJSME&feature=related

>>17079303
The best part is that it wasn't just random words. A very specific dream was taking over his mind.

If you don't have a map in front of you, try some impossible layouts, like in The Shining, if somebody notices, it'll freak them out

>>17079467

I wonder if you could do this in a more subtle way, by splicing words into your normal narration.

"So you open the door, and you look into a plush hotel room, with rich carpets and a large, comfortable murder looking bed occupying the middle of the room. The lights are off, but you stab light from the open bathroom door dimly illuminating the room."

You'd have to practice this a bit ahead of time, I think.

I got the way for you, OP.
Do what the old Build Engine of Doom and Quake fame did.
It created non-euclidean geometry by having all the levels already as one level map, but you went from one 'area' to another by passing through a certain key point.
It was able to work because, effectively, the whole thing was several 2D maps overlayed on each other, and the levels were rendered vertically from the lines of the map, so you could have a huge world take place in an area a hundred times smaller.

This is really less actual non-euclidean geometries, more FUCK YOU PHYSICS geometry.

>>17081051
That's not even mindfuckery. It's just... Keeping maps of the area on multiple sheets of paper.

IIRC the levels were even constructed so they wouldn't double back on eachother like that. And a lot of modern vidya do that too, to save memory. They'll only load in one room at a time, maybe the adjacent ones too. But for the most part, the only part of the world that truly exists in the engine is what the player can feasibly look at.

Which presents its own philosophical implications, but still. It's a whole different thing

>>17081635
>Which presents its own philosophical implications, but still. It's a whole different thing
No, we can work with this.

For example: what happens if the PC's attempt to or even manage to 'get out'?

>>17081051
>Build engine
>Doom and Quake
>Quake's fame is partly derived from its full 3D environments.

e/x/ile bumping for awesome reality warping!

Another thing you could add would be 4th dimensional doors.

Though to the outside observer they would just be teleporters.

A person walks to a particular point in the room and simply vanishes.

It would link well into the "over lapping rooms" stuff.

Messing with time could be good as well, though would need a bit of book keeping.

Having windows or even doors leading to rooms at different points in time, making it possible for the party, or members of it, to end up seeing each other but doing things they've not already done, or have already done.

If the group split up then it would be possible to have them meet future versions of the other members of the group.

There's "And He Built a Crooked House", a short story by Robert Heinlein. Basically this guy builds a house shaped like a shadow of a tesseract, but it ends up collapsing along the 4th dimension during an earthquake, making its shadow in our 3D space very strange indeed.

Not the best formatting, but you can read it here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080115153446/http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/
heinlein/heinlein1.html

>>17084568

http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/courses/2010-11/MTH053-FA10/assignments/crooked-house.pdf

Found it in nice easy pdf form.

Hopefully I'll remember to give it a read sometime, or print it off.

our previous DM was a math major and pretty good at describing environments


he put us in a 4 dimensional maze, was pretty darn fun

>>17079303
>that voice acting in general
A GOOD ENGLISH DUB?

>>17085168
Oh shit, it sounds like an excellent dub.