Talk to Ashiel About Anything Mark II

[Ashiel]

You are right, he doesn't have any energy resistance, and that leaves him vulnerablerable to only non-magical energy damage effects, which are rare for PCs to use.

Remember, he is going to be in a PvP scenario with half the party vs the other half. He has a Sorcerer/Oracle Lich on his side vs a Paladin/unknown and an Arcanist/Investigator. The Arcanist is the guy asking for help because he's new at the game and the other two (Forsaker and Lich) are veteran munchkins.

Damage reduction. It doesn't do diddly vs Regeneration.

[Ashiel]

Because its 1on1 and they are eventually going to meet eachother for some reason?

Anyway, breaking into a completely different topic: I have thought of a curse that would be somewhat interesting, basically you have a curse or a cursed item that just is a constant "speak with plants" spell on it.
It might sound useful at first and thats the fun part as it seems useful, but heres the curse part: since you cant turn it off or remove it ( without a proper remove curse ) the character constantly hear the whining and talking of all the plants within his range of hearing at all times slowly driving him insane.

Imagne walking in the forest hearing the grass under your feet constantly screaming and complaining that you are stepping on them, or the trees around you talking crap about your band of adventures or other useless things. Mechanically it would make your perception for hearing a lot worse ( take a -5 or more depending on the density of the plantlife )

I was thinking of having a NPC that became a hermit on a top of a icy mountain just to get away from all of the voices, and maybe he just have just a single mountain tree he speaks to just to appear insane to the players that find him.

That is hilariously awesome. I've pondered the fun someone could have with bestow curse using the limits of the spell as a guide for what sort of curses you could place on someone. Lots of really fun curses wouldn't even have to have mechanical ramifications. For example, a curse such as "Animals go out of their way to urinate on you" would be a hilariously cruel curse with no mechanical downside for the cursed (well, perhaps making you particularly vulnerable to Scent since things keep marking you as their territory). But that's the sort of curse that will certainly make people want to lock themselves indoors.

[Klara Meison]

I will point out that they'd be loosing 11 points worth of stats over their career. Not being able to benefit from spells means no inherent modifiers from wish. Their lack of mobility isn't particularly helpful either since even being able to fart antimagic fields won't protect you against prismatic spells (such as prismatic wall, prismatic spray, etc), and IIRC I don't think spells like wall of force care about antimagic field. Spell Sunder on the barbarian side is a supernatural ability so that's off the table, so CC'ing the guy by simply placing obstacles in his way seems simple enough. At least until 15th level where he gets super goofy magic immunity.

I also noticed that the class lacks any sort of energy resistances which is bad news. There's a lot of ways of drowning a character in elemental damage without directly affecting the character with magic. For example, this character is vulnerable to alchemist-fire spam throughout its entire career. Most adventurers can be comfortably immune to alchemist fire spam by low-mid levels (6+ maybe) easily enough, but a bunch of goblins no longer worth XP can melt one of these guys to pieces. He's likewise vulnerable to all sorts of environmental effects, and Ex energy damage attacks such as the Ankheg's acid spitting ability, etc.

There's also little protection for him against things like planar binding since such creatures are called rather than summoned. So a cleric can still just gate in a Solar and let it rip him to shreds (fun fact, it's literally impossible for this guy to kill a solar since there's no non-supernatural way of inflicting aligned damage to the solar, to my knowledge).

I wouldn't ever play one of these. If only because their options consist of "I attack it again, I don't even activate any magic items".

I don't think that everyone agrees with your stance on Wish snowcone machines being a feature and not a bug, Ashen One. And how did you get "11 points worth of stats" anyways? Assuming +6 enhancement to all stats and +5 inherent, it comes down to just 6, or 1 difference in each stat. Am I missing something?

>I wouldn't ever play one of these. If only because their options consist of "I attack it again, I don't even activate any magic items".

It's a great class for a cohort, expecially if you can find a race with inherent ex energy resistance. Some amusing tactics can be achieved when you have a ball of anti-magic you can throw around.

Why are one player and the newb o one team while Munchkin 1 and Munchkin 2 are on the other?

Religious affiliations?

