Masque of Shadows - Campaign Concept: What do you think?

[Desert Hare]

Our group is 1/2 of the way into our current 3E campaign and I've asked Tad (the GM, known here as Superfreak) if I could GM the next 3E campaign. He gave me the green light. So I'm hard at work designing the races, classes and spell system.

Think Ravenloft, but throw out the dark lords, replace the mists with shadow, add in a trickling of post-renaissance tech (guns and the like), a modified Masque of the Red Death/Ravenloft spell system, a skill set that is part Gothic era based/part DnD based and throw in some of what makes Ptolus Ptolus and a race similar to half-vistani and that’s basically what I'm working on. I'm also thinking about adding in a little Iron Kingdoms flair (since the advent of the steam engine and the repercussions of it need to be felt throughout the campaign).

It's a world of waning magic and ascendant technology. As parts of it get completed, I intend to post it up and share with enworld if there's enough interest..

 

[Desert Hare]

I've been informed that my blurb isn't long enough to really capture what I'm going after, so I'll attempt to flesh it out more.


Imagine a fantasy 16th century Eurasia. Imagine a darkness creeping into the land of the living and corrupting magic and making it dangerous to use. Morally ambigous can prove to be a persons undoing (Ravenloft powers checks). This keeps the players on their toes to be able to encourage to not perform to many questionable things.

Races found in a standard fantasy campaign can be found here, but some that are tied to arcane forces have become either mildly corupted or are even more dangerous as a stronger connection to magic is debilitaning and can drive a person mad. A race like the half-vistani is available to play here and they treat Fate Weaving as a class skill.

Spell lists are vastly reworked. No spells above 7th level are allowed. Number of spells castable is decreased. Some more powerful spells are reworked to become rituals (Relics & Rituals), like Resurrection. Powers checks from Ravenloft are imported into the game and possibly sanity too.

Taken from Ptolus is the Firearms listing (though some may be dropped) the Craft (Firearms, Machines), Fate Weaving, Knowledge (machines) & Profession (engineer). These skills are wedded to an amlagamation of Masque of the Red Death and the D&D skill set.

The cleric is greatly reworked to be more like the two anchorite classes found in Heroes of Light. Some class features are melded to the features of ther classes and give rise to new unique classes. Other classes are borrowed from other sources and tweaked to fit the flavor of the game (Aethersmith). Some classes take inspiration from many other campaign sources that they create a class with a same name but a different fell (Noble).


If you have questions regarding other design areas, pleases feel free to ask so that I can get a better idea for what I want from this campaign.