the idea of a captive green dragon under a city for hundreds of years making lair effects happen and seeing through the eyes of the city vermin seems like an awesome plot hook actually
transforming the city streets gradually and subtly into an overgrown maze, plants just keep infesting buildings and crawling up the walls and no one can figure out why
Be even more insidious and have the plant growth and stuff be beneficial, a real hanging gardens of babylon sort of situation, so the town draws in richer and richer people, merchants, and things like that, and the dragon is able to grow their wealth and power, and maybe even have the city become an ally of the dragon who send out and finance adventurers against other dragons.
Everyone who had captured the dragon had been slowly killed off and the memory of this dragon gradually forgotten, the dragon could have left ages ago, but it was too much a good thing now to stay.
inspired to write some more on this
Beyond the city's walls were extensive farmlands at the time of the dragon's capture, but now the city is surrounded by a dense, dark forest, growing out of abandoned fields and through rotting farmhouses for many miles around. The main roads are hemmed in closely by the grabby limbs of spooky trees and thorny bushes, but for some reason the maintenance of the roads is easy, the woods do not grow into the thoroughfares vital to the city's trade wealth. Just be wary and do not to leave the roads, for many speculate what happens to the travelers who wander off the beaten path and do not return.
The rats are the dragon's primary eyes and ears in and around the city, with the dragon itself chained with enchanted shackles that expand as it grows in the deepest chambers under the castle. The jailors are a strange bunch that keep to themselves in the underground prison complex, largely withdrawn from the society of the city above, having ritualized the keeping of prisoners to something resembling a religion over the past centuries, a cult of jailkeeping. They regularly offer food to the chute that descends into the sealed chamber of their most important prisoner in a deep and forgotten sublevel of their massive dungeon complex below the castle, and as the years go on the meals are supplemented with gifts of coins and valuables from rulers of the city who have come to believe the city's economic prosperity is thanks to the dragon's blessing.
A tree planted in the castle garden the year the dragon was imprisoned has grown over the intervening centuries into a huge and eerily beautiful tree with pale bark and glossy green leaves, standing alone in the immaculately maintained royal garden (contrasting sharply with the feral growth constantly trying to swallow the rest of the city), and has become the centerpiece of the royal family's ceremonies and heraldry; but visitors to the city get an eerie feeling when looking upon its twisted, gnarled form. Those sensitive to the forces of nature can tell there is something deeply wrong with this tree, a more concentrated feeling of the wrongness that exudes from every growing plant in and around the city. Disparaging remarks about the beloved symbol of the royal family and the city are, of course, a grave insult and not tolerated. If you examine the massive trunk closely, you see it's full of dark hollows hiding swarms of unusual and disturbing insects, centipedes and worse, and large flocks of black carrion birds are found roosting in its massive boughs, weirdly silent and watching.
EVERYONE forgot it. Those that DO somehow remember steadfastly refuse to talk about that time period, saying, in essence, "You know what you did"
I love that it's not just that people forgot. It's all records are gone.. Flash drives? Paper records? Stone tablet etchings? Nothing. It's both a fantastic plot hook, mystery, and solution to a problem all in one, and it turns a setting trope upside down. Instead of a fantasy setting with tens of thousands of years of history, it's a sci-fi setting with just 300.
I wish I liked the rules of Starfinder a bit more but I love the setting.
With some minor changes and some new classes though it'd be perfect for a Mass Effect game. Probably gonna be my next project if/when I'm done with my Star Trek campaign.
EVERYONE forgot it. Those that DO somehow remember steadfastly refuse to talk about that time period, saying, in essence, "You know what you did"
I love that it's not just that people forgot. It's all records are gone.. Flash drives? Paper records? Stone tablet etchings? Nothing. It's both a fantastic plot hook, mystery, and solution to a problem all in one, and it turns a setting trope upside down. Instead of a fantasy setting with tens of thousands of years of history, it's a sci-fi setting with just 300.
I wish I liked the rules of Starfinder a bit more but I love the setting.
Has anybody compared Starfinder to PF2? Are the mechanics in any way compatible?