[Tels]

Actually, Forsaker gains +10 to all states by level 19. They gain +2 to all stats at level 3 and a further +2 every 4 levels afterward. So even if you just use the generic Heroic NPC array of 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8 then you would end up with 25, 24, 23, 22, 20, 18 before racial and level up bonuses. So while they may be missing out on +5 inherent and +6 enhancement, they are only a +1 behind everyone else as they gain scaling bonuses to make up for it.

[Kryzbyn]

I'll have to keep the Forsaker in mind...
My group uses ABP :)

[DracoknightZero]

I'll have to keep the Forsaker in mind...
My group uses ABP :)

No! BAD COOKIE! No cake for you!

[137beth]

I'll have to keep the Forsaker in mind...
My group uses ABP :)

Does Paizo's ABP actually do what it's supposed to do? I've used Grod's anti-Christmas Tree rules in 3.5, and they do work, but Paizo's ABP doesn't seem to do more than a small fraction of what Grod did.

[Tels]

Ashiel-senpai, is this.... Well, I guess my phone has learned my speech, it just auto corrected "Ashiel" into "Ashiel-senpai" :D

Anyway... Is this person, like, an illegitimate offspring, or long lost twin? Perhaps a secret cultist? (Read all of his comments on Urgathoa)

[DracoknightZero]

Hmm, i like their discussion about atheism in D&D. Especially the planescape version where they respect the powers of the so-called "divine" but they have no right to judge or meddle in mortal affairs.

Like this Atheist paladin concept i found on a site that should not be mentioned:

How about an atheist paladin who believes that all 'outsiders' should stop interefering with the material plane (the number of good gods to evil ones is 90 to 198, based just off domains- and the good gods make a mess of things too going on crusades, catching people in the crossfire).

For mechanical reasons, I had this paladin worship Irori because
A. Irori was a human that gained godhood through his own efforts. Fairly respectable, and it means he understands the mortal perspective
B. He is fairly hands off. He lets you find your own way to enlightenment, and only interferes when people (especially other gods or outsiders, I would assume) mess with his followers.
C. Focus on honing yourself-useful for someone that militantly wants to fight off both good and bad outsiders- intends to be self reliant as much as possible.

[Klara Meison]

Ashen One had a pretty good atheist paladin/cleric concept somewhere on the old forums, but I can't find it at the moment.

[Lemmy]

I blame Phasmara's jerkness on JJ. She's his pet mary sue goddess, and he apparently shares many of her views, although he's business-sawy enough to not explicitly say it out loud.

[DracoknightZero]

I blame Phasmara's jerkness on JJ. She's his pet mary sue goddess, and he apparently shares many of her views, although he's business-sawy enough to not explicitly say it out loud.

I have argued on his logic and Golarion world more than once.... i rather not bring him around here for sure...

[Kryzbyn]

Does Paizo's ABP actually do what it's supposed to do? I've used Grod's anti-Christmas Tree rules in 3.5, and they do work, but Paizo's ABP doesn't seem to do more than a small fraction of what Grod did.

Yeah, it does for the most part...we use a modified version that gives you more choice on certain things. By 20th, you end up with +6 to one or +4 to two main and secondary stats, +5 AC, +5 all saves, +5 deflection bonus, +5 natural armor bonus, +5 to hit and damage...

[137beth]

I blame Phasmara's jerkness on JJ. She's his pet mary sue goddess, and he apparently shares many of her views, although he's business-sawy enough to not explicitly say it out loud.

I thought Iomodae was JJ's Mary Sue in WotR? Or maybe he has more than one. He seems to have a decent number of Gary Stus too--I don't think it is a gender bias.

Yeah, it does for the most part...we use a modified version that gives you more choice on certain things. By 20th, you end up with +6 to one or +4 to two main and secondary stats, +5 AC, +5 all saves, +5 deflection bonus, +5 natural armor bonus, +5 to hit and damage...

Interesting. How do you deal with certain classes not being able to get flight/protections from certain divinations/other stuff adventurers need but not all classes can get without items?

