Wizards Playing Telephone
My attraction to skeletal, unfleshed out fiction, as opposed to the flabbier affair filling the fantasy shelves, is that they force me to extrapolate. It’s not that my extrapolations are unceasingly more interesting than what can be conjured by the supreme scribes of speculation, but it is always the most expertly tailored to what most tickles my fleeting fancy. Although I must confess to a thrill of extrapolation and improvisation at the table that threatens to shock and scandalize the most groggy of nards. But I at least limit my wild flights of fancy with some grounding, be it a random table or a half-sketched paragraph in my notes or a dusty D&D tome.
One of my favorite exercises in this vein is to take some offhand Gygaxism, particularly an early one when the world(s) of D&D were still primordial ooze imaginatively speaking, treating that as capital T Truth and seeing how far I can run with that approach. I think of this as the “D&D is always right” hypothesis, which I attribute to my colleague Ram of the Save Vs Total Party Kill blog, but which he attributes to our mutual colleague James of the Grognardia blog (you don’t know it yet, but with this odd way citation method I’m cleverly setting up my conceit for later in this post. Oh ho ho, what a clever boy I am!)
The original Contact Higher Plane spell is an excellent candidate for this type of extrapolation of Lore from skeletal rules text. This is not untrod ground, rather I stand on the shoulders of Archbrick who extrapolated their own chain of planes from Gygax’s rules text, which is reproduced below. It is so richly inexplicable that the aforementioned Grognardia and the unaforementioned Delta’s D&D Hotspot have also taken a stab at figuring out just what is going on which this spell.
“Contact Higher Plane: This spell allows the magical-type to seek advice and gain knowledge from creatures inhabiting higher planes of existence (the referee). Of course, the higher the plane contacted, the greater the number of questions that can be asked, the greater the chance that the information will be known, and the higher the probability that the question will be answered truthfully. Use the table below to determine these factors, as well as the probability of the Magic-User going insane. Only questions which can be answered "yes" or "no" are permitted.
| Plane | # of Questions | Chance of Knowing | Veracity | Insanity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3rd | 3 | 25% | 30% | nil |
| 4th | 4 | 30% | 40% | 10% |
| 5th | 5 | 35% | 50% | 20% |
| 6th | 6 | 40% | 60% | 30% |
| 7th | 7 | 50% | 70% | 40% |
| 8th | 8 | 60% | 75% | 50% |
| 9th | 9 | 70% | 80% | 60% |
| 10th | 10 | 80% | 85% | 70% |
| 11th | 11 | 90% | 90% | 80% |
| 12th | 12 | 95% | 100% | 90% |
If a Magic-User goes insane, he will remain so for a number of weeks equal to the number of the plane he was attempting to contact, the strain making him totally incapacitated until the time has elapsed. For each level above the 11th, Magic-Users should have a 5% better chance of retaining their sanity. The spell is usable only once every game week (referee's option).” - E. Gary Gygax
I quite agree with Archbrick that the 2nd plane must be where the spellcaster is from. However, Archbrick errs gravely by continuing to be correct, listing increasingly higher beings as they ascend the planar ladder. This is very likely what Gygax was hinting at. But fuck Gygax and his coy charts. I’m steering this ship!
Instead of starting from the spellcaster and working our way up, I’m going straight to the top and then it’ll be all downhill from there. The 12th plane is nearly all-knowing, never inaccurate, and communing directing with them will almost certainly drive the wizard mad. Knowing as we do the ordinary structure of a semi-Blorby tabletop game, of whom would this be true? Perhaps a deity, of course, but almost certainly another being, more capricious than any god: the game master.
If a wizard could contact the game master directly (no small feat of magic, surely), and could question them, no doubt it would turn up valuable information. The game master has approximate knowledge of many things! However, as useful as this would be, the 90% insanity odds seem reasonable. Learning you are a fictional character being controlled by some dude named Josh in Virginia is an even harder pill to swallow than realizing your whole life was fiction a lá The Truman Show. At least in that instance, your life itself isn’t fictional. Not so for the wizard who is just a puppet for Josh.
But where do we go from there? Don’t forget the D&D is Always Right Doctrine, as dubbed by W.F. Smith, as ratified by Ram, as named by James. My first option for reflecting the refracting references from the referee is to use a game of telephone. For each plane below the 12th, the referee will draw their answer and give it to another player to interpret, which they will interpret by whispering in another player’s ear, which that player will draw, and the next player will whisper, et cetera. This has two obvious drawbacks. One is that players tend to share information, so even though the caster may only get the information through an attenuated game of telephone, other players will be nearer to having received the answer. The other problem is just that this whole charade will eat up time. What does this represent in the fiction? It represents the fact that the answer is literally getting passed along the planes of existence before reaching the player. The referee tells someone on plane 11 the answer, who tells someone on plane 10, etc., etc.
If you don’t have the instinct or the willpower to incorporate an elaborate game of telephone into your game, an alternative is, and please hear me out before drawing your daggers, a large language model. This is probably the fastest way to represent the muddling of truth as it makes good use of AI’s pre-existing issue of hallucinating mistruth wholecloth. I would just type your answer into the chat bot and say “repeat this back but hallucinate X% of the text” with X equaling the 100% minus the “Veracity”. Let’s test out this method. I am not sure Gygax’s famous advice about time records would be quite as iconic, or even grokkable, if AI wrote it instead.
However, this all is getting a bit too “meta” and ignores the whole “planes of existence” concept. I’ve lost the track! So instead, let’s come up with a fictional grounding for what exists in planes 4 through 11 if plane 12 is occupied by our real-life reality where the referee presumably resides most of the time. For each plane below the 12th, think of one fact of the game setting that isn’t true in the real world and imagine a world exactly as our own, but where that fact IS true. So for instance, dragons exist in the game, but not in the real world, so maybe the 11th plane is just our world but dragons are real. Everything else is the same: Lance Armstrong did land on the moon, Justice Anthony Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Dave Arneson did cut Gary Gygax out from royalties when he wrote “Avant-Garde D&D”, but at the same time, there are dragons. As you go down the chain of planes, you add one more major detail. This does, however, imply that there are 9 key facts about your fictional world and that the planes of existence depend on these facts. But perhaps that is a worldbuilding challenge in and of itself. When creating your fictional world, think of 9 interesting facts about the world that aren’t true of the real world, and the 2-dimension cosmos (which is what is implied by this spell) of your world is now sketched out by those facts).