EVERYONE forgot it. Those that DO somehow remember steadfastly refuse to talk about that time period, saying, in essence, "You know what you did"
I love that it's not just that people forgot. It's all records are gone.. Flash drives? Paper records? Stone tablet etchings? Nothing. It's both a fantastic plot hook, mystery, and solution to a problem all in one, and it turns a setting trope upside down. Instead of a fantasy setting with tens of thousands of years of history, it's a sci-fi setting with just 300.
I wish I liked the rules of Starfinder a bit more but I love the setting.
Has anybody compared Starfinder to PF2? Are the mechanics in any way compatible?
Not really. Starfinder is more closely related to PF1 and still shows some D&D 3rd roots (in fact, it was promoted as being very PF1 compatible but don't think it pulls that off very well, either). PF2 is a much bigger departure from the D20 system. Some things could be adapted like the 3 action economy but that doesn't fix things like space combat.
Starfinder probably should have had a public beta test like both Pathfinder games.
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DepressperadoI just wanted to see you laughingin the pizza rainRegistered Userregular
I've converted a few Pathfinder monsters to Starfinder, and they work okay, just different enough that it's a little bit of a pain in the ass
So what alignment are devils, demons, yugoloths, slaads, etc?
Also I think this is the first time I've seen alignment be called "colonialist".
Alignment-as-colonialism is closely tied to monster-races-as-colonialism. Law/good is frequently represented by civilization, chaos/evil is represented by the mysterious wilderness, tribal cultures, etc. The traditional D&D adventure of traveling out of your town into the wilderness and killing monsters to bring back their treasure is extremely :eek: when viewed through a lens of post-colonial critique.
(Which reminds me that I'm really curious to see what Steven Lumpkin is doing with his Forged in the Dark+West Marches hack, because I know he's actively working to de-colonize it.)
I'm kinda left wanting to play in a D&D game run by a person like this just to see what players are actually expected to do. Will there ever be any dungeon delving or treasure to collect? Who are the bad guys?
I'd almost rather play a role reversal game where the bad guys are the colonialists and you have to drive away explorer's ships and sabotage colonies to comb for items useful in the war against the colonizers.
I also find the idea of monsters always being stand-ins for PoC a bit odd seeing as stories of intelligent, evil monsters have existed in cultures throughout the globe well before the age of colonialism.
I'm genuinely curious what this person's thoughts on demons and devils are.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I'm kinda left wanting to play in a D&D game run by a person like this just to see what players are actually expected to do. Will there ever be any dungeon delving or treasure to collect? Who are the bad guys?
I'd almost rather play a role reversal game where the bad guys are the colonialists and you have to drive away explorer's ships and sabotage colonies to comb for items useful in the war against the colonizers.
Well... that's one great example of a game you could run. I doubt Avery Alder has run much D&D lately but if she did I'm guessing it would have explicitly anti-colonialist themes, so you might be right on the nose.
Otherwise, it's not really that hard to create groups of bad guys without having them be tribes of monster races that live in the wilderness. Just look at basically anything horrible in the real world and I bet you can make a D&D campaign out of it.
If the question is, "how do you de-colonize D&D without eliminating the fundamental mode of gameplay we associate with D&D?" my answer is just to stare directly into the camera.
I also find the idea of monsters always being stand-ins for PoC a bit odd seeing as stories of intelligent, evil monsters have existed in cultures throughout the globe well before the age of colonialism.
I'm genuinely curious what this person's thoughts on demons and devils are.
You could go read the thousands of words of discourse that people who have committed their lives to studying colonialism and playing D&D have written on the topic. The concept of an "orc" or a "djinn" and how they exist in mythology versus their role in D&D are vastly different.
I doubt many anti-colonialist critics care much about demons and devils except for how Christian-centric they are.
Der Waffle MousBlame this on the misfortune of your birth.New Yark, New Yark.Registered Userregular
a way to make it too on the nose would be quoting Gygax's quoting the guy responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre, about said massacre as an example of a Lawful Good action.
I also find the idea of monsters always being stand-ins for PoC a bit odd seeing as stories of intelligent, evil monsters have existed in cultures throughout the globe well before the age of colonialism.
I'm genuinely curious what this person's thoughts on demons and devils are.
I mean, just because you're not defining everyone in terms of a good/evil morality doesn't mean nothing can be defined that way. I would honestly argue that when no people are actually Evil, it makes it that much more significant when someone is.