[DracoknightZero]

I thought Iomodae was JJ's Mary Sue in WotR? Or maybe he has more than one. He seems to have a decent number of Gary Stus too--I don't think it is a gender bias.

Well Pharasma was extremly anti-Atheist and had some more "harsh" biases towards certian alignments ( read religions ) and it was wastly toned down in the current offical versions because it was mentioned JJ shared some of her "traits" in that aspect.

At least thats the version i have heard, could be wastly errorous in the details, but its kinda the gist of it.

[Kryzbyn]

Interesting. How do you deal with certain classes not being able to get flight/protections from certain divinations/other stuff adventurers need but not all classes can get without items?

ABP doesn't remove the need for all magic items, just the ones that provide the above bonuses.

[Kryzbyn]

For my next Pathfinder character, I'm thinking of trying a Deep Marshal Magus. For the theme, he'll be a dwarf (I do love playing dwarves...)
We usually play gestalt and with the following array: 18, 16, 16, 14, 12, 10 before racial mods. What do you think a good gestalt choice would be?
I'm leaning toward vanilla fighter (advanced weapon training allows him to grab a warpriests bonuses with his warhammer) or possibly a stone lord paladin (this would be mostly for flavor; they give up most of the nice stuff a paladin gets).
Any other ideas or synergies?

[Lemmy]

I thought Iomodae was JJ's Mary Sue in WotR? Or maybe he has more than one.

I think Iomedae is just really, really poorly written in that AP. I don't know how much of it is reflective of her actual character concept and how much is bad writing. However, quite a few o JJ's statements led me to believe Pharasma is at least among his favorite characters. Quite possibly his #1 favorite.

He seems to have a decent number of Gary Stus too--I don't think it is a gender bias.

I never said it was. I usually use the term "mary sue" for characters of both genders. Also, Pharasma is female (AFAIK).

[Lemmy]

Anyway...

Ash (and everyone else ),

How would you go about creating a setting where humans are relatively rare, being newcomers in a weird world/continent/plane/whatever and so far only having had time to create a handful of cities?

What contextual and metagame implications can you predict? What would happen to a continent where the other races exist, living mostly in isolation from one another, if humans were suddenly introduced into the mix?

What if the humans had relatively advanced technology (for a mostly medieval world), but not the resources necessary to use/create it? (The idea being that most humans who actually knew how to create/use said technology either died on whatever event caused the humans to leave their land or on their way to this new world).

[Kryzbyn]

There would be hella culture shock for the other races for sure.
This reminds me of the Alera Codex books by Butcher. Humans from the Roman era appeared on a world that had never seen a human before, nor a structured society and military. There was plenty of war...

[137beth]

Sorta reminds me of Mother 3, where Pokey travels from the present time to a world with no wars or money, and stirs up a lot of trouble.

[Tels]

I guess it depends on the type of humans you use. Are they the Three G type, God, Glory and Gold, ala Columbus and Cortez, or are they more like the Vikings who landed in the Americas hundreds of years before any other European ships? All three interacted with the Natives, but only one didn't proceed to ruthlessly dominate and exterminate the locals. Because that plays a huge factor in the over-all interactions.

If the humans are the more explorer type, lime the Vikings, they could be more interested in exploring the land and meeting the people. When the Norse landed, they built temporary settlements to survive the winter and traded with locals, and left in the spring/summer.

But if they're the Three G type, the major hostility and arrogance is to be expected. They should think they are superior to anyone else and seek to integrate and dominate the cultures around them.

It'd be kind of interesting if, perhaps, rival sects of humans crashed in a space battle, or something. Like, maybe one side had a history of unleashing genocide on previously visited worlds to secure resources, and the other side can no longer stand all the death.

To make it a little more morally gray, the violent human s have a reason for it, perhaps preparation for a threat from another world that seeks the death or subjugation of all species, or something, and the non-genocidal humans, not knowing better, have a different viewpoint that is actually very dangerous, like disarming to show a lack of hostility to prompt peaceful negotiation, not realizing there will be zero peace where this threat is involved.

As for meta changes or differences... There won't be a "Common" tongue, unless another race has dominated the face of the planet. Each race with speak it's on language, so knowing more languages should be important. In addition, things won't be built to human standard, I.e., most cities will be sized to non-humans.

