Continuing this month’s Land of the Lost theme, I want to discuss another iconic element of the series: weird technology. Examples in The Land include the pylons, skylons, and light crystals, which combine to provide a strange, yet defining, measure of internal consistency. What gives these elements good campaign cred is that they’re integral to the setting, understanding their origin and operation is a good background goal for characters, and their use (or misuse) has an impact on plot.
Strange Tech
In the greater campaign context, I call these things Strange Tech™—basically any technology completely alien to the characters’ native environment. A hallmark of Strange Tech is that it produces unpredictable (terrible) results when used by the uninitiated (tampered with by characters). That said, characters may eventually understand and master Strange Tech, but it’ll take some expert instruction or, in the case of the Marshall family, a lot of trial and error.
Even though we’re talking about LotL, Strange Tech can play a role in any campaign. When it exists in a setting, it comes in one of three basic flavours:
- Ancient: Its secrets are now lost, which means no one around today really knows how to use it properly
- Advanced: It’s understood by a select few (nerds, wizards, Marilyn vos Savant), which means it’s easy to screw up when used by anyone else
- Broken: It used to work, but missing parts, lack of fuel, or mechanical failure means that it no longer works as expected
Regardless of origin or current state, Strange Tech is capable of great things, wonderful to tell, if only someone understood how to fix it or make it work. That’s what makes it fun—characters naturally reach for the carrot, while the evil GM in you grips the stick.
This Fits In How?
Given typical “Lost World” trappings—dinosaurs, primitive jungles, scantily clad hominids—technology may seem out of place. But technology (or, more accurately, Strange Tech) always plays a part in “Lost World” stories, typically in one of three ways:
- It’s how the characters get there (i.e., some piece of their native technology malfunctions, sending them to the lost world)
- It’s why the characters stay there (i.e., some piece of the setting’s technology is broken or unfathomable, preventing them from leaving)
- It’s the world’s foundation (i.e., the lost world itself was created to serve a technical role)
According to Enik the Altrusian (ancestor to the present-day sleestacks), The Land is itself an artificial construct that serves as a waystation for dimensional travellers. The Marshalls are unwitting travellers, but if they could figure out how to work the light crystals in one of the pylon’s matrix tables, they could open a portal that leads to their home. Simple, right? Well, that’s the carrot. The stick, as it turns out, is all the mess and bother of trying to figure out how to work the damn things, while managing to survive the effects of mistakes made along the learning curve.
“Lost World” settings can exist in any genre—fantasy, sci-fi, or modern, as Land of the Lost aptly demonstrates—either as part of the physical world (e.g., a “Lost Continent” or Valley of the Dinosaurs) or as an extra-dimensional space accessible only via some natural warp in space-time or, as suggested above, a by-product of Strange Tech gone awry. I prefer the latter, as it implies that there’s a malfunction that can be fixed, instead of some natural phenomenon outside the characters’ control.
That said, the Marshalls end up in the Land of the Lost for purely different reasons—as they’re plummeting down a waterfall in a tiny raft, they intersect a dimensional portal that leads to The Land. No malfunction, since the portal is an expected outcome of normal pylon operation. No natural phenomenon, either, since The Land is a manufactured pocket dimension. Just a bad accident, but the good news for the characters is that understanding The Land’s Strange Tech is a logical path toward getting home.
Strange Tech in The Land
You can use The Land’s Strange Tech as an example for your own “Lost World” setting. First, consider The Land’s physical laws. As a pocket universe, it doesn’t have to obey the natural rules. The Land has a looped nature: there’s a circular river (i.e., travelling downstream eventually brings you upstream from where you started), and in one episode where the characters stand on a mountain peak and look through binoculars, they see themselves from behind. Turns out that The Land also adheres to a loose law of matter conservation: when something arrives, something else is expelled (though not necessarily at the same time, and the objects need not be identical in size, shape, weight, or identity). Finally, The Land is self-powered—apparently, there’s an internal generator that lies underground in some floating stasis internal-sun sort of way. This last bit reinforces Enik’s revelation that The Land was manufactured.
These are basic tenants of The Land’s Strange Tech. What follows are the mechanisms that support it.
Pylons
These are smooth, metallic, truncated pyramids, cold to the touch and magnetic, with a single iris-valve-type opening accessed by a key. Pylons are evenly spaced—about a quarter-mile apart—across The Land. When struck, or when an attempt to enter without the key is made, a pylon can emit an electric shock, so it’s immediately obvious that whatever’s inside is important and not a toy.
This turns out to be true: Inside each pylon is a matrix table, basically a horizontal Lite-Bright with 81 squares (9×9). The squares hold light crystals (see below) of different quantities and colours. The configuration of these crystals regulate environmental aspects of The Land: the flow of time and procession of its three moons, the length of day and night, the weather and climate, and the manipulation of dimensional portals. In the control of an expert, altering the crystal’s configuration may open a portal leading home. It’s more likely, however, that goofing around with the crystals will stop time or cause a hurricane.
Skylons
These are airborne pylons that sly about in groups of three. They only show up when a problem occurs as a result of messing about with the crystals on the matrix tables. In one episode, Holly plays with the crystals and screws up the local weather. The skylons appear and start flashing colour sequences. Turns out that arranging the crystals to match the colour sequence calms the weather and gets things back to normal.
The skylons appear to be a self-repair mechanism for The Land, which makes sense—a machine as complex as The Land should have some internal watchdog to assist operators when things have gone wrong. From a campaign standpoint, the skylons are a good tool for nudging the characters in the right direction after they’ve created serious havoc.
Light Crystals
These are natural crystals growing in the ground. They come in red, yellow, blue, and green; all seem to store energy and their arrangement on the 9×9 matrix tables within each pylon keeps The Land running. I think of them as punch cards for a computer program (no, I’m not that old): cards with the right punches, placed in the right order, will produce the desired results. But if you start changing the punches or shuffle the cards, who knows what you’ll get?
The crystals also produce different effects when combined (i.e., held together) in different combinations. For example, combining a red and a yellow crystal creates a small explosion; pairing red and green crystals emit a flash of bright light (enough to drive off a sleestack or two). Blue crystals seem to enhance mental abilities. So not only do crystals have an effect on The Land’s environment when arranged on the matrix table, but combining them in certain ways also produces immediate effects. More Strange Tech for the characters to experiment with…
Final Words
The lesson here is that if you include a “Lost World” setting in your campaign, have a think about how it’s accessed by outsiders, and what keeps the natives inside. I guarantee your thoughts will eventually cross paths with Strange Tech. They have to—otherwise your “Lost World” wouldn’t be lost (or, at least, wouldn’t stay lost for very long).