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    Dwarf in the Playground
     
    GnomeWizardGuy

    Join Date
    Mar 2018

    Default A loose collection of notes, comments and meditations on my current campaign setting.

    I have created a setting for my current campaign, that there was a very modest interest about, so I'm publishing it here.
    All comments, ideas and notes are very much appreciated.

    Mediation the First: Goals of the Campaign
    We have a very loose group of people who play a bunch of games. This campaign was sort of an idea to go back to the roots, and play the sort of D&D stuff we played in school - the one with "balanced" homebrew systems, custom setting, and somewhat laid-back beer-and-pretzels approach.
    The campaign would run for levels 4 to about level 14, however the first party TPKd on level 8, and the new one started at level 7.
    Setting
    Here's a google doc with a bunch of overwritten florid prose, half of which is in Russian.

    History:
    Before the known history, the world was full of various monsters, from which the Elder races (Elves, Dwarves and Humans) hid. Eventually, they figured out some magic and weaponry and one way or the other beat up most of the monsters imprisoning them in the Abyss, which is less afterlife and more monster prison.

    As they so did the ones who delivered the final blow to said monsters, would gain powers above and beyond Class Levels, and would later become Kings and Queens of the new nations.

    Then Gnomes and Halflings joined in (or probably came out of hiding) and, being late to the party, have become lesser races.

    Meditation the Second: Sources
    To be honest, a lot of it is pilfered from Exalted. I like Exalted.
    There are currently two known continents, one of which only recently discovered.

    The Old World is a high-utility-magic civilisation,
    where most kingdoms are ruled by god-like Kings and Queens who have a bunch of special powers.

    Meditation the Third: Meritocracy and Royals
    The meritocracy and special powers of Royalty are there because I wanted to equate power in-setting with the power of the characters. That is essentially a protection against the characters dominating the local King/Baron/whatever, and Royals have the mechanical equivalence of Divine Ranks, which comfortably protects them against pretty much any shenanigans.
    Meditation the Fourth: Level Cap
    I've also decided that levels cap out at about 15. Not mechanically, it's just that it takes an extraordinary combination of talent, effort, means and circumstance to get even that far, and there are about few dozen people who reach that level per the whole continent.
    That was mostly because I feel that both setting and system fall apart on both low levels (as mortality is high and the damage too volatile compared to the HP) and on very high levels (as it's really hard to keep the setting coherent, and the whole thing becomes about rocket-tag and there are way too many ways to break things. Also that's the level where even Tier 2 and Tier 3 spellcasters start to not just have advantage over martials, but just become a different sort of animal entirely)
    The players have decided that they come from the Empire of Shadows, which is a Lawful Evil country, that is very much inspired by the Tang Dynasty China: Everything is ruled by Ministries (and the powerful, but not tyrannical Empress), the bureaucracy is vast and relentless, the law is a vehicle for the oppression of the weak by the strong, and everyone is a ****.
    Meditation the Fifth: Not all Edgelords are Bad
    The reason why this was chosen, was because one of my players had a boner for shadow/darkness magic and wanted to play the evil-oriented campaign. He persuaded the others, and they all created their idea of the Empire, with only marginal input from me.
    I found the result quite nice, and not at all edgelordy.
    Rules
    Thus players at the beginning of the game had access to Arcane, mundane and ToB classes, and I introduced some homebrew rules to balance classes at about Tier 2-3, with the vanilla Sorcerer being about the top class power-wise.
    Wizards (and, provisionally, Clerics and Druids) were nerfed, Paladins and Rangers boosted, and Fighters, Rogues, Ninjas and Monks were discouraged and ToB classes were recommended instead.
    We allowed free multiclassing, but one or two-level dips were discouraged.
    MiC was fully allowed and encouraged for use since civilisation was highly magical, and I allowed players to write and use one Incantation each, but no one picked me up on the offer.

    History: The New World - The Northern side
    Unknown to the players, in the New World the history went somewhat the other way:
    There were only two races - the Elves and the Orcs, and instead of becoming Royals, they became closer to what D&D calls gods. They weren't all-powerful, but they were mostly immortal, had the power over certain domains, could grant spells, were strongly aligned with Good, etc. More Olympian gods of Greek myths than the big gods of D&D - so they did not have omnipresence or their own planes, and there was no afterlife. They were just very powerful material beings that were worshipped as gods.

