D&D 4E [4e] Setting Build Challenge: 4e Banestorm

[LoneWolf23]

I want to see if D&D 4e can handle one of my favorite Fantasy settings: Yrth, the world of GURPS Banestorm.

Basic setting context: the world of Yrth is populated by a wide variety of races and monsters, including humans snatched from Earth during the medieval period, who have since become one of the dominant races on the continent, spread across various nations, like the magic-using empire of Megalos, the Barbaric Nomad Lands, or the Muslim lands of al-Haz and al-Wazif.

Differences from your usual PoL settings:

• No active pseudo-pagan deities; the dominant faiths of Yrth are Christianity and Islam for humans, with Paganism in the Nomad Lands, and a vague religious philosophy called "The Eternal" practices by Elves and Dwarves. Other non-humans tend to follow one of those faiths.
• The role of "Divine Magic Users" is taken up by religious people who happen to be talented in the use of arcane magic.
• Goblins are only slightly shorter then humans, and are actually a rather intelligent and curious people, who generally take on mercantile roles in human society. Hobgoblins are their larger, brutish cousins.
• No Drow. There are "Dark Elves", but these are a xenophobic offshoot of elven culture, who believe non-elves should be tamed or destroyed.
• Magic isn't universally consistent. There are regions where "magic levels" are either stronger or weaker. The Kingdom of Caithness is founded in a "Low Mana" region where spellcasting is harder, and the wizards who live there are in fact more skilled to harness it. And there is a whole region called the Great Desert, where magic cannot function at all.
• There are beings called "Djinn", but they are not true genies. They are in fact humans bonded with powerful immaterial beings, actually Ascended elves, who enter symbiosis with human hosts. (In fact, they are very much like the Inspired of Eberron.)
• Yrth is a "Dimensional Sargasso"; meaning dimensional travel to Yrth is easy, but travelling off of Yrth is difficult. Planar travel isn't going to be readily accessible, even at Paragon levels.

Here's a Map.

There are other, more subtle differences, but I think these are the ones that would require the most "adjusting" of 4e's Base Rules to convert the setting. Giving the matter some thought, one could take the Cleric and Paladin, and convert the flavor text to make them "ordinary" spellcasters, trained to use Magic in service to their Faiths, and I've never really been fond of "Mana Levels" myself, so that could be dropped.

Anyone have any ideas, opinions or suggestions?

 

[Kinneus]

Well, #4 seems easy enough. Just run the drow as written. Honestly, those "dark elves" sound pretty much like "drow" to me. If you want to bar them as a player race, that's fine, too.

You can probably run goblins and hobgoblins as-is, too. Refluffing is free and easy. The truly enterprising DM might allow goblins as PCs. If you do this, I recommend you don't use the goblin race as defined in the MM. It's not intended for players, and goblin tactics is a bit overpowered in the hands of a PC. Tweak it a bit to bring it in line with other PC races.

I'd recommend dropping "magic levels," too, or maybe just making them less dramatic. 4e tends to shy away from using mechanical effects that key off of power sources. Only with Dark Sun have we started to see arcane or primal characters punished under certain conditions. One thing you could do to keep magic levels is just to turn them into fantastic terrain. Pockets of "high mana concentration" (or whatever you'd like to call it) on the battlefield can be resources that the players have to race to exploit before their enemies do. Similarly, areas of "low magic" can be traps that the players can push, pull or slide enemy mages into to temporarily weaken them. So, instead of whole nations being "high magic" or "low magic," consider using smaller areas.

For deities, this is more or less fine. Very few mechanical effects are keyed off of which deities a character worships. The only real exceptions to this that I can think of certain feats like the Domain feats and Channel Divinity feats. You could pick which portfolios Christianity has and Islam has, and maybe make up a few for prominent pagan gods or honored ancestors of dwarves or elves.

Refluffing divine characters as arcane characters sounds good to me. You could also consider just barring the whole divine power source, as Dark Sun did.

Lack of dimensional travel is no biggie, either. If you don't want your players plane-hopping, then just don't give them the opportunity to. You might have to disallow the odd ritual or two, but that's about it.

Djinn sound cool. When it's time for the party to meet some, you can just use the djinn from the Monster Manuals or, if they don't feel appropriate, you can always making your own using the monster creation guidelines outlined in DMG2.

Basically, to make this work, all you need to do is a little bit of refluffing, if even that much. I see no reason why couldn't run a game in Yrth with 4e.

 

[LoneWolf23]

Thing is, when I say the Dark Elves aren't Drow, I kinda mean it. They're really just ordinary-skinned Elves from the Surface who happen to embrace a Nazi-like philosophy of Elven dominance. No dark grey skin, no vast underground empire organized under a matriarachal theocracy, no spider-queen goddess...

...Although adding the Drow as an independant race, unrelated to the Elves, could open up possibilities.

 

[Kinneus]

My point is that you can use the mechanics for drow virtually unchanged, and simply describe them to your players differently.

 

[Spatula]

The first 4e game I played in was actually set in Yrth.

There are other, more subtle differences, but I think these are the ones that would require the most "adjusting" of 4e's Base Rules to convert the setting. Giving the matter some thought, one could take the Cleric and Paladin, and convert the flavor text to make them "ordinary" spellcasters, trained to use Magic in service to their Faiths, and I've never really been fond of "Mana Levels" myself, so that could be dropped.

Anyone have any ideas, opinions or suggestions?

Aside from the varying levels of magic, I don't see anything that needs to be adjusted. I mean, the look of some creatures might change, or how they are roleplayed, but that has nothing to do with the gamesystem.

The magic level thing could be modeled in lots of different ways, but the upshot of it would probably be that no one wants to play an arcane character.

 

[LoneWolf23]

The first 4e game I played in was actually set in Yrth.

Aside from the varying levels of magic, I don't see anything that needs to be adjusted. I mean, the look of some creatures might change, or how they are roleplayed, but that has nothing to do with the gamesystem.

The magic level thing could be modeled in lots of different ways, but the upshot of it would probably be that no one wants to play an arcane character.

How did you handle the differences with Yrth's races, like the Goblins?

 

[Spatula]

We didn't run into any goblins, but I don't really understand the issue. Use the goblin stats in the MM, but say they are large instead of small. Or if those stats don't match the character of Yrth goblins, take some other humanoid whose stats do match and call them goblins. Or am I misunderstanding something?