MY PLAYERS STAY OUT
Possibly heading into wild territory soon after the current campaign I'm running wraps up, and I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with this sort of thing.
The long-story-short bare-bones premise:
The players will create high level characters from a conventional fantasy world(Golarion most likely in this case) for a short plane-hopping adventure.
This adventure ends with them stranded and plane-locked on a lush, vibrant-with-life planet with no sapient races.
The players and the few NPCs that wind up stranded with them will come into contact with artifacts called lifewells, composed of proto-organic matter and souls waiting to be born. Each character will bond with at least two wells. From each well they can craft and create a new sapient race using a set of mechanical guidelines* that still grants them as much creative freedom as they can reasonably get. If they want to create Twi'leks, Tau, or Thri-Kreen, it would be possible. They can pick the general alignment tendencies and craft their culture as they guide their newborn races, but their destiny will be their own eventually.
The lifewells also allow them to craft the biosphere of the surrounding area as they see fit.
After all is said and done, the players will be saying goodbye to those PCs forever(as they have been told ahead of time). Fastforward at least 20,000 years later.
The races they've created have multiplied and spread out over the planet. The old PCs are now minor ancestral gods to their child races along with whatever other gods they brought with them. The players can pick what their domains and general tenets would be. The child races' cultures will have evolved and adapted with their neighbors over time. There are no standard D&D races, only those that the players created.
At some point during this, probably at the end, the players are informed that if they wish, that planet and its new player races will be their next campaign setting for a while.
I've heard tell of communal world building with everyone being in the know, but I'm thinking I'm going to try and keep this IC as much as possible, with the payoff at the end.
Has anyone tried anything similar to this? If so, how did it turn out? What would you have done different, if anything?
*Most likely pulling from and adapting the Eidolon building guidelines from Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide, along with other sources.
Possibly heading into wild territory soon after the current campaign I'm running wraps up, and I'm wondering if anyone has had any experience with this sort of thing.
The long-story-short bare-bones premise:
The players will create high level characters from a conventional fantasy world(Golarion most likely in this case) for a short plane-hopping adventure.
This adventure ends with them stranded and plane-locked on a lush, vibrant-with-life planet with no sapient races.
The players and the few NPCs that wind up stranded with them will come into contact with artifacts called lifewells, composed of proto-organic matter and souls waiting to be born. Each character will bond with at least two wells. From each well they can craft and create a new sapient race using a set of mechanical guidelines* that still grants them as much creative freedom as they can reasonably get. If they want to create Twi'leks, Tau, or Thri-Kreen, it would be possible. They can pick the general alignment tendencies and craft their culture as they guide their newborn races, but their destiny will be their own eventually.
The lifewells also allow them to craft the biosphere of the surrounding area as they see fit.
After all is said and done, the players will be saying goodbye to those PCs forever(as they have been told ahead of time). Fastforward at least 20,000 years later.
The races they've created have multiplied and spread out over the planet. The old PCs are now minor ancestral gods to their child races along with whatever other gods they brought with them. The players can pick what their domains and general tenets would be. The child races' cultures will have evolved and adapted with their neighbors over time. There are no standard D&D races, only those that the players created.
At some point during this, probably at the end, the players are informed that if they wish, that planet and its new player races will be their next campaign setting for a while.
I've heard tell of communal world building with everyone being in the know, but I'm thinking I'm going to try and keep this IC as much as possible, with the payoff at the end.
Has anyone tried anything similar to this? If so, how did it turn out? What would you have done different, if anything?
*Most likely pulling from and adapting the Eidolon building guidelines from Pathfinder Advanced Player's Guide, along with other sources.
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