You might have multiple countries with a dwarven majority populations so most everything is sized for a dwarf. You might have entirely halfling countries, or gnome countries.

Most racial options for humans should be wiped away, as they are all part of a very small bloodline on the planet now. While they could have carried some of the differences from their previous world, they likely stuck together on the new planet and lost many of the racial diversity options and need to start over again. Especially if they were more technologically advanced and now have to revert and relearn things.

[DracoknightZero]

Hmm, you could do a "Endless Legends" type where the humans are from a high tech civilization in space and then get cut off from that civilization crashland into a planet and over hundreds of years their tech malfunction or is in extremly limited supply and they have to go with "high-tech looking swords and armor"

Or you have the "Star Ocean" setup where you have ordinary humans that observed the other races and somehow their starbase get shot down and they are left to fend for themselves... This plot is very similar to the Star Trek episode of the same setup.

You could also see the recent "GATE" anime, though i havent seen it myself you could have high tech modern humans meet with the ancient alien races, and/or have that gate shut and you have humans stranded on this world, but are seen as "elves" to the other races as a earthling lives longer than most beings in this world ( or slower span of time )

This is ideas based on "Modern humans in a New world" deal, you could have "Young human race rising in a old world" which is basically Tolkien.
So take your pick really, personally i think its more interesting to have the "X generation of forgotten colonists" with modern designs, but had to backtrack to swords and shields due to Y issues.

So it depends on what you theme you go for and then you can see how a world would react to them: Modern humans: Most likely as elves, or "The outsiders" and have a fear of them due to their interactions in the past when they still had technology, and the only reason to why they arent wiped out is the old fear from stories back then.

If you have the humans are young and on the rise, you are kinda subbing humans for orcs. Young violent race, organized and potent.

[Kryzbyn]

For my next Pathfinder character, I'm thinking of trying a Deep Marshal Magus. For the theme, he'll be a dwarf (I do love playing dwarves...)
We usually play gestalt and with the following array: 18, 16, 16, 14, 12, 10 before racial mods. What do you think a good gestalt choice would be?
I'm leaning toward vanilla fighter (advanced weapon training allows him to grab a warpriests bonuses with his warhammer) or possibly a stone lord paladin (this would be mostly for flavor; they give up most of the nice stuff a paladin gets).
Any other ideas or synergies?

No ideas here?

[Lemmy]

Lots of great insight here. Thanks guys!

To add a few more details, if that helps (and anyone is interested ):

The idea is that humans arrived in a large fleet of ships (seafaring ships, not spaceships) at the eastern coast of the yet unnamed continent (by unnamed, I mean I didn't think of a name yet. Its inhabitants certainly have a name for it) just slightly south of the mountains where the dwarfs make their home (the reason is that the first thing they'd see from their ships is the mountain range, so they sailed towards it and then outlined the mountain range until they found a place suitable for landing).

Humans' original homeland was made all but completely uninhabitable by some unspecified catastrophe (most likely caused by humans themselves). The fleet is basically a bunch of refugees seeking a place to stay. Their journey lasted a couple decades, however, and at the moment when they landed in this new continent, most people who knew how to use/create/maintain their technology was either dead or quite old.

In any case, human technology is not on par with modern technology... It's more Steampunk-ish. Maybe something close (but not equal) to the Iron Kingdoms. They have steam and gunpowder, but anything much more advanced than that is either lost or unusable. Humans settled on an small island a few miles from the coast at first, then moved on to the actual continent, establishing a few coastal cities (well... towns, I suppose).

I have a few sketches for their first interactions with other races, but nothing settled on stone yet.

Spoiler: Meeting Dwarfs!

Show

Because they landed next to the mountains, dwarfs were the first race to have contact (or at least, prolonged contact) with the arriving humans. I'm thinking the two races got along without significant incidents, since most humans would rather not live on unknown mountains or undergrounds (at least not while there's plenty of space next to the coast), there was no real territorial disputes. Both races sharing an industrial mind-set also helps (maybe they traded technology?)... Of course, this may very well change as human population grows, if they decide to expand towards the mountains and/or explore it for minerals.

