U is for Unkin

[This is the 21st of my April A-Z Challenge series of posts on Symbols, Glyphs, and Sigils. Each day I'll try to include some material that old-school role-playing gamers will find useful, but I can't guarantee that there won't also just be a few posts filled with weirdness for the sake of weirdness....]

Readers who play(ed) classic Dungeons & Dragons may remember that there were several magic spells that required chalking out mystic runes on some surface to get the effect to work.  There were Explosive Runes (3rd level M-U), Aerial Servants that came only in response to a magic circle (6th level cleric), and all-purpose Symbols that could enslave or kill (8th level M-U).  But maybe most famous was the Glyph of Warding (3rd level cleric), which could be tweaked and adapted like a piece of devious technology.  Is it a booby trap?  An unbreakable lock?  It allowed sneaky players to devise all kinds of interesting delayed reactions.

The original D&D books only gave a small number of examples, but fans ran with that ball.  Most memorable to me was an article by Larry DiTillio, in The Dragon #50, which gave dozens of them.  I was a bit freaked out by the one shown here, titled "Unkin," which was described thusly:

The bleeder. This Glyph causes any wounds on the toucher or passer to open and begin bleeding even if the wounds are bound. Wounds will continue bleeding for 2 rounds per level of caster, such bleeding draining an additional 2 pts. every round.

Not fun for the person who happens across this one!  More recently, I encountered the word "unkin" in the novels of Hal Duncan (who is awesome because he's a Blogger blogger, and because of this).  His version of this word refers to mortals who are touched by angels/demons and thus become "...transformed by the ancient machine-code language of reality itself."

But whenever I think about chalking weird geometric symbols on a wall for mystic effect, my mind goes first and foremost to the Twilight Zone -- the "Little Girl Lost" episode to be specific.  In that story, a kid fell through the wall into a fourth dimensional portal and was rescued by a quick-thinking physicist with a piece of chalk...
 

It's been famously parodied by the Simpsons, and it may have been inspired by an earlier, weirdly abstract Jack Kirby comic.  I always loved the idea that simple geometry could be the key to such "magical" outcomes.

And yes, I was probably the only kid in the class who looked forward to this on the ol' 16mm film projector.  :-)