'aight, that sounds much more reasonable. I can understand some frustration there. Stereotypes suck but exist for a reason. Players like their munchkin mechanics.
The whole "dwareves outlawed from the Empire" thing is pretty cool actually.
Talonrazor on
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INeedNoSaltwith blood on my teethRegistered Userregular
'aight, that sounds much more reasonable. I can understand some frustration there. Stereotypes suck but exist for a reason. Players like their munchkin mechanics.
The whole "dwareves outlawed from the Empire" thing is pretty cool actually.
Most of those things aren't really very munchkinish, just... standard.
Sometimes standard isn't a bad thing. I mean, is the divide between memorized and spontaneous casting that huge of a deal, would it have mattered if it was a half elven Sorcerer and an elven Favored Soul?
Limiting the players in the name of flavor is way less cool than adding options in the name of flavor.
Most of those things aren't really very munchkinish, just... standard.
Sometimes standard isn't a bad thing. I mean, is the divide between memorized and spontaneous casting that huge of a deal, would it have mattered if it was a half elven Sorcerer and an elven Favored Soul?
Limiting the players in the name of flavor is way less cool than adding options in the name of flavor.
Here's the magical run down for the campaign;
Elves have favored class of sorcerer in the setting because they are supposedly descended from dragons. As in all of them.
With all the spontaneous magic going on, none of the elf clans have set up any means of studying magic from a more measured direction, making elven wizards an unknown concept (outside of a few exceptions, mainly astral travelers). Half-Elves are purposely bred by the elves to be avatars of themselves, meaning that they are expected to learn the way elves do. Thus we have Half-Elven sorcerers.
The setting as a whole doesn't have gods, only the dwarves and their allies are starting to worship a few that have made their presences known. That means that elves can't gain power from deities, so the fall back on their ancestor dragons. Non-spontaneous spellcasting is completely outside the elven paradigm, so the way that the dragon-ancestor-gods grant spells is through the shugenja and favored soul classes. They don't grant spells to clerics, since that idea doesn't exist here.
Dwarves have developed their own unique form of arcane majic, basically the CArcane version of wu jen.
All the magic stuff is there for flavor, but it is important flavor. It just irks me when a player decides to go completely against the point of the setting just so he can stay with stuff he knows.
I'm not saying that what they did was unreasonable, but if they wanted to play stereotypes I could have built a stereotypical setting.
Sounds a bit restrictive to me, but the simple fact is that it's your setting and if they're not even prepared to give it a try, you've definitely got the right to be miffed... :?
The last time I played with The Window, my players had some... interesting ideas when it came to interpreting my setting.
That pain's probably felt by everyone at some point regardless of the gaming system involved, but some people are dense. Simple as.
So. The party's resident cyborg killing machine flips out and begins attacking his former friends when a psychic enemy drives him to insanity.
The team's medic announces that he's going to try and sedate him with his medikit. Even though it's long established that no drugs have any effect on him, and that the cyborg is a goddamn tank.
"No," he tells me, "I'm going to try. He's still got some flesh in him, hasn't he?"
So he does. And the sedative fails. And he also fails to dodge the retaliating blow. And the cyborg throws him into a wall, costing him two health rungs and breaking his leg.
If the medic doesn't stabilise himself soon, I tell the player solemnly, his life is in jeopardy.
"Okay," he announces directly after learning of his injuries, "I get up, and try to talk the cyborg down."
My homebrew setting is more of a home-tweak than an entirely new universe. Basically, I took the D&D "world" and bumped up the setting a few hundred years. I tried to figure out what all would be changed socially and politically after several key inventions such as Rifles ((Roughly Civil War era in complexity), black powder, and the telegraph. With such a increase in technology, I had predicted "beast" races such as Kobolds and their friends would be at par with "civilization", and in fact being in a arms race with them. With contact being more and more common, many cities are sticking close to the former status quo, and others deciding to be more open with "beast" folk and let centuries of malice slip away to where a Kobold tribe and a Human tribe could be decent trade partners.
Magic has been somewhat decreased, not in the sense of magic's power, but rather, in the decrease of its practice, being seen as "archaic", "Elitist", and "irreverent" for today's society. Also, with the invention of the Rifle, Heavy armor has been mostly mothballed in favor of light armor, though swordsmanship is still practiced.
