d20 Modern on a Different World?

What do we think? Is there interest in running a game set on, say, a world with different geology, history and racial make up from our own world? What would Greyhawk, the Realms or somesuch be like?

Comments?

I think they'd be a lot like Urban Arcana. Hobgoblin police, Gnoll pimps, Ogre hockey players, Drow nightclubs, and so on...
The things to consider would be the political scenes...
How would the nations evolve?
How would Greyhawk remain free?

In the Realms, how would Elminster deal with technology? How far in the future? Long enough that even the Elves have lived with modern culture and accoutrements for a couple of generations, or will they long for the good ol' days before all these new fangled TeeVees, Radios, and Automobiles?
What will the industrial revolution have been like with the existence of magic alongside the cotton gin?
Who will have been the Martin Luther King Jr. of the Kobolds? The Minotaurs?
Who will have equal rights?
Will Orcs have to sit at the back of the bus, and only drink out of fountains marked for Orcs?
There is a veritable PLETHORA of ideas for gaming in Greyhawk or the Realms with D20 Modern...
I'd be quite willing to shoot some ideas into this thread on how I think things would have progressed... maybe we can hash out a well developed world that people would like to game in... I've been trying, for about a year to do this, but as a one monkey circus, it doesn't go far.
Interested in hashing it out?

This is exactly...

...the kind of reply for which I'd been hoping!

I've a semi-developed concept called Enclaves of Coralis that I've been kicking around for a while. In it, the "Good Races" live in large cities, well defended from the "Evil Races" that live in the wild. The Wild Areas were, until recently the thousand-year domain of a Dark Lord (a Great Lich or Dragon) who was defeated in a War to End All Wars. (Think of the world reawakening after a Hitler victory in WWII)

Now, the Enclaves (there are 12 of them) are sending out armed parties (adventurers, you see) and the ruins of the Dark Lord's Realm are the targets of Corporate Relic Hunter Teams, opprotunists, and wizards looking to load up their spell books.

If this is a little close to typical D&D, my apologies, but I wanted to avoid the itchy "Shadow" thingie found in UA... Ya See?

Ya get guns, monsters, spells and cars... just want I wanted... but I'm not entirely happy with it... Wanna help me polish it?

It could certainly be interesting.

What would underground dwarvin and drow cities in a modern world be like? or would these two cultures still even live in there traditional enviroments anymore?

This is..

Jeremy757 said:

What would underground dwarvin and drow cities in a modern world be like? or would these two cultures still even live in there traditional enviroments anymore?

Click to expand...

... the gist of the discussion.

In Coralis, I picture much of the world currently suffering much as the so-called 3rd world does in our world. The Enclaves might be race-specific (which smacks a bit of Everquest and Warcraft) or more cosmopolitan, each of them unto New York or the Mega-Cities of Judge Dredd. Who's to say one or two of them aren't underground or in a mountain fastness?

As the folk of Coralis struggle to rebuild, we can map basic fantasy tropes onto various things: Elves are dying out or rare in most worlds, so in Coralis, they live in Reservations, much like Amerindians in our world. Dwarves live in mountains, and run mining companies, Gnomes probably work at Radio Shack. And out on the devestated plains of the Great South, there's a dragon looking to become the next ruler of the world.

I've got the first few Enclaves figured out, and what I've got suggests starting occupations for characters, Regional Feats and possibly much more.

There was an old Dragon magazine a couple of years back that hits on this, the issue covered:

Greyhawk Y2K
D&D meets differnt time periods
Steampunk

The front cover had a redheaded elf cleaning her pepperbox and tiny steambot on her shoulder as a Victorian cop and a orc in a top hat look on

Shran said:

As the folk of Coralis struggle to rebuild, we can map basic fantasy tropes onto various things: ...

Click to expand...

I fiddled with the idea of putting a SF spin on magic (i.e.lost science to explain the ways of "magic") so that I could use d20 Modern freebies adventures even if I couldn't find a way to retool them since it seems that WotC designed most of those freebies with the assumption that you are using magic FX in your game. *rolls eyes*

So ... A SF spin on some fantasy conventions for you ....

The core idea is that many of the lost "idols" and enchanted figurines that players and their villains go hunt down in stories are actually composed out of an unknown material that a lost civilization (or alien technology) was able to program for certain effects or energy control. Some of the ideas are:

* Authentic "summoning" circles are actually a complex pattern of silver or gold inlaid in a floor. It's a large, crude circuit board. You put a few "idols" at certain points, get an energy source (lighting, sonic vibration from lots of rhythmic chanting, etc.) and it activates the programs or properties stored in the figurines.

* Living sacrifices are needed to "summon" demons because the idol reconfigures the victim's body into a new war-like form.

* "Demonic Possessions" are actually victims that had an idol download its stored personality into living host.

*Some cults are in on some of the truth. They are willing participants in insuring that the personalities in the idols are immortal and always have a new host body ready. The question is, what sort of agenda would commit people to such a cause? One can't always assume it's an evil one, I am just thinking about the movie, The Fifth Element, where a priest is about to poison an archeologist to keep a secret.

Shran said:

What do we think? Is there interest in running a game set on, say, a world with different geology, history and racial make up from our own world?

Click to expand...

There was a Polyhedron Mini-campaign that used D20 Modern on an alien world. Iron Lords of Jupiter. It actually carried over on the next issue a little bit. The author of the setting was the famous "Lizard", in fact.


Regards,
Eric Anondson

Here's a quandry....

...how does one create a fully developed "modern" world without mapping every square inch of it? By this I mean that classical gaming has relied on vast wild areas (VWAs) to attract monsters and PCs to prey on them. The Modern world is filled with GPS, Spy Satellites, really good maps and on and on...

Do you need VWAs? Certainly not, but would you have Dungeon Crawls?