Spoiler: Meeting Elves!

Show

Elves were cautiously curious about the newcomers, but didn't bother interacting with them at first. My current idea is that as humans started expanding at a rate completely insane for elven standards, our pointy-eared friends, having had some bad experience with orcs in the past, decided to act before humans destroyed too much of the continent's biosphere. After a short, but intense conflict... Humans and elves reached an uneasy truce, where humans "agreed" to not deforest beyond a certain boundary. Basically... There's a large natural reserve between the elven kingdoms and the human settlements, which serves as a "neutral zone".

[Zilrax]

No ideas here?

Suspect there aren't a lot of Magus players. I've never used one myself. But I'll roll with it.

Magus are sorta renowned for their shocking grasp tactics but it doesn't fare well against most outsiders. Taking a level into Wizard or Arcanist to get access to Admixture, allowing you to change the energy type of it may help. Plus more touch spells to grope faces with.

Dreadnought Barbarian can let you get half the bonuses but still use your spells and get some nice rage powers.

Get a Conductive weapon and choose antipaladin, deliver your nasty touches via sword to weaken them then follow up with various spells.

Alternatively take cleric and use the Lightning subdomain. May as well go full Thor on things.

[Lemmy]

No ideas here?

Hmmm... I think I'd go with Slayer or maybe Ranger. Oracle and Bard/Skald would be cool, if they didn't use Cha . Unchained Rogue might work as well...

[Klara Meison]

I thought Iomodae was JJ's Mary Sue in WotR? Or maybe he has more than one. He seems to have a decent number of Gary Stus too--I don't think it is a gender bias.

Paizo writing has so many Mary Sues, plot holes and general deus-ex-machina's it's not even funny.

Spoiler: Significant Curse of the Crimson Throne spoilers

Show

So, when that adventure starts, you find this playing card in your house, which gives you a time and a place. You go there, meet the rest of the party and a lady questgiver who gives you a hint where you can find Lamm(person who was hyped up as this untouchable unfindable mafiosi, who ****ed over everyone in the party at least once, and at that point you are thinking "Well, here is the BBEG for the first book"). Lady very unabashedly hints that it was she who snuck the card into your house, bringing you all together. You later find out that she is dead and is actually a ghost thingy tied to the deck of cards, and the ones you got vere illusory.

Well, here is the thing. She literally couldn't have done it. She has no abilities that let her manifest illusions so good they don't grant a save when interracted with from across the city with no line of effect or line of sight and god knows how many walls in the middle. "O but it doesn't matter focus on the story hurr durr"-it actually does matter very much. I was told about this by a friend who played through CotCT, and at one point they had to get a piece of information to a person on the other end of town. So he said "Well, lets call up our lady ghost friend and ask her to do it, like she did with our cards". Nope. Not possible.

And by default you kill/capture Lamm in session one. Talk about overhyping.

Want more? A second serving of plot holes coming up! At the end of first book there is a scene with a public execution. One person participating is JJ's self-insert character who is pretty much batman. Yes, with the costume. Yes, makes about as much realistic sense as the original. What that batman does is stop the execution, right in front of everyone(like half a city is gathered) call for a rebellion, then attempt to escape with the executionee. Party is basically assumed to be helping them. Yep, help out an open rebel out in the open in front of like half of the city, the queen, her guards, and god knows how many other important people. But that's not the insane part. Insane part is that if batman escapes, he manages to hide from Queen's wrath for months. Queen is a high-level caster with a lot of time and money on her hands, and a particular hate for rebels. Batman is something like Fighter 3/Swashbuckler 1. How he manages to not be found in less than a day is beyond me.

Still here? Well, here is the big one. See, CotCT is generally considered the best adventure path by Paizo out there. Pretty much everyone agrees on that. And out of that whole adventure, book 2 is the central point. Devs literally said that the rest has been written as more or less background for book 2. Book 2 of CotCT is where the best of the best Paizo has to offer in terms of writing quality is. What happens in that book is complicated, but basically the whole city suddenly gets infected with a plague. Dropping the question of how the flying flickety flock a mundane plague can function in a world with Remove Disease(it's really rather easy when you consider population mechanics and how many clerics there are in a city), that plague is the whole point of book 2. You do all sorts of quests related to the plague, trying to find out how it started in the process.