    In the end, there was seven of them, with your standard pagan deity archetypes: Ladar the Sun and Fertility God, Laina, the Goddess of the Just War, Lennert the Master, Laertes the Sea and Poetry God, Lita the Goddess of Nature and Wild Hunt, the Trickster God, and the Goddess of Love and Beauty, for whom I have not yet written names because they have not come up yet.

    The point is, that on the North New World continent the seven L-named Good Gods created a nice Ancient Greek-ish civilisation of hugs and rainbows and bunnies that ran mostly on Divine Magic, with some first steps being made towards figuring out psionics.

    Meditation the Sixth: Paths to Perfection
    The idea in this setting is something I often like to play with, in fiction or in RPG settings - that there are more than one valid paths of progress.
    In real life, if one country has guns, and the other thinks that they have magical bullet-deflecting kung-fu, the kung-fu guys get shot and that's the end of the story.
    In this setting, however, one side has functional magic and kung-fu, the other has (or, rather, had) gods and divine magic, supplemented by the less advanced sorcery, which was just as valid and working (well, until it didn't).
    Why did no side have both: Well, that's a good question, but it pretty much has to do with the uniqueness of circumstances of how gods/royals were created. And it's not super-unrealistic, seeing how in real history we don't know why some civilisations had invented things that others have not.
    Meanwhile in the South
    A similar-ish thing happened with the Evil gods, and therefore an evil civilisation of Chaotic Evil puppy-kicking was created, which worshipped Tiamat, Lloth and Orcus. And sort of through evil magics they mutated themselves into this setting's version of Yuan-Ti.

    The two civilisations, at first separated by a huge continent-spanning mountain chain, eventually met, and eventually went to an all-out extinction-level war with each other.

    In the end, all the gods killed each other in a giant Titanomachy and turned out that their worshippers got so accustomed to depending on their God, that they literally could no longer function without a deity.
    About half went catatonic, or clinically depressed, and the remaning 40% went berserk and kept genociding each other, the last 10% just suffered a horrible spiritual wound and barely were able to function.
    The orcs became stupider and more feral (which is how their -2 to all mental stats happened), the Yuan-Ti got their castes (which I inverted back to purebloods being the most functional ones, while half-bloods were the ones mutated and mentally incapacitated, and broodguards as the lowest, most useless slave caste). Everyone regressed back to the bronze or stone-age technology, avoiding the artefacts of the past since they could drive them insane with the longing for worshipping the divine.

    The whole continent essentially fell into barbarism for a millennium. Until they were discovered by the scouts from the Old World, where our story starts.

    First story
    The first story was supposed to be about the group of mostly Good adventurers, finding one of the last remainging temples of Ladar, finding out about old Good gods, and deciding to try to resurrect them, and bring the Good Religion to their country to make them less of a *****.

    As planned they faffed about learning and exploring the continent until they reached level 5, found the temple by the time they just got level 6, and unknown to them triggered the chain of events that would lead to the old gods (Evil and Good) rising again.
    They picked up some useful divine artefacts, feats and prestige classes, and then did some Good adventuring for levels 7 and 8, until they got TPK'd trying to save an Orc tribe from being enslaved by their **** empire, and an even more dickish BBEG of the story who was a powerful Empire noble/bureaucrat who also discovered remains of Evil gods and decided he wanted to really play Team Evil.

    Second Story
    After the TPK, the players decided that instead of playing the Good rebels trying to make the Empire more Good, they will instead want to play the Empire Loyalists -- essentially stazi serving their evil shadowy empire, bringing the civilised humanoid burden to the lesser breeds without the law, and enjoying the smell of Fireballs in the mornings.
    We generated the party by the same rules (so, again, no divine magic on campaign start, with some promise that they would be able to branch out by the level 9), and kept the timeline, so they got pretty much to the point where their last parties actions and the actions of BBEG led to the oppressive machine of the Empire to go against both local orc tribes and the Old World people who have also picked up the worship of the Good deities just enough to start getting powers from them.
    Meanwhile on the other side of continents
    Last edited by ChudoJogurt; 2019-12-31 at 06:42 PM.

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