Like yeah, sapient beings are defined on the law/community axes, and some of them you might consider evil based on how your character views them or whatever. But then you meet a demon, and the demon is Evil (as well as being an Anarchic Outsider), that's such a stronger thing.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Right. I don't think the idea of true Evil is fundamentally harmful to RPGs, but it's a big fuckin' problem when you apply it to humanoid species with generally comprehensible mindsets (like D&D orcs) and especially so when you map familiar traits like tribal social structures onto them.
I'm kinda left wanting to play in a D&D game run by a person like this just to see what players are actually expected to do. Will there ever be any dungeon delving or treasure to collect? Who are the bad guys?
I'd almost rather play a role reversal game where the bad guys are the colonialists and you have to drive away explorer's ships and sabotage colonies to comb for items useful in the war against the colonizers.
I mean, in my Terror Incognita setting, the main bad guy villains are all explicitly colonist (First the Aeternum - roman slaver elves), and now the Conquistadori (Descendants of the Aeternum empire, come from across the sea to conquer legends of a golden land. I might tap into the Congo Free State atrocities with them too). Well, okay there's the spore legions too - but they're just Roman Fungus Antzombies. They're an obstacle and a legacy of the colonization efforts,
While the good guy factions are basically all refugees who are trying to make their best life on this continent, or ex-slaves etc. They never had a choice about coming to the continent, and they're making the best of it, working together.
Though i need to do some more work on the Raider's Rest city-state (Pirates, raiders and a lot of other unsavoury types
Meanwhile, all the supernatural stuff - Demons, Devils, the Fae, none of those are universally evil or good - they're just weird alienpeople at their heart. There's a dmeon running around who's destructive goal is Sadness (She throws GREAT partys). Part of one of the city State's leadership is a big jolly devil. Another city state's advisor is an Archfae Witch. etc
I'll just note, since it came up earlier, that I haven't yet been in a group that actually played the "go into the wilderness and dungeon delve and take treasure" tropes straight
It seems like it's the most boring possible way you can play DnD
Well hell, I've got free time. I'll see about making at least a setting outline.
Okay, first idea for an "against the colonizers" campaign.
The world was created by the primordials, who constantly fought each other over its nature and its mortals. Eventually an alliance of four primordials, the Princes of Elemental Good, defeated, imprisoned, or banished the other primordials to the Elemental Planes to make the world safer for the mortal races (dragonborn, genasi, aarakocra, goliath, and triton). The various races of geniekind rule the Elemental Planes and safeguard the prisons of the primordials while the Princes of Elemental Good remain in the world to prevent conflicts between the elemental spirits suffusing the world and the mortal races living upon it.
Now that the war between the primordials have been settled, though, a new threat has appeared from another plane: the gods. The gods bicker and fight with each other just as the defeated primordials did, and they want to use the world as a staging ground to create worshipers dedicated to stoking their egos and fighting proxy battles for them. These worshipers, the aasimar, are angels of the Astral Sea forced into mortal flesh. They are promised a cycle of reincarnation for their piety, and those aasimar who please their god the most may be promoted to a deva after death. Those who displease or defy their god are sent to a plane of punishment of that god's devising.
Desperate to both avoid the punishment of their own tyrannical gods for failing to sufficiently please them and the constant religious wars between aasimar of the godsclaimed continent of Nefelus, aasimar have crossed the seas and skies to found colonies. From these colonies the aasimar plan to claim more territory in the world for the god, attacking the people of the world and using magic to bind its elemental spirits for exploitation. They build ostentatious fortress temples and monuments of enormous size that increase their patron god's dominion over the world and trap the elementals in dreamless sleep.
The Princes of Elemental Good lead the charge against these invaders, but the gods and their servants have already struck three major blows. First, djinn and marid allies who came to the world have been captured by armies of angels and sealed into binding items. Second, the servants of the gods have found a way expel some of the elemental essence of captured chromatic dragons and replace it with astral essence that shackles the resulting metallic dragons to angelic taskmasters. Third, the gods have sent their empyrean children to do battle with the giants.
That's what I've come up with so far in the last few hours. Comments?
EDIT: A few more details:
- Aasimar reincarnate as adults somewhere in Nefelus or in one of their colonial territories sometime after the death of their previous body. Each aasimar is created as the servant of a specific god. An aasimar that earns the anger of its god becomes a fallen aasimar and is doomed to becoming a fiend in a lower plane after death unless it finds a way to regain its god's favor.