Well, riddle me this. What does an adventurer who is just about out of the "amazing mundane people" range do with a problem? How about a threat?

They deal with it. Directly. They don't run away or ignore it, that has been passed behind 2 levels ago. So, what's a good way to deal with a plague? Well, you try to find a cure. AP blessedly enough gives you a fair amount of downtime to allow for this, so unless your Wizard/Witch/Alchemist/Harbinger is particularily lazy or selfish, they would probably either try to either find a cure themselves through experimentation or try to join an existing research division(it has been announced that The Crown is working on the cure by that point in the AP). Well, guess what. AP has literally no support for this rather obvious idea. None. Nada. Nill. Nihil subsidium.

So, here we have the best book out of the best AP, and it assumes the players will sit on their hands and go on stupid quests on the level of "go and kill those 10 evil people, don't ask questions" to pass the time instead of actually trying to do something productive.

Yeah, not terribly sad about leaving Paizo forums.

Anyway...

Ash (and everyone else ),

How would you go about creating a setting where humans are relatively rare, being newcomers in a weird world/continent/plane/whatever and so far only having had time to create a handful of cities?

What contextual and metagame implications can you predict? What would happen to a continent where the other races exist, living mostly in isolation from one another, if humans were suddenly introduced into the mix?

What if the humans had relatively advanced technology (for a mostly medieval world), but not the resources necessary to use/create it? (The idea being that most humans who actually knew how to create/use said technology either died on whatever event caused the humans to leave their land or on their way to this new world).

Depends. Are we talking about an RPG? Because then you also have to consider who the players are. If they are all humans, i'd consider making the human society more modern-level or perhaps a bit into the future(maybe self-driving cars and intelligent houses are a thing, but not teleportation or space elevators). That way the players will have a lot of background knowledge on their society, and none on the society of this new world, which will help roleplaying a ton. Unless one of your players is an engineer, you probably won't have any trouble with them suddenly figuring out how to make technology either(they may have ideas like "steam machines are good" or "we should make steel", but probably won't know how to do it). I'd likewise make the world the humans were thrust into more medieval/magic-focused, to give a good background for modern technology being awesome.

On the other hand, if players were from the magical world, humans would probably be either the enemy or a powerful third party that everyone would try to get on their side. Then I'd perhaps move technology even more into the future, and have humans accidentally annihilate a few cities with superguns because they didn't know what that small shiny button on the ship's console did.

As for worldbuilding...unless there is some sort of diplomancer amongst the humans, this is a star trek-style expedition or there are only a handful(party+a couple more) humans, they'd probably do what humans do 90% of the time when meeting a less developed civilisation-loot, pillage and murder their way across the continent, replace all the goverments with democracies(or whatever kind is the most popular with those humans), take a whole bunch of slaves and leave everyone really angry at them.

[Tels]

No ideas here?

Nah, I just forgot.

You might take the Weapon Master Fighter archetype and Advanced Weapon Training as a Fighter bonus feat a couple of times to make use of the advanced weapon training options. Like, take Versatile Weapon to use your BAB in place of ranks in 2 skills from a limited selection of skills. Or take the Tactician option to treat all allies as having your teamwork fests, like the Inquisitor, and then stock up on a few of the better ones, like Outflank.

[Edit] Okay, so I actually read Deep Marshal, and Fighter with Advanced Weapon Training can do you some good. For example, if you opt to not take Weapon Master, you can take the feat once ever 5 levels, but the bonuses are no longer limited to only your one, single, weapon, line with the Weapon Master. What this means, is, if you choose Axes as your weapon group, you can take Finesse Fighter and gain Weapon Finesse with all weapons in the Axes weapon group [I]even if they normally wouldnt be able to![I] Or you can take Weapon Spirit to get around the Arcana limit on weapon choices. You can also take the Weapon Specialist option to apply feats line Weapon Focus and Weapon Specialization to all of the weapons in your weapon group.