The Listener on
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UtsanomikoBros before DoesRollin' in the thlayRegistered Userregular
I think the fact that a human rogue is out of line should be reason enough for you to reconsider your own campaign setting, where every race was so pigeonholed that 'dwarven fighter' and 'elven cleric' are problems.
It wasn't really that they were pigeonholed, it's that I was trying to break away from the traditional D&D stereotypes, and they just showed back up.
I think the fact that despite trying to 'break away from traditional D&D stereotypes' you were still stuck with Dwarves, Orcs, Dragons (and their subordinate Elves), Gnomes, et cetera. I'm sure you fully intended to keep those iconic races and merely change their roles within their setting, but they're still going to carry certain stereotypes with players simply by being the Tolkein-esque races defined by Dungeons & Dragons. Simply removing or discouraging certain professions doesn't seem like the biggest leap to me, either.
I've got a setting I've been fine-tuning for a while- mainly as a potential online adventure computer game but I've toyed with running it as a rules-light RP campaign to garner feedback. I've got a lot on my old harddrive so I won't be able to write about it online in comfortable detail for another month.
But basically I wanted to avoid the common 'fanciful/historical medieval society of various races/peoples following an ancient elven/Atlantean civilization', so I shifted things to be a bit more pre-Victorian/Colonial America. And while it springs from an ancient civilization it's nearly unknown and not evident, seeming to be some sort of nightmare atomic age of human decadence. Stylictically and thematically, it's an unadvanced fanciful future following the present rather than the fictionalized past following ancient history. I've worked this into the geography and ecology as well, so it pays a lot of homage to North American folklore and Dougal Dixon's After Man. Jackalopes, deer-eating frogs, and rats in the form of wolves abound and replace our modern ungulate and carnivore Orders.
The races are subsequently more of a human-centric approach, diversifying into several sub-species when the dark civilization collapsed and the age of The Scattering progressed. One is normal by our standards while the others have specialized for other lifestyles & environments, and consider them to be a bit 'short and scruffy'. There are several minor non-human races such as beastmen and trolls, but they're considered to be uncultured at best or simply savage enemies of mankind (bear-men and horse-men respectively in this case, the benefit of a unique future ecology is having such designs be relatable to the audience but distinct within the setting; *we* know what a 12-foot tall hooved man with a horse head would look like, but to them it's a hideously unrelatable monster).
Finally, I took the same approach to the various schools of the setting's magic: 'ethercraft' is the manipulation of unreal energies thought to have srpung into being when true 'magic' was destroyed in the dark era. It ranges from utilizing sheer willpower and creative thought to carefully-learned & rigidly-defined spells. It's liumited to a personal scale (the most powerful magician can't wipe out an army any better than the most powerful swordsman) but its function & form is limited only by one's conceptual capacity. Combined with their history and dominance, I think the human races provide me with interesting potential for strongly themed narratives, of which I'm exploring right now with some short story outlines.
I like the traditional fantasy setting and its thematic elements, but I also feel it needs to be either left intact to keep the whole 'community of races' and 'old world sword & sorcery' thing strong or one needs to make a clean slate to emphasize their own themes.
Basically, a setting that used to be a fairly "standard" D&D fantasy world, but is now going through a magical industrial revolution. It's both a commentary on the standard D&D and fantasy trope, and a fascinating (I hope) setting in its own right.
Wow, I only briefly browsed your Urbis site but it is very impressive.
I was never a big fan of "high fantasy", its my primary beef about Eberron. None the less this is impressive. Indeed, it seemed far more intriguing to me than Eberron itself.
Did you enter WOTC's competition with this by chance a few years back? If you didn't, you should have. They were intentionally looking for "higher" fantasy than normal to augment D&D's integration into online video games.
I will surf this some more, this is very intriguing. My only criticism is some of the formatting of the text. The lack of indentation and space between paragraphs can make it a little hard on the eyes.
Thanks for sharing this out, this is pretty damn nifty.
I once wrote a couple of pages of background for a homebrew world I wanted to use for a DnD campaign that ended up never happening.
It was something like a post-WWII political climate in a fantasy setting, with elements from the American Industrial revolution. And clockwork people. And zombies.
