Mining Tropes for RPG nuggets: Glowing Fluff Elemental

Image Source: RPGnet’s Forums.

This is part of a series of articles that tackles the concepts of tropes and how they can be applied by a DM/GM to improve their favorite Role-Playing game adventures. It is heavily inspired by the sheer goodness of the TV Tropes Wiki.

Quite a number of tropes exist solely because of the Rule of Cool. I’ve already covered the Blade Run in a very Crunchy way. Today’ as a writing challenge, I’ll try to tackle another related trope from a fluff perspective. (See here for my 1st discussion on Crunch vs Fluff).

This week, it’s all about Power!

Power glows. The more power, the more glow. So, anything that glows is automatically presumed to be superior to otherwise identical things that don’t glow, and more glow is better. This is closely related to the Rule Of Cool because glowing is cool, so things that glow automatically get more Willing Suspension Of Disbelief, allowing them to be more unrealistically powerful. They’re often Colour Coded For Your Convenience, too. For example, evil glows bright red, good glows blue or gold, and radioactive materials glow green.

A DM’s visual descriptions will never match a movie or a TV show. But it can fire the imagination if enough flavor can be packed in a short description. Mentionning some glowing in a description can go a long way:

• Describing a desecrated altar as pulsing with a strange violet and sickly green lights will evoke images of things Adventurers were not meant to know (Black Tentacles anyone?).
• Dark Tomes of Eldritch Power, chained to lecterns with magic-damping links and clamped in bands of Cold Iron emit rays of piercing red light from it’s pages whenever the tome shifts under it’s own unholy powers.
• An innocent child, chosen by the Prophecy to succeed to the tyrannical Baron Von Schlep, has crystal-blue eyes that are known to light up like the rays of the 5 suns whenever he witnesses an hidden agent of evil.
• The Potion of Eternity glows so strongly that it threatens to blind all that look directly upon it.
• The Pits of Insanity underneath Ptolus are filled with Liquid Chaos that shimmer with all the colors of the rainbow at the same time (and no, this does not give a greyish-brown glow, logic and proper color mixing are not cool)

Glowing Eyes Of Doom? Inherently superior to ordinary, everyday, garden-variety eyes. Glowing Battle Aura? Opponents who don’t glow won’t stand a chance! Any physical object that glows will also be powerful somehow. Glowing sword vs. boring sword? Glowing sword wins, every time. Explody things that emit a glow first are bigger, louder and/or do more damage. The most powerful magical potions will also glow to signify their superiority over ordinary, non-glowing magical potions. And don’t forget the inherent awesomeness of the Pillar Of Light, which is Glow going to Heaven just to show how overwhelming it is.

Fiends and Celestial can have auras of pure Good or Evil that are so strong that they become visible to the naked eye of even the most mana-dense Barbarian.

Also, you can put glowing in the player’s bling. The first glowing sword a low-level fantasy RPG party will meet will always bring some sort of interest in the players. Heck, in a Sci-Fi setting, a charged Plasma cannon is always comforting when it lights up the dead-dark corridors of a derelict space Hulk.

You can even go totally overboard with this and blow your player’s virtual senses:

• A Chest made out of solid light, bound by chains of Fire, sitting on a Platform of white-hot Iron and bathed in a pillar of ‘Shadowy light’*

I’d bet my next round of XPs that no one will want to touch it before at least some honest research is done. Anyway, if you don’t subvert this trope, the players will expect it to contain a Hole of Absolute Nothingness or a Sphere of Annihilation in it.

Speaking of subverting the trope, this can become interesting also. Light-absorbing, magic-draning swords have cropped up here and there in fantasy literature and campaign settings. A low-power antagonist might blow his whole ‘level-equivalent’ ressources on illusions and light-bending magic to make him look stronger than he is

Aside: Who hasn’t cast continual light on his cleric PC at least once? Huh? Huh? Anyone?…..(Crickets) ooookay, moving on .

Or maybe the more powerful an item, the more darkness it ‘radiates’ as it feeds from ambient energies.

The Cloak of the Night, The Staff of Shadows, The Hammer of the Depths… Possibilities endless.

Have you used or seen this trope in your games?

*Mini crunchy rant: That nerfing of D&D 3.0 darkness is sooooo stupid. Yes pure darkness kills a low level game dead, but Shadowy light???? Come on!!