[Note: This is an entry in the Vornheim: Hack This Book contest, run by Zak Smith. Vornheim is a fantastic RPG setting/supplement, and it seems unlikely I can improve upon it. All the same, it is fun to try and scribble in its margins. -Steve Lawson]
Update: I won! Well, I am in a five-way tie for third place, which is winning in my book.
Vornheim Communication Networks
Information moves quickly in the city, but it also moves differently depending on the social strata. Below are sketches of a few of the many ways that information moves throughout Vornheim.
State information-gathering
The “Wolfkasten” are found in virtually all Vornheim neighborhoods. They are hollow, open-mouthed statues of large wolves, designed so that citizens of Vornheim can denounce one another to the authorities by dropping a written message through the wolf’s mouth. No one ever sees the statues emptied, but enough people have been questioned or simply disappeared after being denounced in this way that citizens fear being cast to the wolves.
People believe that if anyone dares to submit a false accusation, the Wolfkasten will bite off the hand of the offender. If anyone is foolish enough to try to retrieve a letter from inside the Wolfkasten or destroy or tamper with the statue in any way, Vornheimers believe that the entire statue will animate (as a stone wolf golem) and attack and pursue any vandals unto the death.
Aristocratic communication
Just as the Vornheim aristocracy has cultivated slow pets (see “Oddities of Vornheim,” p. 7), they also employ elaborate slow-moving processionals for the delivery of official messages. The slower and less timely the message, the greater the respect shown to the recipient. When sending invitations to a party, the ideal is for the messenger to deliver the invitation just as the recipient is leaving his home in order to attend the event in question.
To avoid a state of constant surprise from these late-arriving messages, aristocratic houses maintain a complex network of servant informants. Wealthy houses have informants in all the best families’ kitchens, stables, boudoirs, and drawing rooms, and likewise employ many servants that they know or suspect to be informants for other houses. These informants are commonly called “ears,” as in “let it be known to the ears that we shall be hunting bats by the full moon” or “find out from the ears what Lady Frost will be wearing to the tournament.”
Those employed as ears by the most powerful families wield an enormous amount of power and influence. By controlling the flow of information to and from both the aristocrats they spy for and the aristocrats they spy upon, they can affect the rise and fall of houses. When an ear can carry on such a performance with discretion, taste, and cunning, he often becomes a trusted advisor to both houses. When an ear in such a position makes a misstep, however, the two houses will fight over who gets to draw and quarter him in front of Palace Massive.
Ears for less-wealthy houses have a job that is difficult in another way. Greater houses are unlikely to accept them as servants as little benefit and less prestige comes from sharing information with lesser houses. Nor will those higher-class houses be particularly eager to spy on less-powerful or wealthy aristocrats, simply because they don’t care what these minor houses are up to. Ears for these lesser houses will be forced to spend much of their time in taverns that cater to the servant class, desperately seeking information that others do not want to share, and likewise seeking to pass on information that few are interested in.
The wall
Many of Vornheim’s poorest residents live along the city’s inner and outer walls in shacks or lean-tos. Even in those neighborhoods that aren’t slums, the wall seems to attract the shifty, the dangerous, and the desperate.
While the culture of the wall is mostly an oral culture, all along the wall one will find graffiti written by literate wall rats (as these men and women are called). But the writing is very seldom straightforward and easy for outsiders to read. Writers use slang or simple codes, or often just distort the letterforms so far beyond the norm as to make the writing indecipherable to those not in the know.
Much of the content of this graffiti is simple and simple-minded, but when major news is in the air–news that affects the wall rats and their neighborhoods–PCs will see variations on the same message over and over again. If they have a local informant (and in this case it must be a very local informant as styles and forms of graffiti seem to change radically with every block), they can easily learn what these messages say. Without a guide, they may wish to try and decipher the messages themselves.
When players declare that they want to try and read the graffiti, use one of the messages below (or devise your own similar method) to show them an English message that is difficult to read at first glance. Players whose characters are not literate should not be allowed to try to decode the message. PCs who don’t have access to writing implements should not be allowed to keep the written message itself, but should only be allowed to look at it while they are standing in front of the wall.
- Fold a piece of paper, unfold it, and write the message along the crease. Tear or cut the paper, and give either just the top halves of the letters or just the bottom halves of the letters to the players.
- Write the message without vowels or omitting letters from the first or second half of the alphabet.
- Omit all vertical strokes (or horizontal strokes or curved strokes) from all letters.
- Write multiple letters over top of one another.
- Write normally, then inscribe dark “O”s over parts of each word.
- Use crude drawings as pictographs, or even as a rebus.
[Note, the idea is not to reproduce exactly what the characters are viewing as written on the wall, but to present an appropriate reading and reasoning challenge to the players.]