Jürgen: nice. Reminds me of my days on the Apheiropolis collab: except with, you know, a decent website
And Anonymous Robot: friend of mine tried a D20 modern campaign with a similar theme to that! WWII without the Nazi's, but plus steampunk technology. His concept art for a (walking) Uberpanzer was the most wonderful (and schlocky) pulp art I've ever seen him do...
Wow, I only briefly browsed your Urbis site but it is very impressive.
I was never a big fan of "high fantasy", its my primary beef about Eberron. None the less this is impressive. Indeed, it seemed far more intriguing to me than Eberron itself.
Oh, Eberron is a very fine setting, which I like a lot - though its aim is somewhat different. It was inspired more by the pulps of the 1920s and 1930s, while my primary inspiration was the Victorian Age. Additionally, I wanted to see how much I can do with the Core Rules alone, instead of adding new rules (which Eberron has in spades - artificers, warforged, dragonmarks...).
Did you enter WOTC's competition with this by chance a few years back? If you didn't, you should have. They were intentionally looking for "higher" fantasy than normal to augment D&D's integration into online video games.
I did - in fact, Urbis was first designed for this very occasion. But I have to admit I didn't understand some of the questions correctly - I only read the FAQ over at ENWorld after I sent in my proposal. Thus, I was not surprised when I didn't get past the first round.
And it wouldn't have worked out anyway - I was drafted next January, and thus wouldn't have had the time to develop the setting in the same time frame...
I will surf this some more, this is very intriguing. My only criticism is some of the formatting of the text. The lack of indentation and space between paragraphs can make it a little hard on the eyes.
Is there some simple HTML tag with which I could add identation?
Really? I had a similarly designed submission as one of my Story Hour ideas. Clearly, Eberron was only one of many settings that resonanted with the common warfare theme. In my setting, which I simply called Godfield, the world recently ended a devastating, centuries-long war between the various celestials and fiends, with mortals trapped in the middle. It largely revolved around the world recovering from this fate and dealing with the remaining outsiders, may of which defied their original alignment requirements to start new lives in the mortal world. It was a little out there, but compared to my other submissions of a world run by psionic mushrooms, a typical post-apocalyptic Earth, and a game that can best be described as "Spelljammer in the Plane of Fire," it was probably my best submission.
Last April, when I started DMing again, I brought back Godfield as the basis for my new setting. I renamed it Mesion and combined the original Godfield ideas with some of the Eberron stuff, especially its races like Warforged, and a backstory that tied to the end of the previous Quill campaign setting I described earlier. The main theme (a world recovering from a war between the various outsiders) was the same, but the underlying themes became more complex and are starting to take center stage. Notably, the game revolves around the increasing emphasis of order and chaotic forces that were returning to the world and the fate of an incredibly powerful artifact called simply the Infernal Egg, which in a bit of a twist I gave the party before they even hit level 2! To my surprise, they eventually gave it to a semi-trustworthy government agent, though I think their ultimate plan is to get it back after obtaining the two objects needed to actually control it. I'm writing a Story Hour in ENWorld about it, but I'm a few weeks behind as of now.
EmperorSeth on
You know what? Nanowrimo's cancelled on account of the world is stupid.
Really? I had a similarly designed submission as one of my Story Hour ideas. Clearly, Eberron was only one of many settings that resonanted with the common warfare theme. In my setting, which I simply called Godfield, the world recently ended a devastating, centuries-long war between the various celestials and fiends, with mortals trapped in the middle.
Well, Urbis doesn't have such a war... yet. But it might have its own version of World War I soon - the situation in the central region, especially around the League of Armach, Hobgoblin Dominions, Thenares and the Alliance of the Pantheon is extremely volatile. Then the world could see some real mass warfare, in combination with the most advanced magic warfare techniques around - and that's not going to be pretty.
Urbis is an analog to Europe before 1914 - and the intensity of WWI took everyone by surprise. Something similar could very well happen here.
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary
opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Posts
The whole "dwareves outlawed from the Empire" thing is pretty cool actually.
Sometimes standard isn't a bad thing. I mean, is the divide between memorized and spontaneous casting that huge of a deal, would it have mattered if it was a half elven Sorcerer and an elven Favored Soul?