- The lower planes are the same as those of the Great Wheel cosmology, save for the absence of the Nine Hells and the Abyss. The gods of the aasimar can allow fiends to emerge from the lower planes, but these fiends can only do whatever a god allows and return to their planes once the god's use for them has ended.
- Destroying a divine keystone frees the elemental spirits of the region from divinely imposed torpor. Soon after awakening the spirits might summon elemental armies, powerful elder elementals, or unleash effects equivalent to spells such as earthquake, tsunami, or storm of vengeance.
- Some giants and dragons contemplate finding ways to absorb the power of the defeated primordials to better fight back the divine invaders.
- The Cleric and Paladin classes are disallowed for player characters, as are subclasses in other classes related gods and celestials.
- Druids call upon primal fey spirits descended from the elementals who agreed to the leadership of the Princes of Elemental Good.
Lately I've been thinking about drawing up an Eberron game where the party takes on the last unfinished case of a dead kalashtar private investigator, who appears to them in their dreams to share his detective wisdom and moodily narrate their progress
Well hell, I've got free time. I'll see about making at least a setting outline.
Okay, first idea for an "against the colonizers" campaign.
The world was created by the primordials, who constantly fought each other over its nature and its mortals. Eventually an alliance of four primordials, the Princes of Elemental Good, defeated, imprisoned, or banished the other primordials to the Elemental Planes to make the world safer for the mortal races (dragonborn, genasi, aarakocra, goliath, and triton). The various races of geniekind rule the Elemental Planes and safeguard the prisons of the primordials while the Princes of Elemental Good remain in the world to prevent conflicts between the elemental spirits suffusing the world and the mortal races living upon it.
Now that the war between the primordials have been settled, though, a new threat has appeared from another plane: the gods. The gods bicker and fight with each other just as the defeated primordials did, and they want to use the world as a staging ground to create worshipers dedicated to stoking their egos and fighting proxy battles for them. These worshipers, the aasimar, are angels of the Astral Sea forced into mortal flesh. They are promised a cycle of reincarnation for their piety, and those aasimar who please their god the most may be promoted to a deva after death. Those who displease or defy their god are sent to a plane of punishment of that god's devising.
Desperate to both avoid the punishment of their own tyrannical gods for failing to sufficiently please them and the constant religious wars between aasimar of the godsclaimed continent of Nefelus, aasimar have crossed the seas and skies to found colonies. From these colonies the aasimar plan to claim more territory in the world for the god, attacking the people of the world and using magic to bind its elemental spirits for exploitation. They build ostentatious fortress temples and monuments of enormous size that increase their patron god's dominion over the world and trap the elementals in dreamless sleep.
The Princes of Elemental Good lead the charge against these invaders, but the gods and their servants have already struck three major blows. First, djinn and marid allies who came to the world have been captured by armies of angels and sealed into binding items. Second, the servants of the gods have found a way expel some of the elemental essence of captured chromatic dragons and replace it with astral essence that shackles the resulting metallic dragons to angelic taskmasters. Third, the gods have sent their empyrean children to do battle with the giants.
That's what I've come up with so far in the last few hours. Comments?
EDIT: A few more details:
- Aasimar reincarnate as adults somewhere in Nefelus or in one of their colonial territories sometime after the death of their previous body. Each aasimar is created as the servant of a specific god. An aasimar that earns the anger of its god becomes a fallen aasimar and is doomed to becoming a fiend in a lower plane after death unless it finds a way to regain its god's favor.
- The lower planes are the same as those of the Great Wheel cosmology, save for the absence of the Nine Hells and the Abyss. The gods of the aasimar can allow fiends to emerge from the lower planes, but these fiends can only do whatever a god allows and return to their planes once the god's use for them has ended.
- Destroying a divine keystone frees the elemental spirits of the region from divinely imposed torpor. Soon after awakening the spirits might summon elemental armies, powerful elder elementals, or unleash effects equivalent to spells such as earthquake, tsunami, or storm of vengeance.
- Some giants and dragons contemplate finding ways to absorb the power of the defeated primordials to better fight back the divine invaders.
- The Cleric and Paladin classes are disallowed for player characters, as are subclasses in other classes related gods and celestials.
