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.
Haha, I thought you were going to take town bells in more of the direction of massive, stationary defense systems deterring supernatural influences - the "ballistae" compared to the "crossbows" of handbells!
ReplyDeleteYou know, that makes complete sense from how I wrote this post. Huh. And I like the arbalestic metaphor!
ReplyDeleteFundamentally, I think trying to scale up the handbell idea is tricky - it makes some communities totally impervious to the Sidh/Yokai threat, which gives me fewer options to work with. On the other hand, think about a city ringed by silver windchimes or with a dedicated bell core, a subset of the city watch who's job it is to stand in a ring around the city ringing handbells. Now, finding cities is not a matter of looking for them as much as it is a matter of listening for them - chains of bellringers along well-traveled pathways, and so on.