Limiting the players in the name of flavor is way less cool than adding options in the name of flavor.
Here's the magical run down for the campaign;
Elves have favored class of sorcerer in the setting because they are supposedly descended from dragons. As in all of them.
With all the spontaneous magic going on, none of the elf clans have set up any means of studying magic from a more measured direction, making elven wizards an unknown concept (outside of a few exceptions, mainly astral travelers). Half-Elves are purposely bred by the elves to be avatars of themselves, meaning that they are expected to learn the way elves do. Thus we have Half-Elven sorcerers.
The setting as a whole doesn't have gods, only the dwarves and their allies are starting to worship a few that have made their presences known. That means that elves can't gain power from deities, so the fall back on their ancestor dragons. Non-spontaneous spellcasting is completely outside the elven paradigm, so the way that the dragon-ancestor-gods grant spells is through the shugenja and favored soul classes. They don't grant spells to clerics, since that idea doesn't exist here.
Dwarves have developed their own unique form of arcane majic, basically the CArcane version of wu jen.
All the magic stuff is there for flavor, but it is important flavor. It just irks me when a player decides to go completely against the point of the setting just so he can stay with stuff he knows.
I'm not saying that what they did was unreasonable, but if they wanted to play stereotypes I could have built a stereotypical setting.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
The last time I played with The Window, my players had some... interesting ideas when it came to interpreting my setting.
That pain's probably felt by everyone at some point regardless of the gaming system involved, but some people are dense. Simple as.
So. The party's resident cyborg killing machine flips out and begins attacking his former friends when a psychic enemy drives him to insanity.
The team's medic announces that he's going to try and sedate him with his medikit. Even though it's long established that no drugs have any effect on him, and that the cyborg is a goddamn tank.
"No," he tells me, "I'm going to try. He's still got some flesh in him, hasn't he?"
So he does. And the sedative fails. And he also fails to dodge the retaliating blow. And the cyborg throws him into a wall, costing him two health rungs and breaking his leg.
If the medic doesn't stabilise himself soon, I tell the player solemnly, his life is in jeopardy.
"Okay," he announces directly after learning of his injuries, "I get up, and try to talk the cyborg down."
Magic has been somewhat decreased, not in the sense of magic's power, but rather, in the decrease of its practice, being seen as "archaic", "Elitist", and "irreverent" for today's society. Also, with the invention of the Rifle, Heavy armor has been mostly mothballed in favor of light armor, though swordsmanship is still practiced.
I think the fact that despite trying to 'break away from traditional D&D stereotypes' you were still stuck with Dwarves, Orcs, Dragons (and their subordinate Elves), Gnomes, et cetera. I'm sure you fully intended to keep those iconic races and merely change their roles within their setting, but they're still going to carry certain stereotypes with players simply by being the Tolkein-esque races defined by Dungeons & Dragons. Simply removing or discouraging certain professions doesn't seem like the biggest leap to me, either.
I've got a setting I've been fine-tuning for a while- mainly as a potential online adventure computer game but I've toyed with running it as a rules-light RP campaign to garner feedback. I've got a lot on my old harddrive so I won't be able to write about it online in comfortable detail for another month.
But basically I wanted to avoid the common 'fanciful/historical medieval society of various races/peoples following an ancient elven/Atlantean civilization', so I shifted things to be a bit more pre-Victorian/Colonial America. And while it springs from an ancient civilization it's nearly unknown and not evident, seeming to be some sort of nightmare atomic age of human decadence. Stylictically and thematically, it's an unadvanced fanciful future following the present rather than the fictionalized past following ancient history. I've worked this into the geography and ecology as well, so it pays a lot of homage to North American folklore and Dougal Dixon's After Man. Jackalopes, deer-eating frogs, and rats in the form of wolves abound and replace our modern ungulate and carnivore Orders.
The races are subsequently more of a human-centric approach, diversifying into several sub-species when the dark civilization collapsed and the age of The Scattering progressed. One is normal by our standards while the others have specialized for other lifestyles & environments, and consider them to be a bit 'short and scruffy'. There are several minor non-human races such as beastmen and trolls, but they're considered to be uncultured at best or simply savage enemies of mankind (bear-men and horse-men respectively in this case, the benefit of a unique future ecology is having such designs be relatable to the audience but distinct within the setting; *we* know what a 12-foot tall hooved man with a horse head would look like, but to them it's a hideously unrelatable monster).