Make sure to go through the Advanced Weapon Training options as there are a lot of interesting things in there.


Another option might be to go with the Investigator, to capitalize on similar build options, high Dex, high Int, etc. You can turn your Dwarf Magus into a super skill monkey, via Inspiration as well. Or you can opt to go Str!Magus and use Investigator to take Mutagens to make you stronger and turn yourself into some sort of Arcane Spellcasting Hulk.

You could also go Wild blooded Sage Sorcerer to get an Intelligence based spontaneous class to back up your prepared Magus casting. You can also get around the limitations of your Spellcasting this way too.

[Tels]

Lots of great insight here. Thanks guys!

To add a few more details, if that helps (and anyone is interested ):

The idea is that humans arrived in a large fleet of ships (seafaring ships, not spaceships) at the eastern coast of the yet unnamed continent (by unnamed, I mean I didn't think of a name yet. Its inhabitants certainly have a name for it) just slightly south of the mountains where the dwarfs make their home (the reason is that the first thing they'd see from their ships is the mountain range, so they sailed towards it and then outlined the mountain range until they found a place suitable for landing).

Humans' original homeland was made all but completely uninhabitable by some unspecified catastrophe (most likely caused by humans themselves). The fleet is basically a bunch of refugees seeking a place to stay. Their journey lasted a couple decades, however, and at the moment when they landed in this new continent, most people who knew how to use/create/maintain their technology was either dead or quite old.

In any case, human technology is not on par with modern technology... It's more Steampunk-ish. Maybe something close (but not equal) to the Iron Kingdoms. They have steam and gunpowder, but anything much more advanced than that is either lost or unusable. Humans settled on an small island a few miles from the coast at first, then moved on to the actual continent, establishing a few coastal cities (well... towns, I suppose).

I have a few sketches for their first interactions with other races, but nothing settled on stone yet.

Spoiler: Meeting Dwarfs!

Show

Because they landed next to the mountains, dwarfs were the first race to have contact (or at least, prolonged contact) with the arriving humans. I'm thinking the two races got along without significant incidents, since most humans would rather not live on unknown mountains or undergrounds (at least not while there's plenty of space next to the coast), there was no real territorial disputes. Both races sharing an industrial mind-set also helps (maybe they traded technology?)... Of course, this may very well change as human population grows, if they decide to expand towards the mountains and/or explore it for minerals.

Spoiler: Meeting Elves!

Show

Elves were cautiously curious about the newcomers, but didn't bother interacting with them at first. My current idea is that as humans started expanding at a rate completely insane for elven standards, our pointy-eared friends, having had some bad experience with orcs in the past, decided to act before humans destroyed too much of the continent's biosphere. After a short, but intense conflict... Humans and elves reached an uneasy truce, where humans "agreed" to not deforest beyond a certain boundary. Basically... There's a large natural reserve between the elven kingdoms and the human settlements, which serves as a "neutral zone".

Im not sure the Dwarves and Humans would actually fight too much in this case. Humans are fairly lazy creatures, so why would they try and start mining the Mountains if they have a good relationship with a race of beings who are already mining it, and already have huge fortresses and cities built into said mines? Better to just trade with them, than try and take it from them. Or perhaps even send people into the mines and work with the dwarves to improve mining, like via their steampunk technology.

How long will the Truce last between humans and elves? The humans are going to need more wood eventually, even if they aren't expanding and population has stabilized. They need it for houses, wagons, barrels and all sorts of things. Eventually, someone is going to cross that border.

Unless the elves have taught the humans some alternative method of acquiring sufficient wood? Like, I'm picturing the elves from Warcraft games were able to acquire lumber without cutting down trees through a magical method. It was slower than just cutting them down, but it didn't damage the trees.

What is the relationship between dwarves and elves? Stereotypical Tolkien one of "mutual dislike" between them? Or something different? The about other races, like halfling and gnomes? I assume half-orc and half-lives are basically non-existant as there just hasn't been enough time for such races to really be even a minority instead of a unique being. What other races will be playable in this setting, as that will greatly change how the setting is shaped.