fun_at_funerals
2010-02-19, 12:00 AM
Alright, a friend of mine and I are planning of running a homebrew campaign set in a world with a kind of 16th-18th century European Age of Discovery aesthetic going. The core motif of the world is developing along the lines of a kind of "World in disjunction" or "Inconsistent World". Characters are going to be encountering civilizations that parallel the rise to power of the Germanic Tribes and Byzantine/Holy Roman Empire, French Napoleonic Imperialism, the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and the Great War/World War I period with a whole lot of fantasy elements thrown in there acting as technological analogues. We're trying to make this as detailed as possible. So much so that we're actually crafting a campaign codex for the players (which includes a bunch of variant combat rules that account for the particular war doctrines of the eras involved).
We're doing fine on the history and geopolitical configuration of the world (we've even drawn up an elaborate map that marks political borders, areas of dispute, trade routes, and such), what we need help with is the cosmology.
The idea was that we were going to develop a cosmology that deviated a tad from that of Traditional D&D where planes were seen as orbiting the material plan in a fashion similar to the orderly Ptolemian Geocentric model. Instead, we were thinking of going with the idea of "chaotic space" where the entire cosmology kinda IMPLODED and there are bits and pieces of every plane mixing with one another. For an easy analogy, think of the ocean that has various current and counter currents mixing and colliding with one another as they follow their own natural course, making contact but never really merging. In our world, there will be pockets of "Weird Zones" that would manifest dimensional and metaphysical anomalies and their own particular local natural laws independent of the True/Real/Natural world. Think of the Manifest Zones in Ebberron but helluva lot more chaotic. We even adapted Knowledge Planes to Knowledge Astral-Geocosmic Topography.
We wanted the player to be immersed in a world where they'll be able to encounter the kind of weird ass **** you find in outer space, quantum mechanics, and Scifi by simply walking far enough or taking a wrong turn (the world is huge by the way. I mean, the central continent where the characters will be based covers more land area than the whole of Asia and half of Europe combined!). They'll be encountering things like "Chaos Space", "Warp Storms", "Reality Eddies", "Pockets of Relative Space-Time", "Wormholes", "BLACKHOLES", and, more importantly places with Relative Dimensional Ecologies. Basically, all the crap you'd find in outer space. Space and time is so screwed up that (assuming we unfold all the folds in space time across the continent) the land area of the continent would nearly double. It's cool because they even have an Age of Discovery thing going where the "New World" is located in the folds in the fabric of space-time in the "Old World."
What we need help with is how the dimensional variation on a single plane would affect the characters. That is, affect them in a significant and palpable way. We were thinking of simply adopting some of the planar traits from the various manuals on D&D planes but we thought that if we limited ourselves to that it would be pretty boring and wouldn't reflect just how significantly the topography of the world affected the native civilizations. I mean, they developed their different professions and industry guilds to takes these anomalies into account. The Logistics guild exploits folds in space time that would shorten travel, Prospectors look at the relative dimensional mechanics/ecologies of certain locals to find ways to harness raw materials that only exist in those spaces (and cease to exist should they leave those spaces), Fabricator Guilds look at production methods that exploit the relative local physics of certain regions that are different and crazy enough to allow them, the Meteorologists don't just study weather patterns but wandering dimensional anomalies and adjustments in space-time. Scholars, in fact, find it inaccurate to think the cosmos as consisting of multiple dimensions but, rather, think that it is more correctly a singular dimension but with multiple mediums for/of existence.
