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Campaign Setting and Adventure discussion - Everybody hates Dragonlance
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Your ideas intrigue me and I am going to make an INT check to try and subscribe to your newsletter!
But in all seriousness, I've guess I've been lucky with my groups. Years ago with D&D nobody minded deviations from canon- if people had wanted to nitpick and refuse to play along, I'm sure there were a dozen things that went against the established continuity.
Using D&D? Or something else?
I've heard some have success with replacing magic with "technology". And 4e seems like it could cope with that trivially.
Using Gamma World and non-magical classes as an examples, I would agree.
PAX Prime 2011 DM Challenge Champion
The heroes are fighting cultists of Zehir in a shrine with several sacrificial altars. Zehir has decided that the cult has outlived its usefulness and doesn't care if the heroes wipe out his expendable underlings. The PCs receive a subconscious message should the cultists gain the upperhand: "If you want to survive, slay the sacrifices and receive my boon".
Do the PCs kill the sacrifices to save their own skins, or would they rather go down fighting without accepting such an immoral offer?
Martial classes work just fine. I don't need to use another system.
I'm wondering about hunting it down and seeing if I can jam it into Pathfinder.
I thought this thread had died, or else I would have responded to this.
Time in the campaign isn't divided into discrete slices, so separate systems wouldn't work out. Instead I have a timeline (gradually being filled in as I work on the campaign), and players can jump around it under their own initiative. From GM's perspective you could kind of say it's divided into slices, with each vaguely defined period or approximate century having its own flavour, and subdivided into “near the beginning”, “middlish” and “near the end”, but that's just a guideline to make things easier to keep track of. It's invisible to players. As far as they're concerned time is continuous and they can jump to any point (not necessarily very accurately).
If you're asking about the setting, here's a summary (spoilered for length):
The setting is dark in the sense that most of real history is dark, if you look at it with a pessimistic slant. No point in the history of the city could be considered a nice time to live, unless you happen to be rich. None of the NPCs are presented as unequivocally 'good'. Bad things happen. There's also a fair bit of inevitability in the flow of history, partly for practical reasons but also to enhance the atmosphere. Conceptually, every important occurrence has the weight of centuries of cause and effect behind it. If the conditions are right for a tyrant to arise, you'll get a tyrant, and if you assassinate him before he comes to power you'll get some other tyrant taking control in his stead, maybe worse, maybe better. That concept carries over into the in-game metaphysics, with a metaphorical river of time built up from the momentum of the accumulation of every past event and decision. So any attempts by the players to make the world less dreary aren't exactly doomed to failure, but will be minor successes at best, which also keeps the GM from having to rewrite the entirety of history.
The secret group the players belong to is a tiny, elite guild of wizards who have mastered the intricate magic of time, which outside of their society nobody even knows exists. Guild members are taken from promising candidates while still young, after which the guild changes history so that they were never born (to avoid loose ends). The guild headquarters exists in a temporal bubble with its own timeline, within which time travel is impossible, and which can be accessed from various specific locations and times in the main timestream. This prevents guild members from upsetting the guild's own history, and also lets the guild observe changes to history without being affected by them. The guild's existence is a stable time loop: their most talented member had a falling out with the other guild members, went back in time, and founded the guild, creating the temporal bubble to prevent the contemporary guild from interfering.
The guild makes subtle changes to history, attempts social engineering, and laboriously study everything. They're not benevolent in the sense that players would think it, although they want what they consider to be best for humanity. The players start out as agents of the guild, acting under orders from the guild elders.
Fifty thousand years ago there was an enormous cataclysm, the temporal shockwave of which makes time travel increasingly difficult approaching that point in time, and actually reaching the point impossible. The guild has deduced that prior to the cataclysm there existed some form of precursor civilisation, but almost every sign of their existence was erased by the disaster. A few artefacts remain and keep turning up at odd places in history: highly magical, solid-state technology well in advance of anything humanity has created since. (Only the guild has any clue of all of this.)
The guild searches out precursor artefacts when they turn up in history and snatches them for study. Some of them are inert, some of them hold mysterious power, often related to time-travel and similar magic. The magical technology (something normal humans don't even have, at any time period) can't be understood or replicated. The guild is able to harness some of the artefacts, but only as technological 'black boxes' – they don't really understand them or the full extent of what they can do.