Finally, I took the same approach to the various schools of the setting's magic: 'ethercraft' is the manipulation of unreal energies thought to have srpung into being when true 'magic' was destroyed in the dark era. It ranges from utilizing sheer willpower and creative thought to carefully-learned & rigidly-defined spells. It's liumited to a personal scale (the most powerful magician can't wipe out an army any better than the most powerful swordsman) but its function & form is limited only by one's conceptual capacity. Combined with their history and dominance, I think the human races provide me with interesting potential for strongly themed narratives, of which I'm exploring right now with some short story outlines.
I like the traditional fantasy setting and its thematic elements, but I also feel it needs to be either left intact to keep the whole 'community of races' and 'old world sword & sorcery' thing strong or one needs to make a clean slate to emphasize their own themes.
Basically, a setting that used to be a fairly "standard" D&D fantasy world, but is now going through a magical industrial revolution. It's both a commentary on the standard D&D and fantasy trope, and a fascinating (I hope) setting in its own right.
I was never a big fan of "high fantasy", its my primary beef about Eberron. None the less this is impressive. Indeed, it seemed far more intriguing to me than Eberron itself.
Did you enter WOTC's competition with this by chance a few years back? If you didn't, you should have. They were intentionally looking for "higher" fantasy than normal to augment D&D's integration into online video games.
I will surf this some more, this is very intriguing. My only criticism is some of the formatting of the text. The lack of indentation and space between paragraphs can make it a little hard on the eyes.
Thanks for sharing this out, this is pretty damn nifty.
It was something like a post-WWII political climate in a fantasy setting, with elements from the American Industrial revolution. And clockwork people. And zombies.
And Anonymous Robot: friend of mine tried a D20 modern campaign with a similar theme to that! WWII without the Nazi's, but plus steampunk technology. His concept art for a (walking) Uberpanzer was the most wonderful (and schlocky) pulp art I've ever seen him do...
Oh, Eberron is a very fine setting, which I like a lot - though its aim is somewhat different. It was inspired more by the pulps of the 1920s and 1930s, while my primary inspiration was the Victorian Age. Additionally, I wanted to see how much I can do with the Core Rules alone, instead of adding new rules (which Eberron has in spades - artificers, warforged, dragonmarks...).
I did - in fact, Urbis was first designed for this very occasion. But I have to admit I didn't understand some of the questions correctly - I only read the FAQ over at ENWorld after I sent in my proposal. Thus, I was not surprised when I didn't get past the first round.
And it wouldn't have worked out anyway - I was drafted next January, and thus wouldn't have had the time to develop the setting in the same time frame...
Is there some simple HTML tag with which I could add identation?
Last April, when I started DMing again, I brought back Godfield as the basis for my new setting. I renamed it Mesion and combined the original Godfield ideas with some of the Eberron stuff, especially its races like Warforged, and a backstory that tied to the end of the previous Quill campaign setting I described earlier. The main theme (a world recovering from a war between the various outsiders) was the same, but the underlying themes became more complex and are starting to take center stage. Notably, the game revolves around the increasing emphasis of order and chaotic forces that were returning to the world and the fate of an incredibly powerful artifact called simply the Infernal Egg, which in a bit of a twist I gave the party before they even hit level 2! To my surprise, they eventually gave it to a semi-trustworthy government agent, though I think their ultimate plan is to get it back after obtaining the two objects needed to actually control it. I'm writing a Story Hour in ENWorld about it, but I'm a few weeks behind as of now.
Well, Urbis doesn't have such a war... yet. But it might have its own version of World War I soon - the situation in the central region, especially around the League of Armach, Hobgoblin Dominions, Thenares and the Alliance of the Pantheon is extremely volatile. Then the world could see some real mass warfare, in combination with the most advanced magic warfare techniques around - and that's not going to be pretty.
Urbis is an analog to Europe before 1914 - and the intensity of WWI took everyone by surprise. Something similar could very well happen here.
http://ashrembayle.atspace.com/Crucible/Crucible%20-%20Home%20Page.html
opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
- Robert A. Heinlein