Other than generic effects like "Empowering Fire Spells" or "Extending and Maximizing spells with the Shadow Descriptor" or even "1:10 Time ratio and subjective gravity" or "No red and poultry meat, only fish" what other crazy stuff could we possibly throw at our PC's and use to define the world? Their effects should as much as possible affect characters in some way, but their planar characteristics should not be limited to having an effect on the game mechanic but should also have consequences fluff-wise. :smallbiggrin:
We were already thinking of adapting several magical locations, particularly, the Metamagic Storm/Malestrom from Complete Mage (or was it Arcane?) as well we Dead Magic Zones from Faerun. We were also thinking of a Zero-G zone where fabricators exploit the lack of gravity to create perfectly round shotgun slugs, thereby making them more accurate, or produce perfectly shaped crystals to be used in their magic based "electronics"
We're doing fine on the history and geopolitical configuration of the world (we've even drawn up an elaborate map that marks political borders, areas of dispute, trade routes, and such), what we need help with is the cosmology.
The idea was that we were going to develop a cosmology that deviated a tad from that of Traditional D&D where planes were seen as orbiting the material plan in a fashion similar to the orderly Ptolemian Geocentric model. Instead, we were thinking of going with the idea of "chaotic space" where the entire cosmology kinda IMPLODED and there are bits and pieces of every plane mixing with one another. For an easy analogy, think of the ocean that has various current and counter currents mixing and colliding with one another as they follow their own natural course, making contact but never really merging. In our world, there will be pockets of "Weird Zones" that would manifest dimensional and metaphysical anomalies and their own particular local natural laws independent of the True/Real/Natural world. Think of the Manifest Zones in Ebberron but helluva lot more chaotic. We even adapted Knowledge Planes to Knowledge Astral-Geocosmic Topography.
We wanted the player to be immersed in a world where they'll be able to encounter the kind of weird ass **** you find in outer space, quantum mechanics, and Scifi by simply walking far enough or taking a wrong turn (the world is huge by the way. I mean, the central continent where the characters will be based covers more land area than the whole of Asia and half of Europe combined!). They'll be encountering things like "Chaos Space", "Warp Storms", "Reality Eddies", "Pockets of Relative Space-Time", "Wormholes", "BLACKHOLES", and, more importantly places with Relative Dimensional Ecologies. Basically, all the crap you'd find in outer space. Space and time is so screwed up that (assuming we unfold all the folds in space time across the continent) the land area of the continent would nearly double. It's cool because they even have an Age of Discovery thing going where the "New World" is located in the folds in the fabric of space-time in the "Old World."
What we need help with is how the dimensional variation on a single plane would affect the characters. That is, affect them in a significant and palpable way. We were thinking of simply adopting some of the planar traits from the various manuals on D&D planes but we thought that if we limited ourselves to that it would be pretty boring and wouldn't reflect just how significantly the topography of the world affected the native civilizations. I mean, they developed their different professions and industry guilds to takes these anomalies into account. The Logistics guild exploits folds in space time that would shorten travel, Prospectors look at the relative dimensional mechanics/ecologies of certain locals to find ways to harness raw materials that only exist in those spaces (and cease to exist should they leave those spaces), Fabricator Guilds look at production methods that exploit the relative local physics of certain regions that are different and crazy enough to allow them, the Meteorologists don't just study weather patterns but wandering dimensional anomalies and adjustments in space-time. Scholars, in fact, find it inaccurate to think the cosmos as consisting of multiple dimensions but, rather, think that it is more correctly a singular dimension but with multiple mediums for/of existence.
Other than generic effects like "Empowering Fire Spells" or "Extending and Maximizing spells with the Shadow Descriptor" or even "1:10 Time ratio and subjective gravity" or "No red and poultry meat, only fish" what other crazy stuff could we possibly throw at our PC's and use to define the world? Their effects should as much as possible affect characters in some way, but their planar characteristics should not be limited to having an effect on the game mechanic but should also have consequences fluff-wise. :smallbiggrin:
We were already thinking of adapting several magical locations, particularly, the Metamagic Storm/Malestrom from Complete Mage (or was it Arcane?) as well we Dead Magic Zones from Faerun. We were also thinking of a Zero-G zone where fabricators exploit the lack of gravity to create perfectly round shotgun slugs, thereby making them more accurate, or produce perfectly shaped crystals to be used in their magic based "electronics"