Bizarre Magic, Empires, Terrible Advances In Technology, and Pushing The Limits!

[Soltares]

I played in one realms game where the DM made Mulhorandi a non-human nation, ruled predominantly by Gnoll priests of Set.

Various animal-headed creatures existed throughout the empire, and the Aarakocra priests of Horus-Re had been overthrown and hid in the mountains between Mulhorand and Chessenta. A rebellion of human slaves led to the creation of Thay, but the slave-overseers who led the rebellion instituted a land as wicked as the one they had fled, keeping themselves in power through arcane might (which they saw as a good substitute for the clergy who had kept them in servitude for so long).

Lizard Men serving Sobek lived in the swamps, Minotaurs worked as elite guards and shock troops, etc.

According to the most ancient legends, the gnolls, minotaurs, lizard men, aarakocra, centaurs, satyrs, etc where all hybrids, magically created by ancient human wizards as various slave species and then forming their own egyptian-style kingdom when they overthrew their masters and made them into the slaves instead, re-imagining many of the humans gods into animal-headed figures like themselves...

It was a unique campaign tweak, and made some of the non-human races a bit more than tiny tribes that live in the dust between the teeming human lands.

 

[Drakmar]

I am currently designing a new campaign setting. Basically about 6000 "humans" called the Tar-Re-Nor escape the Great Enemy via magic and find a new world....(ripped that from a few sources) and they find a large fertile area to colonise...surrounded on all sides by mountains (the area was created by an asteroid) and is pretty big.. the Tar-Re-Nor are two races.. Tar-Re humans that are about 6' - 7' that are supreme warriors (lotsa bonuses) but are completely unable to cast magic...and the Highborn who are and who are blessed by their Three Faced God (That Which Creates, That Which Preserves and That Which Destroys)... The campaign starts about 20 years after the Great Fall. To this date they have not encountered the locals. (I am using the SovStone magic system btw)... All of their magic is cast using a kind of Kung Fu form with special grunts and shouts.

however...the locals are a race that are split into three sub-species...the "human" equiv look just like the tiefling in FR Campaign book..the barbarious sub-species is similar to orcs.. and look like a cross between the tiefling and an orc...maybe even that planetouched one in the Monsters of Faerun thingy. I haven't quite figured out what I will do with the advanced one.

I am still working on it.. but I like it. O... the other thing is that the Tar-Re MUST obey (with a Will Save) what the Highborn of their clan command...similar to a blood bond in V:TM.

The players will come in when the Ruling Lords of the Highborn decide to start exploring. O...and nobody in this culture know of Void Magic. I think I will have another group of the Tar-Re who escaped and discovered that they CAN cast Void Magic..and only Void Magic where as the Highborn can't.

...Now.. in a campaign of Rolemaster that I was playing my mage introduced mass produced Transfer Portals that he controlled.. set himself up a kingdom and completely changed the political arena in his sphere of influence. Way fun.. Mwa ha ha ha ha haaaaa!!!! He is the mage in my sig.

 

[F5]

Now you've got me wondering, what kind of advances are really necessary for a Victorian setting? Do you need much more than a few clockwork trinkets, large-scale navies, and mass-produced weapons (that require little skill, a la guns)? Of course, they all have to be relatively new advances concentrated in one section of the world, so it can "colonize" the rest of the world and form a globe-spanning empire.

Interesting point, mmadsen. On the one hand I'd argue that just introducing clockwork, huge navies and mass-produced guns are all pretty signifigant advances. But actually, almost no major, game-altering advances were really necessary to get to a Victorian era setting. It was done with background and setting and tone, not by handing out pocketwatches, fedora hats and Model Ts. That stuff needs to be there, but it doesn't have to impact the game very much. Victorian Archeologists exploring an ancient, ruined Drow temple complex would translate directly to a standard D&D dundeon crawl, except that the characters would have a better idea what time it was, and might be able to bypass some clever traps with dynamite. If the mage is wearing tweed and calls himself "Professor Hetherington" instead of "Xobor the Arcane" that's pretty much all you need.

The bit in my game where the Goblin waif in line at a soup kitchen asked "Please, sir, c'n I have some more?" pretty much cemented the era I was going for in the players' minds. The transforming robo-steam train fortress was cool, but didn't really contribute as much to the mood...

Still, in order to have a FANTASY Victorian setting, the techno-magic stuff is important. That's what teh Stempunk genre is all about; coming up with technological marvels (or monstrosities?) that MIGHT have existed based on turn-of-the-century technology, but didn't. If you don't go wild with the crazy steam-tech and magical knickknacks, you're missing out, IMO.

I'm not sure revolvers and shotguns would make armor obsolete. A thick cuirass should stop pistol rounds and buckshot, at least at range. The real issue is that it doesn't stop musket or rifle rounds, and armor costs more than a whole new soldier with a firearm -- and weighs down any soldier using it.

Yeah, historically the cost issue was as much a reason for the disappearance of suits of armor on the battlefield as the loss of effectiveness agaisnt guns. But a metal plate chould still be able to stop a bullet in the right circumstances, which is why I said that armor bonuses are reduced against guns, rather than ignored. Technically, different types of armor should be more or less effective against bullets from different kinds of guns, at different ranges, but I didn't want to get into that much detail, so I ignored it.

Dragons are just asking for a Holland & Holland .470 Nitro Express! Beware the big-game hunter!

>Harpo the Marxist Paladin shouts his battle cry of "For the People's Republic!" as he levels his +5 Holy Elephant Gun at the rampaging dragon, and revs his Attack Buggy into gear...
Hee hee hee...

 

[F5]

Sound like GURPS Goblins (a very amusing, not-very-GURPS GURPS supplement).

Yup. I had seen the supplement (a friend had it) and that's kind of what I had in mind.

 

[F5]

It was a unique campaign tweak, and made some of the non-human races a bit more than tiny tribes that live in the dust between the teeming human lands.

Soltares, I love it! It takes the unreal percentage of D&D monsters that are just people with animal heads and justifies it brilliantly. Sounds like fun.