Magic Bells

Magical powers have been attributed to bells for much of human history, in both the West and Far East. The basic premise is that the chiming of the bell drives away evil spirits/lightning/thieves/bad luck/etc. They are essentially a tool that weaponizes sound, directing it at (often) incorporeal or abstract targets. In Garth Nix's Old Kingdom Chronicles, necromancers use a set of 7 bells, which tap into the powers of primordial beings, to unleash specific effects (sleeping, reanimating, forcing movement, speech, thought, binding, and death itself, respectively). This core concept, bell magic, lead me to write my first set of custom rules, an Old Kingdom Chronicles RPG built on a D&D 3.5 chassis (the only system I knew at the time), and gave me my start as a DM.

Based on the folklore, bellringing works kind of like turning undead - while sound emanates from the bell, a targeted type of thing is driven from the space. If we limit it to types of creatures, the bell may ring in the audible frequency range, but it has distinct overtones beyond it only perceptible by the targeted group (or it magically has a low fundamental that matches the targeted creatures' natural frequency and will, over time, vibrate them apart).

Handbells

Now for the implementation. Silver bells repel Sidh and Yokai, an extension of how silver dispels their magic and burns them.

Handbell players have a variety of options when it comes to playing a handbell - the first is a question of how many bells are played. Everyone can ring one bell per hand, but more skilled players can play with 2 or even 3 bells per hand, sounding either 1 at a time or all of them. Furthermore, while a single strike of the clapper is the norm, the bellringer can circle the bell, causing the clapper to slide around the inside of the bell and sustaining the pitch (like sliding your wet finger around the rim of a partially-filled wineglass).

The first ability is something to take note of for later, but not immediately necessary for these rules. However, the ability of a bellringer to arbitrarily sustain the pitch of the bell is a powerful one in this context.

This means that the most important feature of a bell is its loudness, most importantly, the range at which it is still audible (and thus effective). Finding hard numbers on this is somewhat tricky, so I'll cheat. By rearranging the equation I can find relating audibility distance and loudness, I get

r2=10^(L1-L2)/20

Where r2 is the distance at which the sound is L2 loud, if the sound is L1 loud at a distance of 1 yard from the instrument.

Looking at instrument loudness ratings, the upper limit on the sound of a handbell is 100dB (the approximate volume of a fortissimo piano). Now, a 100dB sound is audible for 56,000 yards (since the threshold for hearing is ~5dB for pitches written on the musical staff), which is a massive sphere of influence for a single bell, even at the extremes - that's about 32 miles (admittedly, 32 miles on what I presume is a flat, featureless plain with no sound competition, but still). Perhaps a better range is 55dB, the loudness of a casual conversation. This reduces our 100dB handbell's effective range to 178 yards, which is a far more reasonable range. However, 100dB is the upper limit on how loud a handbell might be - most are not nearly that loud. A 90dB bell is (roughly) half the volume, and travels only 56 yards before crossing beneath our effective threshold, but I want to use 85dB as the standard - it's the threshold for ear damage from prolonged exposure, which means that characters who ring bells for too long will suffer permanent damage, but they can easily ring the bell more quietly for a limited range indefinitely.

Being a fan of round numbers, we'll say that handbells can be played at 3 volumes: 90dB (loud), 85dB (normal), and 80dB (quiet), with effective ranges of 56, 32, and 18 yards. We'll play one last trick and redefine our distances from yards to feet (so that these loudness measures represent what the bellringer hears, not what someone standing in front of the bellringer hears), which lets us shrink these ranges down to 19, 11, and 6 yards of effective range, or 20/10/5 to keep things nice and round.

Returning to silver bells, Sidh and Yokai within the affected range must succeed an Ascetic test (or Magic saving throw) in to remain within that area and their magic becomes more difficult to manifest, requiring them to make casting checks.

Larger Bells

Of course, bells come in more shapes and sizes than just handbells. Churchbells are still a huge part of the soundscape of most European cities - even competing with modern urban noise, one can still hear the churchbells ring out the hour all across the city. The bell and belltower become the center of those communities lucky enough to have one. In most medieval-fantasy settings, the only "practical" reason for this might be the vantage the belltower provides and the ability of the bell to warn of danger. The bell's function in liturgical communities was obviously as a call to prayer (since they had 7-8 different services every day), but we can do better.

The obvious extension is to add bellmaking as a medium under sculpture for the artist/bard. I'd need a new entry in the table detailing different effects a mastercrafted bell (or set of bells) might cause in the countryside. However, I am intrigued by Alexis' discussion of happiness in bardic artwork. Frustratingly, the solution he proposes is impossible for my game - I don't have character levels, so a mechanic that allows them to be acquired faster is not particularly useful, and expediting other kinds of character growth (notch acquisition) is not a particularly elegant solution.

While Alexis was still musing about in what direction to take the bard, I proposed creating a scale of behaviors based upon happiness - an x-happiness settlement behaves in this way, whereas a y-happiness settlement behaves in this other way. It's a ridiculous amount of work, but I think the benefits extend beyond bardic artwork, especially when I return to talking about the settlement campaign at some point in the future.

We can interpret the list of effects bells were thought to abjure in two ways: the first is that bells essentially make the owner/user more lucky (in avoiding theft, lightning strikes, wildfire, evil spirits, whatever) - they are focused upon evading some potential harm, when the chances of that harm occurring are fairly low already. If I still ran my game from a random encounter table, this might be a sensible choice - if the probability of something bad happening is 1-in-6, a community with a bell has instead a 1-in-8 or 1-in-10 chance of suffering that same event. But I don't do that anymore; I want to approach the game as a narrative written by the players that observes cycles of tension and release, which makes that kind of approach less useful.

Instead, community bells increase the happiness of the population that lives near them. The word "happiness" is somewhat problematic. In modern psychology, "happiness" is a technical term that only tangentially relates to its vernacular meaning: "happiness" describes a state of general contentment and inner peace, which quickly links to Buddhist and other non-Western faith traditions. Within the Western psychological literature, "happiness" correlates with trust and risk-taking (which are somewhat linked already). The idea is that happier people are more willing to take chances on something that might make them unhappy because taking that risk allows them to expand, develop, and grow - it is an awareness that one's comfort zone can only expand by leaving it. It's still fairly abstract, but I think this path will give me a powerful tool in the end.