Smells! They play a distinctly tertiary role compared to sight and sound, so central to the mechanically reproducible media of our age. When you bring smell into your description at the table, you really bring an oomph that stirs players out of their cinematic slumber. But precisely because it's less available, it's also harder to get the tools to describe it. Even if I've never seen a dragon, I've seen a million videos of tigers and falcons, but I have a terrible sense of smell and it's been years since I owned a reptile, so that aspect might be a bit harder to do off the cuff.
What I really want is a, like, smell encyclopedia - a big scratch n sniff book where if you want to know what, say, camphor or dillweed smell like, you can just look it up and inhale. I can't find such a thing (if anyone knows, you have my eternal thanks.) But the closest I can find is the Odeuropa smell explorer.
It's just on the edge of useability - you'll find stuff that should be gameable, like an alchemist's lab, and there will be firsthand accounts - but it's hard to navigate and the accounts are often not as useful as they could be - describing things simply as good, bad, suprising, or the like isn't uncommon, or everything will be in Italian, or whatever, and yeah automatic translation is a thing but that's another set of clicks... why am I sharing this bad resource with you? Because it's so close to being so good; my way of interfacing with it must just be off a bit. One of you, I am sure, it will click just right for.
This article claims to have found ten basic smells (analogous to the sweet-savory-salty-sour-bitter division), I don't know the math to critique their math and I'm guessing their report data is biased towards a WEIRD sample that is used to e.g. lemony scents being used in cleaning products. But it's the same biased sample that I and the people I'm likely to game with are drawn from, so it's potentially useful for gameable description - this list will probably end up on my GM's screen at some point:
- floral, perfumey
- woody, musty
- fruity (but not in a citrusy way)
- rotten
- chemical, alcoholic
- minty
- sweet
- nutty, smoky, popcorn
- chemical, onion, gas, decay
- citrusy
I'm never going to remember a list of ten things, so here's them in even more arbitrary categories:
- fragrant
- floral, perfumey (factor I)
- fruity (factor III)
- minty (factor VI)
- citrusy (factor X)
- tasty
- woody, musty (factor II)
- sweet (factor VII)
- fireplace (factor VIII)
- gross
- rotten (factor IV)
- ethery (factor V)
- gas leak (factor IX)
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| Magritte, self-portrait |
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