- Druids call upon primal fey spirits descended from the elementals who agreed to the leadership of the Princes of Elemental Good.
So this is all interesting but is also really effing weird. By which I specifically mean it's a very radical departure from the status quo your average player is going to be familiar with. Doesn't make it remotely bad and I bet you'd have no problem filling a "table" from folks here on the boards.
Personally I'd go a little more simple and straightforward. The campaign premise is already unique enough, why not highlight that further by making your changes as few and far between as possible?
For me, I think if you want a campaign nemesis that is both "easy" and interesting, go Tiefling.
Hear me out! Two reasons.
1 - They're directly connected to humans and devils, which gives them a reason for this particular empire/nation to be bad.
2 - Uhm, well, you wanna talk about race coding. Tieflings are white/euro asf.
Then you have the PCs do something like all roll small races (kobolds, goblins, deep gnomes, there's a small lizardfolk race, etc) and you've got a pretty easy dichotomy.
Alternatively just do uncommon races (no humans, elves, or dwarfs, or anything one step away). So no half-orc (but could easily be full-orc instead). I'd probably say no drow just cuz it'd be too tempting for someone to play a drow as "this setting's regular elf"
That's just off the top of my head, and like I said, it's a pretty easy answer (I personally thoroughly enjoy Tiefling PCs, especially as break-the-mold types, but I feel like they are a pretty easy villain).
And honestly unless you're gonna "E6" your campaign (where PCs stop gaining levels around the mid/late heroic range), it's just a starting point anyway, but Tieflings also offer a gateway to higher level foes that tie directly in. Maybe this Tiefling nation is specifically the result of devils scheming to gain a foothold in the material plane, and while the Tiefling leaders were objectively bad people, the rank-and-file are either unwitting pawns or were pressed into servitude. This gives you options to add some shades of gray for flavor and/or intrigue.
I genuinely have no problem with "here's a generic 'evil' group of things for your low-level PCs to grind on for the first couple levels" but it's easy to find examples that are in very poor taste, so I get it. I'm glad they're rehabbing drow and orcs, at least (I've also always had a soft spot for hobgoblins).
StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I am... concerned by the prospect of running an anti-colonialist game of D&D being based around playing uncommon races.
Like, I get the idea, but it feels like it's still trying to do a thing based around mapping the fantasy races to the real world. Especially when you include stuff like no clerics, only druids - that feels like you're leaning into the idea of pre-colonial/non-european peoples being "primitive."
I'm kinda left wanting to play in a D&D game run by a person like this just to see what players are actually expected to do. Will there ever be any dungeon delving or treasure to collect? Who are the bad guys?
I'd almost rather play a role reversal game where the bad guys are the colonialists and you have to drive away explorer's ships and sabotage colonies to comb for items useful in the war against the colonizers.
I feel like this is basically the plot of the boardgame Spirit Island, which would be pretty dope to turn into an RPG.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
If tieflings are coded as anything I'd say mixed race people before I called them europeans
Yeah, I'm really curious about the logic behind this one, because that is definitely not the way I have ever seen tieflings presented. They're more or less an oppressed minority.
Posts
inspired to write some more on this
The rats are the dragon's primary eyes and ears in and around the city, with the dragon itself chained with enchanted shackles that expand as it grows in the deepest chambers under the castle. The jailors are a strange bunch that keep to themselves in the underground prison complex, largely withdrawn from the society of the city above, having ritualized the keeping of prisoners to something resembling a religion over the past centuries, a cult of jailkeeping. They regularly offer food to the chute that descends into the sealed chamber of their most important prisoner in a deep and forgotten sublevel of their massive dungeon complex below the castle, and as the years go on the meals are supplemented with gifts of coins and valuables from rulers of the city who have come to believe the city's economic prosperity is thanks to the dragon's blessing.
A tree planted in the castle garden the year the dragon was imprisoned has grown over the intervening centuries into a huge and eerily beautiful tree with pale bark and glossy green leaves, standing alone in the immaculately maintained royal garden (contrasting sharply with the feral growth constantly trying to swallow the rest of the city), and has become the centerpiece of the royal family's ceremonies and heraldry; but visitors to the city get an eerie feeling when looking upon its twisted, gnarled form. Those sensitive to the forces of nature can tell there is something deeply wrong with this tree, a more concentrated feeling of the wrongness that exudes from every growing plant in and around the city. Disparaging remarks about the beloved symbol of the royal family and the city are, of course, a grave insult and not tolerated. If you examine the massive trunk closely, you see it's full of dark hollows hiding swarms of unusual and disturbing insects, centipedes and worse, and large flocks of black carrion birds are found roosting in its massive boughs, weirdly silent and watching.