At the end of history, at the climax of the great war, is an unknown period. Divinations can't see past this point in time, and guild members who have travelled forward beyond it haven't returned. The years beforehand don't give any obvious hint as to the reason for the blackout. Much of the guild's social engineering is aimed at preparing humanity for this unknown, or if possible preventing it.
That about sums up the setting, though there's more detail of course. The precursors, cataclysm, and unknown all have explanations, which will come up in the game itself. The players' adventures are more exciting than the social engineering and laborious study which is the guild's usual fare, but that comes up in play too.
The whole campaign was inspired by this image, which I think is unused concept art for some MMORPG, titled "chronomancer". (In the context of the campaign, it would br one of the guild volunteers who have “harnessed” precursor technology at the cost of humanity and autonomy.)
I have most of IKRPG books (Only missed getting the Libra Mechanika) and the PHB has all manner of different rules for things, just because everything works so different in the IK from traditional D&D. The method of weapon enchantment is a chapter alone.
If you're looking for those customer rules, track down the character guide as that's where that crunch is packed, I think the Mechanika has a lot of stuff as well, but I couldn't rightly say.
PAX Prime 2011 DM Challenge Champion
I've been shooting for a level of lunacy along the lines of the comics "Umbrella Academy" and "Chew". The former features a human/martian gorilla/cyborg astronaut superhero and Viet-Cong vampires, while the latter has a psychic cannibal FDA agent and alien plants that taste like chicken.
I ran a time travel one-shot, and as best I could tell the players really enjoyed themselves. But you definitely have to keep things light and "not think too hard about it" in general.
In my game, time was extremely malleable, but time paradoxes were essentially impossible (it was "theorized" that people couldn't meet themselves in the past, but they pulled that one off in the final battle where each player controlled both their Present and Future character). The universe would self-correct any sort of paradox, but it had a tendency to spawn bizarre stuff known as Temporal Resonance. It could be something as simple as a rock that didn't exist before or as complicated as portals to other dimensions.
Naturally, any sort of time travel created some paradox, because they were breathing air that hadn't been breathed and stuff like that, so the party had to contend with the fact that every time they jumped to somewhere they didn't belong, they'd have to contend with the Resonance that resulted.
Basically I used the whole thing as a means to try out some nifty mechanical additions, and to create some wacky Gamma World like monsters that I'd never be able to use in a real game (my favorite encounter involved a group of Sahuagin zombies and a half Female Eladrin Wizard/half Male Orc Berserker, and a side mechanic of single-use zones where time was traveling at the wrong pace and touching one could randomly give or take one of your actions).
S.E.T.I. or Submission to Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Starchildren)
Humanity destroyed the world during their few short millenia of civilization; in contrast, many alien species avoided the mistakes of humanity and gained the ability to travel the gulfs of space. If these extraterrestrial races were able to achieve such greatness when humans could not, then surely the people of Gamma Terra should submit to these inherently superior beings. Perhaps these benevolent aliens will show the races of Gamma Terra how to achieve greatness themselves?
Starchildren believe that alien beings are superior and worthy of dominating the species of Gamma Terra. If only the people of Gamma Terra would submit, the Starchildren profess, they could learn from the wisdom and intelligence of extraterrestrials. Most of the natives of Gamma Terra refuse to bow to their superiors, unfortunately, so the Starchildren must aid their alien masters in invasion attempts.
Yeah that film has inspired me recently as well.
I like 4E for a split kinda like Romans=Martial and Picts=Primal or something along those lines.
But really I think it might make more sense to run it with Iron Heroes.
But with that said, I just picked up the Darksiders artbook. My love of that game, and its universe, is something I don't even try to hide. And suddenly, after getting said book, I've been wondering -- what would be the best engine to run the a game in that setting with? I know that we don't know enough of the 3 other horsemen to have them be PC's, but this is a world of pretty fleshed out angels and demons in a techno-apocalyptic setting. In Nomine, which is another setting I love, doesn't seem over the top enough for this setting...
I'm not sure if going full on manga-style would work either.. but maybe? There's also dX / Tri Stat, the only generic system I own... I dunno. I just would love to explore that world more.
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