Desdichado
Hero
I was tinkering around with some ideas, and that resulted in this blog post (which I've thoughtfully cut and paste for your convenience ). Any thoughts?
So, one of the main reasons I opened up this blog was purportedly to talk about gaming, and I haven't done much of that over recent months. However, I've got a few gaming topics on my mind at the moment.Anyway, that's just three rough ideas of games that I'd love to either play or run either one. Do you have any ideas? Feel free to add comments.
- First off; The Fiendish Codex I: Hordes of the Abyss is a pretty recent release, written by Eric Mona. Maybe these elements were already present in D&D and I just somehow missed them, but there's some Eric Mona-isms all over this book. The idea of the obrylith; ancient demons that predate the tanar'ri are very obviously a riff on his earlier work with the qlippoth in Armies of the Abyss for Green Ronin. He has somewhat expanded their role, though--even making a handful of the Demon Lords remnant obryliths (Dagon, Pale Night, Pazuzu, etc.) Apparently the history of the Queen of Chaos and her pre-mortal war against (among others) the Wind Dukes of Aaqa from the Age of Worms campaign arc in Dungeon Magazine has now been officially canonized as Greyhawk history too.
Anyway, this book is pretty good; more or less as I predicted it would be. I like fiends as antagonists, and I like the work of Eric Mona. I was particularly impressed with his idea of a demon lord pantheon that could replace the gods of a campaign setting, spelled out again originally in Armies of the Abyss. Which leads into my second point.
- I've gotten to the point where I like my campaign settings to have a "twist" of some kind to them. Something that sets them apart, often significantly, from "standard, traditional D&D." The demonic pantheon idea mentioned above is one such idea. It automatically makes the game significantly darker, and gives it a bit of a Midnight vibe. Houserules and GMing advice from the Heroes of Horror book could really add a lot to this type of game, too. Either that or straight-up combing the D&D rules with the d20 Call of Cthulhu rules. Unearthed Arcana has already done a fair amount of the work there for us too.
Here's some other ideas I've had too:
- I'm tired of magic. What if you used the psionics classes in place of magic? Between the Expanded Psionics Handbook (included in the SRD) and Complete Psionic you've got, I think, seven psionic classes. Add the non-magical classes from the PHB back in (barbarian, fighter, rogue; and maybe the monk could pass muster) and you've got as robust as selection as the PHB offers anyway. While you're at it, you could yank all the standard D&D pallette of races (except human) from the selectable pool as well, and just use the psionic races. There's seven of them in the Expanded Psionics Handbook and Eberron introduces the kalashtar (and possibly the Inspired as well) making a nice selection. In fact, Eberron would be great to raid for source material, especially once the Sarlona book comes out (can't find a release date; maybe that book is just a rumor?)
- I don't like the idea of fantasy literally without any humans, but there's plenty of other races that can be added in instead of the standard elves, halflings, dwarves, etc.. How about a campaign where you had humans and x-touched races only? I.e., the planetouched aasimar, tieflings, genasi, and the shifters and changelings (lycanthrope-touched and doppleganger-touched, respectively?) It might take a little work since the earlier races are all LA +1, which is something WotC seems to be trying to get out of doing now. Maybe a little tweaking to make them back to LA +0 and you're good to go? Presumably this campaign would feature a world with lots of interplanar trafficking of some kind. I imagine a setting that is primarily (if not entirely, at least from the point of the view of the players) based in a massive city. A fantasy Coruscant, if you will.