With some minor changes and some new classes though it'd be perfect for a Mass Effect game. Probably gonna be my next project if/when I'm done with my Star Trek campaign.
Has anybody compared Starfinder to PF2? Are the mechanics in any way compatible?
Not really. Starfinder is more closely related to PF1 and still shows some D&D 3rd roots (in fact, it was promoted as being very PF1 compatible but don't think it pulls that off very well, either). PF2 is a much bigger departure from the D20 system. Some things could be adapted like the 3 action economy but that doesn't fix things like space combat.
Starfinder probably should have had a public beta test like both Pathfinder games.
What if you really just wanted to play Pathfinder in Space?
Fiasco isn't really a system geared towards campaign play.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I like a system that lets me play as good guys.
Seize the means of production, comrade.
Is fucking delightful. BTW, I can't find the art online, but Starfinder mephits use power armor.
I'd be down to try playing it, though, if the opportunity ever arises (same with Pathfinder 2E, whose kobold redesign is adorable).
That is incredible.
If you want more art of Optimus Prime as a humanoid lady, I got a folder...
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
So what alignment are devils, demons, yugoloths, slaads, etc?
Also I think this is the first time I've seen alignment be called "colonialist".
Alignment-as-colonialism is closely tied to monster-races-as-colonialism. Law/good is frequently represented by civilization, chaos/evil is represented by the mysterious wilderness, tribal cultures, etc. The traditional D&D adventure of traveling out of your town into the wilderness and killing monsters to bring back their treasure is extremely :eek: when viewed through a lens of post-colonial critique.
(Which reminds me that I'm really curious to see what Steven Lumpkin is doing with his Forged in the Dark+West Marches hack, because I know he's actively working to de-colonize it.)
I'd almost rather play a role reversal game where the bad guys are the colonialists and you have to drive away explorer's ships and sabotage colonies to comb for items useful in the war against the colonizers.
I'm genuinely curious what this person's thoughts on demons and devils are.
Well... that's one great example of a game you could run. I doubt Avery Alder has run much D&D lately but if she did I'm guessing it would have explicitly anti-colonialist themes, so you might be right on the nose.
Otherwise, it's not really that hard to create groups of bad guys without having them be tribes of monster races that live in the wilderness. Just look at basically anything horrible in the real world and I bet you can make a D&D campaign out of it.
If the question is, "how do you de-colonize D&D without eliminating the fundamental mode of gameplay we associate with D&D?" my answer is just to stare directly into the camera.
Well hell, I've got free time. I'll see about making at least a setting outline.
You could go read the thousands of words of discourse that people who have committed their lives to studying colonialism and playing D&D have written on the topic. The concept of an "orc" or a "djinn" and how they exist in mythology versus their role in D&D are vastly different.
I doubt many anti-colonialist critics care much about demons and devils except for how Christian-centric they are.
unrelatedly:
Several of my previous avatars have come from that folder.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I mean, just because you're not defining everyone in terms of a good/evil morality doesn't mean nothing can be defined that way. I would honestly argue that when no people are actually Evil, it makes it that much more significant when someone is.
Like yeah, sapient beings are defined on the law/community axes, and some of them you might consider evil based on how your character views them or whatever. But then you meet a demon, and the demon is Evil (as well as being an Anarchic Outsider), that's such a stronger thing.
I mean, in my Terror Incognita setting, the main bad guy villains are all explicitly colonist (First the Aeternum - roman slaver elves), and now the Conquistadori (Descendants of the Aeternum empire, come from across the sea to conquer legends of a golden land. I might tap into the Congo Free State atrocities with them too). Well, okay there's the spore legions too - but they're just Roman Fungus Antzombies. They're an obstacle and a legacy of the colonization efforts,
While the good guy factions are basically all refugees who are trying to make their best life on this continent, or ex-slaves etc. They never had a choice about coming to the continent, and they're making the best of it, working together.
Though i need to do some more work on the Raider's Rest city-state (Pirates, raiders and a lot of other unsavoury types
Meanwhile, all the supernatural stuff - Demons, Devils, the Fae, none of those are universally evil or good - they're just weird alienpeople at their heart. There's a dmeon running around who's destructive goal is Sadness (She throws GREAT partys). Part of one of the city State's leadership is a big jolly devil. Another city state's advisor is an Archfae Witch. etc
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
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Switch: 0293 6817 9891
It seems like it's the most boring possible way you can play DnD
Okay, first idea for an "against the colonizers" campaign.
That's what I've come up with so far in the last few hours. Comments?
EDIT: A few more details:
- Aasimar reincarnate as adults somewhere in Nefelus or in one of their colonial territories sometime after the death of their previous body. Each aasimar is created as the servant of a specific god. An aasimar that earns the anger of its god becomes a fallen aasimar and is doomed to becoming a fiend in a lower plane after death unless it finds a way to regain its god's favor.
- The lower planes are the same as those of the Great Wheel cosmology, save for the absence of the Nine Hells and the Abyss. The gods of the aasimar can allow fiends to emerge from the lower planes, but these fiends can only do whatever a god allows and return to their planes once the god's use for them has ended.
- Destroying a divine keystone frees the elemental spirits of the region from divinely imposed torpor. Soon after awakening the spirits might summon elemental armies, powerful elder elementals, or unleash effects equivalent to spells such as earthquake, tsunami, or storm of vengeance.
- Some giants and dragons contemplate finding ways to absorb the power of the defeated primordials to better fight back the divine invaders.
- The Cleric and Paladin classes are disallowed for player characters, as are subclasses in other classes related gods and celestials.
- Druids call upon primal fey spirits descended from the elementals who agreed to the leadership of the Princes of Elemental Good.
So this is all interesting but is also really effing weird. By which I specifically mean it's a very radical departure from the status quo your average player is going to be familiar with. Doesn't make it remotely bad and I bet you'd have no problem filling a "table" from folks here on the boards.
Personally I'd go a little more simple and straightforward. The campaign premise is already unique enough, why not highlight that further by making your changes as few and far between as possible?
For me, I think if you want a campaign nemesis that is both "easy" and interesting, go Tiefling.
Hear me out! Two reasons.
1 - They're directly connected to humans and devils, which gives them a reason for this particular empire/nation to be bad.
2 - Uhm, well, you wanna talk about race coding. Tieflings are white/euro asf.
Then you have the PCs do something like all roll small races (kobolds, goblins, deep gnomes, there's a small lizardfolk race, etc) and you've got a pretty easy dichotomy.
Alternatively just do uncommon races (no humans, elves, or dwarfs, or anything one step away). So no half-orc (but could easily be full-orc instead). I'd probably say no drow just cuz it'd be too tempting for someone to play a drow as "this setting's regular elf"
That's just off the top of my head, and like I said, it's a pretty easy answer (I personally thoroughly enjoy Tiefling PCs, especially as break-the-mold types, but I feel like they are a pretty easy villain).
And honestly unless you're gonna "E6" your campaign (where PCs stop gaining levels around the mid/late heroic range), it's just a starting point anyway, but Tieflings also offer a gateway to higher level foes that tie directly in. Maybe this Tiefling nation is specifically the result of devils scheming to gain a foothold in the material plane, and while the Tiefling leaders were objectively bad people, the rank-and-file are either unwitting pawns or were pressed into servitude. This gives you options to add some shades of gray for flavor and/or intrigue.
I genuinely have no problem with "here's a generic 'evil' group of things for your low-level PCs to grind on for the first couple levels" but it's easy to find examples that are in very poor taste, so I get it. I'm glad they're rehabbing drow and orcs, at least (I've also always had a soft spot for hobgoblins).
Like, I get the idea, but it feels like it's still trying to do a thing based around mapping the fantasy races to the real world. Especially when you include stuff like no clerics, only druids - that feels like you're leaning into the idea of pre-colonial/non-european peoples being "primitive."
I feel like this is basically the plot of the boardgame Spirit Island, which would be pretty dope to turn into an RPG.
Yeah, I'm really curious about the logic behind this one, because that is definitely not the way I have ever seen tieflings presented. They're more or less an oppressed minority.